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REALISM IN M O D E R N AMERICAN FICTION 1). II. Before passing on to Dreiser I should like to explain why I mentioned Norris's books before Dreiser's first novel Sister Carrie, which appeared in the year 1900, that is, a year before The Octopus. The reason is that while Norris's books seem to have had a fairly large circulation at the beginning of the present century, those by Dreiser did not reach the general public before the second decade. No sooner had the manuscript of Sister Carrie been accepted by the publishers than they felt grave doubts and scruples about it. The first edition was so limited in number and so unattractively got up, being without a title or name, that the American reading public seems to have been quite unaware of its appearance. Not until the year 1907 did a second edition appear from the hands of another publisher. And yet here was a novel that can be truly said to have inaugurated a new era in the literature of the United States. Here for the first time in American prose do we find an uncompromising application of the naturalistic method of description; an exact, almost photographic rendering of the facts in the life of the heroine, without reticence and almost without moralization. Of course, it was exactly these things which had aroused scruples in the minds of the publishers and which so seriously impeded any popular recognition at the time. The American publisher was quite willing to publish any book containing grave accusations of the existing social conditions, painful though they must have been to patriotically inclined readers. In these matters America has always been truly democratic, so that I do not know of any literature in which social conditions and persons in power are so freely exposed and attacked. But Dreiser's realism went one step farther. It did not fall in with the puritan conception of morals, and at that time even the most liberty-loving American would have been shocked by the public discussion and description of subjects usually banned. Similarly Whitman's failure in his own country was simply due to the fact that he had not heeded his countrymen's attitude in the question of morals. His poet's love of his country caused him to visualize an America of a more courageous mood than was really the case. When Dreiser began to write all these conventional standards in the literature of his country were still in full sway. He knew this; he must even have realized the almost absolute certainty of failure. But a great desire to represent life as he had come to know it during his professional work as a reporter was awakened in him when he was still at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat in 1892. This desire soon become so irresistable that it put an abrupt stop to his journalistic career and launched him into a very precarious literary life. To us it is of the greatest importance to read in his Book about Mysell x) A Bibliography will be given at the end of the last part of this study.
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that Dreiser's desire to write in the form of a realistic novel about his experiences as a newspaperman was a direct result of contact with the two French past-masters of naturalism, Zola and Balzac. Two of his fellowworkers at the Globe had together composed a novel which "was plainly a bog-fire kindled by those blazing suns, Zola and Balzac". The following passage is important enough to justify my qouting it here in full: "The scene was laid in Paris (imagine two Western newspaper men who bad never been out of America writing a novel of French life and laying it in Paris!) and had much of the atmosphere of Zola's Nana, plus the delicious idealism of Balzac's The great man [rom the Provinces. Never having read either of these authors at this time, I did not see the similarity, but later I saw it plainly. One or both of these men had fed up on the French realists to such an extent that they were able to create the illusion of France (for me at least) and at the same time to fire me with a desire to create something, perhaps a novel of this kind but preferably a play. It seemed intensely beautiful to me at the time, this book, with its frank pictures of raw, greedy, sensual human nature, and its open pictures of self-indulgence and vice." As Dreiser relates in the following chapter all three young fellows knew that a novel like this one, which represented life in its more sordid aspects, could never find a publisher in America at the time. In this respect publishers of books and editors of newspapers were of the same opinion. As reporters, these young men had special opportunities of seeing life in its crudest, hardest, most unrelenting aspect. But though editors liked to have sensational facts about murders and suicides and any other sort of police-news set forth in detail, sensationally got up, in their news columns, the leading articles were always of a different tone, or, again to quote Dreiser: "While the editorial office might be preparing the most flowery moralistic or religionistic editorials regarding the worth of man, the value of progress, character, religion, morality, the sanctity of the home, charity and the like, the business office and news rooms were concerned with no such fine theories. The business office was all business, with little or nog thought of anything save success, and in the city news room the mask was off and life was handled in a rough-and-ready manner, without gloves and in a catch-as-catch-can fashion." Nothing can give us a better insight into the changes that so suddenly seem to have overtaken American literature during the second and third decade of the present century than these reminiscences and reflections described by Dreiser at great length in this book. Tho generation of authors to which he belongs, journalists most of them, revolted more and more consciously against the double standard of morals prevalent in the whole realm of American letters at the time. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century great changes had come over the whole of American life, spiritually as well as materially; the old order was evidently passing, but literature was still clinging to the old conceptions and illusions. Men like Henry .James or William Dean Howells were no exceptions. Though strongly influenced by European realists, their personal tastes, their upbringing or perhaps the whole American atmosphere made them adopt
