Diary of a Chambermaid

A few things. The neighbors tell Celestine to beware of Montiel, as he knocks the women up. Rose says specifically that, with him, "bang," the first time, you're pregnant. This, in the presence of an old man who loves Huysmans, seems to be a parody of aristocratic enervation - Montiel, rather than being inadequate, is in fact amazingly virile.

When Montiel first propositions Celestine, he tells her "I'm not a brute. I won't get you pregnant!" Virility, again, is associated with the animal - as an aristocratic man, Montiel should not be so virile.

Aha! In addition to the servants' constant anti-Semitism, the neighbors call Montiel a "Jew." If he is actually Jewish, that could explain his virility - the jew is apparently the brute, and his bloodline comes from outside of the family's. And the family does seem completely without energy; Madame no longer has sex, according to the servants, because it gives her pain. Instead, she fetishizes household objects - lamps and such - investing all of her energy in them. And her father is even further gone; he wants to hold Celestine's calf, dress her in shoes, and watch her walk around the room in them, but never seems to want to go further than that. Montiel could bring some of the blood of the brute to this family (Priest: "Monteil is a very vigorous man" Madame "Unfortunately" - he has to work off all of his energy hunting) but Madame cannot receive his energy - it's too painful.

Darwin

I read large chunks of Darwin's writings and many other smaller chunks of works about Darwin, all from the Norton Darwin: Texts and Commentary. Let's try to get the useful stuff:

First, a little bio: After his voyage on the Beagle, inspired by the idea of Malthusian struggle, Darwin came up with the idea that natural selection was responsible for the origin of the species. But he feared to publish this work, and spent 20 years developing his theory until a friend of a friend, Wallace, discovered natural selection himself. Darwin feared he had been pre-empted but Lyell, the mutual friend, arranged for them to publish simultaneously and give a talk together, and Darwin's pre-eminence immediately shone through.

Effects: There were evolutionists prior to Darwin, especially Lamarck, but those theories did not hold up to scientific examination. Quite startlingly (given our own feelings on the subject) the Darwinian revolution occurred very rapidly, first because naturalists, especially younger naturalists, rapidly accepted Darwin's research. More startlingly, the Victorian populace, which was fascinated by science, also accepted Darwin's research. The society's general interest in science allowed for Darwin's rapid success.

Before Darwin, humanity could see the hand of God in both man and nature. Darwin's biggest effect was to eliminate this certainty; no longer were things they way they were because God ordained them, but rather came about through struggles to the death. This reoriented everything, and eliminated teleology (something Lamarck tried to preserve). But Darwin, despite his atheism and materialism, did not give up on meaning in the universe. Origin of Species ends: "Thus from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved" (174).

By using language such as "grandeur," "exalted," "most beautiful and most wonderful," as contrasted to "famine and death," Darwin is clearly making evolution a hopeful progress. Famine and death may be the mechanisms of evolution, but its end result thus far has been humanity, which he wishes to exalt rather than debase.

Descent of Man: I found the Descent of man to be incredibly boring, far less readable than Origin. There are a few passages I wish to note. First, as seems quite obvious, this leading evolutionist seems to offhandedly support voluntary eugenics: "Both sexes ought to refrain from marriage if they are in any makred degree inferior in body or mind; but such hopes are Utopian and will never even be partially realised unil the laws of inheritance are thoroughly known. Everyone does good service, who aids toward this end" (253). Although he acknowledges this idea as Utopian, he seems to think that it will also become commonly accepted, once a theory of genetics is advanced.

Also: "Animals endowed with the social instincts take pleasure in one another's company, warn one another of danger, defend and aid one another in many ways. These instincts do not extend to all the individuals of the species, but only to those of the same community. As they are highly beneficial to the species, they have in all probability been acquired through natural selection" (247). This strikes me as a rebuke to the naturalists; the naturalists seem to see all return to instincts as negative; whenever impulses or drives are given free range, cruelty towards man results. But as Darwin has made quite clear, or impulses are also towards love and helping one another. Naturalism has emphasized the flip side of this to a poor degree.

Spencer: According to Richard Hofstadter, writing in 1955, Spencer combined Darwin with thermodynamics - his theory was predicated not just on "survival of the fittest" but also "the persistence of force" (aka conservation of energy). This led Spencer to take solace in an equilibirum, which ultimately led to his popularity among the rich: degeneration would always follow evolution, no ultimate progress would be gained, and thus there's no reason to try to legislate change. Evolution is a zero-sum game; humanity as a whole cannot be elevated (this union of Darwin and thermodynamics seems to me to completely misunderstand Darwin). Hofstadter also notes that Spence was popular in American b/c of his doctrine of "the Unknowable" - it was impossible to know anything in the realms of religion. This meant that religion could not be proved, but also not disproved, and thus, once religion and science were separated, the free practice of religion was not in the slightest bit conflicting with evolution (391).

Dewey on Darwin: Pragmatism is essentially evolution in the realm of ideas, so it's no surprise that Dewey appreciated Darwin. As always, Dewey wants to beat down an older, Platonic notion of change: prior to Darwin, change and origin were "signs of defect and unreality" and what change that did occur within a species (eidos) was merely the movement towards the final telos of that species - a "fixed form and final cause" reached by change (483, 485). Darwin did away with this Aristotelian notion (he wasn't the first to do so, but the most successful) and thus philosophy was permanently altered - the old problems of philosophy are done away with, and new ones appear. No longer are final problems and certain answers interesting, but rather, philosophy should turn itself to the questions of change, to truths that can be shown to "be generated by concretely knowable conditions" even if we don't know there "inclusive first cause and some exclusive final goal" (488). To think otherwise is "intellectual atavism."

Northop Frye

Northrop Frye – Essay 1 of Anatomy of Criticism

I found the introduction to Anatomy of Criticism uninspiring, but the first essay, “Theory of Modes,” was rewarding. In it, Frye divides literature up into five main modes, in descending order: mythic, romance, high mimetic, low mimetic, and irony. The mythic mode is about gods and demi-gods (the hero is different in kind from us); the romance is about a hero who exists in a world close to ours, but one in which “the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended” (33) (the hero is different in degree from us); the high mimetic mode takes place in a world just like ours, but follows a leader or other important people (the hero is just like us, but with greater authority and passions); the low mimetic mode doesn’t seem to have a hero, as it just gives us a variety of normal people; in the ironic mode, the subjects are inferior to us in “power or intelligence” and thus “we have the sense of looking down on a scene of bondage, frustration, or absurdity” (34). As Frye points out, as works like Ulysses seem to blend the ironic and the mythic, it turns out that these are not hierarchical distinctions, but circular ones.

As always, I read with an eye to naturalism. It seems clearly that naturalism represents a tragic mode, and thus it is at times either a tragic low mimetic mode or a tragic ironic mode. Frye describes the low mimetic (domestic) tragedy as the expression of the sensation of pathos. He states “the root idea of pathos is the exclusion of an individual on our own level from a social group to which he is trying to belong” (39). This seems to be the perfect definition for the low mimetic version of naturalism: in The Damnation of Theron Ware, in An American Tragedy, in Martin Eden and other novels a young man attempts to join a slightly higher social group and fails. And the young man in each of these cases is on our level not in terms of class, but in terms of intelligibility; he can speak and be understood. Furthermore, the contrast to the low mimetic tragedy is the Horatio Alger story; it is exactly like low mimetic version of naturalism, except that this time lower class individual is accepted into the next social class (45).

But the next step down, the ironic mode, gives us the works of Zola, of Hamlin Garland, and the great novel McTeague. In this ironic tragedy, the fiction writer “pretends to know nothing” (40); unlike a London or Harold, who beats us over the head with the various philosophies that offer up different values for life, there are absolutely no articulate characters proposed in this kind of life. Frye puts it this way: “Thus pity and fear are not raised in ironic art: they are reflected to the reader from the art” (40). The author has absented himself from judging the circumstances; he simply puts them on the page for the reader to see, and pretends “to know nothing, even that he is ironic” (40). And Frye agrees with my central tenet: that the force that sends the hero into his spiral is random. “Thus the central principle of tragic irony is that whatever happens to the hero should be causally out of line with his character […] Irony isolates from the tragic situation the sense of arbitrariness, of the victim’s having been unlucky, selected at random or by lot, and no more deserving of what happens to him than anyone else would be” (41). As much sense as this makes for the works Frye is discussing (such as The Trial) it doesn’t seem that useful for my understanding of naturalism. Or rather, it is useful insofar as it gives an explanation for why the works of naturalism operate as tragedies of the arbitrary, but not why the authors think such a system would be compatible with naturalism.

This connect up for me to something that Frye notes in the introduction; when discussing how authors are frequently not the best critics of their own work, Frye quotes John Stuart Mill: "the artist [...] is not heard but overheard" (5). I don't think that's uniformly true; for Frye, I think that's supposed to explain why Ibsen is not a good critic of Ibsen, because we are supposed to overhear Ibsen's ideas (in his art) not hear them (in his direct commentary to us). But I think this distinction becomes problematic/interesting when we apply it to the low mimetic/ironic distinction. We can only overhear the artist who pretends to know nothing; we must overhear the message of Zola. But we can hear Jack London loud and clear in some of his books; when his characters spout philosophies based on the works that he himself has read, it becomes hard not to hear him. And of course we hear him in The Jungle as well, in which he has a brief cameo as a socialist speaker.

