Form and History in American Literary Naturalism

June Howard

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781469620695
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Literaturkritik

Examining the novels of Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, and other writers, June Howard presents a study of American literary naturalism as a genre. Naturalism, she states, is a way of imagining the world and the relation of the self to the world, a way of making sense -- and making narrative -- out of the comforts and discomforts of its historical moment. Howard believes that naturalism accomodates the sense of perilousness, uncertainty, and disorder that many Americans felt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She argues for a redefinition of the form which allows it to be seen as an immanent ideology responding to a specific historical situation. Working both from accepted definitions of naturalism and from close analysis of the literary texts themselves, Howard consructs a new description of the genre in terms of its thematic antinomies, patterns of characterization, and narrative strategies. She defines a range of historical and cultural reference for the ideas and images of American naturalism and suggests that the form has affinities with such contemporary ideologies as political progressivism and criminal anthropology. In the process, she demonstrates that genre criticism and historical analysis can be combined to create a powerful method for writing literary history. Throughout Howard's study, the concept of genre is used not as a prescriptive straitjacket but as a category allowing the perception of significant similarities and differences among literary works and the coordination of textual analysis with the history of literary and social forces. For Howard, naturalism is a dynamic solution to the problem of generating narrative from the particular historical and cultural materials available to the authors. Originally published in 1985. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

1 Conceptual Combinatory: The Nature of Genre and the History of Realism, the Genre of Nature and the Reality of History

It is almost impossible to read any work of literary criticism without encountering some generic term, whether one as specific as “sonnet” or “bildungsroman” or one as broad as “poem” or “novel.” Yet more often than not the content of such generic ascriptions remains implicit, and even when they do define a genre critics rarely state the theoretical assumptions governing their use of generic categories. Genre criticism is a great deal more common than genre theory, and theorists tend to find critics’ use of generic concepts and the concept of genre deplorably lacking in rigor. This study is in fact a work of genre criticism rather than theory: my central concern is the nature and significance of American literary naturalism, not the uses and abuses of literary classification. But genre itself is an important topic, and in order to make it clear why I proceed as I do I will begin by making some observations about genre theory and the place of genre in this study. Although these remarks are not a systematic exposition of literary theory, they will serve to suggest the more general assumptions underlying my work. Similarly, the discussion of received notions of naturalism and realism that follows will lay the groundwork for my own reconstruction of those generic concepts and for my analyses of American naturalist novels.

Even among advocates of genre criticism it is common, if not uncontroversial, to admit that the approach is in some disrepute and that it is not easy to articulate a coherent genre theory.¹ Yet as I have indicated literary critics seem unable to do without generic classifications. As an editor of the journal Genre put it recently, “certitude about genre has now all but vanished, and we are left with a concept which, like Henry James’ description of the novel as a genre, is a baggy monster. We, like James, know that the genre monster is out there, but we can never seem to describe it adequately or confine it.”² One can, certainly, find a multitude of articles and books that argue for a meaningful continuity among a group of works, explicitly or implicitly constituting them as a genre—or mode, or type, for it is the operation of classification and not its vocabulary that is in question here. Often when one begins to examine the assumptions informing such analyses, one finds that they not only contradict other genre criticism (which is, however, rarely confronted as incompatible—the pages of Genre often exemplify this disorder), but that they mobilize different ideas about what constitutes a genre at different moments in the same discussion.

There are as well many attempts at wider, more consistent classificatory systems; one can choose among a dizzying variety of taxonomies, each incommensurable with the others. For that matter, one can choose among different schemes genre theorists have proposed for classifying generic systems into their kinds. We begin to understand why Derrida writes, in disingenuous bemusement, of the “terminological luxury or rapture” and “taxonomic exuberance” of generic debates.³ Ten years ago Paul Hernadi (actually one of the more optimistic genre theorists) acknowledged the field’s lack of rigor, writing that “most critics propounding new generic concepts or endorsing old ones show little awareness of the full theoretical horizon against which recent genre criticism operates.”⁴ Despite Hernadi’s own useful survey and his proposed synthesis, the situation he described has not changed significantly. The theoretical confusion that characterizes so much genre criticism is in fact perpetuated by the disrepute of genre criticism and genre theory— critics write in an atmosphere that discourages examination of categories that nevertheless continue, unexamined, in use.

