Patrick Geddes - Cities in Evolution

Geddes, Mumford's primary inspiration (to the point that he named his son "Geddes") was a biologist who wrote more or less one book on city planning. This copiy of "City in Evolution" is a version of that book.

Geddes has a number of interesting and provocative ideas about cities. The one I think is most important is the idea of city in evolution. In other words, Geddes constantly uses biological metaphors to describe the growth of the city: he describes London as an "octopus" or "polypus," ever-expanding, and also as a "man-reef," a particularly apt metaphor as the reefs are more or less concrete structures built by the creatures who live in them (9).

One of Geddes' biggest concerns is that, as "conurbation" occurs and chokes the life out of the cities, no municipal body is prepared to govern it. Looking at a map of London, Geddes asks "Do we not see, and more and more clearly as we study it, the need of a thorough revision of our traditional ideas and boundaries of country and town?" (11). Geddes suggests that industrial growth has created "a new heptarchy, which has been growing up naturally, yet almost unconsciously to politicians, beneath our existing, our traditional political and administrative network; and plainly not merely to go on as at present, straining and cracking and bursting this old network, but soon surely to evolve some new form of organisation better able to cope with its problems than are the present distinct town and country councils. What are the new forms to be?" (19). Geddes doesn't answer this question, but I would like to suggest that perhaps private industry - Cowperwood at least - are what stepped up to the task. Also, heptarchy refers to an ancient grouping of 7 Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, now replaced by 7 conurbations (West-Riding, London, Tyne-Wear-Tees, etc). Geddes, in these names, suggests that a simple town or city name is no longer enough, and we need to recognize that we are in the presence of regions.

A few other notes: In regards to the industrial revolution, Geddes is adamant that what looks like "progress of wealth and population" is just the rampant march of coal "to produce cheap products to main too cheap people" and the industrial revolution has created cities which look like mold spores on jam - rapidly devouring all available resources and then dying out once the jam/coal has been consumed (26). Geddes does note that there is a new hope: electricity which can do everything coal does more cleanly (31 - a 2nd industrial revolution) and he praises the nordic system of wind and hydroelectric power for allowing humans to spread out in a line, not in a giant clump.

Democracy and Social Ethics - Jane Addams

Ok, there's tons of useful stuff in this little book, although perhaps not quite as much as I'd hoped. Some highlights from Anne Firor Scott's introduction: We get the importance of Darwin to Addams on p. xiv, some information about the radicalization of Addams on p. xxxix, a quick rundown of Hull House accomplishments on pp. xxxvi-xxxvii. We also have, on page xxv, the acknowledgment that Dreiser, Norris, and Garland were on the same path as Addams, Henry George, and Emma Goldman: all of them were expressing bitterness about the social conflict taking place in the gilded age.

The biggest thread to follow in the introduction - a thread that is also the biggest thread within the larger work, but is never hit quite so hard as in this intro - is Addams belief that humanity in the industrialized society needs to develop a new form of ethics. In Scott's words: "It was no longer sufficient to fill responsible for the well-being of one's own family, friends, and social equals. A new social ethic would have to evolve which would be based on responsibility to the whole community. This is [sic] essence was the purpose of Hull House..." (xxvi). This is the biggie in the whole book - the idea that an ethical evolution needs to take place, where a newly interconnected world requires a newly expanded ethics (this also sounds alot like Rorty's insistence that to be a liberal is simply to be a bleeding heart).

A few other related notes from the introduction. Addams/Scott diagnoses the problems of capitalism quite succinctly by noting that "an inherently social effort was used for individual gain" (liv). In other words, in true Marxist fashion, Addams doesn't understand why the work of the many enriches the one. She does, however, note (in p. 270 of the text, quoted on p. lvii of the intro) that the boss can be more moral than the reformer, for although he is corrupt he nevertheless is "democratic in method" while the technocratic reformer "believes that people must be made over by 'good citizens' and governed by 'experts.'"

The text itself has plenty of highlights, such as her description of the new ethics as "an affinity for all men" (9), but is most useful for me in two chapters: the chapter on industrial reform and the chapter on political reform.

The industrial reform is chock full of useful stuff about Yerkes/Cowperwood. Addams begins by noting that we are in a new era of association, but committees nevertheless often struggle, and the decisive individual still has the best of it in terms of getting things done (137-138). This seems to backup my idea that Cowperwood's ruthlessness is better for the community in the long run. Addams also mentions the Chicago strike of 1894 (140), something I should be thinking about. Finally, she mentions that the factory owners are not yet aware of this new era of association and are stuck back in the old squid/lobster way of thinking (148).