More tidbits:

Frye describes naturalism’s movement from low mimetic to irony: “On the other hand, the term ‘naturalism’ shows up in its proper perspective as a phase of fiction which, rather like the detective story, though in a very different way, begins as an intensification of the low mimetic, an attempt to describe life exactly as it is, and ends, by the very logic of that attempt, in pure irony. Thus Zola’s obsession with ironic formulas gave him a reputation as a detached recorder of the human scene” (49)

Naturalism as a fringe version of literature; if literature is a different mode of language, more interested in putting together words in a certain way than simply conveying knowledge, then “literature goes about as far as a representation of life, to be judged by its accuracy of description rather than by its integrity of a structure of words, as it could go and still remain literature” (80)

Finally I want to extract from Frye the idea of the "green world" in comedy which Cavell makes so much of, and which I've argued that Deleuze has inverted. Frye writes: "We may call it the drama of the green world, its plot being assimilated to the ritual theme of the triumph and love and life over the waste land...Thus the action of the comedy begins in a world represented as a normal world, moves into the green world, goes into a metamorphosis there in which the comic resolution is achieved, and returns to the normal world" (182). This sounds exactly like Deleuze's argument that naturalistic cinema represents the fusion of an originary world and a real milieu, as displayed in Stroheim's Blind Husbands. But in Blind Husbands, everything is reversed: the suitor is in fact an interloper, and the blocking father figure is in fact a husband. And yet the suitor seems to have been successful, until we see that, in contrast to the comedy, the note the woman gives him is actually a repudiation of his interests. And we find that out while the suitor and the husband are on the peak, and there, in a terribly bleak green world, they behave like animals to one another, and the result is the death of the suitor. Cinematic naturalism, at least, seems to be the exact inverse of Frye's "new comedy," and that starts with the fact that the simple and pastoral "green world" has become an "originary world" of cruel impulses.

Quicksand by Nella Larsen

I doubt that Quicksand is often associated with naturalism. And yet, I found many of the hallmarks of naturalism in it. The protagonist, Helga Crane, is looking for happiness. And that happiness is, from the start, problematized by race. She's unhappy in the U.S. because she naturally gravitates to a class of black intellectuals. And while she enjoys their company, she can't handle the rigid, Booker T. Washington style of education of Naxos, where she briefly teaches. In NYC, she seems to have found a preferable mode of being, but all the intellectuals there are obsessed with "the race problem," and particularly obsessed with the horrors of miscegenation. As the child of a white mother and black man, Helga is frequently the brunt of unwitting insults.

In true naturalist fashion, Helga tries to escape her problems through a change in environment, and moves to Denmark to live with her mother's rich relatives. Here she begins what can only be considered a life of decadence: going to nice parties, wearing expensive clothes, and being painted and courted by Axel Olsen, a man who is both rich and an artist. But being exoticized in Denmark, and having no other black people around, eventually grows old, and Helga decides that she needs to have a partitioned life, splitting time between Europe and America. "This knowledge, this certainty of the division of her life into two parts in two lands, into physical freedom in Europe and spiritual freedom in America, was unfortunate, inconvenient, expensive."

But even this solution doesn't hold up; Helga's friend Anne has married her old superior at Naxos, Dr. James Anderson, who Helga holds an unbreakable yearning for. They kiss once, she imagines a future between them, but he makes it clear that the kiss was a mistake. Helga decides abruptly to marry a rural Southern preacher, and thrusts herself into the world that most subjects of naturalism work to escape; Quicksand is thus a version of reverse naturalism, in which the intellectual, who could live a rich life in Denmark or an intellectual one in Harlem, voluntarily descends into a life of hard work and poverty. At first she dislikes the life, but eventually accepts it by accepting faith in God: "Her religion was to her a kind of protective covering, shielding her from the cruel light of an unbearable reality" (117). But the horror of her third childbirth destroys this faith: "Because, she knew now, He wasn't there. Didn't exist. into that yawning gap of unspeakable brutality had gone, too, her belief in the miracle and wonder of life" (120). And in keeping with this naturalistic view of life, her infant perishes in less than a week, lacking the "vitality" to survive (121). But the novel ends with Helga still trapped in her miserable environment; although she's discovered that the Negroes are trapped by their belief in the "white man's God," she doesn't quite have the physical strength to leave the town yet (123). And the novel ends: "And hardly had she left her bed and become able to walk again without pain, hardly had the children returned from the homes of the neighbors, when she began to have her fifth child" (125).

To return to my original point: I wouldn't necessarily think of this as a naturalistic novel. And yet, it's depiction of a world without meaning, of people trapped in an unalterable environment, and it's obsession with the importance of race (something that Helga both discounts and accepts) it seems similar in many ways to naturalism. Which leads me to the question: is the question of race simultaneous a question of naturalism? Or, to put it in another way, could an African American novelist write a book in the first part of the 20th century that didn't share many of the concerns of naturalism? I think this is possibly an essay question; it's also something to think about in the highly naturalist work of Richard Wright (and his move from the naturalistic despair of Native Son to the mild optimism of Black Boy) and in the racial theories of Alain Locke.

Frost

I've never liked Frost, but he's certainly not unique among poets. This is the most extending reading I've ever done of him, which tells you something, since it was only like 15 pages of Frost. But here's what I think now:

He's certainly enjoyable to read, particularly as his style is so rural and thus readable. He's also not in the slightest bit naturalist, and also not terribly transcendentalist. (His lack of naturalism comes in spite of the fact that his poems are often very bleak and interested in "decay") He does seem to have been quite an individualist, and fascinated by nature. He was also very clearly swimming against the modernist tide, by producing such readable and mostly clear poems.

I was stunned to find the famous "The Road Not Taken" to be more complex than I realized. The famous declaration that taking the less traveled road made all the difference is actually undercut, first by the acknowledgement that, although that road does look less traveled, "Though as for that, the passing there/Had worn them really about the same." And the looking back doesn't actually take place, but is imagined "I shall be telling this with a sigh/Somewhere ages and ages hence:" I'm inclined to think that the "difference" the road made was actually trivial; the significance on this moment comes from the speaker's choice, not because the road actually made a difference or was even actually much less traveled.

A poem like "The Wood-Pile" is much more to my liking. In it, the speaker is wandering alone, far from home, and encounters a little bird which fearfully hides from him. The speaker forgets the bird and frightens him, and the bird hides behind a woodpile which someone has cut and carefully stacked, but has rested here for a long time, about to lose structural integrity, overgrown by the vine Clematis, and completely abandoned by its creator. "I thought that only/Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks/Could so forget his handiwork on which/He spent himself, the labor of his az,/And leave it there far from a useful fireplace/To warm the frozen swamp as best it could/With the slow smokeless burning of decay." A bleak image, but one that also strikes me as beautiful.

Two more poems, The Death of the Hired Man, about an inconstant hired man who has come "home" to die, and "Home Burial," about a couple torn apart by the death of their son and the wife's perception that the husband did not feel it deeply enough, seem like the best candidates for naturalist readings. They do seem to have the pall of rural death and despair hanging over them, and thus in many ways could fit into Main-Traveled roads or a like set of stories. But they also seem, to me, to be lacking the deterministic and scientific underpinnings of naturalism; the deaths haunting them are more Romantic than naturalistic.

Stroheim

Blind Husbands

Blind Husbands is a very good film, made by and starring Stroheim based on a novel he wrote. THe film opens with a title card noting that "alienation of affection" is a frequent cause for divorce, and when it occurs the blame is usually put on the wife and the other man, if there is one. But, it asks, what about the husband, who has stopped wooing the wife with his "wiles" in his complacency?

The husband and his wife are in town for him to climb a mountain. As a doctor, he's called away several times to help people, and Lt. Steuben (Stroheim) takes those opportunities to romance the wife. He seems to have done so successfully; she promises to run away with him. When Steuben and the doctor are at the top of the pinnacle, the husband finds a letter from his wife on Steuben, which Steuben knocks away. When the husband demands truth, Steuben admits that the wife is running away with him (which the husband already suspected) and he leaves Steuben on the peak to die.

Coming down the mountain, Dr. Armstrong finds the letter: his wife rescinded her promise to Steuben, explaining it was just to get out of an awkward situation, and she loves her husband. Armstron wants to rescue Steuben but falls off the mtn. Steuben has rescuers coming, but is frightened by the spirit of the mountain (a very expressionistic specter) and falls to his death; the film notes that the spirit is satisfied. The husband and wife are reunited.

Deleuze has argued that Stroheim is the director of entropic degeneration and Bunuel is the director of cyclical degeneration. This film does not bear that out. We see a young honeymooning couple, deeply in love, and they observe Armstrong's inattention and vow never to be that way. And Armstrong does seem to degenerate; after suspecting his wife, he reads a plaque (complete with a soul descending into hell) that explains that a lover was killed by a jealous husband on the mountain. Thus his marriage (once like the honeymooners) and his morals have degenerated, so he attempts to leave Steuben to his death. But the note brings him full circle. He no longer wishes Steuben to die, and is redeemed. And the final scene shows the two couples leaving side by side, with the mountain guide imploring armstrong to love his wife. They may not be as lovey-dovey as the honeymooners, but they do seem to be in love. In this film, degeneration seems to be cyclical, and things come full circle.

Foolish Wives
For this film, I was more interested in watching a movie and less interested in examining how it fit in with Deleuze's analysis, and perhaps for that reason enjoyed it much more. But it also seems to me a much more mature work; it legendarily cost more than $1 million, far above the budget Stroheim was given, and it was worth it. Stroheim plays Karamzin, a false count romancing a naive American woman, but he also romances everyone else. He and his fake cousins, also fake nobility, survive using counterfeit bills, and Karamzin lusts after the counterfeiters mentally challenged daughter. He also seduces his cousin's servant, convincing her to give him her entire life savings. Finally he does seduce the American, the wife of the Ambassador to Monaco, and is going to get 100000 francs of gambling winnings from her, but the jilted and cheated servant ruins the tryst by setting the house on fire. The pair survive, but Karamzin's credibility is ruined by the fact that he escaped the house first, and that his tryst was discovered.

