of An American Tragedy is its emphasis on Clyde’s thought patterns, which are expressed in reported speech, what Donald Pizer calls “free indirect discourse,” as if this vernacular idiom were a reflection of the uneven state of
Clyde’s mind: “But how wonderful this invitation! Why that intriguing scrib-
ble of Sondra’s unless she was interested in him some? Why? The thought
was so thrilling that Clyde could scarcely eat his dinner that night” (326).45
The phrase “interested in him some,” more Clyde’s than Dreiser’s, suggests a
desire on the author’s part to reproduce something approximating the style
of interior monologue that had become commonplace in avant-garde novels
of the 1920s.
58
Dreiser’s style
In similar fashion, the drift toward parenthetical interruptions as a mirror
of Clyde’s tortuous mental processes indicates a readiness on Dreiser’s part
to balance the rhetoric of public affairs with a more typically modernist sense of linguistic slippage and radical ambiguity:
What then of Roberta? What? And in the face of this intimate relation that
had now been established between them? (Goodness! The deuce!) And that
he did care for her (yes, he did!), although now – basking in the direct rays
of this newer luminary – he could scarcely see Roberta any longer, so strong
were the actinic rays of this other. Was he all wrong? Was it evil to be like this?
His mother would say so! And his father too – and perhaps everybody who
thought right about life – Sondra Finchley, maybe – the Griffiths – all. (327)
The multiple hesitancies and open questions in this passage are more reminis-
cent of William Faulkner than of the lumbering Dreiser of naturalist legend.
Thematically, what is at stake here is the failure to marry mind and matter,
self and society; and this issue looms large toward the end of An American
Tragedy, where the questions become more unanswerable and the disjunc-
tions between subjective impression and objective perception more intense:
“Was it possible that by any strange freak or circumstance – a legal mistake
had been made and Clyde was not as guilty as he appeared?” (817). Dreiser’s
working title for this novel was “Mirage,” and one of the implications of this
work is that faith in the justice system itself constitutes a collective illusion, with belief in its integrity and validity being impelled more by the political
pressures of the day than by any philosophical standard of truth.46
It is, then, not difficult to see how the quality of inarticulacy in Dreiser
signifies not merely a stylistic maladroitness but, more importantly, a lack
of trust in the fidelity of the relationship between language and object. Even
in the first chapter of Sister Carrie the author declares that “words are but vague shadows of the volumes we mean” (6); and Dreiser’s sense of the
insufficiency of his verbal medium carries right through to his later writ-
ings. In A World Elsewhere, subtitled The Place of Style in American Literature, Richard Poirier sharply differentiated Dreiser from Henry James, on the grounds that James pursues the characteristically American method
of building a new world through “structures of the mind and . . . analo-
gous structures of language,” while Dreiser, more passive in his rhetorical
strategies, seems content to report “a world . . . already existent,” and thus
not to “care about achieving through language any shaped social identity.”
But the quality of indeterminacy in James’s late style, where his difficult cir-cumlocutions revolve awkwardly around an absent center, is not altogether
different in tone from what Poirier recognized as the lack of faith in an
59
pau l g i l e s
authorial “ability to give authoritative shape to words” in Dreiser’s writing.
Poirier found it “admirable” that Dreiser “does not in any way compromise
himself by subscribing to a bourgeois faith in the reality of language,” but
the same thing is equally true of late James, and it indicates the extent to
which both American writers in the early twentieth century were responding
to a climate of skepticism about the efficacy and interpretative power of
language.47 Dreiser’s style is as carefully worked through, in its own way, as
that of James or Dos Passos, and the skill of his narratives turns upon the way they represent a world of commodities interacting with and circumscribing
the “world elsewhere” of consciousness. Dreiser’s sense of ethnic difference
and transnational hybridity, as well as his pronounced mystical inclinations,
impel him toward a “paratextual” reconfiguration of social formations, so
that his narratives come to refract American traditions and assumptions in
an oblique, interrogative manner. His novels are, in the final analysis, con-
cerned less with the plain representation of documentary truth than with a
more stylized mediation between alternative versions of truth and different
categories of representation.
