Frank Norris and American Naturalism

By Donald Pizer

‘Frank Norris and American Naturalism’ brings together in one volume Donald Pizer’s lifelong exploration of Frank Norris’s work, ranging from his 1955 discussion of point of view in ‘The Octopus’ to his 2010 essay on the thematic unity of that novel. The essays as a whole seek to demonstrate both the coherence of Norris’s thought and his contribution toward the establishment of a specific form of naturalism in America. The collection’s principal focus is Norris’s most enduring works, the novels ‘McTeague’ and ‘The Octopus’, though his other fiction and literary criticism are also discussed.

Although Norris died at 32, his literary output during his brief career has played an important role in efforts to interpret the nature of American naturalism. He was one of the few naturalists to write literary criticism, a body of writing which casts much light on his self-conception as a naturalist, and his novels ‘McTeague’ and ‘The Octopus’ rely on two of the most distinctive forms of naturalistic fiction—the sensationalistic novel of violence and the panoramic novel of social protest. Furthermore, though he was deeply indebted to Zola’s fiction, he broke free of Zolaesque themes in ways which are significant for most later American naturalists. Thus, despite the brevity of his career, Norris is a seminal figure in the history of American literary naturalism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: May 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781783088041

Donald Pizer

Donald Pizer, Pierce Butler Professor of English Emeritus at Tulane University, has published widely on late 19th- and early 20th-century American literature. His books include The Novels of Theodore Dreiser: A Critical Study (1976) and The Theory and Practice of American Literary Naturalism (1993).

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FRANK NORRIS AND AMERICAN NATURALISM

ANTHEM NINETEENTH-CENTURY SERIES

The Anthem Nineteenth-Century Series incorporates a broad range of titles within the fields of literature and culture, comprising an excellent collection of interdisciplinary academic texts. The series aims to promote the most challenging and original work being undertaken in the field and encourages an approach that fosters connections between areas including history, science, religion and literary theory. Our titles have earned an excellent reputation for the originality and rigour of their scholarship and our commitment to high-quality production.

Series Editor

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Editorial Board

Dinah Birch – University of Liverpool, UK

Kirstie Blair – University of Stirling, UK

Archie Burnett – Boston University, USA

Christopher Decker – University of Nevada, USA

Heather Glen – University of Cambridge, UK

Linda K. Hughes – Texas Christian University, USA

Simon J. James – Durham University, UK

Angela Leighton – University of Cambridge, UK

Jo McDonagh – King’s College London, UK

Michael O’Neill – Durham University, UK

Seamus Perry – University of Oxford, UK

Clare Pettitt – King’s College London, UK

Adrian Poole – University of Cambridge, UK

Jan-Melissa Schramm – University of Cambridge, UK

FRANK NORRIS AND AMERICAN NATURALISM

Donald Pizer

Anthem Press

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© Donald Pizer 2018

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CONTENTS

Preface

Editorial Note and Acknowledgments

Criticism

Introduction: The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris

Frank Norris’s Definition of Naturalism

Frank Norris and the Frontier as Popular Idea in America

Vandover and the Brute and McTeague

Evolutionary Ethical Dualism in Frank Norris’s Vandover and the Brute and McTeague

McTeague and American Naturalism

The Problem of Philosophy in the Novel

The Biological Determinism of McTeague in Our Time

Frank Norris’s McTeague: Naturalism as Popular Myth

The Popular Novels

The Masculine–Feminine Ethic in Frank Norris’s Popular Novels

The Octopus

Another Look at The Octopus

The Concept of Nature in Frank Norris’s The Octopus

Synthetic Criticism and Frank Norris: Or, Mr. Marx, Mr. Taylor and The Octopus

Collis P. Huntington, William S. Rainsford and the Conclusion of Frank Norris’s The Octopus

Index

Preface

Both as a Californian (though, like Norris, not a native of the state) and a student of American literary naturalism, I was always interested in Frank Norris’s work. Indeed, one of my earliest publications was an essay on The Octopus, which appeared in 1955 when I was still a UCLA graduate student. It was not, however, until I completed and then revised my dissertation on Hamlin Garland for publication in the late 1950s that I gave full attention to Norris, an effort that resulted in a number of essays and that culminated in two books, The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris (1964), an edition, and The Novels of Frank Norris (1966), a critical study. Although I occasionally wrote about Norris in the three decades that followed, especially in essays devoted to naturalism in general, I was principally preoccupied during this period with the writings of Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser and John Dos Passos. Since the late 1990s, however, I have again given Norris’s work a good deal of attention, concentrating on prominent issues in the interpretation of McTeague and The Octopus.