The movie ends in a brutal way. We see several things happen: 1. the servant kills herself 2. Karamzin sneaks into the bedroom of the American, possibly awakening the manservant in the house 3. the "cousins" are arrested and exposed as frauds 4. the manservant drags something out of the house slowly, and opens a manhole to throw it away. it seems to be a body, and just as he's about to throw it away, the hood fall off and we see that it is Karamzin. the corpse is thrown in the manhole. 5. the husband points out to the wife that the end of the book she's reading (Foolish Wives by Stroheim)

One of the film's chief accomplishments is creating the "milieu" of Monte Carlo - a decadent and degenerate city - on the backlots of Hollywood. Keith Phipps (quote from Wikipdia) writes: "Foolish Wives re-creates Monte Carlo in a Hollywood back lot...Playing a fraudulent aristocrat, in a touch that echoed his own biography, Von Stroheim dupes the gullible, lusts after a retarded teenager, and attempts to undo an innocent American. It's like a Henry James novel as dreamt by a pornographer, and it illustrates what makes Von Stroheim such a problematic genius: Is it nascent post-modernism or egotism run amok that made him prominently feature a character reading a novel called Foolish Wives, credited to Erich Von Stroheim?" The Henry James analogy is very most telling; I might have put it: "It's like a Henry James novel imagined by a naturalist" or, in more Deleuzian terms, "It's like a Henry James novel in which the real milieu of Europe is corrupted by an originary world of impulses, represented here by a swamp."

Edgar Lee Masters

I had never heard of the minor American poet Edgar Lee Masters, but he seems to be, if not a naturalist, someone who is interesting in terms of naturalism, which I did not much expect to find in poetry. The Norton Anth of Am Lit describes his most important work, Spoon River Anthology, in terms that sound very much like Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio or Garland's Main-Traveled Roads: the dead speakers of interrelated poems in the anthology "continue their loves and quarrels beyond the grave. Their dissonant voices converge in a lament for suppressed and wasted lives, only rarely varied by joy or gusto. Sex has driven them, but given little pleasure. They long for the sympathy that they withhold from each other. Yet the poems as a group are compassionate, not judgmental" (1101). Save for that last line, that sounds like a perfectly naturalist description. And individual poems also seem to take up naturalist points.

Serepta Mason believes that she could have flowered in life, but a "bitter wind" prevented her from. Like Maggie, her environment prevented her growth. "Ye living ones, ye are fools indeed/Who do not know the ways of the wind/And the unseen forces/That govern the processes of life." This sounds like a perfectly naturalistic account of the complex social forces that prevent the seed of humanity from flowering.

Trainor, the Druggist notes that, like chemicals, people's offspring are the unpredictable outcome of contending forces. "There were Benjamin Pantier and his wife,/Good in themselves, but evil towards each other:/He oxygen, she hydrogen, /Their son, a devastating fire." In this poem, people are just chemical elements, and their offspring are the product of a chemical reaction. That's not far from a naturalist theory of offspring and racial stock.

Margaret Fuller Slack's poem is a feminist lament; she could have been another George Eliot "But for an untoward fate." The poem ends with a pun; after marrying the druggist (seemingly not Trainor) who promised her leisure time to write a novel, Mrs. Slack bears 8 children and dies of lockjaw after piercing herself with a needle while washing for a baby. She concludes "Sex is the curse of life!" Both sex (as her gender) and sex (as the force that engendered her children) locked her into her fate.

Abel Melveny's situation doesn't make too much sense; he hoarded "every kind of machine that's known" but, with no use for most of them and no shed to store them in, had to watch them "Getting rusted, warped, and battered." After noting that he never used a fine machine, he concludes "I saw myself as a good machine/That Life had never used." Abel, like his tools, was an automaton, who, due to the hand of fate, never saw use.

Lucinda Matlock has the only really positive poem; her life is a catalog of pleasure taking and joyous events, save for the fact that she lost 8 of her 12 children. But she takes a naturalist stance towards those that she sees not enjoying life around her: "What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness/Anger, discontent, and drooping hopes?/Degenerate sons and daughters,/Life is too strong for you -/It takes life to love life." Lucinda here, I think, is referencing the reservoir; only by bringing energy to life can one make something of life. This, like the difference between Clyde Griffiths and his cousin, makes all the difference: strong drives can bring pleasure, the lack of drives results in degeneration.

Ragged Dick by Horatio Alger

Ragged Dick is the first book in Alger's Richard Hunter series, about the rise of of young Dick from penniless bootblack to, presumably, titan of finance. It is also Alger's first novel. As such, it is the perfect example of anti-naturalism: a book which has all the same basic elements of naturalism (impoverished people in an urban area) but which writes their story in a positive light.

As with naturalism, physical appearance plays a great part in determining how once can judge someone. Over and over, Alger points out that people trust Dick because he "had a frank, straight-forward manner that made him a favorite" (4). The face is the window to the soul; physiognomy is as strong here as in naturalism.

One way to think about Ragged Dick is to perceive it as the story of American Tragedy, if Clyde's cousin were the penniless up and comer. Over and over, Dreiser points out that, although Clyde is handsomer than his cousin, he's less driven and ambitious. He does not burn with a fire to succeed. Alger makes this same point about Dick by repeatedly comparing him to the fellow bootblack Johnny, who does not succeed because he's lazy. Johnny "was a good-natured boy, large of his age, with nothing particularly bad about him, but utterly lacking in that energy, ambition, and natural sharpness, for which Dick was distinguished" (125).

Dick also meets good fortune after good fortune; he's constantly thrown into situations that will lead to his success. The most outrageous of these is when his friend Fosdick applies for a job at a hat shop, which just happens to be the hat shop where the boys' sunday school teacher teaches, who just happens to walk in during the interview and recommend Fosdick( 95). This, and many other coincidences, are the counter to the negative coincidences that take place in naturalism and bring about the downfall of the naturalist subjects. And of course, sometimes in naturalism these chances (Trina winning the lottery, Clyde running into his uncle and obtaining employment) seem, like Dick's chances, to hold promise. They just never do.

I can see the appeal of these books. Dick is a charming character, and although Alger's style is repetitive, it's charming enough. I was personally revolted by the right wing platitudes all through the book; this is the ur-novel for those who believe that the poor need to just pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. But I can also understand it's appeal for the second half of the 19th century, as a document fully embracing and encouraging the American dream.

Cinema 1

Having now completed Cinema 1, I'll try to give an overview of it, to the best of my abilities. As the movement-image, it is concerned with three different kinds of movement images which represent the three different ways of making films, and then the fourth that calls them into question These are:

1.The affect-image, or affection. This mode of filmmaking corresponds to Peircean firstness; it is a thing in and of itself. It emphasizes close-ups to get the emotional affect of a human face. It does not take place in a realistic setting (which would render it secondness) but rather in an "any-place-whatever." The affect-image
2. The impulse image, or naturalism. The impulse image is a transitional place between firstness and secondness. It is concerned with real milieux, places that are really there, but it imposes on them an "originary world" where human beings are under the control of their animal impulses. It is neither an any place whatever nor a real milieu, but something in between.
3. The action image, or realism. The action image takes place in a real milieu, and it seems to be the dominant form of the movement image. It is the mode of secondness, what Deleuze calls the binomial or the duel, in which two terms are in conflict with one another and one must work to overcome the other.
Deleuze divides the action image into two main forms, the large form and the small form. The large form takes the form SAS' . A situation (a real milieu, it seems) is presented, a character must take an action to deal with that situation, and a new situation (S') is created due to the characters action. This is the mode of most westerns and of the gangster film. A negative corollary is SAS", where the new situation is worse than the previous one.
The small form, which is often dictated by a low budget and encompasses a noir, instead takes the form ASA'. What opens the film is action, which brings about a new situation, to which the character must respond with a new mode of action. The alcoholic hero is a version of this; he opens the film in a rut, a new situation presents itself, and he either rises (or fails to rise) to the situation and ends up with a new way of acting at the end of the film.
4.The mental image, or the crisis. This is a version of thirdness: not just the emotional affect, not just the relationship between the two things, but a third play considers them, interprets them, considers them logically. What matters in Hitchcock is neither who committed the murder (firstness) nor how they did it (secondness) but "the set of relations in which the action and the one who did it are caught" (200). Deleuze argues that this is the mode of logic and philosophy, and thus Hitchcock is the philosopher of the cinema. Unfortunately, the cinema could not rest there, although he wanted it too. By opening up the idea that the cinema could have a version of thirdness, could question its precepts, a crisis was opened up. Film moves beyond SAS and ASA (no longer believing that situations or actions can be changed) in favor of a much more diffuse and problematic mode of filmmaking. This mode, which appears in Italian neo-Realism, the French New Wave, German neues Kino, and certain films of American New Hollywood (Lumet, Scorsese, Altman), has these characteristics: "dispersive situation, the deliberately weak links, the voyage form, the consciousness of cliches, the condemnation of the plot" (210).

Cinema 1: The Impulse Image

I have now read the chapter on naturalism in Cinema one 4 or 5 times, so I'm finally going to try to make sense of it. It will be a crucial text for me.

