pythoness in humour” (160). Rather than just understanding these animal-
istic images in grim Darwinian terms, it is important also to recognize how
Dreiser’s style is shot through with aspects of the ludicrous. Dreiser was a
great admirer of Charlie Chaplin, with whom he became friendly after his
move to Hollywood in 1941, and he shared with Chaplin an interest in
the formal strategies of burlesque, where conventional social categories are
confused by being redefined in terms of their opposite.23 In Dreiser, as in
Chaplin, the epic hero is artistically transmogrified into a comic clown, and
vice versa.
Although Dreiser liked to think of himself as a realist, then, the way his
art embodies this illusion of reality is far from straightforward. Sandy Petrey perceptively noted the existence of “two irreconcilable styles” in Dreiser,
the way that “narration and morality assume dissonant écritures”; but he went on to argue, not so convincingly, that the “moral passages stand as formal parodies of the language of sentimentality,” so that Dreiser’s dynamic
“social realism exposes sentimental posturing as absurd.”24 This is to pos-
tulate an alienation technique whose center of gravity is weighted firmly
towards a naturalistic aesthetic, but it ignores the structural hybridity of
Dreiser’s idiom, the manner in which it achieves its peculiar effects, as James T. Farrell suggested, from the way “beauty, tragedy, pathos, rawness, sentimentality, clichés – all are smelted together.”25 There is a heterogeneity in
Dreiser’s style which makes him reluctant to partition or compartmentalize,
and it is this tendency towards universality which ensures that his narratives
encompass formal incongruities and logical opposites. There is more than a
touch, in early Dreiser especially, of Thomas Hardy: Dreiser is said to have
talked about his “enchanted discovery” of Hardy’s work in 1896, and there
is a hommage to Hardy in the uncut version of Sister Carrie, when Ames 52
Dreiser’s style
discusses Tess of the D’Urbervilles with Mrs. Vance while recommending The Mayor of Casterbridge to Carrie, thinking that the “melancholia” and the
“gloomy” aspect of Hardy’s art would appeal to her “lonely” disposition.26
What we find in Hardy, as in Dreiser, is an aestheticized domain of spirit –
“the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport
with Tess” – a domain which has no necessary purchase on metaphysical
or positivistic truth but which serves to displace the autonomy of the fic-
tional characters, so that we as readers are always being forced to observe
them from two different perspectives simultaneously.27 Hardy’s style, like
Dreiser’s, has been accused of being cumbersome and prolix, particularly in
the way it mixes Latinate constructions with more colloquial dialects; but
this hybrid idiom serves in a curious way aptly to reflect Hardy’s discourse
of doubleness, whose ironies derive from the paradoxical intersections of
history and fate. Dreiser, not unlike Hardy, uses this idea of celestial power
as a vehicle of formal dislocation in order to transform his protagonists from
subjects to objects, from entities impelled by emotional consciousness to cor-
poreal entities scarred by the commodified nature of an industrial society,
so that Ames, after discussing Hardy’s work with Carrie, can fittingly say to
her: “You and I are but mediums, through which something is expressing
itself” (485).
This implicit dialogue in Dreiser’s novels between materialism and rar-
efaction is commensurate also with what David Baguley has called natural-
ist fiction’s “paratextual” procedures, based upon incongruous analogues
and parodies of romance. Baguley is among more recent critics who have
emphasized the metafictional aspects of naturalism, rather than seeing it as
subservient merely to Darwinian or scientific theories, and he has suggested
that the naturalist text is typically predicated upon a series of disconcert-
ing effects which are liable to shock readers into reactions of indignation
or disgust. Whereas Northrop Frye saw Zola and Dreiser as being intent
upon a brutal “accuracy of description,” Baguley argued that their more self-
conscious aesthetic strategies seek provocatively to twist round expectations,
to juxtapose the sordid and the high-flown, so as to give the impression of
“a world in decay.”28 This would help to explain why Dreiser was so keen
to exaggerate the censorship difficulties faced by the first edition of Sister Carrie when he organized the glossy publicity for the book’s relaunch in 1907; whatever the truth about Mrs. Doubleday’s objections to the novel
when it was first published seven years earlier, it clearly suited Dreiser’s marketing strategy to present his work as transgressive and iconoclastic, as ded-
icated to exposing facets of the urban world that civic authorities and timid
publishers would prefer hypocritically to remain concealed. As a journalist,
Dreiser was involved professionally in the business of exposés, a business
53
pau l g i l e s
which is, of course, given its raison d’être only by the structural censorship
endemic to a particular society. In this sense, the idea of a systemic suppres-
sion of truth is as central to Dreiser’s style as its revelation, a paradox that that is given its fullest expression in An American Tragedy (1925), where the question of exactly what happened when Clyde Griffiths was in the boat
with Roberta Alden – whether it was murder, or whether it was an accident –
is entirely swamped by retrospective legal and media fictions about the
event.
