Regionalism, Realism and Naturalism Part 1

Though I understand what the title of this week's study is referencing (Twain introduced regionalism -- particularly regional dialects and vernacular -- into American literature in a big way; James and Howells were always striving after the perfect realist novel, and Crane and London were, by the very dent of their wild lives, born naturalists [see what I done there?]) but I would find that too easy and too much discussed a piece of American literary history. Put simply, it has been done to death. Now, I'm not replacing it with an untouched topic -- indeed, it would be accurate to say that my topic has also been done to death -- but it is a focus that I particularly have not much been exposed to: the idea of these men as America's first great prose fiction stylists.

Yes, Fenimore and Poe and Hawthorne and Melville all predate them or are contemporary with them (and we won't even go into the poets of the time) but their styles were a good bit more subdued. Even Poe, for all of his Gothic, morbid bluster did not have complete control over his style. In many ways, they let their styles take over their writing to the point that they became pale parodies of themselves(or in Hawthorne's case, his style was so dry and unremarkable that it's a wonder he's still remembered). Not so Twain, who managed to introduce the first real strain of American comedy into literature, focusing heavily on irony, paradox and the contrast between his regional saps' low-dialect and their occasional high-thoughts (case in point: Finn's complex decision to turn against the laws of his father and country [which are highly immoral] and his own certainty that in choosing this moral high-ground he is doomed and damned). Or James, who, despite his seemingly dry work, is a master pensman, his tightly controlled prose disguising the incredible complexity of his characters and the instrumental importance of each sentence.

Crane and London, while rougher, are by no means inferior to their cousins, for they wrote with a verve that echoed their own harsh and all-too violent lifestyles. They were men of the wild, if not literally then figuratively, and their style reflects this. Tough, lean, with very little in the way of flourish, they might be considered in some odd ways precursors to Hemingway. Their themes -- particularly their focus on the brutal, nasty brevity of life -- are much more concerned with the nail of tooth and claw than their contemporaries, who were focused much more on civility and social conduct and all of the ironies therein. Such topics called for a much more brutal style, a style that one might at first miss. But second readings will assure the attentive audience that these two did not spend their time hammering out long, needless passages full of flowery imagery and sentimental moralizing. They were more than anything concerned with capturing the "truth" about life in an interesting mirror-image of James and Howells, who were attempting to do the same through realism.

Interesting that two approaches to achieving the same end -- to capture life as it really is in fiction -- could give birth to such widely different styles. Maybe, then, the differences between realism and naturalism hint that the whole picture of life is so much larger than any one style is capable of capturing? At any rate, the joy in these authors is not that they capture the complexities of life in their work (they are so prone to sentimentality and to over-simplifying something as infinitely complex as life), but in the beauty of their styles, which arise so naturally out of their individual concerns.

Fulfilling the Promise: Race and Gender in Ante-Bellum America

There is something about "minority literature" that I am inherently adverse to. It's not that I have a problem with minorities making work; that would be insane. My problem is that most of the work qualified as "minority work" isn't terribly good; the fact that it must be prefaced with the disclaimer that it IS "minority work" to legitimize it should be warning enough. No one would ever be dumb enough to marginalize Emily Dickinson's work as "women's literature," because it stands perfectly well on its own. It is landmark work! Much unlike what was on the agenda for this week, which was devoid of powerful style and which never managed to say anything more than "slaves are humans, ergo slavery is a bad thing!" (well, I suppose I should except Margaret Fuller; she wasn't actually all that bad).

The problem with Stowe and Jacobs is that there work is DULL! It is moralizing, simpering and trite, yes, but these faults might be excusable if the writing wasn't so lifeless. There is no variety to the sentence structure, no enthusiasm in the work, just very boring, journalistic, matter-of-fact recounting of events that MIGHT sound interesting (a leap across a frozen river, a ride through the wilderness in the dead of night, hiding out in an attic for years) but are in execution forgettable. It is as if in their haste to write about the evils of slavery that Jacobs and Stowe forgot to care about their subject long enough to invest it with the proper energy. For all the life here, the stories may as well be covering the lives of rocks. What should anyone care about the evils of slavery when one cannot even begin to imagine these characters as REAL? And yet, everyone in Jacobs' autobiography DID exist; what does that say for her? Not much, I'd imagine; though one can hand wave this lack of stylistic power by pointing out her own history as a slave, that's a defense of the lowest order.

Douglas, for the obnoxious, self-righteous tone of his work, is a powerful speaker and writer, with just a dash of the mad prophet in his words. Too bad that he wastes so much time railing about injustice and inadequacy and the evils of slavery that he ever forgot to write anything interesting. Maybe this is just the literary snob in me, but quite frankly, I have grown very sick of writing that is blatantly political and written for "moral" reasons; such writings belong in the ethical field of philosophy (which seems to me the lowest discipline in the field) or in sociology, where questions of utilitarian good popular. Again, this is not to say that there AREN'T excellent works about race in the American tradition -- Invisible Man is a classic by anyone's standards -- but these works are not soapboxes and speaking platforms so much as they are an honest exploration of the subject; Invisible Man is actually, in the end, a story most concerned with identity, a theme of the most vital importance, while Douglas and his contemporaries are only interested in demanding there rights instead of actually securing them. Interesting as his words are, at the heart of it he is just demanding freedom, something that, sad to say, is not just a right, but something that must be taken by force.

At least Margaret Fuller has the grace to be not only eloquent but relevant. Instead of railing about how women should be entitled to the same rights as men, she charts out the differences between men and women and suggests how they work together. There is in her none of the feminazi that is so despicable, just a well-reasoned, well-written and very readable account of how men and women might make the most of their relationships with each other, in every sense of that phrase. Why she had to be shoved into the "minority" section with the rest of these writers, I do not know; her writings just as much address the plight of men as women, showcasing her multidimensional thinking, and she manages to remain immensely readable, despite how off-putting the subject matter might seem at first.