First, Deleuze situates the "impulse-image" between the action-image and the affect-image. In the affect-image, which highlights emotion, a part (especially face) is rendered such a way as to become a whole. And space isn't part of a larger environment, but becomes an "any-place-whatever" (123). Through these techniques, emotion is evoked. And moving beyond that, to the action-image, we'll get the "Determined milieu" where things are where they are, not any place whatever. This will trade in affect for action. But in between is the impulse-image, which takes place in an originary world.

To try and make sense of this: a determined milieux is a realistic place. An originary world, by contrast, is a place dominated by impulses, which is to say animal drives. In an originary world "the characters are like animals: the fashionable gentleman a bird of prey, the lover a goat, the poor man a hyena" (123). The impulse image creates a strange fusion of a real milieux and an originary world; it is a determined milieux which seems to have been invaded and controlled by an originary world, usually with a single setting where nature dominates infecting the entire film. Deleuze has a whole list of originary worlds in Stroheim and Bunuel films: "the mountain peak in Blind Husbands...the rock garden of the Golden age..." (125). He concludes that list with: " Even though it is localised, the originary world is still the overflowing location where the whole film happens, that is, the world which is revealed at the basis of the social mileiux which are so powerfully described" (125).

This idea - that the originary world is the originary point - has so much room for unpacking. First, it reminds me of Freud's/Lacan's navel of the dream, which is the place where the conscious mind's meaning-making system is no longer able to graft an interpretation on the overdetermined expression of the unconscious. This seems to be very similar to Deleuze's concept; in the impulse-image, the originary world erupts into the real milieux, rendering the entire milieux a naturalistic system. And at the point of contact between the milieux and the originary world (the desert, the rockgarden) the interpretive act becomes problematic - after all, the desert potion of McTeague/Greed has long troubled reviewers. Besides that navel, the milieux and the originary world seem to have the same relationship as the conscious interpretation of the dream and the unconscious expression lying below it: "But what gives their description such force is, indeed, their way of relating the features to an originary world which rumbles in the depths of all the milieux and runs along beneath them. This world does not exist independently of the determinate milieux, but conversely makes them exist with characteristics and features which come from above, or rather, from a still more terrible depth" (125-126).

Deleuze identifies a number of directors who attempt to be naturalist but fail, with some interesting results (p 134+, including Vidor, Nicholas Ray, Fuller, Renoir, and others). But he is mostly interested in the three directors who do succeed in being naturalist: Bunuel, Stroheim, and Losey. The most interesting part of Deleuze's commentary on these directors seems to be his distinction between how they treat degeneration. Stroheim does straight degeneration; he has an entropic system of degeneration, and he uses Expressionistic techniques of lighting and shadow to demonstrate how degeneration occurs over a period of time (126-127).

Bunuel has a much more interesting and problematic version of degeneration, one which, like Stroheim and expressionism, is linked to surrealism. Deleuze describes the system as follows: "The originary world thus imposes upon the successive milieux not exactly a slope, but a curvature or a cycle" (127). This cyclical nature of degeneration, which takes place as a "precipitating repetition, eternal return" means that there is never anyone who is completely evil (as they will always swing back to good) and that good figures play a stronger role than in Stroheim, as there always exist those on the upper part of the cycle. But ultimately things do not improve, as even the positive figures ("the male or female lover, the holy man") will eventually return and thus are "no less harmful than the pervert or the degenerate" (127). Either way, naturalism becomes very close to leaving the movement image and finding the time-image, but will never get there because it keeps its conception of time "subordinate to naturalistic co-ordinates" and thus naturalism could "only grasp the negative effects of time: attrition, degradation, wastage, destruction, loss, or simply oblivion" (127).

Much later than Stroheim or Bunuel is Losey, in whom the degradation takes the form of "the reversal against self" (137). In Losey, every character breaks down and degenerates when their own impulses are too strong to bear. "Fundamentally, there is the impulse, which, by nature, is too strong for the character, whatever his personality" (137). But Losey does seem to offer up, like Stroheim and Bunuel, an ambiguous form of salvation. This reversal only affects the men: "It seems that the world of impulses and the milieu of symptoms enclose the men hermetically, delivering them up to a sort of male homosexual game from which they do not emerge" (138). The women in Losey, by contrast, do not seem to feel the impules. "The leave naturalism to reach lyrical abstraction."

Well, I'm sure there's much, much more, but I think that's all I have for now. Whew. This Deleuze is a bitch to read and think through, but it's also very satisfying and above all rich with meaning.

The Politica Unconscious

I should begin by saying that I found this book pretty unuseful. As Jameson himself admits, a great deal of the content is very technical. Having not read any Lukacs and very little Althusser, I found the complicated discussion of their two positions meaningless. And I felt less confused - as if Jameson was saying something important but I didn't understand it - than apathetic. He did not seem to be working in an area that seemed fertile.

This may be because Jameson, along with most Marxists, partakes in the Marxist myth which I find absolutely laughable: "In the spirit of a more authentic dialectical tradition, Marxism is here conceived as that 'untranscendable horizon' that subsumes such apparently antagonist or incommensurable critical operations, assigning them an undoubted sectoral validity within itself, and thus at once canceling and preserving them" (10). I couldn't agree with Jameson more that the various modes he's discussing - psychoanalytic, ethical, myth critical, structural, etc - deserve to be treated this way. They should all be canceled as all-inclusive systems but preserved for their own provisional value. But the fact that he accepts the Marxist orthodoxy that Marxism itself is outside of ideology and can be the Ur-system that preserves and cancels the others is just silly. Perhaps he explains why this is so the technical portion that I did not understand.

Besides this pre-eminence of Marxism, Jameson's main goal seems to be to historicize everything. - to turn all of interpretation into the retelling "within the unity of a single great collective story" (19). He seems to be rescuing interpretation from uselessness by hooking it up to a Marxist narrative of history, in which each text has something to tell us about it's historical time and place, which in turn will inform us about the march of history, which we hope to maneuver in favor of fairer economic distribution.

He also seems to side with Western Marxism in tossing aside Vulgar Marxism and accepting a more complex relationship between the base and the superstructure, one which requires an immanent critique rather than mere economic manipulation (see p. 36).

Outside of that big picture dismissal, I did find a few interesting things. First, Jameson argues that Anti-Oedipus is doing a similar sort of thing - Deleuze and Guattari are eliminating the mommy-daddy-me triangle in favor of a "reassert[ion of] the specificity of the political content of everyday life" (22). He ties this in with the Deleuzian command to ignore what a text means and look instead at how a text works. This seems to me to be an endorsement of Deleuze's pragmatism, although the rhizomes of Deleuze, as an alternative to the Freudian triangle, strike me as very far from Jameson's "collective story." Jameson is just reigning things in through a different, historical lens; Deleuze wants to let them all loose.

Some things that are interesting for naturalism: Jameson argues that Freud's theory of sexuality is truly just the theory of the flow of desire, but he seems critical of the fact that Freud has isolated sexuality from the rest of life, which seems to me a valid complaint (64). And he quotes Frye as saying desire is "the energy that leads human society to develop its own form" (71), which makes it sound opposed to naturalism and a good deal like Eros.

Finally, one thing that Jameson gets really, really right: "the mirage of of an utterly nontheoretical practice, is a contradiction in terms; that even the most formalizing kinds of literary or textual analysis carry a theoretical charge whose denial unmasks it as ideological" (58). Well said.

Portrait of a Lady

Portrait of a Lady is one of the most dreariest, boringest books I have ever read. I was barely able to get through it; I spent months reading it. It was atrocious.

Anyway, I have very little to say about it. Gregg thought it might be interesting to view Osmond as a seducer in the tradition of naturalism, but I didn't find Osmond's character that interesting. Frankly, I didn't find anyone very interesting, least of all Isabel Archer, who deflects rich and perfect suitors Caspar Goodwood and Lord Warburton so she can have her freedom, marries Osmond for no clear reason, and then stays with Osmond even when he is (perfectly, precisely) horrid and hateful to her.

The most important thing I thought about this book is that Lord Warburton is considered a "radical" but that ideas are never broached. Unlike McTeague style naturalism, which leaves ideas out of it, or London style naturalism, which uses ideas point blank, this book suggests that ideas exists but then makes it clear that James simply has no interest in them at all. On p. 67, Isabel and Warburton discuss ideas, and Warburton disabuses her of all of her current ideas, but the ideas themselves are never mentioned. Everyone says that Warburton is a hypocrite for being a radical and a large land-owner, but never does anyone say that being a radical involves communal living or anything like that. Like EVERYTHING ELSE in James, ideas are obscured behind a blank wall of language.

I do think that, although Isabel is a character caught up in circumstances beyond her control, James' methods are the opposite of naturalism's. In the preface, he writes, that his idea flows not from any plot but from an idea of a character (p.4). This is the opposite of naturalism, in which the plot always comes first - it is usually drawn from the newspaper. I don't know if James works better as a realist or a modernist, but he's not a naturalist: his only concern seems to be individual psychology, and the controversial ideas that are naturalism's stock in trade are nonexistent.

The Sun Also Rises

The Sun Also Rises is, along with A Farewell to Arms, a key naturalist-modernist text by Hemingway. It certainly doesn't share with Arms a belief in the inevitability of the coming catastrophe. Arms ends up in a hyper-naturalist place; its protagonist ends up concluding that all existence is nothing but a steady march towards death.

But The Sun Also Rises does have a number of aspects which make it interesting for a consideration of naturalism. It's ultimately about impotence; Jake Barnes has come back from WWI with his balls blown off, which leaves an Italian military commander to tell him: "you...have given more than your life" (39). The out from the naturalist system that is denied in Farewell to Arms is denied here, and more thoroughly. Jake can never have offspring and perpetuate his genetics. The catastrophe has already come, once again delivered by WWI.

