Question #11: Dewey and Naturalism

First, the reasons why naturalism and pragmatism are or could be opposed - these might come most easily from James. Put in the most simple terms, naturalism is fascinated with degeneration, with the devolution of the human subject, whereas pragmatism seems to be only interested in moving humanity forward. But there are crucial ways in which pragmatism and naturalism dovetail. Using Dewey:

First, and most obviously, it's no coincidence that Dewey uses the term "empirical naturalism" to describe his understanding of the scientific method. This use of the term naturalism refers not to the literary movement headed by Zola but rather to the older, original use of the term naturalism, which means some combination of a materialist and scientific philosophy. In other words, we have an initial point of agreement between pragmatism and literary naturalism: both discard Platonic realism/metaphysics and Descartian dualism, favoring instead a naturalistic/materialistic epistemology.

Beyond this similarity is the uniquely textual method that both naturalism and pragmatism employ. To put this more precisely, both naturalism and pragmatism (particularly in its Deweyan manifestation) represent practitioners of a textual field (literature, philosophy) attempting to use certain aspects of the scientific methodology to reveal truths on some border ground between their traditional disciplinary space and the space of politics and sociology. In other words, both naturalism and pragmatism, inspired by a materialist philosophy which abandons most traditional aesthetic or metaphysical concepts, seeks to find a way to bring literary/philosophic writing to bear on the contemporary social problems of the world.

This uniting takes place when he concludes that a useful description of his project is "naturalistic humanism." In other words, an the philosophical system of the type that both naturalism and pragmatism reject held, perhaps about all things, a separation of man and experience from nature. This for Dewey is but a silly obstruction - how else is man to know of nature than by experience? The only other alternative is a supra-empiricial, a transcendental knowledge of nature which both naturalism and Dewey see as an outdated and obfuscating mode of epistemology.

Perhaps nothing links Dewey's epistemology with naturalism more than his belief, as is only natural once we do away with a transcendental knowledge of nature, that non-cognitive experiences precede cognitive experiences, and that cognitive experiences are made up of non-cognitive experiences. This could more or less be the doctrine of Zola - in fact, it is a better way of putting it than Zola ever could. This is the central doctrine of naturalistic philosophy; not that consciousness does not exist or is a fiction, but that whatever consciousness is, it arises out of biological functionings of the nervous system. Dewey describes the alternative to such an understanding as a world in which every human is a stranger in every environment, abstracted from their surroundings and unable to know them. The naturalists, with Dewey, wanted to get rid of such an understanding of humanity, as well as humanity's morals and, indeed, consciosness. For both Dewey and Zola, humankind was another biological organism, finding its way in an environment by virtue of the biological signals communicated by its nervous system.

From here, it is not hard to imagine naturalism and pragmatism as divergent courses with near identical starting points. Both of them wanted to sweep away what they perceived as millennia of rubbish that had accumlated from a disassociation of man from his environment. Both of them did so, not by writing scientific texts, but by attempting to link this newly scientific awareness with the unique strengths of their respective disciplines. Etc.

Exam Prep: Question #1: Drama in Sister Carrie/Maggie

1.Two of the most important American naturalist novels, Sister Carrie and Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, are highly dramatic in their sense of place and staging, and both feature key dramatic performances in public spaces. Discuss the role that drama and performance play in each of these novels, and explain how the dramatic strands of these novels affect the authors shared desire to highlight social inequality and class issues.

In ways that will become clear almost immediately, Maggie and Sister Carrie are deeply different novels. Most of their similarities are superficial: they represent canonical naturalist novels by canonical male novelists that follow and are named for lower-class urban heroines who struggle to find a use for their uncommon beauty and talent. Of course, in another equally superficial way, these novels are highly different: Maggie is short even for a novella, whereas only An American Tragedy makes Sister Carrie look like a picture of restraint. But they do share an emphasis on the dramatic; in both Maggie and Sister Carrie, dramatic performances play a major role in the story and shape the interactions between the characters.

For Maggie, her first date with Pete is an escape from the miserable life of her apartment in the form of a trip to a music hall which mixed burlesque and musical performances, to the enormous delight of Maggie. But more important to Maggie than the musical performances are the cheap plays, all of which are described as having beautiful girls live as the wards of rich gentleman who have impure intentions; the girls are inevitably rescued by dashing young men whose primary action in the play is to rescue elderly strangers.

It is from these plays, and these plays alone, that Maggie gets her view of romance. Pete is transformed into one of the dashing young men who rescues the heroine, and Maggie herself becomes of course the girl in need of rescuing. But Maggie's understanding of her situation could hardly be more at odds with the facts of the case. The greatest dissimilarity is with her home life.

