Art in McTeague

ART IN McTEAGUE D. B. Graham* Frank Norris's McTeague (1899) is typically seen as a straight Naturalistic novel embodying such standard assumptions as sexual determinism, atavistic degeneracy, the influence of sordid milieu, and the operation of chance.1 There is no question that quasi-scientific theorizing is one side of McTeague. Like Dreiser and London, Norris often chose to ground his fiction in the presumably authoritative scientific opinion of the day. (The difference between this faith and a present-day novelist's reliance upon post-existential assumptions is slight.) Still, there is no reason to believe that Norris and the other Naturalists were preoccupied with Content and Truth to the point of not caring about the art of fiction. Norris in fact produced a fair amount of practical criticism himself and was capable of ideologically neutral statements: "After all in fiction, the main thing is fiction."2 Praised for its exposition of Naturalistic ideas, McTeague seldom receives favorable mention of its art. Warren French, for example, would seem to speak for a whole generation of critics when he observes, "as art McTeague leaves much to be desired. The novel is not likely to excite much enthusiasm among critics who cherish formal perfection. . . ."3 Warner BerthofFs summary indictment of Norris's formal crudities is worth quoting too: "All in all, composition in Norris's novels seems to be reckoned exclusively in calculations of decibels and gross tonnage."4 Gross tonnage may be a successful impressionistic rendering of the feeling aroused by a book like McTeague, whose hero is ostensibly a brute, but it is not an accurate description of Norris's art in this novel. The word that Ellen Moers has applied to Dreiser's artistry in Sister Carrie is needed to describe Norris's efforts in McTeague: "finesse."5 It is the ending of McTeague, those last three chapters detailing the hero's flight from the city, that has come in most often for derogation. "Professor Graham, who teaches in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania, has published widely on American literature, especially on Naturalistic writers. He is currently working on articles onDreiser and Richard Wright and on a book to be entitled Frank Norris and Art in the 1890s. 144D. B. Graham Any defense of the art of McTeague has to account for the ending. From the first reviews on, the desert material has provoked controversy. In an otherwise very favorable review, William Dean Howells faulted only the desert flight, which he saw as a lapse into melodrama.6 Interestingly, another novelist has found the ending worthy of high praise. In an essay on Stephen Crane, Edward Dahlberg says grandly, "Death Valley is what makes Frank Norris."7 Norris wrote Howells a thank-you note for that kind review with one demurrer: "I agree in every one of your criticisms, always excepting the anti-climax, the 'death in the desert' business. I am sure it has its place."8 He is right. Thematically and structurally the ending of McTeague is justified; far from being anticlimactic , it climaxes the evaluation of landscapes, of interior and exterior space, that forms a central and controlling tension in the novel. Norris's management of background material in McTeague, whether interior decor or external landscape, constitutes a kind of internal non-discursive rhetoric of object and symbol. Long descriptive catalogues of a room's contents are never purely documentary in purpose, never merely therecordedhabits of aphotographicrealist. The interior of the Big Dipper Mining Office, for example, is a highly symbolic rendering of the novel's issues. This setting occurs in Chapter 20, which marks the break with the urban environment. After murdering his wife Trina, McTeague has fled San Francisco andhas returned to the landscape of his childhood. Looking about, he observes certain changes that have taken place over the years: There was a telephone on the wall. In one comer he also observed a stack of surveyor's instruments; a big drawing-board straddled on spindle legs across one end of the room, a mechanical drawing of some kind, no doubt the plan of the mine, unrolled upon it; a chromo representing a couple of peasants in a ploughed...