The novel is essentially the love story between Jake and Brett, the femme fatale who has dalliances and falling outs with her fiancee Mike, the Jewis novelist Cohn, and thtPerhaps is e ultra-masculine 19-year old bullfighter Romero. Each of them are a standin for the sexual relationship she cannot have with Jake, and she ends up with Jake in the end, having ruined all of her other relationships, but inevitably in a nonsexual way. Perhaps this is the most naturalist thing of all: neither jake nor Brett ever seriously consider being in love but not being able to have sex. It's just ont on the table.

Jake also advances a theory of morality which reminds me of Zola's belief that guilt is just a nervous reaction. Morality, or more accurately, immorality, is just "things that make you disgusted afterwards." This is a fully naturalistic system; only the gut can provide you with morality.

An American Tragedy

An American Tragedy, or Oh My God I Can't Believe I Read the Whole Damn Book

An American Tragedy is the longest slog I have every worked my way through. It is boring and poorly written, but is certainly worthy to stand as the most canonical text of American naturalism. It is a very pure form of naturalism - the essence of naturalism, which has not been reduced and strengthened in power but allowed to flow endlessly and thus blunted in its force.

It is essentially a novel of the American Dream, and how that Dream is thwarted by class. Perhaps moreso, it is a novel about how social strictures, particularly puritan methods of nobility, bring about tragedy.

The tragedy hear is no that Clyde Griffiths kills Roberta Alden. It's that society sets up a situation in which that could occur. Clyde doesn't love Roberta; he has a better life waiting for him. But she's pregnant. Society dictates that single mothers should be ostracized; society dictates that abortions are illegal (unless, as we hear about repeatedly, a wealthy woman of good stock is pregnant, in which case a physician can always be found). Society, then, brings about the tragedy by hypocritically insisting that Clyde must marry Roberta even though doing so would ruin both of their lives.

This determinstic viewpoint is pushed by Jepheson, one of Clyde's two lawyers (the other, Belknap, pushes the hypocrisy: he helps Clyde because he feels bad that, in the same situation, his wealth enabled him to get an abortion). Jephson says "You didn't make yourself" (710). He lays the blame for Clyde's problems outside of Clyde. That's the naturalistic way.

The introducer writes: "As a poor boy in his native Indiana, Dreiser avidly read the Horatio Alger stories and other self-help books about success. Unlike Chester Gillette (the historical precedent for Clyde), however, he had the talent, intellect, and drive to achieve it." (IX)

Drive, drive, drive. Here is Serres' thermodynamics - his engine. Over and over again, we're told that Clyde is handsomer than his cousin Gilbert, but lacks his drive and force. In other words, Gilberts was born with a more powerful reservoir than Clyde; he has a greater energy system to draw upon. This is what ultimately prevents Clyde from succeeding; although he could never be Gilbert, who was born to success, his lack of drive prevented him from rising on his own. Unlike Dreiser, or an Alger Hero, he simply doesn't have the motor for success. And lacking that motor, the classism and religious hypocrisy of his society dooms him.

Ethan Frome

Ever since Madame Bovary, that first proto-naturalist work, naturalism has been the literature of adultery. Ethan Frome is no exception - although no sexual adultery takes place, it is the story of farmer who, saddled with a nearly invalid wife, loves her cousin, Mattie, who has come to stay with them.

It is without a doubt of story of degeneration. There is in fact a reference to technological advances as "degenerate," which I assume to be in the sense of decadence (5). But more prevalent is physical degeneration. When we meet Ethan, he has already degenerated. But this is no slow, gradual degeneration: he is permanently marred by a past accident, described as a "smash-up" (3). Eventually, we hear the whole story in flashback: how Ethan and Mattie grew close, how his wife Zeena kicked Mattie out of the house to make room for a hired girl who can do the work an invalid shouldn't, how Mattie and Ethan, unable to afford to run away, decide to commit suicide by running into a giant elm on a sled, and how they survive, Mattie paralyzed from the waist down, Ethan, with one side marred, to spend the rest of their lives together with Zeena.

This work seems to perfectly fit within Norris' definition of naturalism as a dialectic between the deep truths of romanticism and the surface accuracy of realism. In that way it recalls Garland's veritism as well - these are hardened people, beaten down by life, who long for escape, but they are not depraved murderers, incestuous, or adulterous.

But the mode of telling is romantic. The foreshadowing of the elm is repeated over and over again, and that particular method of suicide is deeply sentimental and romantic. Wharton has taken rural Massachusetts and made it into a snow-drenched land of mystery and secrets. And the final scene of the book, when we see the Frome's house in present day: broken down Ethan,
endlessly toiling Mattie (whose "complications" eased up when she had to work), and paralyzed, tortured Mattie. This is a romantic story with all the bleakness of real, hardbitten, hardworking people.

Two more notes: First, this is definitely a story of inertia. Our narrator is an engineer, and when he offers the scientifically minded Ethan a book about biochemistry "[Ethan] hesitated, and I had the impression he felt himself about to yield to a stealing tide of inertia; then "Thank you- I'll take it," he answered shortly" (9). But if Ethan overcomes the tide of inertia that comes with his degeneration to accept the book, it is only because inertia let him down. Death by sled is undoubtedly death by intertia; this is a story that sees its characters inevitably sliding down a slope to their doom, and even dramatizes it in their method of suicide.

Secondly, a note on value: I have noted before that, in Age of Innocence, the van der Ludyens are the most prestigious family in New York, but their influence seems mostly based on the fact that they don't entertain - their value grows as their presence is absent, and upon seeing them, Ellen, who has no interest in New York social politics, finds them uninteresting.

In the same way, Mattie gets down and uses a pickle bowl while Zeena is away, and the cat breaks it. Zeena is away - it is her most precious and beautiful posession, and yet she has not used it a single time - not "even when the minister come to dinner" (63). Wharton seems to view these situations with derision; her sympathy is with Mattie and Ellen, who want to use beautiful things even if there are risks, and not with Zeena and the van der Ludyens, who see the withholding of a thing as its most powerful use.

Update:
The introducer writes:
"Ethan Frome has elements of romance in it, but Wharton radically refuses the Romantic's romance with time. Timer here is not the swift devestator [...] it is rather the gradual, relentless poisoner" (i would add: the bringer of degeneration)

And also: "The end of Ethan Frome is, in fact, the triumph of the realistic mode over the romantic one." (both quotes xiii).

The introducer is spot on, except she seems to be missing Norris' insight: this triumph is what we call naturalism!

Karl Marx

On Hegel's Philosophy of Right


Every complaint I had about Hegel's philosophy of right is taken up by Marx in this brief piece. Most importantly, as the introduction in the Selected Writings of Marx points out, Marx takes issue with Hegel starting with abstract ideas and working out the way things should be, rather than taking the way things are and working from there to theory. As Marx puts it in a more philosophical manner: "Hegel gives the predicates an independent existence and subsequently transforms them in a mystical fashion into their subjects" (18). That's a mouthful, but I think it means that Hegel has taken what is supposed to be the acted upon and made it the actor. He's subordinated actually existing humanity to his abstract philosophy, which is obviously the opposite of Marx's project. Another quote makes this more concrete, whereas Hegel's Philosophy of Right (also translated as Philosophy of law) puts his theoretical conception of the law first and asks that the people conform to it, Marx writes "Man does not exist for the law but the law for man." (20)

The German Ideology

The German Ideology is a really great and clear philosophical enumeration of materialist philosophy, just as we'll see that the 18th Brumaire is an example of actually writing history using materialist philosophy.

The basic point of the German Ideology might boil down to this: the real world exists, and the world of consciousness is not a separate plane, but simply one aspect and manifestation of the physical/material world.

Marx starts, in a very un-Hegelian way, with dealing with what reality is. He begins at the very beginning: "The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human organisms" (149). Damn. That's a good first premise.

But how do you define the human organism? There are several ways (including consciousness and speech) which Marx mentions, but a materialist conception of humanity begins with production (150). Everything else in human society flows from the fact that they must work to produce their subsistence; every historical event stems from the play of intercourse - of trade - ie the course that production and exchange takes place.

This leads Marx to make some very big claims:
p. 155 - "Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life." His method of philosophy starts with "real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness" (ie not as some vague, abstract spirit consciousness)

158 - "Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all."

160- Since the interaction of production leads to different classes, one of which must dominate at any given time, "It follows from this that all struggles within the State, the struggle between democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, the struggle for the franchise, etc., etc., are merely the illusory forms in which the real struggles of the different classes are fought amongst each other."

Spirit-philosophers like Hegel might describe the march towards liberalism as democracy becoming consciousness, but Marx knows that's a bunch of bull. All democracy is is the lower classes, who do not control production, trying to get empower themselves politically so they can control production. And if they control production, they can better their lives materially - the only goal.

162 - "Communism is not for us a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things." Post-Soviet Union, I have a tendency to view Communism as a vague and unattainable abstraction. It's good to have this perspective - Communism as an active changer of the world.

The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

I have to confess, I didn't get much out of this piece. This is definitely Marx at his most cogent and insightful; you could subtitle it "Marx for Bartlett's."

It includes the classic lines: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as a tragedy, the second as farce" (594).

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given, and transmitted from the past" (595). The first part of this phrase gave us Sartre's existentialism; the second, Levi-Strauss' structualism.

