"A True Picture of Facts": Cinematic Realism in Dreiser's An American Tragedy

In 1919, Theodore Dreiser took an advance from publisher Horace Liveright to work on The Bulwark (1946) but instead moved to Los Angeles to begin writing An American Tragedy (1925). Even before moving to the newly established American film capital with a working studio actress (Helen Richardson, his eventual wife), Dreiser had been a regular filmgoer, the author of several (unproduced) film scenarios, and (he claimed) a potential studio head.¹ So in many crucial ways Dreiser lived physically and psychologically closer to film and filming than most writers of his generation, especially while writing what is perhaps his most important novel. Yet scholars rarely think of Dreiser's work as having any relationship to film, and when they do, they almost inevitably see that relationship as adversarial. This serious misunderstanding obscures film's importance in An American Tragedy and even in literary history.

The tendency to see Dreiser's work as insulated from or hostile to contemporary Hollywood film comes in large part from Dreiser's well-known hatred for Josef von Sternberg's 1931 adaptation of An American Tragedy. Dreiser eventually sued Paramount over that adaptation because he saw it as "a deliberate attempt to botch the American Tragedy" (Letters 2: 521) and "not so much a belittling as a debauching process" ("Real Sins" 211). The lawsuit led to a bitter public feud with von Sternberg, a squabble that afforded Dreiser an opportunity to portray himself as a great writer wronged by Hollywood hatchet-jobbery.² Since then, the feud's salience in the history of An American Tragedy seems to have encouraged those scholars interested in the connections between film and that novel to focus on the filmed adaptations of the novel.³ In doing so, critics generally have treated film as a monolithic and vaguely deficient medium incapable of communicating subtleties, of tackling serious social issues, or of creating rich character subjectivity. Seen in that light, Dreiser's psychologically rich, sociologically capacious novel appears all the richer and more capacious, and so the study of the adaptations has generally involved explaining how they failed to live up to their source.

But focusing on the filmed adaptations tends to distract one from the most consequential connections between An American Tragedy and film. In contrast, interrogating how film's formal resources helped to shape An American Tragedy reveals that film contributes substantially to the novel's complexity and even to its concluding perplexity. In the novel, film—often Hollywood film—embodies on the one hand a mode of positivist factual richness and on the other a deeply suspect mode of narration. Film thereby sets the conditions for the novel's insoluble concluding dilemma, in which the novel's discovery of the fundamental inscrutability and ineffability of human action undermines the same positivist evidentiary practices and narrative modes that permit that discovery in the first place. In so doing, film both represents and provokes a crisis regarding the nature of literary realism.

While this article will focus on that crisis in terms of An American Tragedy, the questions it raises have much broader implications for the study of literature, particularly American literature from the first half of the twentieth century. At a minimum, by opening up the complexity of the novel's engagement with film I hope to demonstrate that in considering the film-fiction question, studying adaptation alone typically tends to reinforce inaccurate and counterproductive hierarchies of worth and that a more nuanced and less evaluative approach pays greater dividends. More importantly, the epistemological and formal questions raised by the novel's "cinematic realism" are far from unique to An American Tragedy. In tracking the complexities and contradictions of the novel's realism and in showing how the novel attempts to reconcile older forms of realism with newer visual and cultural habits, I hope to suggest the way in which American literary realism not only engaged with but in many ways emerged from various technologies of visual reproduction and representation and, in so doing, to suggest the particularly powerful influence exerted by the motion picture camera...