Brute Time: Anti-Modernism in Vandover and the Brute

Often read as a reflection on his wilder college years, Frank Norris's Vandover and the Brute centers on a phenomenon far more troubling to the young author than collegiate indiscretions.¹ The novel's first paragraph indicates that Vandover suffers from a disorder that can be understood as particular to modernity and as particularly troubling to an author invested in narrating time's onward march: "What he at first imagined to be the story of his life, on closer inspection turned out to be but a few disconnected incidents that his memory had preserved with the greatest capriciousness, absolutely independent of their importance" (3). The incidents that follow include Vandover's indulgence in drink and gambling, loss of artistic ability, fall into destitution, and eventual change into a barking brute. Norris's portrayal of the young artist's transformation may be understood in terms of Hayden White's claim that "To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture, and possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself" (1). In Vandover and the Brute, Norris takes claims about the direct relationship between narrative and humanity a step further, insisting that being human requires narrating oneself as a historical agent and that the rejection of linear narrative time by modern subjects yields monstrous results.

In Paris, on 28 December 1895, a year in which Norris made "considerable progress" on Vandover (McElrath and Crisler 160), the Lumière brothers held their first exhibition and showed ten fifty-second films, only one of which—L'Arroseur Arrosé—was a fiction film with a narrative. The rest were "actualities," a genre for which the Lumières became famous. The first actualities were short, typically single-shot, nonfiction films that represented a wide array of subjects: exotic foreign views, street scenes, families at play. Precursors to documentaries, the actualities lifted events from everyday life, achieving a nonnarrative quality by extracting moments from larger temporal contexts. At the turn of the century, entertainments that created new temporal experiences may have held special appeal for audiences who found themselves living in a world that seemed to be moving faster than ever before. In 1903, sociologist Georg Simmel argued that the speed and chaos of modern life altered human perception:

Lasting impressions, impressions which take a regular and habitual course and show regular and habitual contrasts—all these use up, so to speak, less consciousness than does the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions.

(175)

As recent theorists of modernity have noted, entertainments including vaudeville, newspapers, and fairground attractions echoed and participated in the creation of the modern perspective of time that Simmel here describes.² In Vandover, Norris imagines the subject position hailed by these new perceptual opportunities and explores the costs of indulging this new perspective. His description of Vandover's deteriorating state is strikingly similar to Simmel's account of modern sensory experience: "Not only were his nerves out of tune, but they were jaded, deadened, slack; they were like harp strings that had been played upon so long and violently that now they could no longer vibrate unless swept with a very whirlwind" (205). Put in Simmel's terms, Vandover's consciousness is exhausted, deadened by the discontinuous and onrushing impressions that shape his worldview.

Actuality films probably did not directly influence Vandover, but they are powerful analogues to the fragmentary perspectives offered up by the modern amusements to which Norris reacts. For example, chapter 7, which begins with Vandover's entering the Mechanics' Fair with its "huge ampitheatre full of colour and movement" (65), also describes tacky paintings, Vandover's indulgence in popular novels, and the newspaper announcement of Ida Wade's death. The steady stream of media forms in the early chapters suggests an environment teeming with sham representations of the world that cater to the lowest desires in consumers. When the brute in Vandover first overtakes him, the symptoms echo the transience and senselessness of the entertainments he has been...