There's more to say about how despicable the label of "minority" writer is, but I won't waste my time ranting about it now; there is a topic that deserves a very radical, thorough treatment, one I am not equipped to give here.

American Poetry: The Loud and the Quiet

How funny that the two major American poets of the 19th century are such contrasts: Whitman, the quintessentially "manly man", a massive, vibrant spirit whose work was to encompass the spirit of the Americas and who was to be the poet laureate of the new nation that Emerson demanded, and Dickinson, the demure, secluded woman of no great aspirations or designs. Fitting that they differed so greatly in style, as well. Whitman preferred an energetic free-verse, a structureless, malleable form that allowed him to shift and swerve and mold his style at a moment's notice, allowing him the freedom to write as he needed. His poems were as massive as the themes he was tackling (Leaves of Grass being a book-length work). Dickinson, by contrast, preferred a style that was tightly structured, pithy and delivered in tidbits; one would be hard-pressed to find any poems of hers that go beyond a few hundred lines.

As is fitting, they were focused on very different themes. There was nothing that held Dickinson's interests more than death, than obscurity; Emerson celebrated nothing besides life, extending that word to encompass everything that happened to him and everything that could happen to him. There could be no better representative American poets, then, than these two, who between them attempted to encompass everything that poetry could. In some ways, this opposition, these vivid contrasts, do not so much separate them as combine them. For between the two of them, they have established American poetry in a way that no one before them or no one since has, and so are BOTH the quintessential American poet that Emerson called for. Their interests were never the maudlin sentimentality or enlightened morality that so enraptured their British forerunners, but the pleasures and fears of the material and the mortal.

Expanding the Purvue of American Letters:

Until this week, our studies have focused on American literature of a particular bent: personal reflections and musings, delivered mostly through essays and journals, with only a few other forms (a poem or two, a political document) poking their head through at points. Interesting that American prose fiction, philosophy and poetry have yet to be explored with any depth, the former two having been unmentioned until now!

Well, until now: and with them, we see major American prose form (fiction) emerge, while a still-undeveloped strain of writing peaks and then disappears here with the two preeminent American philosophers: Emerson and Thoreau. Likewise, the scene of American fiction (if you believe high-school and lower-level college courses) peaks here, too, with the presence of Poe, Washington Irving, Cooper, and (most importantly) Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is interesting to note that of the 4 fiction writers, only Poe paves new ground thematically; Cooper and Irving are still most interested in American individualism and the American character as it exists in such turbulent, dangerous and shifting times, as well as its impressive ability to respond to the demands wrought by such a system. Hawthorne is still obsessed with the conflict between the individual and the community that plagued every religious-centric community in his time and before it. While they do not necessarily agree with their predecessors (Hawthorne seems to advocate the value of individuality and warn against the danger of dogma and the will of the mass, while Cooper and Irving seem to celebrate the wilderness and its power), they still focus on the same themes.

Only Poe dares to contemplate spheres beyond theirs, and not just simply in his obsession with the supernatural (a topic that he treats not so much with religious reverence as with fear). Where Hawthorne, Irving and Cooper all focus on love to some extent (it is the focus of The Scarlet Letter, van Winkle has a wife who is central to the story and one of the subplots in The Last of the Mohicans focuses on the betrothal of the Alice to a Duncan) none of them raise it to the level of central interests that Poe does. Love for Poe is not a fancy or a convenient avenue by which he can preach another point; it is the central focus of everything in his writing. The problem with all of their foci is that they are, generally, maudlin and lacking in any real depth. Poe only mourns love, never hoping to explain it or explore anything beyond the pain inherent in it, and the others are quick to expound their messages tritely. This is not to demean the power of their prose; stylistically, though they are generally accessible to the modern reader (they are incredibly verbal, these writers, and quick to switch syntax and to manipulate structure where it suits them), they are brilliant and command a power over the written word that has secured them their rightful place in history.

Our philosophers lack the stylistic gifts of our storytellers. Emerson is prone to obfuscation and rambling. His love of tangents muddles his impressive command of language and logic, and his points are either never explained or reiterated to excess. Thoreau is as boring a writer as they come, with a dry, boastful prose that reads less like philosophy and more like a journal he wrote to reassure himself of his masculinity. Nevertheless, these two begin to codify the rugged individualism and romanticism that embodies so much of the American character, adding a dash of metaphysics that, to the unobservant, upends religion (where in reality it merely replaces it). This does not stop prevent them from being fascinating, though, as they are truly the first American intellectuals and are in many ways the last. No American thinker since Emerson has had his impact: without Emerson, it is doubtful Nietzsche as we know him would exist, if not for the ideas he contributed to Nietzsche, then for the stylistic tendencies he lent the mad philosopher. Without Emerson, who would have synthesized the disparate body of American attitudes and writings into this coherent whole that embodies and explains so much of the American character?

Sadly, Thoreau is little more than a footnote in Emerson's shadow (he seems to admit as much by his incessant hero worship). All that is truly interesting in his character is how he bridges the gap between classic American frontiersman and city-dwelling dilettante. Much as he would love to be a woodsmen, independent from the world at large, he admits that his work in Walden is little more than a dare, a task he undertook just to prove that he could carry it through. Enabled to pursue his "rugged", "experimental" lifestyle by virtue of improvements in technology and standards of living, Thoreau is the bridge between modern American attitudes and earlier American attitudes.

Now the only link missing in this literary chain is a significant contribution from the poets!