From the issue dated July 30, 2004
|
|
|
Keeping It RealStrip mined by historians and abandoned by literary scholars, American literary realism deserves another look
A teenager from a respectable, if by no means prosperous, family stands in front of the bathroom mirror, smoking a cigarette with an air of practiced insouciance. His composure is unaffected by the worry that his parents will catch him. Studs Lonigan wants to be a tough guy. As he works at the pose his thoughts roam across the entire world, or as much as he will ever know of it, for he is a citizen, not so much of the United States, or even of Chicago, as of his Irish-American neighborhood, a community that few will leave for long. The year is 1913. By the time he dies in 1932, Studs will be far older, and much harder inside than time alone could make him. Publication of Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy in a single volume in 1935 placed its author, James T. Farrell, in the forefront of American literature as a practitioner of realism -- the mode of fiction that seeks to evoke the experience of ordinary life through a patient accumulation of detail, and a forthright interest in how people are driven by the quest for sex, power, and money. For many readers and critics of Farrell's day, the struggle for literary realism had defined the course of American culture for decades. Nor was the struggle quite over. As late as 1948, police in Philadelphia seized copies of Lonigan, which contained passages that were just as coarse in tone and language as any conversation in Studs's neighborhood. No hint of controversy attended the publication this year of an annotated edition of the trilogy by the Library of America -- a fitting way to mark the centennial of Farrell's birth. But Shawn Gillen, an associate professor of English at Beloit College, says he still feels that an interest in American realist literature goes against the cultural tide, at least in academe. "Considering their importance in literary history," he says, "there's relatively little scholarship being done on realist authors." As if to confirm that point, one might try looking up "realism" in Critical Terms for Literary Study, edited by Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1995. The widely used handbook includes no entry on realism, though the index does point to two uses of the word, in passing. Both place it in the protective custody of ironic quotation marks. Postmodern suspicion of any claim to be able to represent reality is only part of the problem. "Realist works tend to be forthright and explicit," says Mr. Gillen, "so there's less of an overt challenge for scholars to 'crack' them." Nor is it that easy to get students to crack the novels. "The realists tended to write long books, sometimes whole series of novels," says Mr. Gillen. "Committing an undergraduate class to Theodore Dreiser or to Studs Lonigan takes more optimism than I necessarily have in me." He recalls reading Sinclair Lewis's novels Babbitt and Main Street in literature courses during the 1980s. "But if I see them on a syllabus now," he continues, "it's more likely to be in a sociology or history course." The small body of scholarship on Farrell confirm Mr. Gillen's point. Most of it emphasizes not the literary text but the historical context -- analyzing Farrell's role as a supporter, then a critic, of the American Communist party, for example. To contemporary literary scholars, it seems, his work as a novelist looks as simple as young Lonigan himself. But Farrell's point is that Studs is more complex than appearances might indicate; and the same might be true of realism itself. Indeed, the relative indifference to American realist fiction on the part of literary scholars is all the more puzzling given the continuing (and sometimes fierce) discussions of the genre among writers and critics outside academe. In Hatchet Jobs: Writings on Contemporary Fiction, published this summer by the New Press, the novelist and freelance critical assassin Dale Peck complains that his peers are much too indulgent of the "recidivist realism" of authors such as Raymond Carver -- a literary tendency he loathes, as he does the "recherché postmodernism" of other writers. (What American literature would look like minus both realism and postmodernism is not clear, though no doubt we would all have more time to read Mr. Peck.) In another recent collection of essays, The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), James Wood coins the term "hysterical realism" to describe the work of Thomas Pynchon and Salman Rushdie -- fiction in which "stories and substories sprout on every page," driven by "a fear of silence." Such uses of the term are far less rigorous than a literary scholar might like, but they make up in vigor what they lack in academic precision. 'Grounds' for Dismissal Like American realism itself, its eclipse in literary studies has been anything but a simple matter. In his classic work On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature, first published in 1942, the literary critic and historian Alfred Kazin recounted the labor of realist authors to create a prose adequate to portraying the changes under way in the wake of industrialism, immigration, and other forces dissolving the old cultural order. The effort was heroic; it gave American writers a way to document, and to criticize, the world being born around them. But the style, at times, could be incredibly clumsy. A case in point was Theodore Dreiser, whose tales of the rise and fall of ordinary people in the Gilded Age retained their power despite slovenly diction, bad grammar, and the author's penchant for surges of bombastic prose-poetry. (For example: "Moralists come and go; religionists fulminate and declare the pronouncements of God as to this; but Aphrodite still reigns Embowered in the festal depths of the spring. ...") "It is by now an established part of our folklore," wrote Kazin, "that Theodore Dreiser lacks everything but genius." Kazin wrote his influental account of realism as part of an epic transformation in American culture during the Depression. An article in the latest issue of the journal American Literary History calls On Native Grounds "perhaps the single best work of American literary history" -- then puzzles over Kazin's seeming disappearance from recent scholarly discussions. But the challenge to viewing Kazin's notion of the "struggle for realism" as a central dynamic of American culture began well before the rise of contemporary literary theory. In his widely read collection The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (1950), Lionel Trilling challenged what he called "the American metaphysic," in which "reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant." The realist authors tended to reproduce this simplistic worldview in their fiction. They saw