Frank Norris's common sense

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes I first presented this essay as a member of the panel ‘Modernism-Effects’ at the Modernist Studies Association Conference in November 2008. My thanks go to Mark Goble for inviting me to participate, as well as to early readers of this essay in draft form, including Douglas Mao, Bruce Robbins, and an anonymous peer reviewer for Textual Studies, who offered many helpful suggestions. For recent work on naturalism and the problematic of environmental influence, see Richard Daniel Lehan, Realism and Naturalism: The Novel in an Age of Transition (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), Jennifer Fleissner, Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), Mary Lawlor, Recalling the Wild: Naturalism and the Closing of the American West (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), and Christophe Den Tandt, The Urban Sublime in American Literary Naturalism (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1998). Frank Norris, The Pit: the Epic of the Wheat and a Deal in Wheat (New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1902), pp. 271–272. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text. Zola famously observed, ‘The novelist is equally an observer and an experimentalist. The observer in him gives the facts as he has observed them ... then the experimentalist appears and introduces an experiment, that is to say, sets his characters going in a certain story so as to show that the succession of facts will be such as the requirements of the determinism of the phenomena under examination call for’. See Zola, The Experimental Novel and Other Essays, 1893 (New York: M.S.G. House, 1970), p. 8. Howells noted of realism that ‘the effect is like that in those cycloramas where up to a certain point there is real ground and real grass, and then carried indivisibly on to the canvas the best that the painter can do to imitate real ground and real grass. We start in our novels with something we have known of life, that is, with life itself; and then we go on and imitate what we have known of life. If we are very skilful and very patient we can hide the joint.’ See William Dean Howells, Criticism and Fiction (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1892), p. 37. These critics show that an emphasis on cognitive aesthetics was common not only to genres of realism and naturalism, but also to aestheticism and early modernism, for an appreciation of the interplay between the embodied mind and the environmental surround ‘continually challenge[s] our usual distribution of values’, in Dames's words. It can lead in many directions, from a Zola-esque aspiration to ‘regulate society’ to a Paterian celebration of sensory flux and flow. See Nicholas Dames, The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 16; Douglas Mao, Fateful Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and Literature 1860–1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), and Jane Thraillkill, Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literary Realism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Norris's critics have generally found it challenging if not impossible to reconcile his muckraking emphasis on the particular, as evidenced by his drive to novelize real events, with his interest in the sublime, which has been generally equated with a universalizing and transcendent vision that renders all particular and local struggles irrelevant. See Charles C. Walcutt, American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956), Donald Pizer, The Novels of Frank Norris (New York: Haskell House, 1973), Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987), and Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992). Michaels solves the problem by describing The Octopus as a post-Populist novel that begins to imagine ‘not only production but also the opposition between producers and distributors as something of an anachronism’ (184). Seltzer has similarly observed in regard to The Octopus that the idea that ‘the wheat grows itself’ – a sentiment voiced in that novel by the railroad magnate Shelgrim – effects a ‘radical emptying of the category of production – the very category that the social–economic ‘protest’ the novel might be seen to embody centrally requires' (26). In a reading that has been influential to my thinking in this article, Christophe Den Tandt has resuscitated the local politics of Norris's texts – which were far more evident to critics at the time of their publication – by tracing a ‘complex pattern of ideological faltering’ inherent in his ‘attempt to mingle the epistemologies of realism and romance’ (see The Urban Sublime in American Literary Naturalism 81). For recent work on the global ‘turn’ circa 1900, as reflected in American realism and naturalism, see Russ Castronovo, Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), Ann Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), and Thomas Peyser, Utopia & Cosmopolis: Globalization in the Era of American Literary Realism Durham (Duke UP, 1998). In addition to sources cited above, this essay is indebted to Wai Chee Dimock's argument that the category of the aesthetic has the potential to challenge the national frame as ‘taxonomic unit’. See Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). For these and other details about Norris's plans for his trilogy, see Donald Pizer, The Novels of Frank Norris (New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1973). For details of Norris's research in Chicago in the spring of 1901, see Charles Kaplan ‘Norris’ Use of Sources in The Pit,' American Literature, XXV (March 1953) and Joseph R. McElrath Jr. and Jesse S. Crisler, Frank Norris: A Life (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006). Pizer suggests that Norris's idea for a naturalist trilogy unified via recurring characters came in part from Zola's La Terre. See Pizer, The Novels of Frank Norris, p. 116. On Norris's struggles to weave together his divergent plot lines, see McElrath and Crisler, Frank Norris. Pizer, The Novels of Frank Norris, p. 162. See David A. Zimmerman, Panic! Markets, Crises & Crowds in American Fiction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Letter to I. F. Marcosson, quoted in Pizer, The Novels of Frank Norris, p. 165. Charles Kaplan ‘Norris’ Use of Sources in The Pit', pp. 75–84. On Norris's struggle to understand market speculation as he was writing The Pit, see McElrath and Crisler, Frank Norris: A Life, p. 395. Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida argue that the sublime artwork exposes its own inability to signify, forcing a confrontation with the other, and/or the material basis of language as a support for the self. See Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting (Chicago University Press, 1987) and Jean François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). Yet the Kantian category of the sublime, as many besides Rancière have pointed out, is not a category pertaining to objects, but rather denotes a subjective struggle over place and point of view. On the sublime and the aesthetic as categories pertaining to subjects, rather than objects, see Francis Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York: Routledge, 1992), Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), and Jacques Rancière, ‘The Sublime from Lyotard to Schiller: Two Different Readings of Kant and their Political Significance’ in Radical Philosophy, 126 (July/August 2004). See Rancière, ‘The Sublime from Lyotard to Schiller,’ p. 37. See Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in a Series of Letters (1801). Translated, with an introduction by Reginald Snell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1954). On Schiller's hope that theatre could provide an alternative to the excesses of the French Revolution, see Rancière, ‘The Sublime from Lyotard to Schiller’ and ‘Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics’ in Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009). On the totalitarian implications of Schiller's continued reliance on the Kantian a priori, see Castronovo, Beautiful Democracy, pp. 190–194. For an analysis of the influence of the Schillerian aesthetic state on Norris's portrayal of a new world order in The Octopus and Vandover and the Brute, see Castronovo, Beautiful Democracy, pp. 180–213. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, p. 40. On the significance of the category of attention during this period, in addition to the sources cited in note 4, see Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1999). Mao, Fatal Beauty, p. 63. For a lucid distinction between cognitive and philosophical models of the unconscious, see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999). The disease of ‘American Nervousness’ was coined by the neurologist George Miller Beard, who emphasized, in particular, the ways in which ‘buying on margin’ was more conducive to nervousness than ordinary gambling. He also stressed that nervousness resulted from ‘the heightened activity of the cerebral circulation which is made necessary for a business man, since the introduction of steam-power, the telegraph, the telephone, and the morning newspaper’. See American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1891), p. 117. Tom Lutz has documented the widespread literary and cultural influence of Beard's ideas. However, the novel's embodied aesthetics leads me to disagree with his claim that the centrality of nervousness in The Pit represents ‘a return from social reform to the problem of an individual's reformation’. See American Nervousness: An Anecdotal History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 135. Rancière describes the characteristic sensation of the sublime as that of a ‘disagreement’ between reason and desire, as neither one nor the other can be evoked by the imagination to explain a given phenomenal experience. On the ways in which aesthetic disagreement can disclose a ‘sensible politicity’, see Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, Gabriel Rockhill (Trans), Continuum, 2004, pp. 12–20. Norris, ‘The Frontier Gone At Last.’ in Frank Norris: Novels and Essays, 1185. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. The shift in Norris's essay seems particularly odd in light of what has preceded it. As Castronovo has argued, Norris's conviction of the metaphoric relationship between war and trade throughout most of the essay has established a fascistic and totalizing sense of the globe as a formally perfect circle. This ‘beautiful’ image, Castronovo shows, allows Norris to justify American militarism and racial supremacy on a global scale. See Castronovo, Beautiful Democracy, pp. 180–211. As Zimmerman notes, circa 1900, crowd theorists and New Psychologists often explained market panics as a form of mass hypnosis, in which the rational self-surrendered to a suggestible, emotive, and often rapacious and desiring second self. For sources, see Zimmerman, pp. 132–139. On the pervasiveness of figures of errant desire in Progressive Era social thought, see Michael Trask, Cruising Modernism: Class and Sexuality in American Literature and Social Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 15–36. The final bond between Landry and Jadwin, and the absence of Laura from the scene, which I discuss subsequently above, suggests the beginning of a kind of world brotherhood often imagined by Wagner and given vivid life in the story of the ‘innocent fool’ Parsifal. In Wagner's eponymous music drama, Parsifal's innocence of sexuality, like Laura's of finance, allows him to recapture the grail, expel the witch and ‘go-between’ Kundry – a figure for mediation – and reinstate the homosocial and homoerotic bonds of the grail knights. On Parsifal and the purification of the medium, see Matthew Wilson Smith, The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (New York: Routledge, 2007). Friedrich Kittler has argued that Wagner's goal was to play directly on the senses of his audiences, bypassing mediation altogether. See Kittler, ‘World Breath’ in Opera Through Other Eyes, David J. Levin (Ed.) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). As Smith notes, Kittler somewhat overstates the case for Wagner's multimedia aspirations. Norris had become particularly interested in the theatre while writing The Pit by his friendship with Katherine and Julie Herne, widow and daughter of the playwright and actor James A. Herne. As Donald Pizer reports, he had considered collaborating with them around this time on a dramatic version of The Octopus (Pizer, The Novels of Frank Norris, p. 166). Rather than ‘sharpening his sense of the dramatic element in fiction’, as Pizer notes, my analysis suggests that his encounter with the Hernes may have heightened his interest in the particular sensory effects of theatrical spaces. See Norris, ‘A Plea for Romantic Fiction’ in Frank Norris: Novels and Essays (New York: The Library of America, 1986), p. 1166. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. In an essay on ‘Zola as a Romantic Writer’, Norris also turns to an aesthetics of displacement to challenge the idea that naturalism is a ‘representation of things “as they really are” ... with the truthfulness of a camera’. In Zola and in naturalism, more generally, as Norris defines it, characters that appear ordinary are ‘wrenched out from the quiet, uneventful round of every-day life’ (see Frank Norris: Novels and Essays, p. 1099). Laura may have been reading Meredith's infamous novel of adultery, Diana of the Crossways. See Robbins, ‘The Sweatshop Sublime’, PMLA 117:1 (January 2002), 84-97, 85. This essay is also indebted to Robbins' groundbreaking account of the contested politics of cosmopolitanism in Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (New York: New York University Press, 1999). As Jadwin's object of desire, Laura arguably stands in less for the bewildered viewer of financial speculation, or Norris's imagined reader, than for the ‘giant cloaca’ of ‘the pit’ that Jadwin seeks to dominate. As Walter Benn Michaels argues in his reading of Trina's masochism in MacTeague, in a novel in which everything can be exchanged, even the self, ‘perversions’ become ‘characteristic functions in the instinctual life of property’. See Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, p. 136. Robbins, ‘The Sweatshop Sublime’, ibid. For details of Norris's struggle to pay the bills during the writing of the novel, see McElrath and Crisler, Frank Norris: A Life, p. 395

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