A strategic document with which to begin an exploration of the debates over genre is Tzvetan Todorov’s The Fantastic, the subject of which is indicated by its subtitle, A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. In recent years Todorov’s generic model has been more widely discussed than any other critic’s but Northrop Frye’s. Todorov in fact begins his own discussion of genre by summarizing and critiquing the “preeminent” and “remarkable” Frye, in the process touching on a wide range of problems.⁵ He finds the sets of classifications proposed in The Anatomy of Criticism “not logically coherent, either among themselves or individually” (p. 12). Separately, he argues, they are incoherent and unjustifiable because the categories on which they are based are arbitrary; Todorov states directly and simply what is perhaps the most basic objection to a systematic generic typology: “why are these categories and not others useful in describing a literary text?” (p. 16). I suspect that when confronted by generic systems (especially the more elaborate ones) many of us have shared his skepticism—why should this particular order somehow inhere in the tremendous diversity of actually existing literary works? Todorov finds Frye’s categories particularly unacceptable because they are not literary categories; they are, he accuses, “all borrowed from philosophy, from psychology, or from a social ethic” (p. 16). In raising the question of the source and justification of generic systems, Todorov poses a problem that goes far beyond the critique he makes of Frye and that is not fully resolved in his own theory. Todorov’s own proposed generic model draws its categories from linguistics, which, given his assumptions, seems to him more legitimate, but which we will want to acknowledge as another borrowing. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine any defense of an ideal classification system that would not rely on nonliterary justifications. Pace Todorov, that does not necessarily invalidate such systems. We will find some justifications, those that draw on the explanatory systems we prefer, more persuasive than others. But surely no argument can demonstrate conclusively that literary kinds must derive from a particular cause; the ontological status of an ideal generic typology must always remain questionable, must always to some degree rely on our acceptance of arbitrary, a priori categories.

Todorov argues that Frye’s sets of classifications are not coherent as a group because they are not logically coordinated and because “many possible combinations are missing from Frye’s enumeration” (p. 13). I would suggest, however, that one of the attractive features of Frye’s system is that it offers multiple descriptive categories and thus accommodates our intuitive sense that generic expectations and recognitions are extremely complicated and, in fact, function in a rather untidy and unsymmetrical fashion. But the systematizing impulse of genre criticism persistently seems to do away with such multiplicity. Even Paul Hernadi, who attempts to incorporate the explanatory powers of the many generic systems he describes by proposing a “polycentric” genre theory, ends by suggesting a single, symmetrical—though extremely elaborate—chart of the modes of discourse.⁶

Todorov does accept that genres “exist at different levels of generality,” depending upon the point of view chosen (p. 5), and that we tend to use the term to identify both “elementary” genres, defined by the presence or absence of one trait, and “complex” genres, defined by the coexistence of several (p. 15). He attempts to legitimate Frye’s incomplete combinatoire by proposing a distinction between “historical” and “theoretical” genres, that is, between genres that “result from an observation of literary reality” and those that result from “a deduction of a theoretical order” (pp. 13–14); the missing terms become theoretical possibilities Frye omits because they have not come into actual, historical existence. Thus Todorov subsumes historical genres into his abstract system by construing them as “a part of the complex theoretical genres” (p. 15). Actually existing genres animate preexisting possibilities established by the abstract potential of language, and multiple methods and levels of generality once again disappear into an ideal order that is unified if perhaps not fully describable.