the artist as "the lens in the first diagram of an elementary book on optics." Besides these philosophical objections, Trilling was also clearly not comfortable with the tendency of many contemporary realists to ally themselves with the extreme left. (Dreiser, for example, joined the Communist Party shortly before his death in 1945.) By the 1970s, Marxist literary scholars who would not have been caught dead quoting a bourgeois liberal like Trilling began criticizing realism in terms that were remarkably similar to his. From the vantage point of structuralist thought, literary realism did not have any special relationship with reality itself. It was just an "effect" (as Roland Barthes put it) generated by certain patterns of discourse. Far from challenging the order of capitalist society, realism was one of the means by which that order reinforced its own conception of what was real. Welcome to the Jungle However ambivalent literary scholars may be about realism in general, specific realist authors have lodged themselves so deeply in the culture as to have virtually defined it. The title character in Babbitt (1922), Sinclair Lewis's portrait of a small-minded businessman, lent his name to an entire social subspecies. While Richard Wright is often studied as an African-American writer, his early fiction, especially Native Son (1940), belongs unmistakably within the realist school known as naturalism, which emphasizes the determining influence of environment and family on personality. "Interest in particular realist authors ebbs and flows with time," says James M. Hutchisson, a professor of English at the Citadel, whose book The Rise of Sinclair Lewis, 1920-1930 was published by Penn State University Press in 1996. "Dreiser has never really gone away, but there's definitely a renewal of scholarship on him. You saw that with Sinclair Lewis in the 1980s, when there were new editions of his works." But the work of preparing biographies and editions is one thing, and the production of critical analysis is another. "The neglect is odd," says Mr. Hutchisson. "These novelists were looking at social issues of the kind that interest literary scholars now. It's surprising that they don't pay more attention to realism." In default, perhaps, some American realist fiction has become the province of scholars outside of literary studies. When St. Martin's Press wanted to include Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (serialized in 1905 and published as a book the following year) in its Bedford Series in History and Culture, the publisher commissioned an edition from Christopher Phelps, an associate professor of history at the Mansfield campus of Ohio State University. Remembered today as a muckraking exposé revealing the noxious contents of breakfast sausages, The Jungle was actually written as a realist novel about immigrant workers in the meatpacking industry. (As the author later put it, he aimed at readers' hearts, but hit their stomachs.) While literary scholars have, for the most part, ignored Upton Sinclair's fiction, Mr. Phelps says that historians tend to treat realist fiction strictly for its documentary value. "In general, historians don't give the slightest thought to literary form," he says. "Like strip miners, they rampage through texts, interested in only the most obvious social references." In the introduction to his new edition of The Jungle, to be published this year, Mr. Phelps corrects for that tendency by analyzing the work's literary structure as well as its social context. The vivid (and often nauseating) details about the Chicago meatpacking yards embody Sinclair's commitment to a realist aesthetic. But his treatment of the meatpackers' home lives reflects the influence of a very different literary genre: the sentimental novel, with its picture of the moral influence of female domesticity threatened by social corruption. Whatever its resemblance to, say, the work of Dreiser, says Mr. Phelps, Sinclair's novel was more directly influenced by Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Unreal City The coexistence of realist and sentimentalist strands in the same novel is not one of Upton Sinclair's quirks (like his curious theories about fasting and mental telepathy). The writings of the American literary realists were often more heterogeneous in genre than literary scholars have recognized, according to Eric Carl Link, a professor of English at North Georgia College & State University. In The Vast and Terrible Drama: American Literary Naturalism in the Late Nineteenth Century, published this year by the University of Alabama Press, Mr. Link reconsiders the way one important genre of realist fiction has been understood. Naturalism was the hard edge of literary realism -- works that combined an aesthetic commitment to unvarnished actuality with a keen sense of the darker implications of Darwin's evolutionary ideas. Some American naturalists were familiar with Émile Zola, the French novelist whose manifesto The Experimental Novel (1880) came very close to defining naturalist fiction as a form of sociological inquiry. But Mr. Link contends that a careful reading of the American writers reveals a stronger influence that issued from an incongruous source: the deep current of literary romance, exemplified in American literature by the work of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The genre of romance -- with its strong tendency toward symbolism and its eruptions of the fantastic and the supernatural -- seems like an improbable influence on, say, Frank Norris, whose sprawling novels document the impact of the railroads and financial speculation on the American Midwest. But Mr. Link shows a markedly romantic undercurrent in otherwise naturalistic works such as Vandover and the Brute (1914), in which Norris portrays the struggle between the civilized and the animalistic sides of an artist. As he succumbs to the vices available to the city dweller, Vandover degenerates -- and not just morally. He becomes, in effect, a wild beast. Mr. Link quotes the comments of one scholar who took pains to stress that Vandover does not actually become a werewolf. And to be sure, a lycanthrope would definitely be a problem in a work judged by the strictest standards of literary realism. But for Mr. Link, the unhappy fate of Vandover is less of a problem (at least for the reader) if we see the realist and romantic currents in American literature as overlapping, rather than in conflict. "There are things that look like literary defects if you read these authors simply in terms of realism or naturalism," says Mr. Link. "But the same qualities turn out to be a lot more interesting if you look at the fiction from a different angle." http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 50, Issue 47, Page A11 |
Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education