As I note in several of the essays that follow, Norris has not been taken seriously by most scholars of American literature. His early death at 32 was much lamented at the time, but soon afterward it became common to place his work in various pigeonholes that had the effect of prejudicing any interest in its possible depth or quality. Although his playful self-designation as the Boy Zola in several of his letters did not directly influence the deterioration of his early reputation, both his youth and his enthusiasm for Zola were nevertheless well known and their implications played a major role in its decline. In the conventional reading of Norris’s work that soon arose and still persists, Norris had full-heartedly seized upon Zolaesque naturalism as his principal form of expression and thereby doomed his novels to the mediocrity characteristic of an immature acceptance of a simplistic and inadequate interpretation of existence. This dismissal was later endorsed by the tendency in most histories of American literature to consider late nineteenth-century American naturalism in general an unproductive (but fortunately brief!) moment in this history, with Norris the best example of the thinness of the movement.¹

Norris’s critical reputation was thus at a low ebb when I first developed an interest in his work in the late 1950s. He had always attracted general readers by the vibrancy of his best novels (what is traditionally known as his power), but academic criticism maintained that this fictional appeal could not disguise the shallowness and confusion of his themes. There were few exceptions to this judgment, the most notable being Charles C. Walcutt in his landmark study American Literary Naturalism, A Divided Stream, which appeared in 1956. Walcutt stressed in his examination of Norris and other naturalists of his period their divided allegiance both to the mechanistic scientism of their age and to elements of early nineteenth-century American transcendentalism. Walcutt went astray, I believe, in holding that this largely unconsciously pursued divided stream led to the naturalists’ inability to create a form expressive of their basic beliefs, but he nevertheless was hugely influential in suggesting the movement’s native roots as well as its possession of a greater complexity of theme than was conventionally acknowledged.

My own early research on the source of Norris’s ideas and the form of his fiction was thus closely related to Walcutt’s basic insight, though I in fact had noted the transcendental element in The Octopus in my 1955 essay before his book appeared. In general, I was at pains in those essays of the late 1950s and early 1960s to demonstrate that Norris was a kind of closet intellectual. His initial two novels, I argued, are deeply indebted both to the significant efforts by various late nineteenth-century scientists to describe hitherto neglected diseases of the mind and body and to the attempt by prominent American philosophers of the period to reconcile science and traditional belief within an evolutionary theistic philosophy. I was seeking through this research not merely to discover the sources of Norris’s beliefs but their underlying coherence in relation to the thinking of his time. My attempt was similar to that of scholars of the so-called Dark Ages, who have revealed that this period is obscure principally to those who do not make an effort to study it closely. In a like manner, I was attempting to explain that Norris’s ideas appear to lack coherence principally because they derive from various systems of belief that are today only vaguely or inadequately understood.

Much of this early work deals with Norris’s three most compelling and frequently read novels, Vandover and the Brute, McTeague and The Octopus, though I was also drawn to his often neglected literary criticism and popular novels because of their important role in making even clearer the themes present in these novels. (For some reason not fully evident to me, I have never written on his last novel, The Pit, except for the obligatory chapter in my The Novels of Frank Norris.) More recently, I have narrowed down my interest to McTeague and The Octopus—the works on which his permanent reputation will undoubtedly rest. In the essays on McTeague, I explore aspects of Norris’s fascination with the animal vestiges of man’s evolutionary heritage, while the essay on The Octopus refines and expands on my earlier efforts to describe the complex body of ideas underlying that often misinterpreted novel.

My effort throughout my work on Norris has been threefold: to establish his firm relationship to American thought of his own time, to describe the consistency both of his general scheme of ideas and of their representation in specific works and to demonstrate how he seeks (not always successfully) to manifest these ideas in his fiction.² These efforts have exposed two major ironies at the heart of Norris’s work and career. Norris the professed anti-intellectual primitivist is in fact both well-informed and coherent in creating his own intellectual system; and Norris the sensationalistic naturalist is at the core of his belief a moralist and theist.

Notes

1. Warner Berthoff expresses a characteristic disdain for Norris’s work in his The Ferment of Realism: American Literature, 1884–1919 (New York: Free Press, 1965), 223: With Norris in particular the impression is strong of a writer who never got beyond the synthetic ambitions of his apprenticeship. His continuing reputation as a serious figure in American literature is hard to understand.

2. In addition to my essays The Problem of Philosophy in the Novel and Nineteenth-Century American Naturalism: An Essay in Definition, both collected in this volume, I also discuss Norris’s fictional technique in the essay Nineteenth-Century American Naturalism: An Approach through Form, which is available in my The Theory and Practice of American Literary Naturalism (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993).

Editorial Note and Acknowledgments

All the essays in this volume have been reprinted unchanged from their original publication except for the omission of some material from the essay "McTeague and American Naturalism" (indicated by a line of asterisks in the text), the correction of obvious errors and the normalization of the citation styles in the notes.

I wish to thank the following publications for permission to reprint:

Introduction to The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), xiii−xxii. Copyright © 1964 University of Texas Press, copyright renewed 1992. Reprinted by permission.

Frank Norris’s Definition of Naturalism, Modern Fiction Studies 8 (Winter 1962–63), 532−41. Copyright © Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted by permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.

Frank Norris and the Frontier as Popular Idea in America, Amerikastudien 33 (1978), 230−39. Reprinted by permission of Amerikastudien.

"Evolutionary Ethical Dualism in Frank Norris’s Vandover and the Brute and McTeague," PMLA 76 (December 1961), 552−60. Reprinted by permission of PMLA.

