English but German; his father was a German immigrant who still spoke in
his native tongue at home and who insisted on sending his son to a parochial
school, where the nuns also gave priority to instruction in German rather
than English. The novel which addresses this ethnic heritage most explic-
itly is Jennie Gerhardt, where Father Gerhardt is said to wear a “knotted and weatherbeaten German” countenance (37), and where, as the narrator
makes clear, much of the novel’s dialogue is reported in translation:
He sat down calmly, reading a German paper and keeping an eye upon his wife,
until, at last, the gate clicked, and the front door opened. Then he got up.
“Where have you been?” he exclaimed in German.
(58)
Andrew Delbanco has suggested that Dreiser’s German inheritance may be
“one reason his sentences often reflect some discomfort with customary
English word order,” and it is true that his style seems always to preserve
a distance from Anglo-Saxon syntactical norms, hinting at forms of linguis-
tic and cultural defamiliarization.33 There is a tendency toward compound
words, as in hyphenated constructions like “race-thought” (403), and to-
ward circuitous grammar rife with subordinate clauses: “This added blow
from inconsiderate fortune was quite enough to throw Jennie back into that
state of hyper-melancholia from which she had been drawn with difficulty
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during the few years of comfort and affection which she had enjoyed with
Lester in Hyde Park” (387). All of this gives the reader the curious impression that the whole of Jennie Gerhardt, and not just Gerhardt’s own speeches, might almost have been translated from the German.
Thomas P. Riggio has described Dreiser as a “hidden ethnic,” someone
whose German provenance is not always self-evident in his writing, and it is
true that we do not automatically identify Caroline Meeber, Sister Carrie, as
being from a German-American family, in the way that we see the characters
of Ole Rolvaag, for example, as emerging from a manifestly Norwegian-
American background.34 Nevertheless, as Stuart P. Sherman observed in his
1915 essay, Dreiser’s outlook does not seem to fit comfortably within an
American tradition of moral realism. William Dean Howells was another
who was uncomfortable with Dreiser’s work because of its apparent dis-
tance from this world of realism, with its concomitant sense of clear ethical
choices, which operated for Howells as the epitome and guarantee of a rec-
ognizably American literary domain.35 By contrast, for H. L. Mencken and
other radical commentators associated with the Seven Arts journal, Dreiser’s detachment from the received patriotic wisdom of this era, along with
his acknowledged Anglophobia, became positive sources of approbation.
Randolph Bourne in 1917 called Dreiser “a true hyphenate, a product of that
conglomerate Americanism that springs from other roots than the English
tradition,” adding that though his work was “wholly un-English” it was also
“not at all German” but rather “an authentic attempt to make something
out of the chaotic materials that lie around us in American life.”36 Bourne’s
perception here of Dreiser’s “hyphenate” status points to a thread of double-
ness that is indeed a constant factor throughout his narratives; while evading
any separatist account of ethnicity, Dreiser’s texts refract American national
values aslant, as it were, mimicking the mythologies of United States nation-
alism while reframing them within a different linguistic and cultural con-
text. This again is to highlight the intertextual nature of Dreiser’s work, the way he reconfigures the rags-to-riches paradigm made famous by Benjamin
Franklin and Horatio Alger within a quizzically transnational framework.