In the political passage, Addams first attacks wealthy reformers who seek only to fix the political machine so that it is no longer corrupt without trying to actually better the lives of people. For them, politics and life are separate, something that the workingman and the Hull House worker know to be totally untrue (222). She also again mentions, on both p. 224 and p. 240, that a corrupt alderman might do more for the community than a highminded reformer, because the alderman is at least integrated into the praxis of daily life. Although he is stealing a few pennies from the people's pockets in streetcar fares every day (p.252-253), the alderman is a "manifestation of human friendliness," far better received than the reformer who only embodies "honesty of administration" (240). Obviously, Hull House attempts to bridge this gap with both honesty of administration and manifestation of human friendliness.

Henry George, Progess and Poverty

Henry Georeg's giant book, which I didn't read in its entirety, isn't super-full of useful stuff, but his thesis is definitely worth getting right. George, writing in the 1870s, is famous for wanting to abolish private property. The reason comes from this formula: Production - Rent = Wages + Interest (171). I didn't quite follow the interest stuff, but for now we can stick with Production-Rent= Wages.

George is trying to solve the problem: why do the richest areas also have the most poverty? (6,9). The answer is that, when land is free, production will equal wages, because people will be their own bosses or work for whoever will pay them as if they were their own boss. However, when land gets built up and production increases, rent goes up. Rent doesn't have to be paid to the landlord; the landlord and the employer can be the same person, and the owner-operator takes the same chunk the operator would have to give to the owner. Based on our formula, now that land is very expensive and all land is owned by someone and workers can't become their own bosses, most of the money produced now goes to the landowner. This means the bottom falls out of wages. Solution: end private property so that labor, which produces capital, can access the capital which it produces, rather than having it sucked up in rent (328) (See also 213, 6).

Other important points George makes:

On Malthus, he argues that Malthus fails to understand how, if we just used the resources we used to make, say, diamonds to feed people, human society could always feed everyone (142). He also points out that larger groups of people generally have more, not less, productive power. George also notes that Darwin called evolutionary theory the application of Malthus to the natural world, meaning we have it backwards when we call the application of Darwinism to humanity "social Darwinism." It would be better put that Darwinism is "biological Malthusianism." The relevant quote is on page 101.

Also, George notes that Malthusian makes the rich feel good, because poverty is the natural mechanism by which population growth is stopped (96, 98). Cue the Ebenezer Scrooge quote about reducing the surplus population here.

Two tiny notes: George mentions the great Chicago fire on p. 148 and the power of railroads (more The Octopus than The Financier) on p. 192.

Ebenezer Howard's "Garden Cities of Tomorrow"

Howard's Garden Cities of Tomorrow wasn't that interesting, perhaps because Mumford loves it so much that he'd already told me all the interesting stuff. Most of this slim volume is just explaining how the Garden City would work - how it would raise funds, etc. That wasn't interesting. Here's what is important:

First, in Mumford's intro, a couple more awesomely Mumfordian tidbits: he makes the obvious (to a Mumford reader) but controversial otherwise statement that a Garden City is not a suburb but an "anti-suburb" (35). Also, he connects the urge to utopian city planning with shaker communities in the US, a connection I had not yet made (39).

The best thing to get out of Howard's book is just an understanding of what a Garden City is. As expressed on page 48, both the town and the country have strengths and defects. The town has great society but no scenery or fresh air; the country is bright and clean and devoid of human beings. The solution is the "Garden City," not a city made of gardens but a city inside a garden. In other words the garden city is on 6,000 acres: 1,000 acres of actual city and 5,000 acres of farmland (the so-called "Greenbelt") surrounding the city. Thus, within that 1,000 acres is a coherent community - residential, commercial, and industrial built around a park and the hospital, musuem, library, town hall, etc. It's pleasant, walkable, and mildly dense (brownstone level, according to Mumford (p. 519 of "The City and History). And since it's surrounded by rural areas it cannot ever get built up and overrun (these specs are on p. 51-53).

The second and vital part of this plan is the idea of "Social Cities." Garden Cities must be restricted from growing, but growth will occur. Howard calls for a series of garden cities linked together by high speed rail and highways (142). Mumford expands this idea, but it is certainly the key to whole thing - this plan would let the entire world urbanize and keep its green space.

