"Fighting Against the Earth Itself": Sadism, Epistemophilia, and the Nature of Market Capitalism in Frank Norris's The Pit

Earth, I am thine again!

—Faust, from Goethe

Fairly late in Frank Norris's The Pit, Curtis Jadwin is struck by a peculiar memory:

Somewhere, in a long-forgotten history of his brief school days, he had come across a phrase that he remembered now, by some devious and distant process of association, and when he heard of the calamities that his campaign had wrought, of the shipwrecked fortunes and careers that were sucked down by the Pit, he found it possible to say, with a short laugh, and a lift of one shoulder:

"Vae Victis." (307-8)

The phrase—translated as "woe to the vanquished" or "woe to the conquered" and taken from the Roman historian Livy's Ab Urbe Condita—is attributed to Brennus, leader of an army of Gauls who assaulted Rome in 390 BC. Realizing the inevitability of their defeat, the Romans offered to ransom their city, agreeing to pay Brennus one thousand pounds of gold. When the Romans brought forth their gold, though, they noticed that the counterweights on the scales being used by the Gauls were fixed to under weigh their gold and complained to Brennus that they were being cheated. Brennus, so the legend goes, drew his sword and added it to the counterweights, declaring "Vae Victus!" and demanded that the Romans now bring even more gold to balance the scales. The vanquished, according to these laws of "victor's justice," have no rights, and their suffering is therefore the mere plaything of the vanquisher. Jadwin's memory, then, is one not only related to the notion of conquest, but more essentially to a particular constellation of conquest through which pleasure—"a short laugh, . . . a lift of one shoulder"—derives from the suffering of others; that is, to the distinct constellation of sadism.¹

While critics have discussed the sadism of Norris's McTeague, they have paid little attention to the role of sadism in his later novels.² As Bert Bender argues, sadism is less prominent in his later work because of a shift in his attitudes about the "sexual instinct" and the influence of "the courtship plots of novelists like Howells, James, and Harold Frederic" (83). Indeed, Bender asserts that, while in novels like McTeague, we see Norris's "determination to . . . bring the sexual beast to life," in his later works we see a desire "to subdue it or cleanse it of its grosser animal features" to such an extent that by the time we get to The Pit, "there is scarcely a remnant of the 'foul stream of hereditary evil,' the 'panther leap of the animal,' or 'the fury of a young bull in the heat of high summer' that had awakened in McTeague" (82-83). While Bender correctly contends that The Pit eschews the overt sexual violence found in Norris's earlier works, the explicit physical violence of McTeague is displaced by the more subtle violence of sadism in The Pit, especially as manifested through philosophical form. Here, then, Norris's preoccupation with violence is less about the domination of one person by another and more about a fuller sense of nature's sadistic force—and it is this sadistic force that informs The Pit and, more specifically, animates the very being of the speculator Curtis Jadwin.

Just before the "devious and distant process of association" brings forth the memory of vae victis, Jadwin reflects that "[h]e was too rich, too strong now to fear any issue" (307). And yet, in spite of this unassailability, when confronted with "more and more of these broken speculators"—that is, those that Jadwin has himself broken—Jadwin recognizes that "a vast contempt for human nature grew within him" (307). For a man who, earlier in the novel, is described by his good friend Mrs. Cressler as "[t]he kindliest, biggest-hearted fellow," who even "passes the plate in our church" and "was talking about supporting a ward in the Children's Hospital for the children of his Sunday-school that get hurt or sick" (67...