Dreiser’s style, then, mediates between two different conceptions of truth:
the received wisdom of social custom on the one hand and the uncertainties
of philosophical agnosticism on the other. His novels skillfully bring into
juxtaposition the rhetoric of public, corporate life with the ragged edges of
epistemological uncertainty and aesthetic impressionism, and they deliber-
ately veer away from being simply an expression of the author’s own point of
view. In keeping with this idiom of impersonality, Dreiser presented himself
less as the author of Sister Carrie than its amanuensis: “My mind was blank, except for the name. I had no idea who or what she was to be. I have often
thought there was something mystic about it, as if I were being used, like
a medium.”29 Such apparent relinquishment of authorial control is entirely
consistent with the uncut novel’s contention that its citizens are “more pas-
sive than active, more mirrors than engines,” so that in both its formal style
and its thematic content Sister Carrie ostensibly abjures the notion of active design and sets itself to reflect instead a heterogeneous world that already
exists.30
This image of the mirror is an important one in Sister Carrie, implying a symbiosis between character and culture: Carrie endeavors “to re-create the
perfect likeness of some phase of beauty which appealed to her” (117), while
other characters see “mirrored upon the stage scenes which they would like
to witness.”31 To be “like” something is to place oneself in a mirrored rela-
tion to it, and “like,” in both its verbal and conjunctive senses, is a crucial word in Sister Carrie: “Like the flame which welds the loosened particles into a solid mass, his words united those floating wisps of feeling which
she had felt, but never believed, concerning her possible ability, and made
them into a gaudy shred of hope. Like all human beings she had a touch of vanity” (117; my emphases). As a conjunction, in the way it is used here,
like binds the fictional protagonists into a structural similarity and homogeneity, as if Dreiser’s style were a great magnet sweeping everyone into its
orbit; the first chapter of this book is actually entitled “The Magnet Attract-
ing: A Waif Amid Forces.” And as a verb – “scenes which they would like
to witness” – it suggests how these characters are impelled by the desire to
54
Dreiser’s style
identify with what they are not, thus again emptying out their interiority and
rearticulating them as cogs within the city’s financial machine. Matthiessen
noted how the rhythm of “repetition” was one of the defining characteristics
of a Dreiser narrative, and this again can be related to the impulse of struc-
tural homogeneity, since the cumulative power of Dreiser’s works derives
from their sense of relentlessness, the way the episodes become increasingly
“like” each other.32 When Trilling complained about the “crude” nature of
Dreiser’s style, one of his principled criticisms was that the author does not
leave sufficient room for the liberal imagination, for the representation of
a flexible individual consciousness. But Dreiser in this sense was always a
profoundly illiberal writer, not because he was conservative, but because the
philosophical basis of his work is centered around analogy and homogeneity
rather than contingency or freedom.
Such philosophical homogeneity should not, however, be seen as synony-
mous with political uniformity. Dreiser was always aware of himself as a
cultural outsider, and his texts consciously incorporate various aspects of
ethnic difference which serve to position his narratives in an oblique relation to the nationalistic imperatives of American life. Such imperatives were, of
course, particularly pressing around the time of the First World War, and it is important in this context to remember that Dreiser’s first language was not