Ok, this isn't working, so breaking it down: 1.Maggie is inspired by the plays to read her life as a storybook romance.
2.However, the reality is that her romance is a play, but an entirely different one. It takes place in music halls of ill-repute, and there people are not judged on their moral fibre but their beauty. Thus Maggie is a succesful performer for atime, but eventually Pete sees his more beautiful ex, and Maggie is abandoned. In other words, she didn't play the part beautifully enough - she was lacking the requisite experience, makeup, and costume.
3.Maggie's home life is an inversion of the plays - she could not live in a slummier setting. But, just like the dance halls, it too is a performing space. Within the apartment, her mother's true colors come out; she destroys furniture and takes her rages out on everyone. When Maggie exits this space by spending a night out, she is condemned to hell by her mother, not for actually doing anything with Pete but merely for not spending the night there - the performance matters, not the action or intentions. And then the mother's true intentions go away when she moves to the public space: the tenement hallway. Here maggie's mother is the picture of morality, condemning Maggie to hell and wailing to her neighbors' of the unfairness of the situation in a way that Crane compares to a museum showman. It is also in this hallway where the book's final performance takes place: after Maggie's death, her mother does a call and response with the other busybodies in the apartment building, reiterating her sadness over Maggie's descent into hell and then finally, vocally, with the final words of the novel, "fergiving" the girl who she did not support in life. This ties in with Pizer's assertion that this is not really a naturalistic novel but rather one concerned with the hypocrisy of society - it's not necessarily environment that brings everyone down, but unrealistic "show morals"

Sister Carrie is not an inversion of the traditional damsel in distress is rescued by dashing young man kind of play, but simply a reordering of it. After all, although Dreiser makes it very clear with some late editorializing that Carrie will not find happiness simply by obtaining the object of her desire (ie fame and fortune) she does nevetheless achieve those things. And she achieves them, at successive terms, by playing the part correctly. The primary rewriting in this retelling of the story of young girl who makes good concerns the role of the prince. Carrie auditions two different princes, Drouet and Hurstwood, and both of them prove ultimately ineffectual. Drouet first wins her heart by simply being present and dandy, and he proves to be her first drama coach: he dresses her correctly and teaches her the correct mannerisms of a lady. Once Carrie starts playing the part of a higher-class woman, her success begins, when she literally begins performing in an amateur play which attracts her the attention of Hurstwood, a nightclub manager who is friends with Drouet but, by virtue of his higher social status, is able to steal Carrie and eventually flee and sham-marry her.

Carrie eventually casts off Hurstwood and rebuffs Drouet, because she reaches a point where her acting can sustain her. Like the heroine of the cheap play, she has made good. Her first steps involved performing in polite company; her later steps came from performing on stage, but either way she has created performances that captivate men and result in success. But, as I mentioned, Dreiser undercuts this final success in a number of ways. For starters, Hurstwood is not only not a handsome prince, he eventually becomes a suicide, ignored by Carrie. Not only does his miserable suicide provide a contrast to Carrie's success, it also makes it clear that Carrie's success is ultimately shallow and has made her unfit for human sympathy. And Dreiser makes clear that it is Carrie's status as a constant performer, always seeking out the correct behavior and best, most superficial finery, that has made an empty shell of her. Carrie, like Maggie, was lured to an unfortunate end by making real life into a peformance; in Maggie's case this performance is mostly forced upon her by others, while Carrie is an active participant in it. (and Ames suggests to her that true art is a way out - he represents possibly an another option, that Carrie misses)

Exam Prep: Question #7: Canonical Male Novelists

Choice #1: Hemingway

Novel in Question: A Farewell to Arms

A Farewell to Arms is perhaps not so much naturalist as Ur-Naturalist; just as Matt Taylor argued that Henry Adams, in The Education of Henry Adams, went beyond the naturalists in terms of determinism, Hemingway went beyond the naturalists in the inescability of death. For the canonical naturalists, death was frequently lurking at the end of the novel for the characters in question. Death was a deterministic consequence of the genes and environment of the figures in a naturalistic novel; it was also, potentially, an avoidable scenario. But A Farewell to Arms goes beyond that. A Farewell to Arms makes explicit the secret that the naturalists seemed to be avoiding: that everyone dies. Presaging Neil Gaiman, who would write "She realized the real problem with stories - if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death" and Hemingway created a novel which faced that all stories, whether those of Zola or those of George Eliot, were trending inevitably towards death. And the very fact that the naturalists sought a reaction from their readers, sought to illustrate that death was inevitable because of environment and heredity, illustrated that they, like the unpublished romance novelist who voices Gaiman's quote, are not only avoiding the fact of certain death but avoiding it in a particularly novelistic way, by imagining that a story could be told that does not end in death. This, as Hemingway points out repeatedly, is just the dream of an artist who wants to mold the novel to his will. The truly naturalist artist, who wishes to capture the entire human condition, knows that nothing but death awaits all of their characters.