Besides that, the 18th Brumaire is just a very well-reasoned and very specific analysis of the movement of history, as it works itself out through class. The most interesting thing is the introducer's description of it "as a prologue to later Marxist thought on the nature and meaning of fascism" (594). Statements about Louis' rise seem to support this, such as: "The Bonaparte dynasty represents not the revolutionary, but the conservative peasant; not the peasant that strikes out beyond the condition of his social existence, the small holding, but rather the peasant who wants to consolidate it; not the country folk who want to overthrow the old order through their own energies linked up with the towns, but on the contrary those who, in stupefied bondage to this old order, want to see themsleves with their small holding saved and favoured by the ghost of the empire" (609).

Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Preface and Intro

Hegel's Philosophy of Right seems to provide some surprisingly ripe material for an examination of naturalism. It also seemed slightly more readable to me than much other Hegel.

The preface makes it clear that the project at hand is to prove that "the Right" - ie the concept of good and right laws in society - can be philosophically proven. And Hegel puts the idea that it can't be proven into the language of degeneration: his method (which he calls speculative, which is more philosophical than the "empirical" method but still scientifically based) "is essentially distinct from any other way of knowing" by virtue of its "mode of scientific proof." "It is only insight into the necessity of such a difference that that can rescue philosophy from the shameful decay in which it is immersed at the present time" (2). Hegel is attacking a philosophical method which- sense the old rules of logic seem to be in doubt - wants to toss scientific method into the dustbin altogether, and replace it with the belief that "that only is true which each individual allows to rise out of his heart, emotion, and inspiration about ethical institutions" (5). This transcendental way of knowing "the Right" is the enemy - it depends on "opinion and caprice" (6).

Hegel's manner of proving that "the Right" is considerably more difficult to follow, but it rests on a notion which is compatible with naturalism's vocabulary, if not in sync with its beliefs. Hegel does some very complicated stuff with the idea of determinism and free will, and ultimately produces something which sounds very much like Dreiser's famous opening to Chapter 8 of Sister Carrie.
Dreiser: "Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason."

Hegel's goal is to prove that, although the human will is constantly beset by these instincts, which he calls (anticipating Deleuze) "impulses, desires, inclinations, whereby the will finds itself determined in the will of nature" (25), the will can actually overcome these impulses and reach a state of greater rationality, which he calls both universality and the "essentially human."

P. 30: "This self-consciousness which apprehends itself through thinking as essentially human, and thereby frees itself from the contingent and the false, is the principle of right, morality, and all ethical life." I can't say I entirely understood Hegel's complex proof as to why this is possible, nor do I agree with him. But I think this overcoming is the core tenet in his belief in the Right; when he declares "An existent of any sort embodying the free will, this is what right is. Right therefore is by definition freedom as Idea" (33) he's articulating that Right is what happens when humanity achieves freedom, not by abandoning itself to its instincts, but by understanding that it can free to act not on instincts but in a purely rational manner - ie, when its subjectivity becomes the same as rational objectivity.

Wikipedia offers these thoughts: "The Philosophy of Right (as it is usually called) begins with a discussion of the concept of the free will and argues that the free will can only realize itself in the complicated social context of property rights and relations, contracts, moral commitments, family life, the economy, the legal system, and the polity. A person is not truly free, in other words, unless he is a participant in all of these different aspects of the life of the state."

I think this is just a more grounded version of what I was saying. In other words, if impulses drive us to be outside these structures, our reason drives us inside them. And thus "the Right" is achieved when we can reorient our will so that we subjectively desire to be enmeshed in the objectively useful framework just discussed by Wikipedia.

Finally, Wikipedia summarizes the rest of the book:

The bulk of the book is devoted to discussing Hegel's three spheres of versions of 'right,' each one larger than the preceding ones and encompassing them. The first 'sphere' is abstract right, in which Hegel discusses the idea of 'non-interference' as a way of respecting others. He deems this insufficient and moves onto the second sphere, morality. Under this, Hegel proposes that humans reflect their own subjectivity of others in order to respect them. The third sphere, ethical life, is Hegel's integration of individual subjective feelings and universal notions of right. Under ethical life, Hegel then launches into a lengthy discussion about family, civil society, and the state.

Hegel also argues that the state itself is subsumed under the higher totality of world history, in which individual states arise, conflict with each other, and eventually fall. The course of history is apparently toward the ever-increasing actualization of freedom; each successive historical epoch corrects certain failures of the earlier ones, but Hegel does not seem to have figured out--and he admits as much--how the modern state can solve the problems of poverty and class division, something his successor Karl Marx would attempt to solve. At the end of his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel leaves open the possibility that history has yet to accomplish certain tasks related to the inner organization of the state.


Erin Sez: Hegel (and Kant) seem to be frequently dealing with linguistic problems. they seem to believe that language can actually capture the truth. this pre-rupture (pre-wittgenstein?) approach is what leads them to believe they can answer these questions absolutely and universally - the very form of language leads them to them.

History of Sexuality, v1

Although I never would have guessed it, The History of sexuality reads more or less like a history of naturalism, or at least traces a phenomenon which naturalism and degeneration are a part of. Along the way, Foucault does something which I find impressive and relieving in equal parts: he relieves Freudian psycho-analysis of the pseudo-scientific burden of naturalism and sets it up, at least partially, as an opposing force to the deterministic, normalizing, and racist beliefs of naturalism.

Foucault's thesis is a reversal of received wisdom: sexuality, which once flowed freely, was clamped down on during the 18th and 19th centuries - the periods of Victorian repression. Foucault denies such repression and argues instead that the tradition of confession, in which sexual desires, dreams, and whims, are extensively catalogued and brought to light, means that sexuality was actually flowing to an unprecedented degree in this period of so-called repression. Every single desire that a human has is transformed into discourse, and thus becomes a point of power relations (21).

This obsession with sexuality had four main outlets, which he outlines on pages 104-105:
1.hysterization of woman's bodies - women become "saturated" with sexuality
2.pedagogization of children's sex - children must be educated about the (paradoxically) natural inclination to a sexuality that is against nature
3.socialization of procreative behavior - power was exerted on the control and direction of fertility
4.psychiatrization of perverse pleasure - perverse pleasure was defined as anomalous, a normalization procedure was necessary

It's this last one that I deem most interesting. Foucualt tells of a village simpleton who paid young girls for some form of sexual gratification in 1867, and, when his actions are known, something quite remarkable occurs: the simpleton's "bucolic pleasures" become the object of "a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration... they went so far as to measure the brainpan, study the facial bone structure, and inspect the possible signs of degenerescence the anatomy of this personage who up to that moment had been an integral part of village life" (31). This is part of the project of naturalism, or at least it's fellow travelers; Foucault, in a very useful move, is linking naturalism's racist narrative of (in his words) "degenerescence" with this project of turning sexuality into discourse.

Almost of equal importance is how Freud downplays concerns about Freud's "normalization" and argues that psycho-analysis "rigorously opposed the political and institutional effects of the the perversion-heredity-degenerescence system" (119). Psycho-analysis did this by, rather than hunting out desires like incest "as a conduct," "alleviating...the severity which repressed it" (130). Although this is a limited and not entirely clear endorsement of psycho-analysis, it is an important one for my project nevertheless.

The Sea-Wolf

Charles Walcutt describes London as an excellent naturalist author whose works always inevitably end up a sentimental mush. Having only read Martin Eden recently, that seemed an incorrect characterization.

The Sea-Wolf could not more perfectly fit that description. It is the perfect example of Donna Campbell's "second thematic course" of naturalism: "Sissy" van Weyden, a literary critic, is rescued from shipwreck by a sealing ship that won't set him back in San Francisco, but takes him out to Japan to hunt seals, on the captain's whim. The captain is Wolf Larsen, a sort of evil inversion of the Martin Eden character: he's physically enormous and strong, but also a self-trained philosopher who, following Nietzsche and Darwin, believes that life is nothing but the struggle between various forms of yeast, trying to stay alive. He has the beliefs of the beast, and the erudite philosophy to back them up; Martin had the philosophy, but never seemed quite able to hold to it.

Under Larsen's order, Hump shapes up and becomes a man. Then, as Bosley Crowther put it in a review of the John Wayne Western "Red River," which is also "the story of a desperate contention between two strong-minded men, a hard-bitten veteran and a youngster." Crowther writes: "Then the cowboys—and the picture—run smack into "Hollywood" in the form of a glamorized female." In The Sea-Wolf, the women is Maud Brewster, an acclaimed writer that the literary critic van Weyden had much praised in the past. The two eventually end up together on an island and then, after refurbishing Wolf's ship and overcoming a stroke-weakened Wolf, end up happily together in a load of sentimental mush.