From this perspective, then, the task of genre criticism is to describe what is visible and deducible of the system of literature, articulating the criteria for accurate classification in a structure in which “a genre is always defined in relation to the genres adjacent to it” (p. 27). Thus The Fantastic would seem to equip us to decide whether or not a given work properly “belongs” to the genre. Such claims, so characteristic of genre criticism, open Todorov’s theory to a host of serious theoretical questions. If generic order is immanent in literature, does that not mean a genre is immanent in the works that constitute it, that it exists somehow “in” the literary text? And if the work belongs to a genre, is it not in turn contained by it, and must not its every feature be generically bound?⁷ Can we credit such homogeneous belonging after recognizing that, as Derrida argues, the very codes by which a text declares its genre simultaneously mark its participation in a system defined by difference?⁸ Once we have classified a work, have we somehow “accounted for” and explained it, or is this a purely tautological operation since the traits that placed the text in a given class are by definition those that characterize the class? Are particular interpretive procedures prescribed and others proscribed by a classification—is it necessary, is it legitimate, to limit a work’s meaning to what is evoked by the procedures specified for a particular genre? Does the value of a work depend on its conformity to norms established for the genre?⁹

Todorov attempts to avoid at least the prescriptive implications of a taxonomic approach, asserting that the significance of the concept of a genre or species in literary criticism differs decisively from its significance in, for example, botany and zoology because in literature “every work modifies the sum of possible works” (p. 6). A literary text “is not only the product of a pre-existing combinatorial system (constituted by all that is literature in posse); it is also a transformation of that system” (p. 7). Yet such statements make it still more apparent that Todorov views literature as an ideal system of works deployed in orderly fashion in some mysterious, closed realm and capable of shifting instantaneously to accommodate new contributions.

Even if we choose to read Todorov as referring not to an a priori typology but to mental codes and generic expectations, as Claudio Guillén proposes in a related theory of literature as system, such a model depends on a concept of static structure and an image of literature scarcely viable in the climate of contemporary critical theory.¹⁰ In work later than The Fantastic Todorov himself begins to lose faith in that closed realm of literature; the effort to isolate something that is uniquely literary in literature and thus define and delimit the category seems, more and more, doomed to failure.¹¹ We are perhaps most familiar with this question as it is put to us by works that blur or even deny the boundary between literature and literary criticism, but its consequences are potentially still more far-reaching. Not only structuralist poetics but poetics itself assumes an object of study defined by “literariness” and is put in question by a challenge to the specificity and privilege of literature. Meanwhile, the assumption that discrete works constitute integral, inviolable unities has also been challenged in theories of what we may, in abbreviated fashion, call textuality. As Pérez Firmat points out, even if we rescue poetics by redefining it as the general theory of discourse (as Todorov suggests) there is “no reason to suppose, and every reason to doubt, that a typology of discourse would organize itself by reference to works.”¹² The theoretical grounds of the project of literary classification, undermined from many directions, seem to be crumbling under our feet. From this perspective genre criticism looks very much like a dangerous dead end.

Given these difficulties, it is not surprising that critics tend to retreat to more empirical and historical approaches to genre. Many studies that fail to specify their theoretical assumptions simply rely on impressionistic description of similarities between works, prompting one to ask if all similarities are necessarily significant. As Pérez Firmat points out, rigorously speaking one cannot define a genre without identifying features “common to all the members of the class and only to them.”¹³ These empirical analyses are also particularly vulnerable to the accusation that they have explained nothing about works but merely reported what is immediately observable about them.¹⁴ However, they frequently go beyond noting similarities to discuss a genre as an entity, as a creature that waxes and wanes, grows or mutates and declines, in any case somehow manifesting a substantial and transhistorical existence. Analyses and taxonomies that appear purely descriptive implicitly appeal, with some regularity, to a priori if rather unsystematic typologies.