Mumford, The City in History, Part 3

The final sections of Mumford's "The City in History" seemed slightly less useful, perhaps as he advanced beyond the time period that is my focus. There are still plenty of relevant and interesting points, however. One of Mumford's most insistent observations is that the so-called "Megalopolis" is actually no such thing, but in reality an "anti-city," a conurbation of ever-expanding suburbs with no centrality (505). In contrast to the doomed megalopolis and the suburban conurbation, Mumford praises Ebenzer Howard's garden cities (515-onward) asserting that they are far more successful than they have ever been given credit for, and that their true genius is lies not in their garden nature but in their ability to create a series of small urban centers which provide for a walkable life but also connect with one another to achieve cultural significance.

Some of Mumford's observations which seem useful for a chapter on Cowperwood are:
520 - Howard believes that a single public figure must hold the planning power. Is this what Cowperwood did, from a private standpoint?
534- Mumford mentions the power of bureaucracy, but notes that it's not a government creation but a business one, imported to a less extent by government
536 - the banker is the central figure in the modern city - this is the "financier" model that cowperwood ultimately found to be untrue
544 - the urban economy is an ever-expanding "Maw" - this is how Cowperwood makes his money, by banking on this ever-expanding Maw to consider expanding.

Mumford, The City in History, Part 2

Mumford's description of "Coketown" gave me a series of ideas about writing about Chicago. The first and most important of these is his assertion that society gave up the Baroque art of city planning in favor of a "Darwinian" belief that laissez-faire attitudes were the right ones to take towards the creating of the city (453). This belief, which Mumford consistently but slightly confusingly labels "utilitarianism," "was an attempt to break through the network of stale privileges and franchises and trade regulations that the absolute state had imposed upon the decayed economic fabric and dwindling social morality of the medieval town" (453). This belief that harmony would emerge out of chaos (something that emphatically did not happen) led to the "natural expectation that the whole enterprise should be conducted by private individuals" (454). In other words, urban planning became a private enterprise because the state wasn't trusted with the responsibility. Thus "The very age that boasted its mechanical conquests and its scientific prescience left its social processes to chance, as if the scientific habit of mind had exhausted itself on machines, and was not capable of of coping with human realities" (470).

This is obvious the place to talk about Cowperwood - on the one had his actions are obviously a product of this laissez-faire approach to city planning, and thus he benefits from from this system, whereby "individual competition for ever-greater profits led the more successful to the unscrupulous practice of monopoly at the public expense" (453). But Mumford continues: "Design did not emerge" and Cowperwood is the living, breathing embodiment of design - he is a central figure who centralizes everything and sees the entire system - something which Taylor, in The Principles of Scientific Management, says is impossible. So perhaps there is a bit of slippage, a very interesting bit of slippage, between Mumford's conception that design did not emerge and the design that Cowperwood brought. Is this a throwback on Dreiser's part to a Baroque age? A special exception in the case of Cowperwood? etc.

If Cowperwood fits into Coketown, Addams fits into its response, the "counter-attack," whereby hygiene is newly valued (475) and "municipal socialization" finally steps in to provide that hygiene (476). Obviously, Addams is one of those who set out to effect that municipal socialization. Mumford also mentions settlement houses by name, stating that, since the laissez-faire city planning created cities with no municipal center, the settlement movement formed to give cities "an organizing social nucleus" through which to bring about political vitality (500).

Finally, I want to mention that Mumford praises Olmsted's suburbs in various cities for building workable green spaces into coherent communities (497).

Mumford, The City in History, Part 1

There are a number of interesting things to be gleaned from the roughly 50 pages of Mumford I read today, although none of it is necessarily a slam-dunk thing to be put into my dissertation. The main point from this portion of the book is Mumford's argument that the city (in a process beginning in the 16th century and accelerating in the 19th century) became a purely financial endeavor, one in which the primary unit is "the individual lot" and those lots are treated "without respect for historic uses, for topographic conditions, or for social needs" (421). In other words, the only parts of a city one can act on are little chunks, and those little chunks are dealt with purely financially. This makes municipal building nigh-impossible (424) and requires only a single municipal service: transportation (424-425). Transportation, notes Mumford, is at first helpful to the worker by allowing him to cheaply get to his place of work (429) but quickly just becomes another way to extend the city, making transportation as expensive as time-consuming as it was before by enlarging the city and increasing the distance the worker must travel (430). This transportation stuff should shield interesting results when considered with Cowperwood.

The most problematic part of this for me is how much Mumford hates density. He's right that density robs the city of that which the town has - air, light, green space, etc. But in "The Regimentation of Congestion" his attacks on density seem to leave out all that's good about density - he goes so far as to suggest that the "Paris flat" and other wealthy ways of living in dense areas suffer from much of the same problems as slums (433). I think that Jane Jacobs championing of the street as a place to play would be the exact opposite of Mumford's disgust at how cramped together people have become.

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.

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).