I was grateful this last Christmas when my Facebook friend Derek surprised me with a box of books to read. It was an amazing gesture not only because he was thoughtful enough to send a (sizable) gift, but more importantly, he sent me a parcel of books that he has loved over the years, and in a way, invited me to share in the inner considerations of his life. He sent me a very personal gift, one which I have been enjoying heading into this year.

Among the handful of volumes it contained was a novel that he earlier told me was his favorite: Frank Norris’ McTeague. I had actually acquired Frank Norris’ other “big book”, The Octopus, years ago for some reason, at the time knowing nothing about it or Norris, and recall starting to read it once or twice, but always faltering a few pages in. That book ended up on a To Read shelf, wondering if it would ever be read.

Halfway into McTeague, I am thinking The Octopus has a good shot of being read in the near future as well.

Unsuprisingly, I am very much enjoying McTeague– and it was a impulsive perusing and then reading of the book’s Afterword by Vince Passaro that helps me to see why. And also certainly tells me something about myself.

Over the years, I have gravitated toward and deeply enjoyed works by American writers from the first half of the 20th century. I’ve always wondered why. What is it in these books, in that period of prose, that draws me in?

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Passaro points out that in 1922, D.H. Lawrence and his wife migrated to the United Sates and settled in Taos, New Mexico. Once there, Lawrence wrote a book trying to define the essence of “classic” American literature at that time. He pointed at several authors who produced remarkable works for that era: Herman Melville, Ben Franklin, Edgar Allen Poe, Richard Henry Dana. The one he was most fascinated by was James Fennimore Cooper.

Distilling what Lawrence observed writing about these authors, Passaro says they produced “a distinctly new and wholly American literary narrative… a fiction that takes place away from society, outside its grasp and naked of its protections, oft in the wild of the forest are far at sea.” These writers that Lawrence profiled were “outsider” writers of the early and mid-19th century, and it is, to some extent, the accents in outsider fiction that give American literature its distinctiveness. “[The] core narratives of American life touch on certain otherwise unacknowledged animating characteristics: most articulately a dark sense of isolation, violence, and greed”, and in Lawrence’s analysis, such literature was not the product of educated and refined highbrows, but rather “it was produced- figuratively speaking- by madmen and beggars in the street”, or, as Passaro later calls them, “muckrakers”.

Passaro continues to trace the relationship between Lawrence’s muckrakers and the early 20th century writers influenced by them. Lawrence’s influential outsiders spoke as early voices in the American Naturalist movement, a literary movement that was heavily anchored in Darwinian theory, and that featured stories “about characters who had to act the way they did- for good or ill- because whichever action they seemingly chose, they were merely fulfilling the requirements of their natures.” Accordingly, one would think most of these novels are drowning in determinism, and to an extent, many of them are. A key question is ever present in these works: are humans, when removed from culture and community codes of conduct, simply beasts? Stephen Crane, Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, and Kate Chopin all write from this milieu, observing humanness in anarchy and social collapse.

This Naturalism, Passaro says, is not to be confused with Realism, a European perspective and flavor of writing that found embrace in American writing early in the 20th century as well. While Realism tried to capture details more clearly in literature and convey the psychological machinations that drove characters to behave as they did, it was nature ambivalent. Realism maintained a sober optimism about human nature wrestling with the realities of life, even if life was harsh and violent. American Naturalism, not so much.

“You might say that Naturalism is a more limited- and quite often, as in McTeague, more flagrantly romantic- kind of realism in which individual characters are not so much opened up and explored psychologically by the careful observation of their manners and moods and by credible development of their circumstances, as they are buffeted and usually ruined by the greater forces of the world around them.”

Romanticism is inherently tragic, and in the romanticism of American Naturalism, nature- both within and without each human heart- determines destiny. Nature is ominous and overpowering, unseen but nefarious, brutish but ever-present

It is this germ of Naturalistic thinking that influences- and finds resonance and reflection- in the tomes of the 20th century Modernist writers that I love (Anderson, Hemingway, Faulkner, etc.), for indeed, with the march of progress in America after the industrial revolution and the turn of the century, those authors continued to ask whether progress and enlightenment could ultimately overcome and subdue nature and its unyielding domination over human development.

The question of determinism and how influential nature is on human destiny is not new. Theologians have wrestled with it for centuries. The question reasserts itself in modernity, though, when human progress- which should seemingly foster peace, prosperity, and global collegiality- is perpetually shackled by greed, violence, poverty, and warfare. Our advances don’t seem to quiet the Beast.

Passaro makes an interesting observation about American Naturalism, Lawrence’s identified form of “classical American literature”. It is not a genre of the gentrified, but rather a fiction based in frontiers, as America has been a nation of people, outsiders, searching for lives living on frontiers.

McTeague “is the story of human beings going to extraordinary lengths in pursuit of wealth, and finding only moral desolation and death in a landscape that is vast, brutal, and indifferent.”

“Such is not a story, finally, that an Ivy leaguer, a Easterner, would be inclined to tell… [I]t is in the West, with its monumental landscapes comprising both riches and brutality, where the most enduring tales of America reside.”

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Quotes from “Afterword”, Vince Passaro, McTeague (Signet Classics, 2011), pages 349-356.

Photo Source: Greed. 1923 film version of the novel.