Literary Naturalism as a Humanism: Donald Pizer on Definitions of Naturalism

In the preface to his recent edition of Hamlin Garland, Prairie Radical: Writings from the 1890s, Donald Pizer notes that while Garland made little money from his early work he did win considerable renown “for his pioneering efforts to replace depictions of his region as a land of bucolic bliss with truthful accounts of its hardship, poverty, and cultural isolation, conditions that he knew firsthand” (vii). Since Pizer began his scholarly career in the mid-1950s with a series of articles on Garland that culminated in the seminal study Hamlin Garland’s Early Work and Career (1960), this new collection gives his five and a half decades of scholarship a kind of symmetry. There is also symmetry between Pizer’s scholarly project and Garland’s early work, for Pizer too has been a pioneer in a career-long effort to replace misconceptions, in his case about American literary naturalism, with more truthful accounts derived from firsthand experiences of the texts themselves.

At this point, an overview of Pizer’s career would be in order. But since the lead essay in the inaugural issue of Studies in American Naturalism provides such an overview (Brennan), it seems appropriate to focus here instead on Pizer’s own commentary—in his published work, in recent interviews, and in personal correspondence, though some overlap with the earlier essay is inevitable. It would be impossible to capture in a brief essay the range of thought in Pizer’s eleven books, sixty-odd articles, and dozens of reviews, lectures, and introductions to editions and collections. Still, one can discern in his more theoretical statements two central beliefs: that American literary naturalism is best understood when read as literature rather than as philosophy or ideology, and that it is a species of humanism.

In casual conversations at recent conventions and in the interview I conducted on 26 December 2009 in his Tulane office,¹ Pizer several times expressed regret at the recent tendency among critics to treat American naturalism mostly in light of some current theory of discourse rather than as literature. As I began this essay, it struck me that I didn’t know precisely what he meant by literature. Drawing upon my reading of most of his work, I inferred a definition and asked him in an email whether I had it right. Below is the key passage in his reply:

I think my sense of what is literature is probably more oppositional in origin than the product of a fully thought out conception. I was responding to the tendency that I first encountered in theory-based criticism and then in the New Historicism and Cultural Studies to reduce all writing to “discourse”—that is, to a form of communication little different from any other, to which could be applied universal means of analysis. This to my mind eliminated almost all that is distinctive both in particular literary works and in the special appeal and permanent hold of literature as a whole within the human experience. I was especially appalled by the effect of this conception of the literary work on the young person who is drawn to literature because he or she loves to read novels or poems and who then discovers that this response is considered simple-minded and extraneous. I realize that there is danger in my mode of thinking—that it raised the specter of the high school teacher half-comically and ineptly rapturous over a Keats sonnet. But that’s the way the issue played out for me.

Although I think you are correct in locating some of the roots of this antagonism in my early experience of intellectual history and the New Criticism, I also sense that part of the lasting impact of these critical methods on me was their common stress on what can be called the “individuality” of each work of literature. The literary works of an era may deal with the same body of ideas, but they often do so in strikingly different ways. And specific works within a period differ strikingly in their success in moving us to...