Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature by Donald Pizer (review)

112Reviews argument—seem too little aware of textual duplicities and on occasion so eager to find a route into the heart of Pynchon's mystery that they verge on reductionism. Some of the same problems occur in the other thematic approach, James W. Earl's "Freedom and Knowledge in the Zone," although Earl is more single-minded in his identification of Pynchon's "positions" — "the old order is that of mechanism, society, and death, and the new is of freedom, nature, and life" (p. 239) —and inclined to cite philosophers, psychologists , and scientists similarly in favor of freedom, nature, and life as if this unremarkable affinity established them as sources or influences. Raymond M. Olderman's "The New Consciousness and the Old System" and Charles Russell's "Pynchon's Language: Signs, Systems, and Subversions" place a third construction on what an "approach" to Gravity's Rainbow involves. Both begin from an inquiry into what the text is doing, rather than into what it alludes to or what beliefs it espouses, and both counter the emphasis on unity in Slade's and Earl's readings by focusing on disintegration as both a theme and a strategy. Olderman's thesis that a fundamental tension between "freak" and "straight" world views (the terms do not occur in the novel itself) is an important structural principle yields a sophisticated and surprisingly persuasive analysis based on a distinction that was perhaps too obvious to have attracted attention previously. Russell is one of the first critics to align Gravity's Rainbow with postmodernism and the nouvelle roman; he examines Pynchom's fascination with aesthetic and social language and with the struggle between a theory of language as stable and referential and a deconstructive theory in which the free play oí the signifier constitutes meaning. On the other hand, Roger B. Henkle takes a more traditional view of disintegration in "The Morning and the Evening Funnies: Comedy in Gravity's Rainbow," warning of "the danger of psychic breakdown" underlying Pynchon's comic surface (p. 283). Henkle's discussion of comedy is also traditional—unfortunately so, as his rigid applications of Bergson's and Frye's theories, developed in the context of two very different kinds of comedy, end up suggesting that Gravity's Rainbow is somehow culpable rather than funny. The juxtaposition of differing "approaches" thus ultimately calls attention to some of the most important issues in Pynchon criticism. For this reason, it seems particularly regrettable that there is no dialogue between the individual essays, even though all were written for this volume. Some sense of Slade's and Earl's reactions to Olderman's and Russell's ideas and vice versa would have been especially useful: whether Gravity's Rainbow is essentially a highly unified or a highly fragmented work is a question that Pynchon studies must address directly. Cornell UniversityMolly Hite Pizer, Donald. Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Revised Edition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1984. 244 pp. Cloth: $15.95. The value of Donald Pizer's Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature has been well established in the years since it first appeared in 1966. At that time, Pizer pointed out that he had made only minor changes in the texts of his essays Studies in American Fiction113 since their original publication in various periodicals, plus major revisions in his original notes, to bring his ideas "up to date and to avoid excessive repetition." Almost twenty years later, the same author has done a larger job of remaking his book. Under the old title, now appears (according to Pizer's "Preface to the Second Edition") "both the heart of the original book and considerable new material reflecting my continuing thinking on the subject. . . ." In all, three essays from the 1966 edition ("Evolution and Criticism: Thomas Sergeant Perry," "Evolutionary Criticism and the Defense of Howellsian Realism," and "The Garland Crane Relationship") have been dropped, while six newer ones have been added. Rather than list these six—all of which have been printed elsewhere (some in publications not easy to locate)—I will simply suggest that, with a single exception, they contribute largely to our developing sophistication in understanding both Realism...