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.
No comments:
Post a Comment