N O T E S
1 Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (1950; reprinted London: Secker and Warburg, 1951), pp. 11–16, 20.
2 Saul Bellow, “Dreiser and the Triumph of Art,” in Alfred Kazin and Charles
Shapiro, ed., The Stature of Theodore Dreiser: A Critical Survey of the Man and His Work (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955), pp. 146–148.
3 Kazin and Shapiro, The Stature of Theodore Dreiser, pp. 62, 53, 59.
4 Bellow, “Dreiser and the Triumph of Art,” p. 147.
5 Alfred Kazin, introduction, Kazin and Shapiro, The Stature of Theodore Dreiser, p. 6; Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature, 2nd edn. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), pp. 87–88, 84.
6 John Berryman, “Dreiser’s Imagination,” in Kazin and Shapiro, The Stature of Theodore Dreiser, pp. 152, 150.
7 Paul Lauter, “Caste, Class, and Canon,” in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, rev. edn., eds. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 141–143.
8 Clare Virginia Eby, Dreiser and Veblen: Saboteurs of the Status Quo (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), p. 44; Ford Madox Ford, “Portrait of Dreiser,”
in Kazin and Shapiro, The Stature of Theodore Dreiser, p. 31; Donald Pizer, introduction, New Essays on Sister Carrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 12.
9 Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie: An Authoritative Text, Background and Sources, Criticism, 2nd edn., ed. Donald Pizer (New York: Norton, 1991), p. 13. Subsequent page references to this edition are cited in the text.
60
Dreiser’s style
10 Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 20.
11 Theodore Dreiser, Newspaper Days, ed. T. D. Nostwich (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), pp. 524–525.
12 Norman Mailer, Cannibals and Christians (1966; reprinted, London: Andre Deutsch, 1967), pp. 96–97.
13 Eby, Dreiser and Veblen, p. 65.
14 Theodore Dreiser, The Financier (New York: New American Library, 1967), p. 131.
15 Theodore Dreiser, The Titan (New York: New American Library, 1965), p. 18; Dreiser, Financier, p. 120.
16 Stuart P. Sherman, “The Barbaric Naturalism of Mr. Dreiser,” in Kazin and
Shapiro, The Stature of Theodore Dreiser, p. 79.
17 Sherman, “Barbaric Naturalism,” pp. 71–72; Amy Kaplan, The Social Con-
struction of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 104–160.
18 Hugh Witemeyer, “Gaslight and Magic Lamp in Sister Carrie,” PMLA, 86 (1971): 240.
19 Theodore Dreiser, The Bulwark (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1946), pp. 110, 90; Theodore Dreiser, The Stoic (New York: New American Library, 1981), p. 315.
20 Theodore Dreiser, Plays, Natural and Supernatural (London: Constable, 1930), p. 64; F. O. Matthiessen, Theodore Dreiser (London: Methuen, 1951), p. 177.
Dreiser’s only full-length play, The Hand of the Potter, was written in 1916, but he wrote several shorter dramatic works in 1913 and 1914.
21 Shelley Fisher Fishkin, From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 111.
22 Theodore Dreiser, Jennie Gerhardt, ed. James L. West III (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), p. 16. Subsequent page references to this edition are cited in the text.
23 Helen Dreiser, My Life with Dreiser (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1951), p. 281.
24 Sandy Petrey, “The Language of Realism, The Language of False Consciousness: A Reading of Sister Carrie,” Novel, 10 (1977): 102, 110.
25 James T. Farrell, The League of Frightened Philistines and Other Papers (London: Routledge, 1948), p. 11
26 Robert Shafer, “An American Tragedy: A Humanistic Demurrer,” in Kazin and Shapiro, The Stature of Theodore Dreiser, p. 120; Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie, ed. James L. West III (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), p.
481.
27 Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman (London: Macmillan, 1975), p. 420.
28 David Baguley, Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 156, 170–172, 197; Northrop Frye, Anatomy of
Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 80.
29 Matthiessen, Theodore Dreiser, p. 55.
30 Dreiser, Sister Carrie, ed. West, p. 78.
61
pau l g i l e s
31 Ibid., p. 158.
32 Matthiessen, Theodore Dreiser, p. 85.