Now one of the reasons that the application of a Heideggerian perspective to a reading of Sister Carrie becomes intriguingly meaningful is because of some striking parallels between Dreiser’s and Heidegger’s views on Beauty and the nature of human communication/relationships. In Heidegger’s terms, the individual Dasein living “inauthentically” as a “they-self” misunderstands its genuine possibilities and the nature of Being in the world; this in turn has crucial implications for an individual’s pursuit or apprehension of Beauty (an idea vitally important to Dreiser’s characterization of Carrie), since, Heidegger explicitly identifies Beauty with Being:
To be beautiful means — in Greek as well as German — to shine, gleam, and blaze forth, to appear in the light, to be revealed in one’s essential nature, to be disclosed in one’s true Being. Beauty is disclosure. That is why Being and beauty belong together. … Beauty, Being, and Truth are but so many names for the same thing: original disclosure.11
With its own humanity reduced to thinghood and blinded to such true disclosure of Beauty and Being by the prevailing values and views of “the they” (the mass society), the “inauthentic” individual is led astray from his/her own genuine, ideal possibilities. And
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these Heideggerian concepts provide a pertinent and meaningful means of understanding Dreiser’s portrait of his protagonist in the novel, as she seeks self-fulfillment through her response to and quest after Beauty in both the spectacle of the city and the world of the theater — each suggestively shining brightly with lights. Influenced (in effect) by the “crowd” around her, Carrie acquires distorted impressions of what to value and (accordingly) how to define both others and herself in her unfolding quest — fed by her inherent desire for Beauty — for self-fulfillment. It is finally the relevance of the philosophical context of “inauthentic” being (so applicable to Carrie’s confusion over her goals in light of her society’s materialistic values) that makes important some key similarities between Heidegger’s and Dreiser’s ideas on ‘‘language” — more basically, on communication and the nature of relationships12 — in relation to the disclosure of truth and the understanding of self in human experience.
The opening scene of the novel immediately begins to show how even the moments of potentially genuine “self-and-world disclosure” in Carrie’s life are tinged with the gilded hues of the false “ideals” her society offers her as ways of defining herself and of pursuing Beauty. In her encounter with Drouet on the train, Carrie finds “something satisfactory in the attention of this individual with his good clothes,” as he describes the “magnificence” of the city she is approaching (SC 5). Meanwhile, she is “of interest to him from the one standpoint which a woman both delights in and fears” (SC 5). Their conversation is superficial and basically impersonal, yet we learn that there “is much more passing [between them in the scene] than the mere words indicat[e]” (SC 5). For Dreiser explains that
… words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes. Here were these two, bandying little phrases, drawing purses, looking at cards, and both unconscious of how inarticulate all their real feelings were. Neither was wise enough to be sure of the working of the mind of the other. He could not tell how his luring succeeded. She could not realise that she was drifting, until he secured her address. Now she felt that she had yielded something — he, that he had gained a victory. Already they felt that they were somehow associated. (SC 6)
These comments by the novel’s narrator on the nature of communication interestingly invite comparison with Heidegger’s views on language. Drawing a key distinction between the language of people’s ordinary “inauthentic” state13 and that of an “authentic”14
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Being-in-the-world, Heidegger first describes the former (the language of “inauthenticity”) as merely “everyday talk” (Gerede):
In talk, everything is understood because everyone moves on the same level of generality without trying to get to the foundations of what is being talked about. Communication is no longer a problem, since no one really attempts to appropriate what is communicated. Almost everything is self-evident and one cannot fail to understand anything, because understanding is not attempted but presupposed. In talk, understanding is more or less disrooted, it is a public good belonging to everyone and no one, and communication occurs on the ambiguous level of the everyday, public, generally known, common-sense “real world.” (H, B, & T 29)
The flow of words between people is so easy that it glibly obscures, or omits the expression of, individuals’ underlying attitudes and purposes; such common “talk,” which falsifies the essential meaning of life, is an appropriate medium of communication for a world living on the surface of things — whether described analytically by the philosopher or dramatized by the novelist. Dreiser’s authorial statement about ‘‘words” quickly suggests that his novel similarly questions the meaningfulness of “everyday talk” and significance of speech per se in scenes of important action.
On the one hand, his characters use and misuse language in ways that illustrate the nature of Gerede: Hurstwood’s relationship with each patron of Fitzgerald and Moy’s is based on his skill (as the title of Chapter V says) in “the use of a name” (or formula of address) in response to the person’s socioeconomic “rank.” And in the “personal” relations shown between Sven and Minnie Hanson, Mr. and Mrs. Hurstwood, Drouet and Carrie (later on) in Chicago, and then Carrie and “Wheeler” in New York, we see people who converse, but do not truly communicate, with each other. On the other hand, scenes throughout the novel show the unimportance of words in instances of profoundly personal illumination for Carrie and of genuine understanding between her and others and her world. Although we shall have to return soon to the problematic nature of this theme conveyed by Dreiser, these parts of the novel — explicable in terms of the forms of communication which Heidegger calls “Discourse” — seem to further her development and quest as a self.
According to the philosopher, “discourse” — the language of “authenticity” — is “a meaningful articulation of Being-in-the-world as disclosed in ‘finding’ (oneself-in-the-world) and [in genuine] ‘understanding’” (quoted in H, B, & T 29). This language of “au-
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thenticity” is by no means dependent on words: In silences as well as in speaking and listening, it “manifests the existential openness of coexistent ontological beings toward each other” (quoted in H, B, & T 29). As Heidegger sums it up in Toward Language, “The essence of saying is the saying of Essence” (quoted in H, B, & T 133). Thus the essential function of any form of language (or communication) is to express a disclosure of Being.15 Because talking often obscures the way to true understanding, a communication without words may best conduce to such disclosure. Indeed, pertinently, the philosopher sees the fundamentally wordless creation of art as one of the most striking illustrations of ‘‘discourse.” Heidegger notes a special affinity between the artist’s responsiveness to Beauty — which is itself tantamount to a disclosure of Being — and “authentic” experience’s openness to Being. The inspiration of the artist makes him/her one who is unusually attuned to Being; as she “creates” a work of art, Beauty and Truth come to light through her.16 So the essence of art is disclosure, and artistic expression — which originates largely in silence and needs no words in several of its forms — is exceptionally well suited to be an “authentic” medium of “language.” And in view of Carrie’s artistic nature and aspirations, as well as her eventual ascent to stage stardom (ironically) in a nonspeaking role, the relevance of these philosophic ideas to Dreiser’s fictional design is readily suggested.
It becomes evident that a theory of “language” akin to Heidegger’s underlies the action in Sister Carrie. Dreiser’s own ideas about often wordless communication are quite appropriate in a work depicting relatively inarticulate characters and dramatizing “primitive” kinds of experience related to his on-going artistic attempt to get at the core of Life’s meaning. And one can easily see the potential relevance of the concept of “discourse” to the story of Carrie herself. In the opening chapter, as she begins wonderingly discovering the city, she is (indirectly) termed by the narrator a “genius with imagination” (SC 6), whose whole developing life will be portrayed as a passionate pursuit of Beauty derived in great part from her artistic instincts and needs. Years later, led by that pursuit into the world of the theater, Carrie becomes a remarkably successful “actress,” in Ames’s analysis, because the silent “expression in [her] face” represents and discloses what her audience senses as its true, “natural … longing” (SC 356) — its most fundamental feelings.
With a skepticism like Heidegger’s about the value of “talk” as a vehicle for the “truth” of Being, Dreiser asserts that words “are, as a rule, the shallowest portion of all the argument. They but dimly