Hemingway does this in a number of ways. I'll start with Henry's reaction to the book's final tragedy. When Henry's wife and child are dying, he thinks "This is what you did. You die." Here, at the end of the book, we have the expression of the Ur-Naturalism: death waits for all of us. He goes through a laundry list of characters who have died and how they will die; all the different "naturalist" ways that one might die - in war, through sickness, in childbirth. But the determinism goes far beyond that; "This is what you did. You die" means that all of us die. Frederic Henry does not die in the novel, but he makes it quite clear that even if you do avoid all of the things that might kill you, avoid the syphilis and the court martial and the childbirth, you still die. They still get you.

Henry follows this observation up with a naturalist parable of the kind so beloved by Orson Welles (as in the classic story of the scorpion and the frog in Mr. Arkadin or the famous monologue about sharks in The Lady from Shanghai). The naturalist parable, which can function even in non-naturalist works, describes the horrors of the natural world in such a way that it becomes clear that we humans face these exact horrors. For Henry, this naturalist parable is a recounting of a time that he put a log on the fire, only to discover that it was full of ants, and he was killing them. The ants went various ways to try and escape the fire, just as humans take different routes in life, but all died. And to cement his status as ur- or meta-naturalist, Henry even recounts an intervention: he's a messiah to the ants and removes the log from the fire and throws some water on the log. The water steams the ants. The point being, quite obviously, that the social intervention that so many of the naturalists craved, and even sought to bring about by their stories, was for naught. You died.

By making this particular event a fable, Hemingway seems to be commenting on the entire naturalist project. It's all well and good to tell a story a certain way, to imagine that an outcome might be different, that death doesn't have to come to a certain human at a certain time. But that's bunk. You want to be a messiah? Too bad - you're just going to steam the ants to death.

This particular meta-literary point is also made in the most famous of all of the passages in this book, the passage in which Henry reflects that all of the words that had meaning before the great war, like sacred and glorious, have now been rendered meaningless. In other words, a certain way of storytelling, a way of storytelling that imagined that there were alternatives to death or that deaths could be "spun" in a certain way, made to look heroic and valuable, was no good. Again, Hemingway seems to be going beyond the naturalist project, foreclosing it. A story that imagines an alternative to death is a lie; a representation of life which doesn't end in death is just a weak (Hemingway probably would have argued feminine) pipe dream. His alternative to the language of heroism is a language of pure facts, where only the names of battles have any meanings. There's no spin on death; there's no alternative to death, just the names of places where people died. This is the most objective form of literature: a pure recording of rivers and towns where people died. Any alternative is simple soft-mindedness, a literary attempt to imagine an alternative to death when, as the novel amply illustrates even by leaving Henry alive, in fact especially by leaving Henry alive, there is no alternative. Henry doesn't have to die within the story; we know what happens to him. He, like Hemingway's rhetorical "you," dies.

Author #2: Dos Passos

Like Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, Dos Passos' USA trilogy goes beyond some of naturalism's concerns in a particularly literary way. Specifically, although the traditional naturalist text is meant to represent a sort of hyper realism, the naturalist novels are often different from realist novels in only minor or superficial way. In other words, although they have attempted to reach a new category of greater and more faithful mimesis, they are also incredibly open to complaints, like those made by Max Nordau in Degeneration, to being completely arbitrary, artificially following the rules of realistic novels without questioning them. And thus the naturalist novel usually follows only a few characters, is confined to a few geographical locations, and above all tells a traditional story, a narrative arc that carves down reality into a simple and understandable chain of cause and effect limited to but a few times, places, and people. At its very best, this could be synecdochic representation of reality; at it's worst, it's nothing but a traditional novel that follows novelistic conventions while purporting to represent a closer tie to reality (admittedly, insofar as the naturalist novel duplicates the realist novel, it is partaking in a tradition interested in getting reality "right," but of course this leaves the naturalist novelist open to the charge that his project is just a recapitulation of realism).

Dos Passos deals with this problem through his revolutionary use of four different types of narrative in The U.S.A. trilogy: traditional realist narrative, Newsreels, Biographies, and the Camera-Eye. By using each of these methods, and extending his project well beyond a thousand pages (to nearly 2000 in my mass market paperback editions), he creates a novel truly worth of being classified as "naturalist" by virtue of containing all of the U.S.A. as possible within literature.

