“The Game as It Is Played”: Essays on Theodore Dreiser by Donald Pizer (review)

The major essays in this collection span the years 1977 to 2011, the time frame within which Donald Pizer, displacing Charles Child Walcutt, became the foremost critic concentrating on American literary naturalism. His 1976 book The Novels of Theodore Dreiser set the stage for his subsequent analytical forays into the writer’s fiction and the genre employed in it.

This welcome gathering of reprintings owes its title to the answer Dreiser once gave an interviewer who asked what he sought to accomplish in his writing. Dreiser replied that his goal was simply to describe existence realistically, to inform or remind his readers how the “game” of life is actually enacted. Over the course of four decades, Pizer has shown through many essays how Dreiser went about his task and what methods he used to effect it. This new book compiles sixteen of those essays and Pizer divides them into three overlapping categories: Dreiser’s career, Dreiser and naturalism, and Dreiser’s works. The opening section is made up of three essays. The first situates the novelist at the turning point between realism and naturalism. The second looks at the late letter Dreiser wrote expressing his wish to join the Communist Party. The third measures the extent of his anti- Semitism. The first of the book’s second group of essays verifies Dreiser’s status as a naturalist. The second shows how his novels describe states of consciousness. The third draws on An American Tragedy and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence to illustrate the power of naturalism in its “perfected” stage. The fourth considers the distance between naturalists’ espousal of their philosophy’s core beliefs and their actual practice and uses Sister Carrie as a specimen. The section’s final piece reintroduces the reader to naturalistic precepts. The concluding cluster of eight essays examines “Nigger Jeff,” Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, The ‘Genius’, and An American Tragedy. References to other American writers pepper these pages as well, including, among others, Garland, Norris, Crane, London, Anderson, Dos Passos, Farrell, Steinbeck, and Faulkner.

As with any collection of this kind there is some repetition of fact and finding, though less than might be expected. Readers coming to these essays for the first time will encounter a judicious critical voice and a wealth of crucial information about Dreiser’s life and works, and about naturalism as conceived and carried out by its adherents. Readers already steeped in these matters will find the essays, on rereading, as thought- provoking as when they were first published. The essay titled “Dreiser and the Naturalistic Drama of Consciousness,” for example, brilliantly makes the case for naturalism’s historically unappreciated ability to render the inner lives of fictional characters and Dreiser’s individual gift for doing so. And speaking of gifts, this essay in particular displays Pizer’s uncommon one, a penchant for painstaking scholarship combined with a capacity for razor sharp close reading. This accounts for his decades- long dominance as American naturalism’s chief analyst and sets him apart from his predecessor. My dissertation advisor at the University of Michigan once quipped that Walcutt lacked one of the more desirable attributes a literary critic can possess, namely the ability to read.

The foregoing praise of Pizer does not negate the necessity of disagreeing with some of his judgments. His introduction to the 1989 Penguin edition of Jennie Gerhardt, reprinted in the collection, makes enough persuasive points to tempt my upgrading of the novel from last place in the Dreiser canon to a spot a notch or two higher. But he quotes and comes close to agreeing with critic Floyd Dell’s intensely overheated 1911 assessment that ranks Jennie Gerhardt as a “a great novel.” In arguing for its merits, Pizer declares that Jennie, thanks to revisions Dreiser made between versions of her story, becomes a character “of potential depth of mind.” But...