Dreiser updates and remodels the Alger myth, associating the worldly success
of his hero Cowperwood in The Trilogy of Desire not with a straightforward
“adherence to orthodox middle-class values,” but with a capacity to sail close
to the wind, to circumvent business ethics in order to triumph through force
rather than virtue.37 Dreiser consequently reproduces the Alger myth while
emptying out its moralistic content, reconfiguring it within an estranged
realm where the familiar iconography of United States nationalism is dis-
placed into a merely formal phenomenon. In this way, as Azade Seyhan has
written, transnationalism, like bilingualism, serves to denaturalize inherited
56
Dreiser’s style
assumptions, denying to the represented world the transparency and
finality associated with a fait accompli and implying how it might have been
organized differently.38
An American Tragedy is, as Matthiessen observed, perhaps the clearest
example of Dreiser “taking one of the stock legends of American behavior,”
the poor boy who marries the rich man’s daughter, “and reversing its happy
ending.”39 The title of the novel also suggests the extent to which Dreiser was seeking here specifically to confront the significance of national identity in a decade, the 1920s, when developments in media and communications technologies – radio, syndicated newspapers, Hollywood cinema, and so on –
were ensuring rapid moves towards the consolidation of an American na-
tional consciousness. Joseph Karaganis has written of how An American
Tragedy turns upon the “limitless extension of the commodity form imaginable in the mid-twenties,” when, as the novel remarks, Clyde Griffiths’s trial
could be covered by the media “from coast to coast” and staged as a national
event.40 This is the same world as that of The Great Gatsby, with which An American Tragedy is exactly contemporaneous: an “economy of spectacular value,” where “the value of visibility” supersedes the authenticity of any singular event.41 Just as Fitzgerald explores the culture of advertising and mass
images, so Dreiser responds to this scene of burgeoning commodification
and consumerism by casting himself, once again, less as a traditional author
than as a conduit, a medium for the transmission of public information.
But while Fitzgerald primarily confines himself in Gatsby to the purlieus of New York, Dreiser takes as his field nothing less than the condition of the
United States itself. The enormous bulk and scope of An American Tragedy
results partly from Dreiser’s assimilation within his narrative of journalis-
tic materials relating to the murder of Grace Brown by Chester Gillette in
Herkimer County, New York, in 1906. Letters from the real-life protagonists,
legal speeches and so on are all integrated almost verbatim into Dreiser’s
novel, and in this sense again he might be said to anticipate the New Jour-
nalism of Mailer or Tom Wolfe in his attempt to assert the primacy of brute
fact over tenuous fiction. Such a reliance upon primary factual material is
also the basis for what Richard Lehan has called the novel’s “block method,”
involving “a great mass of accumulated material being arranged into blocks
or units, each scene repeating and then anticipating another.”42 Dreiser,
that is to say, reflects formally as well as thematically the modular repe-
titions of American life in the 1920s, with the mutating name of the hero –
the original prototype Chester Gillette, the fictional Clyde Griffiths, and
Clyde’s pseudonymous variations of Clifford Golden and Carl Graham –
seeming to betoken a world where identity itself becomes part of the cycle of
barter and exchange. The way Clyde’s individuality is displaced here into a
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pau l g i l e s
series of parallel selves becomes symptomatic of the larger system of modern
American culture, whose emphasis on structural depersonalization and inter-
changeability Dreiser’s novel impassively records. In the same way as Carrie
sees her face reflected in the shop window, so Clyde Griffiths finds his sense
of selfhood supplanted by public images reflected and projected back upon
him. Just as Jay Gatsby achieves a symbolic aura that transcends his personal
idiosyncrasies, so Clyde finds himself objectified into an exemplification of
American justice, a cautionary tale where the execution of this public fig-
ure becomes necessary for the efficient functioning of the corporate social
machine.
Despite the reputation of his work as stylistically cumbersome, Dreiser
was actually quite knowledgeable about the more technical aspects of lit-
erature, and his method of impersonality is a studied affair which does not
derive simply from blankness or naiveté. Ford Madox Ford recalled his first
meeting with the American writer where they spent “three or four hours”
talking of “nothing but words and styles,” with Dreiser offering his opinions
on a range of authors from “Defoe and Richardson, to Diderot, Stendhal and
Flaubert and so to Conrad and James.”43 As Thomas Strychacz noted, the
hostility expressed by Dreiser in 1931 toward Paramount Pictures, against
whom he took legal action for attempting to release a supposedly “inartistic”
version of An American Tragedy, clearly suggests that he did not believe his stylistic dependence on newspaper articles and other facets of mass culture necessarily involved a forfeiture of his rights to artistic independence.44
There are, of course, many examples of authors in the 1920s negotiating
with the language of popular culture while attempting simultaneously to de-
familiarize and recontextualize it – one has to think only of James Joyce’s
Ulysses (1922), or of John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, published in the same year as An American Tragedy – and Dreiser, like these authors, is concerned to investigate the increasingly fractious relationship between individual subjectivity and collective consciousness. One stylistic characteristic