In the traditional narrative, Dos Passos retains the leap that he made from Three Soldiers, which follows three, and eventually one, soldier in a traditional plot of cause and effect (beginning-middle-end, etc) to the Manhattan Project, in which a number of characters weave in and out of the narrative. Just like in real life, or the natural world, the characters of USA come and go unexpectedly. We see them from all angles - we get to know their own thoughts, the narratives they impose on their stories through their third person limited narration, but then we leap to the narrative of another character and receive an entirely new image of our original character, allowing us to triangulate a far more accurate vision of them than would be provided by a traditional naturalist text. Perhaps more importantly, our characters unexpectedly die, in car or plane crashes or of sickness, or suddenly cease to be of any importance. Just like in real life, Dos Passos' naturalistic characters come and go unexpectedly, fade in and out of the picture, jostle up against each other in a neverending search for the answer to their desires, be they financial, sexual, or otherwise. Dos Passos U.S.A, like the real U.S.A, is full of contradictory people and contradictory stories, reaching completion by eschewing any simplistic and "complete" telling of any individual.

But Dos Passos' remarkable project goes far beyond just these interwoven narratives. Each of the other three types of narrative within the book gives us something that the main narratives (and traditional realist/naturalist texts) are lacking. Whereas naturalist narratives are content to deal with the small picture, the Newsreels give us the big picture, showing objective history. And yet they are fractured newsreels, we seem to be missing the big picture; in other words, although there is a big picture, it always seems to be right outside of our grasp.

In a similar but opposite way, the camera eye passages offer the small picture: miniature stream of consciousness vignettes which tell stories in a page or two. These seem to be the most subjective portions of the novels, and yet their name, the "camera-eye" denotes a pure objectivity. In fact, Dos Passos is giving us pure objectivity, attempting to let us see beyond the shallow exterior that a camera would normally capture and giving us the real stuff, the actual inner workings of the mind. But it's no surprise that, like the newsreels, this is a fractured and difficult to understand world - the small picture, like the big, races to fast for us to fully understand it.

Finally we get the historical narratives. Dos Passos knows, as many of his naturalists seem to studiously avoid knowing, that great men and women do arise and stand up over the crowd of teeming humanity that make up most of America (and thus, in the main narrative, most of the book). And so luminaries like Randolph Bourne, Thomas Edison, and others get brief biographies, frequently partial but always readable and forceful biographies. These are the most exciting parts of U.S.A to read; these are the parts where the human subject becomes something powerful and inspirational. Because some humans do rise about the naturalistic world of unfulfilled desires, at least in the history books, Dos Passos gives us their portrait here, towering over the other portions of the book in style and in shear emotional power.

Thus does Dos Passos create America: by providing objectivity at it's highest (the newsreel) and lowest (the camera eye) points and then examining both how most of humanity carelessly careens through a naturalist existence while certain luminaries (inexplicably both by naturalist theory and by the USA trilogy) rise above the rest of humanity.

Country of the Pointed Firs

I just finished Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs and, beyond being a truly excellent book, it seems to me, like The Rise of Silas Lapham, to have enormous usefulness as the standard bearer for an alternative to naturalism, in this case local color (although I need to read up on Donna Campbell's thoughts on this to make sense of it).

My primary observation - begun by a metaphor for people as trees in Cather's My Antonia - is that if in Realism people are people, and in naturalism people are animals - "human beasts" - in local color people are definitively plants. This idea is shaped not just by the fact that Jewett's narrator defines the country of her title in terms of "pointed firs" but in constant reference to plants and plant metaphors. The narrator's friend, Mrs. Todd, is an herbalist, constantly growing plants; Mrs. Todd's friend Sarah Tilley is referred to as a "plain flower" (124). In reference to Sant Bowden, a throwback to the Bowden's French military stock who was unfit for American military service, Mrs. Todd says "There's a great many such strayaway folks, just as there is plants" (103). This is an especially interesting observation - Mrs. Todd does have a theory of evolution, and what sounds even like degeneration, in the case of Sant Bowden, but it's put in terms of plants instead of animals.

In many more ways, the people of the country of the pointed firs seem like plants. Outside of the narrator, and a few others who are mentioned, they seem rooted to their spots; Mrs. Todd's mother still lives on Green Island, motionless, and a relative, Joanna Todd, lived, completely cutoff from all society, on Shell-Heap island for decades after her betrothed left her. This brings me to my next point: the men of the country of pointed firs fish and sail (as do a few of the women), but it may be that women are rooted to the ground, while the men are not - Joanna's betrothed, after all, fled to Boston, rooting her even more permanently in the back. This would set up for me (again, Campell needs to be consulted) a gender based binary, in which men are animals, women are plants in Jewett, but also in which naturalism might be the genre of men/animals, while local fiction is the literature of women/plants. Campbell, again, would complicate this in interesting ways.