A number of interesting issues are in play here. One is Wolf Larsen's brother, Death, who is never onscreen but hunts Wolf down; Wolf describes him as identical to himself, but without the whimsical or philosophical underpinnings. This suggest to me that philosophy, as London perceives it, may be just window-dressing or a veneer; Wolf and Death don't act any differently, even though one has read Darwin and one not. Alternately, Wolf might be worse than Death, as his belief-system leads him to toy with people, as he does with two sailors he promises Hump that he will not harm but then repeatedly sails outside of their ship's reach so that they drown.
Also notable is the fact that Hump is never able to murder Wolf; Wolf taunts him that society still has its grips on him. Although Hump is toughened by his conflict with Wolf, he retains society's deepest injunctions against murder. This tells us two things. First, in the second thematic form of naturalism, the classist fantasy that the man of good stock can be toughened by the encounter with the brute is complete: he is toughened, but he never becomes the brute. Second, like in Red River's infamous climax, you cannot kill the father in naturalism: the urge to cut the ties completely and institute a new system of government is never realized. At any time, Hump could have killed Wolf and liberated the crew of the Ghost from his tyranny, but he's never able to act on this impulse.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

The first thing that strikes me about The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is how similar it is to The Searchers, especially in terms of its John Wayne character. In Valance, Wayne plays Tom Donophin, a goodhearted and decent, but dangerous, farmer who is the only man in town not afraid of the titular villain. Donophin is, like Ethan Edwards, on the same side as the communitarians - he's for making the territory into a state, for democracy, for some sort of advancement of African-American rights, etc. He eventually fights for the side of good, shooting down Valance when he's facing off with the tenderfoot Ransom Stoddard, that Donophin's former girlfriend loves. In other words, Donophin is Ethan Edwards: he's the muscle that the community needs to protect it from the outlaw, but he doesn't end up getting his own family, he provides that muscle technically outside the law, and the film ends with him being shut outside the community. In fact, in Valance the final scene of Searchers is reenacted twice: first, just after Donophin tells Stoddard that he secretly shot Valance when Stoddard was facing him down, but Stoddard should continue to take the credit for it. Stoddard, henceforth "the man who shot liberty valance," walks back into the crowded meeting hall and accepts political appointment as the man who vanquished the rancher's hired gun and who will make the territory into the state. Donophin is left looking into the community meeting, then walks away. This is the final scene of the flashback that occupies the bulk of the film; in the next scene, Stoddard and his wife leave Donophin's casket, and the casket remains, just as in the earlier scene, behind the doors after the community builders have walked out.

Valance is most different from The Searchers in that it presents a stronger alternative to the "good bad man" than Searchers does. Although Stoddard is constantly mocked, as a dishwasher who can't shoot straight, he eventually becomes a well-known teacher and lawyer, and, in the frame story, a multi-term senator, governor, and ambassador who brings railroads and irrigation to the desert and truly civilizes it. In The Searchers we see all these things as distant promises at best, but in Valance Jimmie Stewart's Stoddard brings them all to pass and embodies them, sometimes forcefully. He still needs Donophins (aka Ethan's) gun, but only in the past - in the present day, we hear that Donophin hasn't worn a gun for years. The Community, at last, has come to pass.

The strangest part about this film, when compared to naturalist literary texts, is the reversed position of the ranchers and the railroads. As in Shane, the villains are the cattle ranchers and the true community is made up of small farmers trying to band together against the giant villainous specter. As people repeatedly point out in Valance, the railroad brings both progress and civilization, and promises a better life in the future for the small farmers. This is a vast contrast from The Octopus where the big ranchers, growing wheat instead of raising cattle, are the sympathetic figures, and the railroad brings not progress but the destructive corporatization of the West. I've already noted this as a strange feature in Norris' text to begin with - for all that that novel, especially in Presley's poem "The Toilers," attempts to embrace the proletariat, its heroes are mostly giant land barons of the kind scorned in Valance and Shane. This might just underline Norris' fundamental conservatism, or at least his disconnect with the common people as displayed in McTeague, but it certainly bears further investigation.

Martin Eden

So far, Martin Eden is my leading candidate for the masterpiece of American naturalism, beyond even McTeauge, Studs Lonigan, and The USA Trilogy in excellence. It is Jack London’s semi-autobiographical story of a hoodlum sailor who, upon meeting a middle-class woman, falls desperately in love with her and begins a project of self-education in order to be worthy of her. The project is eventually a failure, as he winds her hand in marriage, loses it, and then regains it only to shun it, but along the way London has created the most persuasive portrait of excessive desire I have yet encountered. Once Martin Eden is exposed to history, poetry, biology, and above all philosophy, he becomes an unstoppable machine of knowledge collection and story writing, eventually finding fame and fortune only to find it all meaningless. At the novel’s close, he sets up all of his impoverished friends and family for bourgeois respectability, then commits suicide.

The first interesting aspect of Martin Eden is that, in its fairly complicated rags to riches narrative, it gives us a new type of naturalist narrative, one not mentioned by Donna Campbell. In this one, the brutish man, who the author identifies with and doesn’t condescend to, is introduced to the feminine poetry and manners of upper middle-class society. That the result is still disaster has less to do with the new environment that Martin finds himself in and more to do with the fact that he surpasses the feminine society of his beloved Ruth and her class and ascends beyond them. This is a narrative with one further step than a traditional rags to riches story; upon receiving his riches, Martin is completely dissatisfied for him because he cannot find a place that makes him happy, not because he still empathizes with his previous state, but because he has surpassed upper-class morality with his Spencer and Nietzsche.

The most interesting part of this novel, for me, is Martin’s early love for Spencer and later love for Nietzsche. In Spencer, Martin finds the piece of knowledge that will come to dominate his entire theory of knowledge: “And here was the man Spencer, organizing all knowledge for him, reducing everything to unity, elaborating ultimate realities, and presenting to his startled gaze a universe so concrete of realization […] There was no caprice, no chance. All was law.” (109). From Spencer, Martin learns that evolution dominates every process, from biology to philosophy, and this becomes his intellectual framework: the dominance of evolutionary process. From there, he eventually becomes the disciple of Nietzsche, combining Nietzsche and Spencer such that he comes to understand slave-morality as a misguided evolutionary process which hijacks the natural evolution of humanity away from the ubermensch and towards the unwashed masses. There’s no doubt that London himself regards Martin as a version of the superman; Martin accomplishes intellectual and artistic feats that seem impossible, while in his previous life he got every girl and won every fight.

It is impossible for me to discuss every point I found of interest in this novel. I want to conclude simply by stating that, in Martin Eden, London seems to have put every single imaginable aspect of naturalism into play, while also writing the philosophical novel of ideas. Such an accomplishment is, to my mind, nigh impossible, and I expect to study this novel extensively, as it is both the perfect example of what makes naturalism pathological and how a naturalistic work of literature can overcome the standard strictures of naturalism.

My Antonia

It would appear that My Atonia is the perfect example of how a work of realism can have little or no connections to the realm of naturalism, just like The Rise of Silas Lapham. It begins with a fairly simple frame story – an unnamed female writer (implied, of course, to be Cather herself) discusses a girl, Antonia, she once knew with her friend Jim Burden. They decide to each write an account of Antonia, with an interesting sort of impressionistic collaboration: “I would set down on paper all that I remembered of Antonia if he would do the same. We might, in this way, get a picture of her” (5). Apparently two different impressions, when triangulated together, can provide some sort of greater accuracy – an idea that seems to me to be slightly opposed to the idea of impressionism itself.

I must confess that, on the whole, I found My Antonia fairly dull. The first portion follows the orphaned Jim Burden’s time on the farm and his relationship to the neighboring Bohemian girl Antonia; in the next section, Jim and his grandparents have moved to town, and Antonia has come as well to work in the house of their next door neighbors. Book III, Lena Lingard, describes Jim’s lackasdaisacal romance with Lena, a more promiscuous doppleganger of Antonia while he’s in college, whereas Book VI is the story of Antonia’s failed attempt at marriage, which ended her pregnancy and eventual marriage to Cuzak. The final portion details Jim’s visit to the adult Antonia Cuzak, and her preponderance of offspring. The novel closes with a final two lines which sum up, I think, much of my disinterest in the proceedings: “Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past” (273). Not only does this last sentence call into question the triangulation I mentioned earlier, it makes it clear that My Antonia is a work of nostalgia for a frontier time and place, and a frontier woman, and I was never drawn into and understanding of Burden’s/Cather’s desire.

This is a quintessentially realistic book, particularly in that it looks at the lives of Midwestern farmers and never, it would seem, finds excess. It bears many similarities to Main-Traveled Roads, but mostly lacks that book’s interest in the damage that the bleak farm life can do to human beings, outside of the suicide of Antonia’s father, who misses the old country but was compelled to find a way to feed his family. Furthermore, My Antonia seems to have absolutely no interest in punishing female misbehavior; no one is ruined, and although Antonia is described as “disgraced” by the pregnancy that resulted from her failed engagement, her life with Cuzak is, if small, not a bad one (253). Lena, the novel’s constant candidate for ruination (which is described as being “compromised” (215)) has a different fate than we would expect: “And that Lena, that was always a bad one, say what you will, had turned out so well” (233) as a dressmaker in San Francisco. My Antonia seemed to me mostly a tranquil novel, with most desire confined to the past and, even then, existing only below the surface.

This tranquility, which is the novel’s clearest sign of being opposed to naturalism and its excessive desires, has one more clear manifestation. In naturalism, people are often described as animals; naturalism’s entire product blurs the line between man and animal. But My Antonia has an entirely different model: “Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we were used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons” (28). Here, and elsewhere (253), the boundary between trees and humans is compromised, and the plant kingdom seems to be the model for humanity: tranquil, grounded, able to be transferred only with difficulty (Antonia’s father), and endlessly reaching into the past.

House of Mirth

The House of Mirth

The House of Mirth has been described as one of the two works by female novelists of this period most likely to be considered naturalism, with Kate Chopin’s The Awakening being the other. It’s the story of Lily Bart, a high-society maiden whose family fortune is lost. Lily has a chance for a middle-class existence with the lawyer Lawrence Selden, but Wharton makes it quite clear that Lily is the product of her early environment, in which there was nothing worse to live in a dull apartment and own ugly things, and thus cannot ever marry Lawrence Selden (316). For the same reason, she cannot marry the wealthy Mr. Rosedale, who is not quite in society enough and highly unrefined; she needs both taste and money. She is finally reduced to the point that neither Lawrence nor Rosedale desire to marry her (although Rosedale offers to, if she can regain stature), and lives a pathetic lower-class existence, without any lower-class skills, before accidentally overdosing one sleeping medication – committing suicide (if unintentionally) in true naturalist fashion.

