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sought to illustrate that death was inevitable because of environment and heredity, illustrated that they, like the unpublished romance novelist who voices Gaiman's quote, are not only avoiding the fact of certain death but avoiding it in a particularly novelistic way, by imagining that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.