Gustavo Pérez Firmat himself, as we might expect, argues a more resolutely historicist position. The final, irreducible credentials of genre criticism are constituted by the evidence that writers and readers do in actual practice make use of generic categories. There is certainly a place for a criticism that codifies the knowledge of contemporary writers and readers about the literary kinds of a given period. From this perspective genre is not immanent in literature or in literary works but itself constitutes a kind of text; it is, as Pérez Firmat puts it, “a verbal message that is durable, delimitable and coherent,” although not “always or easily retrievable,” “in treatises on poetics, interspersed in works of literature, scattered about in prefaces, letters, anthologies, and other assorted documents.”¹⁵ Genre is thus constructed in critical discourse rather than existing independently in literature itself.

It is scarcely disputable that some such body of knowledge forms an indispensable part of the reader’s equipment for encountering texts. Generic ascriptions and classificatory operations do much toward making texts intelligible (and thus, as contemporary critics have made us acutely aware, toward circumscribing and naturalizing them). As one critic puts it, “merely to say that a work is to be read ironically (i.e., as one reads works of an ironic kind) is to offer a new way of making sense of what might not otherwise seem sensible.”¹⁶ The comparisons between works that characterize genre criticism also enable a rich intertextuality that is an important context for interpretation. Recognition of this activity of the critic in generic operations is appealing and widespread. One can find it even in the work of that ardent typologizer Frye, who writes at one point in Anatomy of Criticism that the “purpose of criticism by genres is not so much to classify as to clarify such traditions and affinities, thereby bringing out a large number of literary relationships that would not be noticed as long as there were no context established for them.”¹⁷ But, of course, unless one believes that such relationships have an objective existence, that generic observations have validity of some sort, one will scarcely trouble to make them—so that the question of the source of genres has here been neatly sidestepped. In fact most genre criticism proceeds by some similarly elusive movement between implicit claims for “theoretical” genres and evidence for “historical” genres.

Genre is, certainly, a “text” in the sense that Pérez Firmat describes. But to confine oneself simply to collecting and summarizing contemporary views of genre, remaining agnostic about the validity of the similarities and differences that are described, is to consign such original articulations of generic affinities and systems to the theoretically naive and the daring (to, say, writers themselves, who cannot be expected to know any better and might not care if they did). Taken to its logical end, such an approach legislates itself out of existence, since it cannot defend the creation of the very generic formulations it takes as its object. And such a genre criticism seems a rather uninteresting and antiquarian enterprise—a project of collation rather than analysis. Indeed, strictly interpreted these principles would scarcely allow the construction of any generic descriptions, and Pérez Firmat must allow the critic sometimes to derive generic norms from observations not explicitly offered as such, thus making a place for the intervention of even the most severely historicist genre critic. We must wonder, with Pérez Firmat himself, “whether such lofty methodological aspirations can stand the wear and tear of painstaking research into individual genres.”¹⁸

In any case we lose too much by so thoroughly yielding up the concept of genre to the case against classification. Without claiming to intuit a unique “literariness” in poetic language or a vast a priori system of theoretical possibilities, we can see that literature does exist as a social institution and that within it readers find genres distinguishable if not distinct. But the processes that constitute them are neither exclusively textual nor exclusively literary, so that a genre theory or generic description argued purely in aesthetic terms is fundamentally misconceived. Literary forms exist, not as embodied or disembodied essences, but as effects of historically specific practices of reading and writing; they have a weight, a material reality of their own, and offer a slow, stubborn resistance to the innovator. Nor of course are the needs answered by formal innovation or the constraints on imagination and articulation purely formal. Literary language interpenetrates with other discourses; the production, distribution, and consumption of tales takes place through particular social and economic structures; the experience out of which narration proceeds is always historically specific— and all these circumstanc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Conceptual Combinatory: The Nature of Genre and the History of Realism, the Genre of Nature and the Reality of History
• 2 Forces, Freedom, and Fears: The Antinomies of American Naturalism
• 3 Casting Out the Outcast: Naturalism and the Brute
• 4 Slumming in Determinism: Naturalism and the Spectator
• 5 Documents, Dramas, and Discontinuities: The Narrative Strategies of American Naturalism
• Notes