Frank Norris and American Naturalism by Donald Pizer (review)

Several observations can be made about this collection of previously published essays, spanning six decades of scholarship. First among these is the simple, staggering fact that this book spans six decades. For several generations of scholars, the path to a better understanding of Frank Norris (or indeed of literary naturalism) has run though the writing of Donald Pizer, and anyone who has studied Norris at an advanced level will likely be familiar with many of these essays. Second, without consulting the editorial notes, it is somewhat challenging to determine the original dates of publication of the different contributions, which are organized here by topic. This is not because they do not engage with recent scholarship or critical developments; rather, it is largely because they consistently respond to a variety of problems, issues, and perspectives while eschewing the kind of language that we might recognize as markers of a particular ideological or theoretical trend. Finally, among the many impressions left by this volume, perhaps most important are its meticulous attention to Norris’s writing itself and its presentation of a unified and compelling argument for Norris’s ongoing relevance to the study of American literature.

In a brief preface, Pizer traces his own journey as an interpreter of Norris and identifies the “two major ironies” of Norris’s work: “Norris the professed anti-intellectual primitivist is in fact both well-informed and coherent in creating his own intellectual system; and Norris the sensationalistic naturalist is at the core of his belief a moralist and theist” (ix). Consistent with an interpretation of naturalist fiction that Pizer has articulated elsewhere, he is committed to an interpretation of Norris’s work enriched by formal and thematic paradoxes, which manifest themselves not as aesthetic failure or inconsistency, as other critics have claimed, but as constructive tensions through which these novels present the complexity of the human experience. Following an opening section on Norris’s criticism, the bulk of the remaining essays focus on Norris’s two best-known novels, McTeague and The Octopus, both of which Pizer reads as illustrating important characteristics of literary naturalism within the larger context of American literary history and its critical interpretation.

Somewhat unique among his American contemporaries, Norris explicitly defined himself as a literary naturalist, and he also wrote extensively on his aesthetic and critical ideas within this framework. Many readers and critics have understood Norris’s criticism as inconsistent, derivative, or compulsively anti-intellectual. Pizer instead recognizes a more nuanced paradox of “sophisticated primitivism” central to modern American literature, for which Norris is an early, if sometimes unacknowledged, advocate. Indeed, Pizer identifies a “vital paradox” (5) in Norris the artist, who embraces “life, not literature,” yet demonstrates a craftsman’s commitment to the construction of fiction. In his definition of naturalism, Pizer maintains, Norris draws heavily on Zola but focuses largely on “subject matter and method” (15) rather than on the deterministic philosophy associated with Zola’s (and Norris’s) writing. While evolutionary ideas would prove essential to much of Norris’s work, critical attention to this aspect of his writing has obscured his participation in the development of modern American literature and its varied manifestations. Though seldom defined as a canonical writer of the American West, for instance, Norris’s engagement with the implications of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, as Pizer explores in “Frank Norris and the Frontier as Popular Idea in America,” provides a vital illustration of the impact of historiography on literature (and vice-versa). Moreover, Pizer argues that Norris’s investment in naturalism, although certainly derived from Zola, speaks to the diversity of subjects and philosophies particular to its American manifestation, “a movement characterized by similarities in material and method, not by philosophical coherence” (15).

The coexistence of apparently incompatible ideas or the absence of a consistent determinism in Norris’s fiction provides both a challenge to common perceptions of literary naturalism and a key focus of Pizer’s scholarship. This approach is exemplified...