2 • Frank Norris[6]
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Parrington, Vernon Louis
The most stimulating and militant of our early naturalists—the only one who wrote consciously with a definite creed. He had thought out a naturalistic philosophy under the inspiration of Zola. “He was never without a yellow paper-covered novel of Zola in his hand,” wrote his brother of him. His two chief novels reveal the twin tendencies as revealed in Nana and Le débâcle: The study of the individual in his reaction to environment, and the study of social forces and their impact upon a group of related individuals.
His Work. Falls into three groups: (1) Romance—Blix, Moran of the Lady Letty, (2) Naturalism—McTeague, Vandover and the Brute; (3) The Pit and A Deal in Wheat. Between the two latter groups stands The Octopus. The dates of the earlier works uncertain. Commonly believed that Norris began as a romantic and worked out of it slowly. Another view that he wrote romances as a means of arriving, side by side with his serious work. Thus he seems to have begun McTeague about 1894—although it was not published till 1899.
Theory. His passion for truth more ardent—or more noisy—than Crane’s: his objectivity less. The strong conviction of a deterministic universe was on him, but he never quite attained the scientific detachment. His nature large and eager. Like Zola he loved large canvases. This induced him rather to the sociological than to the individualistic study. The Octopus more representative of his genius than McTeague. Man in society, his theme: not mere men and women as ends in themselves. This grew on him—the second phase. The novelist must deal “with elemental forces, motives that stir whole nations. These cannot be handled as abstractions in fiction.... The social tendencies must be expressed by means of an analysis of the characters of the men and women who compose that society, and the two must be combined and manipulated to evolve the purpose—to find the value of x.”[7] Above all, avoid propaganda.
Unskillfully treated, the story may dwindle down and degenerate into mere special pleading, and the novelist becomes a polemicist, a pamphleteer, forgetting that although his first consideration is to prove his case, his means must be living human beings, not statistics, and that his tools are not figures, but pictures of life as he sees it....
Consider the reverse—Recondite, for instance. The purpose for which Zola wrote the book ran away with him. He really did care more for the depopulation of France than he did for his work. Result—sermons on the fruitfulness of women, special pleading, a farrago of dry, dull incidents, overburdened and collapsing under the weight of a theme that should have intruded only indirectly.[8]
He never quite arrives at the amoral attitude. Ethical values persist in intruding themselves, sometimes quite incidentally, as in McTeague, but increasingly, as in The Octopus and The Pit.