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the realistic method only very half-heartedly. Jame's aloofness from life in general incapacitated him more than anything else perhaps from describing life from any other point than the very narrow one displayed in all his work. Life as it appears in his work is much more romantic than most people find it to be. And as for Howells, he has somewhere confessed that the preferred to avoid all dire catastrophies. But Dreiser and his fellow-journalists had experienced life as a very series of such dire catastrophies. Thus, when the works of Flaubert, Zola, Balzac, and later Wells and Shaw and the Russians came within their ken it was a matter of course that they readily turned their backs upon all the older fiction of their own country and eagerly began to tread in the footsteps of the Europeans. In direct contrast to Howells these young men desired nothing more ardently than to write in novel-form about the "dire catastrophies" every-day life had revealed to them. A great deal of what is distinct in American realism must be attributed to this reporters' heritage, as we may call it. There is, however, another reason for its strikingly crude form. These new writers were without a tradition, spiritually and often even physically. We have already seen that their inspiration did not come from their own American precursors. What is perhaps more inportant: the majority of them did not and do not even belong to the same classes from which the earlier novelists sprang. Broadly speaking we may say that the new fiction was introduced into America by a new class of men, no longer university men or others belonging to the cultured classes of the New-England states. Instead of these we find obscure names, many of them from the West or Middle West; men very often of mixed descent, sometimes without a trace of Anglo-Saxon blood in them. Yet it is with these Westerners, immigrants and foreigners that an authentic American realistic literature started, much more authentic at any rate than what had gone before. It may sound paradoxical, but still I think it is quite correct to say that the new inspiration coming from Europe contributed mainly to the fact that American authors began to use truly American themes for their novels. The older fiction was a direct imitation of European models, in form especially, but frequently even as regards subjects. Or else the authors were concerned with a very narrow circle of American life, while, especially in the historical novel, things were described in such a romantic light as to give an absolutely false impression of reality. The new novelists on the contrary are neither concerned with a supposedly heroic past, nor with an equally supposedly arristocratic tradition among America's leisured classes. What interested them was life as seen through their reporters' experience. In most cases they applied the same methods as they had used for the newspapers to their work as novelists or storytellers. Besides, these new authors are all intensively subjective; and as they generally knew life in its more sordid aspects because of their own struggling youth, we can here readily find an explanation for the fact that modern American realistic fiction is to such an extent sociological if not socialistic in its choice of subjects. The struggle of the individual against the harsh conventions of society; the unequal battle of the poor in their
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longing for a place in the sun; the squalid misery of those who lose, and the absence of happiness in those who succeeed, these are the ever recurring themes in all these modern novels. There is among all the new novelists not one who has done all this with more seriousness or greater honesty than Theodore Dreiser. His first and to my idea still his best novel, Sister Carrie, is one long piece of minute and acute reporting raised above the level of ordinary newspaper work by a poet's vision and an uncanny insight into the workings of the human soul. In this way Dreiser has succeeded in creating a masterpiece of realism ,unique in the whole realm of American letters. Where else can we find such an absolutely realistic and thus absolutely convincing picture of the slow desintegration and deterioration of a man, at first quite normal and even fine, as Hurstwoord is? There is nowhere a striving after effect, no conscious application of devices or rules, no sentimentality. The descriptions remain reporting to the end. One of the best illustrations of what I mean may be found in the last chapter where the ultimate state of degradation reached by Hurstwood is given in grim details, ending in the description of his suicide in the following passage. Hurstwood has been standing with many others, hungry and cold and miserable creatures like himself, outside a sort of nightshelter, until the doors should be opened to let them in for the night. - - "Ain't they ever goin' to open up?" queried a hoarse voice, suggestively. This seemed to renew the general interest in the closed door, and many gazed in