In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Literary Naturalism and Its Transformations:The Western, American Neo-realism, Noir, and Postmodern Reformation
  • Richard Lehan (bio)

I. Introduction

There have been essentially two ways of looking at American naturalism as a literary movement: naturalism as influenced and essentially the product of French literary invention, especially as formulated by Emile Zola, and naturalism as a more indigenous American product. The French influence has been documented in works of mine such as "American Literary Naturalism: The French Connection." The more indigenous product can be found in the works of Charles Child Walcutt and Donald Pizer.1

The more indigenous product is often thought of as different from French concern because America was culturally different from France. But as I suggested in my essay, there was a common factor—namely, the transformations from an agrarian to an industrial world—shared by both nations. There is both a French influence and an American cast to the movement, and we can recognize the French influence even as we give testimony to the specifics that were responsible for the American product.

In this context, American literary naturalism takes on a meaning of its own: the product of the intersection of two frontiers—the wilderness frontier of Frederick Jackson Turner and the urban frontier of the second industrial revolution. The purpose of this essay is to fill in the historical and literary details involving the realms of this transformation: my contention is that in this time of historical change, generic forms like the American Western were transformed by literary naturalism and that naturalism as a literary movement was transformed in turn by the neo-realism of modernism, by literary and film noir, and by the constructed (i.e., paradigmatic) assumptions of postmodernism.2 But first, a consideration of literary naturalism as an international (and modal) movement supplies a context useful to both the meaning of naturalism and the process of its change. [End Page 228]

II. Literary Naturalism

Literary naturalism is characterized by plots involving a dichotomy between man and both natural (cf. London's "To Build a Fire") and mechanical (cf. Zola's la Bête humaine or Norris's The Octopus) forces. In each case, the human burden involves adapting to the force rather than being destroyed by it. The individual in combat with a force is analogous to the individual on the frontier in combat with the environment, which made literary naturalism a perfect literary mode to accommodate narratives of the frontier—and to pick up where the Western left off.

Along with a theory of force, naturalism was the product of the radical shift in cultural meaning that came with the above-mentioned transition from an agrarian to an industrial society. The naturalistic novel examined in detail the fate of the farm worker (the peasant in France) who was now being displaced from the land, moving to the city to find work in the new factory system.

In the Western, the characters had a certain control over the environment; in literary naturalism, the environment controlled the characters. When the character reached the city, the control (or lack of it) over the environment depended on the ability to fathom how the urban institutions work (cf. Dickens's Inspector Bucket or Conrad's Inspector Heat to Chandler's Phillip Marlowe) and to work the urban system accordingly.

Naturalism emerged as a response to romanticism and as a product of ideas taken from Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. The romantic element supplied the ideal that most naturalistic characters seek, and the Darwinian/Spencerian element supplied the forces that they must confront. There is thus a romantic dilemma at the heart of a naturalistic narrative: naturalistic characters pursue an ideal that puts them in motion at the same time that it is beyond achieving. The ideal lures them on, but the material force holds them back: we can find this plot element in novels that range from Norris's McTeague to Dreiser's An American Tragedy.3

The literary situation owes its depiction to a mythic reality; the mythic element was in turn the abstracted by-product of the historical situation. That there was a mythic frontier does not negate the fact that there was also...

pdf