One Man's Junk: Material and Social Waste in Frank Norris's McTeague

In his fall from wealthy son of the Old Gentleman to a sort of lycanthropic housecleaner, the title character of Frank Norris's Vandover and the Brute (posthumously published in 1914 but written at about the same time as McTeague), finds himself at the novel's close cleaning an incredibly nasty rental cottage. He removes from the basement a barrel full of "odds and ends of rubbish," including "broken bottles, old corsets, bones, rusty bedsprings," and a horrific, half rat-eaten "dead hen" (254); sweeps up, scrubs the baseboards, and scours the greasy kitchen; but just when he thinks he is done, a new tenant, a German man working in the factory across the street, points out that he has missed something. "Prone in filth," he then crawls "way in" under the kitchen sink to get at "something gray" in the corner and disgorges "an old hambone covered with a greenish fuzz." Crawling back in, he also extracts "a rusty pan half full of some kind of congealed gravy that exhaled a choking, acrid odour; … an old stocking, and then an ink bottle, a broken rat trap, a battered teapot lacking a nozzle, a piece of rubber hose, an old comb choked with a great handful of hair, a torn overshoe, newspapers, and a great quantity of other debris that had accumulated there" (258).

What are we to make of a home formerly occupied by people who did not really divest themselves of their waste but who tossed it, instead, into the basement and crevices of their home only to be dredged out by the degenerated son of a wealthy man? Certainly the catalog itself seems somewhat randomly, even gratuitously assembled, perhaps stretching the indexical function of a literary catalog to the breaking point, as Lee Clark Mitchell has argued (76). Yet we might begin to understand how the objects in Norris's assemblage could relate to one another, and in so doing get a better understanding of what Norris is up to, by taking seriously the new tenant's complaint that the previous occupants turned their home into "a regular dump heap" (258), for they have, recreating in miniature and with fidelity the turn-of-the-century urban dump heap, which massively accreted all manner of materials, from the most noxious and polluting (like half rat-eaten dead hens) to the ordinarily repairable (like broken rat traps) or reusable (like ink bottles). An outgrowth of the newly forming culture of consumption, the turn-of-the-century dump heap speaks to the culture of consumption's internal logic, in which disposability and replacement trump usability and in which the home, a traditional locus of consumption, becomes, as well, the locus of wasting and the agent of an ever-swelling heap of urban garbage. As a catalog of disposed items, then, Vandover's does not amount to an accretion of separate, self-referential items, as Mitchell asserts, but instead does, in fact, "imply a context of values unapparent in individual items" (76). In locating the dump heap inside, and not outside the home, that is, Norris encapsulates a signal condition of modern life that fascinated him in his early career as a novelist: waste is not simply an undesirable, if necessary nuisance of modern life; rather, waste and wasting are material conditions and habits that both represent modern life and construct modern subjectivity. Thus, in a general sense, Norris's catalog suggests that the dump heap is figuratively always already there, inside the home, immanent in the subject.

Norris in his early career as a novelist, like Vandover as a housecleaner, crawls "way in" again and again into crevices where clean and proper people do not venture, disgorging and bringing forth waste and filth, after "something gray" in the corner. That gray nexus between waste and modern life he took as a central concern in McTeague (1899), which, alongside Vandover, he had composed while studying writing as a special student at Harvard in the mid-1890s. This concern with waste appears as well in his first published novel, the sea romance...