that direction. They looked at it as dumb brutes look, as dogs paw and whine and study the knob. They shifted and blinked and muttered, now a curse, now a comment. Still they waited and still the snow whirled and cut them with biting flakes. On the old hats and peaked shoulders it was piling. It gathered in little heaps and curves and no one brushed it off. In the centre of the crowd the warmth and steam melted it, and water trickled off hat rims and down noses, which the owners could not reach to scratch. On the outer rim the piles remained unmelted. Hurstwood, who could not get in the centre, stood with head lowered to the weather and bent his form. A light appeared through the transom overhead. It sent a thrill of possibility through the watchers. There was a murmur of recognition. At last the bars grated inside and the crowd pricked up its ears. Footsteps shuffled within and it murmured again. Some one called: "Slow up there, now", and then the door opened. It was push and jam for a minute, with grim, beast silence to prove its quality, and then it melted inward, like logs floating, and disappeared. There were wet hats and wet shoulders, a cold, shrunken, disgruntled mass, pouring in between bleak walls. It was just six o'clock and there was supper in every pedestrian's face. And yet no supper was provided here - - nothing but beds. Hurstwood laid down his fiftheen cents and crept off with weary steps to his allotted room. It was a dingy affair - - wooden, dusty, hard. A small gas-jet furnished sufficient light for so rueful a corner. " H m ! " he said, clearing his throat and locking the door.
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Now he began leisurely to take off his clothes, but stopped first with his coat, and tucked it along the crack under the door. His vest he arranged in the same place. His old wet, cracked hat he laid softly upon the table. Then he pulled off his shoes and lay down. It seemed as if he thought a while, for now he arose and turned the gas out, standing calmly in the blackness, hidden from view. After a few moments, in which he reviewed nothing, but merely hesitated, he turned the gas on again, but applied no match. Even then he stood there, hidden wholly in that kindness which is night, while the uprising fumes filled the room. When the odour reached his nostrils, he quit his attitude and fumbled for the bed. "What's the use?" he said, weakly, as he ~.~etched himself to rest. In a passage like this one, and just as well in the earlier parts of the novel, we see the reporter Dreiser, as it were, standing there with his note-book and jotting down the details of what he sees and hears, "getting the news", as they told him to in the newspaper offices. Thoughts and feelings of his own were of no importance to the proprietors; Dreiser had simply to provide them with the news in a quick and efficient way and they would see to the use to be made of it. Here, 1 think we may find an explanation of the ~trangely detached manncr in which all Dreiser's books have been written; a manner, by the way, that sometimes seems to impart something mechanical to all his characters. It is not within the scope of the present paper to give a detailed study of this highly interesting author and his work. Being the first and, to my eyes, in all that is of importance, the greatest of modern American novelists, I fell it necessary to go to some length in giving certain characteristics of his method. The treatment of his material is the same in all his novels. Whether he is concerned with the life of simple girls or powerful financiers, criminals or geniuses, we shall always find the characters revealing themselves by a minute and photographic rendering of their acts and words. The details are often heaped up one upon another without any apparent discrimination between what is essential and what is not. This defect has often and not unjustly been the cause of bitter attacks by critics. It is, however, difficult to see how with this kind of treatment such a defect can be avoided. This revelling in details will be found in the work of other foremost American novelists. If we take for example the second book of importance in the history of modern American fiction, i mean of course Sinclair Lewis's Main Street, we shall find the same heaping up of details, the same photographic reproduction of every-day life, the same detached out-look. In essence these things are the same in this and others books of Lewis. The difference in method between these two authors is not so great as some would think. That a great difference in other respects does exist nobody will deny. First of all there is of course the question of style, of which Dreiser has simply none. Then there is the language, which in Dreiser's case is sometimes so distorted and misused as to obscure and spoil great parts of his books. The main difference arises from the choice of characters. Lewis directs the focus of his sharp powers of observations principally to the ludicrous side of present-day Americans. The result is a picture viewed
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from a different angle from that presented by Dreiser, but not essentially different. Indeed, it will strike every student of modern American literature how a certain sameness pervades the work of all the realistic fiction-writers, a sameness that is the result, as we have seen, of method first of all, but secondly of theme. The latter always relates to the coarseness and unsatisfactory state of American life and civilization. We are not concerned here with the question as to whether the authors are right in their observations and conclusions; they themselves certainly think they are, and in this conviction they find the main material for their satiric and gloomy pictures.