"McTeague and American Naturalism, excerpted from Nineteenth-Century American Naturalism: An Essay in Definition," Bucknell Review 13 (December 1965), 1−18.

The Problem of Philosophy in the Novel, Bucknell Review 18 (Spring 1970), 53–62.

"The Biological Determinism of McTeague in Our Time," American Literary Realism 29 (Winter 1997), 27−32. Printed by permission of the University of Illinois Press.

"Frank Norris’s McTeague: Naturalism as Popular Myth," ANQ 13 (Fall 2000), 21−26. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis LLC.

The Masculine–Feminine Ethic in Frank Norris’s Popular Novels, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 6 (Spring 1964), 84−91. Copyright © 1964 by the University of Texas Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the University of Texas Press.

"Another Look at The Octopus," Nineteenth-Century Fiction 10 (December 1955), 217–24. Reprinted by permission of the University of California Press.

"The Concept of Nature in Frank Norris’s The Octopus," American Quarterly 14 (Spring 1962), 73−80. Copyright © Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted by permission of the Johns Hopkins University Press.

Synthetic Criticism and Frank Norris, American Literature 34 (January 1963), 532−41. Copyright © 1963 Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Duke University Press.

"Collis P. Huntington, William S. Rainsford, and the Conclusion of The Octopus," Studies in American Naturalism 5 (Winter 2010), 133−50. Reprinted by permission of the University of Nerbraska Press.

Criticism

Introduction: The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris

1

Most discussions of Norris’s ideas, or lack of them, owe much to Franklin Walker’s biography of Norris. In that work Walker stressed Norris’s boyish enthusiasm and his code of feeling raised above thought. Walker implied by this emphasis that Norris was not a systematic thinker and that it would be futile to search for a coherent intellectual position in his fiction or criticism. But Walker’s characterization of Norris is misleading for two reasons. A writer under 30 does not have to appear solemn to think seriously. And the rejection of thought for feeling is itself capable of expansion into an elaborate intellectual position. Because Norris advised others to feel does not mean that his advice was not reasoned. Indeed, in the history of man much thought has been devoted to the creation of anti-intellectual philosophies. At the heart of the unified and coherent system of ideas underlying Norris’s criticism is a primitivistic anti-intellectualism.¹ One method of describing this system is to adopt as convenient counterwords the key terms in Norris’s cry that life is better than literature. Superficially, he affirmed by this statement that firsthand experience (life) is better than secondhand experience (literature). But when the terms are placed in the context of Norris’s critical essays, one realizes that they are Norris’s inadequate symbols for two rich and opposing clusters of ideas and values. I therefore use life and literature both with recognition of their deficiencies as generally viable critical terminology and with an appreciation of their usefulness and appropriateness when analyzing Norris’s critical ideas. To Norris, life included emotions and instincts. It incorporated both the world of nature (the outdoors and the country) and the kind of life that Norris believed natural (the life of passion and violence, and the life of the low and fallen) because such life was closest to the primitive in man and furthest from the cultivated. Literature, on the other hand, included thought, culture, over-education, refinement and excessive spirituality. Life was dominated by connotations of masculinity, naturalness and strength; literature by suggestions of effeminacy, artificiality and weakness. Life was the source of good art—from it sprang art that moved and led men—whereas from literature came imitative and affected art, written entirely for money or for the approval of a cult or because the artist was unfortunate and unknowing enough to over-refine his temperament and to neglect the crude, raw, often violent world of action and affairs—the world of men and of nature.

From this primitivistic center Norris’s critical system branches out in several important directions. Norris believed that the greatest attribute of the writer is sincerity, because the sincere writer rejects the artificialities of literary schools, vogues and style, and turns rather to the true sources of power and worth—his own heart and his immersion in the rough and tumble of active life. By being faithful to his own vision of life, and by dealing with the full compass of life, including the sordid, the sincere writer avoids the two great interdependent flaws of literature—rejection of life and imitation of others. The correct formula for sincerity is individual knowledge of life and then individual use of one’s vision of life as the material of fiction. Norris’s faith in the intuitive or instinctive is thus the common foundation both for his mystique of sincerity and his call for life, not literature.

Norris’s primitivism and anti-intellectualism also contain the seeds for two other aspects of his critical system—his belief in the critical judgment of the People and his demand for the practical and useful, in both life and fiction.² Norris’s minimizing of thought implied his confidence in the instinctive judgment shared by all men, regardless of position or education. He insisted that though the sincere writer who failed to conform to popular imitative vogues might not be immediately successful, the People in the long run would confirm his worth. Moreover, since Norris made action rather than the mind the center of experience, he valued the demonstrably useful in men’s affairs above the independent cultivation or stimulation of the mind. He believed that the best fiction does not merely describe or amuse. Rather, it serves the practical moral purpose of revealing both the primary truths of human experience and the full extent of human injustice and deprivation, so that man might learn and mend his ways. The predominantly middle-class direction that Norris gave to his primitivistic values is revealed both by his faith in the majority and by his