Beyond the obvious connection to naturalism that comes from Wharton declaring that Selden “was, like Lily, the victim of his environment” (160), I’m most interested in the way this novel manages to reduce everything to basic economics. Strangely, Lily is never described as “ruined” in the novel, perhaps because she is never physically “ruined” but only rumored to have been ruined, by virtue of her connection to a married man, Gus Trenor. Her connection to Trenor is of course provable because she borrowed money from him; she is rumored to be ruined sexually because she was ruined financially. Of course, women can’t be ruined financially, as men can; in the case of House of Mirth, Lily’s father: “I’m ruined” he says, when the fortune fails (34). But the family’s fortune isn’t entirely gone until Lily is ruined as well: Lily’s beauty “was the last asset in their fortunes, the nucleus around which their life was to be rebuilt” (35). This completes the circle. Men are ruined when they lose finances; women are ruined when they have had sex outside of marriage, rendering them no longer eligible to marry men with fortunes. This observation is of course not unique to Wharton – Prince Amerigo, after all, hears in Charlotte’s beauty the chink of gold in The Golden Bowl – but it draws an incredibly clear line between Wharton’s novel and The Rise of Silas Lapham, a line that solidifies Mirth’s status as naturalism. In Lapham, money turns out to be no substitute for taste, and morals rise above both of those; in Mirth, both taste and morals are simply processes by which money makes itself felt – even the possibly immoral and seemingly distasteful Mr. Rosedale is eventually able to transmute his gold into a strong standing in the upper-class community. In The House of Mirth, every interaction is fundamentally revealed to be a financial transaction. The only possible exception is Lily’s union with Lawrence, which she can never bring herself to make, as it is a move full of both morality and taste, but forecloses all paths to future financial success.

On a side note of naturalist import, the novel is full of interesting naturalistic observations – characters are often described as automatons or cogs in a giant machine (54, 324-325). More important is an interesting gender distinction; when Lily is in a more lively (aka Aestheticist) surrounding we get this description: “Little as she wasin the key of their milieu, her immense social facility, her long habit of adapting herself to others without suffering her own outline to be blurred […] had won for her an important place in the Gormer group” (248). The downfall of both Theron Ware and Vandover is that they cannot adapt themselves to those around them without losing their own selves; Lily, I think for purely gender reasons, is allowed that privilege.

“Frederic, Norris, and the Fear of Effeminacy” by Donna Campbell

“Frederic, Norris, and the Fear of Effeminacy” by Donna Campbell, from Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 1885-1915. 75-108

Donna Campbell argues that fears of the feminine illuminate both The Damnation of Theron Ware and Vandover and the Brute. She begins by suggesting that naturalists were hostile to “the feminine” in literature, without noticing that the decadent, one of the strongest strands of the feminine, was often either in accord with or a parody of naturalism. Caught up in a general social mistrust of the “mollycoddle” and admiration for the “bully” (T. Roosevelt’s words), the naturalists rushed to the defense of the masculine, particularly in the two novels mentioned, but failed to appreciate the complexity of their undertaking.

Campbell notes three possible arrangements of the masculine and the feminine. The first is the standard naturalist one: brutish people are exposed to brutish conditions, and the result is the brutality of McTeague or L’Assomoir – something deplored by both Lombroso and the middle-class naturalists (77). Another option is the healthy compromise; over-civilized men are confronted with brutish nature, and, thanks to their genetic “good stock,” develop into healthy men – this is the model of Moran of the Lady Letty and Sea-Wolf (78). The final option, the option of Vandover and Theron, is to become so civilized that, paradoxically, one becomes a degenerate. By repeatedly surrendering to civilizations emphasis on taste, the feminine man eventually becomes a creature totally devoted to his desire – the brute (80).

From the start, Theron occupies the position of the woman – the novel repeatedly describes him in womanly terms, both him specifically and his profession particularly. Even his wife declares that he should carry a parasol like a woman (84). And he feigns illnesses to get out of responsibilities, just as a woman of the period (82-83). Perhaps most interestingly, Campbell notes that he displays all of William James candidates for the degenerate: they “show fear, anger, pity, tears, and fainting … they are ‘oversensitive’ and show an ‘excessive response’ which can include neurasthenia and dependency” (84). Ultimately, Campbell concludes that Theron falls because, rather than taking up any of the ideas of those surrounding him, he merely apes their taste or style, and thus gives himself over to the feminizing influence that causes Ledsmar to view him as a lizard. “He begins, in fact, to see himself as a victim of impersonal forces and to measure things by only the most elemental laws of nature: greed, self-interest, and sexual attraction. The education of this local minister has led him only into a self-delusional justification of the naturalistic brute within” (91). The only escape the novel affords is to throw off his profession altogether, and become a man of business.

Vandover, as Campbell points, out, could hardly be more similar to Dorian Grey: an artist who is distracted from his art by sensual pleasures, who impregnates a woman who commits suicide, who attempts to redeem himself but fails, and who is beset by an almost supernatural malady ( 93). Ultimately, Vandover fails as an artist because he’s not a naturalist – with a vibrant city scape in front of him, and an exciting shipwreck in his past, he does nothing but plan a romantic landscape in a desert. To succeed as an artist, he would have needed to become another Ash-can School painter, but instead he’s just another failure (105). He can’t reconcile his artistic impulses with his everyday life because his attempts to unite the masculine and the feminine “lead him not only into misreadings but into exaggerations or perverse visions of traditional masculine and feminine behavior” (94). Vandover needs to simply grind out a great work of art, to apply a masculine force of will to a masculine subject, but instead he allows himself to be feminized, by virtue of the pliancy the novel always mentions in connection to him. As with Theron, allowing his whims free range in the rarefied air of culture eventually just turns him into a brute, as he becomes controlled by his desires (105). All of this stems from his belief that the feminine manner of art can be reconciled with the masculine, when in fact no reconciliation is possible and, as a man abandoning himself to the feminine, “he becomes the brute that the new age demanded without any of the brute’s traditional vitality” (107).

Quite simply, both of these characters foolishly try to cultivate feminity, to graft it on to their masculine natures, and the result is a masculine brute who lacks even the brutes raw power. Campbell argues that this plight which the two authors attempt to depict affects them as well. By obsessing over all of the topics of the decadents – philosophy, vividly “real life,” lists of facts, and in depth descriptions of “things, money, clothes, houses, phrases – the naturalists recapitulate to a lesser degree those very symptoms they sought to critique. Like their characters, they walked dangerously close ‘to the edge of the slope, at the bottome of which lie pessimism and the nightmare or suicide view of life,” which constitute the real menace of degeneration” (108).

Once again, as I repeatedly mentioned in the case of Nordau, when one tries to separate naturalism from decadence, one manages only to tie the two closer together.

Vandover and the Brute

Vandover and the Brute

More than anything else, Vandover and the Brute resembles a sort of naturalist retelling of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The novel has a pretty standard view of the dichotomous nature of humanity: Vandover has a good side, which is appealed to by art, interested in high class women, and must be prodded into action by external forces in society. He also has a bad side, which is activated by alcohol, looks for sex with lower class women, and is waiting at every moment to spring forth and overwhelm him. It does so in one particularly notable moment: Van takes the mid-class girl Ida to The Imperial, which seems to be some sort of oyster bar/brother, where he sleeps with her (79). This is the seed of his ruination: Ida becomes pregnant, commits suicide, Van leaves town but is shipwrecked coming back, his father dies of the shock of the shipwreck, Van fails to take care of his father’s business well, Ida’s father sues Van and Van’s old friend Geary is the lawyer, but swindles Van by pretending to be acting on his interests, and then Van, swindled, loses the rest of his money gambling before being employed by Geary as a cleaner for some slum apartments Geary owns. The novel’s most interesting sequence by far is its last: Van cleans a vacated apartment while a family moves into it; the wife harshly supervises him, the child mocks him, and the father finally takes pity on him and gives him a quarter (340-354). Furthemore, the novel makes it quite clear that Van could have avoided all of this is someone had pushed him in the direction of his better interests – he is a skilled painter – but in the absence of a positive influence, the brute was destined to win.

Some points of interest. First, the brute in Vandover manifests itself in a remarkably strange way: he literally barks like a dog when the brute is uppermost (citation needed). Furthermore, there only seems to be so much room inside Van’s psyche; after his father dies, he goes to work on his masterwork, trying to redeem himself by virtue of his art, but he finds that his ability to make art has left him – not his hands, but his imagination (225). Vandover is very much like Edna Pontellier; the novel makes it clear over and over again that he has no will of his own but his pliable nature adapts to his environment (17, 120, 207). It is this pliability that allows the brute to become dominant: “he, pleasure-loving, adapting himself to every change of environment, luxurious, self-indulgent, shrinking with the shrinking of a sensuous artist-naure from all that was irksome and disagreeable, had shut his ears to the voices that shouted warnings of the danger, and had allowed the brute to thrive” (215). Perhaps there is an important distinction to make, that Edna was seized by whims and impulses while Van simply adapts to his environment; perhaps not.

Finally, Van seems to have a great deal in common with Des Esseintes of Au Rebours. Just I have suggested that McTeague is a creature of sensuous pleasures like Dorian Gray, just in a lower environment, Vandover too seems to be such a creature. Furthermore, we have a sequence straight from Au Rebours when Vandover chooses rooms, obsessed with their light and windows, and then gives us a lengthy list of the furnishings he intends to put in them, to make them suitable (169-172). Of all the American naturalists, Norris seems the one most in line with the European tradition which unites naturalism and aestheticism, and Vandover is clearly the novel that demonstrates that connection most fully.