Leiden.
A. PERDECK.
DIE GRUNDLAGEN DER T H R Y M S K V I D H A . An einer ziemlich verborgenen Stelle (Der Meine Bund. Literarische Beilage des Bund. 13. Juli 1930) babe ich auf eine merkwfirdige l]bereinstimmung eines arabischen Prosaromans des 14. Jahrhunderts (Rudi Parer: Die legendiire Maghdzi-literatur. Tfibingen 1930) mit dem Inhalt der Thrymskvidha hingewiesen. ,,So berichtet die Erz~ihlung vom Kriegszug gegen al-Kabb~s, diesel ein menschenfresserischer Riese, habe von einem arabischen H~iuptling seine Tochter verlangt. Der grosse All, der Schwiegersohn des Propheten, erbietet sich nun, die Rolle der Braut zu spielen, und l~igt sich als solche einkleiden und in einer S~infte zum Zelt des Br~iutigams tragen. Dieser staunt fiber die Kraft, mit der die vermeintliche Braut aus der Shnfte ins Zelt springt, und beim Betreten des Zeltes erschrickt er gewaltig fiber die blitzenden Augen tier Brant und sucht sie dutch Oeschenke gniidig zu stimmen. Da packt ihn All an der Hand, wirft die Verkleidung ab, gibt sich zu erkennen und schl~igt ihn tot." Die l~bereinstimmung ist f/Jr jeden, der die Thrymskvidha kennt, verblfiffend, und so schlol3 ich denn, wie ich meinte, methodisch vollst~indig richtig: ,,Dieser Schwank mug wohl mindestens schon im 12. Jahrhundert vorhanden gewesen sein, da er bereits in einem Lied der ~ilteren, poetischen Edda benutzt erscheint, das man frfiher zu den ~iltesten fi6tterliedern gestellt hat, jetzt zu den jfingeren rechnet: aber sp~iter als das 12. Jahrhundert wird man diese Thrymskvidha doch nicht ansetzen dfirfen. Aelter als das 11. Jahrhundert kann sie aber deswegen doch nicht sein, da erst um diese Zeit die arabische Schwank- und M~irchenwelt ihren Einzug in das westliche Europa h~ilt. Hier ist tier Schwank an den alten Mythus yore Raube des g6ttlichen Blitzfeuers durch einen Titanen, einen nordischen Prometheus, angeschlossen. Der Riese Thrym hat dem Gotte Thor seinen Blitshammer gestohlen und will ihn nur herausgeben, wenn man ihm die Q~)ttin Freya zur Frau gibt. Thor l~Bt sich nun selbst als Braut einkleiden und zum Riesen bringen. Beim Hochzeitsmahle erschrickt der Riese suerst fiber den groBen Appetit, dann fiber die blitzenden Augen der Braut, liefert
