Although I am getting a bit ahead of my discussion here, it is helpful to outline the pervasiveness in the novel of the “ambassadors” theme, which is expressive of the “inauthentic” relationships Dreiser portrays, as a foundation for explaining his treatment of “language” in Carrie’s problematic “progress.” Words are of limited importance in the scenes between her and each of her “ambassadors” not only because she understands what his “credentials” communicate symbolically, but because she is incapable of understanding him personally: that is, each “ambassador’s” way of using language, which expresses the nature of his personality, has no intrinsic significance for her, since his personal identity does not truly interest her. What Drouet and Hurstwood (and later, in a very different sense, Ames) say only has meaning for her as it relates to her possibilities of “success,” reflecting their ambassadorial qualities for her. And all of this fits the warped logic of a world in which “love and friendship” have little “reality” because “almost everything turns on money” and “personal relationships are inseparable from commodity relationships.”22 These ideas, as well as his views of “language” akin to Heidegger’s, appear to underlie Dreiser’s presentation of characters and scenes.
Although my main focus, like the novel’s, is on Carrie, it is important to stress that her “inauthentic,” instrumental way of relating to others is rampant in the world of the novel — characterizing most of the relations in her society, based as they are on ma-
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terialistic motives. It will be recalled that Heidegger explains there is neither “authentic” communication nor genuine communion between people in an “inauthentic” existence derived from overinvolvement in appearances and the values of materialism.23 And the individual Dasein, having had his or her human dignity subverted by an obsession with things, improperly treats (human) Others rather as if they are things and have “the kind of Being which belongs to equipment ready-to-hand. …” For we know that Dasein “approaches the world teleologically, discover[ing] beings in terms of its own ends’’ (H, B, & T 25) with respect to “what they are ‘good for’ in its Being-in-the-world” — and we find that “they” regard human beings, in the same way, as instruments. In sum, Heidegger indicates that individuality and relationships are perverted in an age inducing an unconscious “fall” into thing-hood: “Everydayness takes Dasein as something ready-to-hand to be concerned with — that is, something that gets managed and reckoned up. ‘Life’ is a ‘business,’ whether or not it covers its costs” (B and T 336). This view of the human condition clearly corresponds to Dreiser’s, in his fictive study of characters whose lives spent in search of material “success” as a means to happiness, neither “cover” their “costs” nor contain genuine relationships.
With a vision of the modern age’s effects similar to the philosopher’s, Dreiser reveals relationships throughout Sister Carrie that are rife with misunderstandings and manipulative motives, as those involved in them think of other people as “possibilities” for themselves. Drouet is shown capable only of shallow liaisons aimed at diversion and sexual pleasure. Hurstwood’s loveless marriage is based merely on a preservation of appearances and a joint possession of goods; he and his wife do not truly share anything, care about each other, or even communicate (in authentically personal terms), and tellingly raise a daughter who will marry only for money. In his relationship with Carrie, Hurstwood first deceives her about his marital status and romantic “intentions,” then conceals from her the fact of his theft and the change in his social position (away from Chicago), and finally ceases to care for her or even converse with her except with regard to their common economic problems. Meanwhile, Carrie keeps her thoughts and rocking-chair dreams to herself while living with men whom she sees impersonally as symbols — symbols of social worlds to which they can give her access and which seemingly offer higher possibilities for a life of “success.” Personally committed only to the dreams she pursues and the stage roles she plays, Carrie, caught in the perpetual quest for more and other, is ever the “anticipatory self” (as Philip Fisher has pointed out [1982]) whose “emotional
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substance” of “desire, yearning, and a state of prospective being” finds its apt “cultural symbol” in the “notion of acting. …”24 Giving herself to each man in a physical sense alone, she withdraws from him once he is no longer materially useful, as if his role in the drama of her life has abruptly ended. At the end of the novel, her life of luxury and Hurstwood’s death in poverty, for all their outward contrast, equally manifest the profound aloneness of ways of being based on ‘‘inauthentic” relations with others.
Against the background of the foregoing focus on the way the novel as a whole exposes distorted relationships caused by the values in a materialistic American society, Dreiser’s peculiarly Heideggerian treatment of “language” in crucial moments within his heroine’s evolving quest for fulfillment can be fully understood. The opening scene’s ideas on “language” and on Drouet’s potential “ambassadorial” value for Carrie are greatly extended by the luncheon scene in Chapter VI: during this scene arising out of their chance encounter in downtown Chicago at the point, months later, when a discouraged Carrie has lost her first job and appears about to be forced to retreat from the city whose magnetic attraction has totally seduced her, Drouet attains his full “ambassadorial” status in her life through some profound — yet peculiar — communication. Considering the dramatic importance of the scene to the design of his plot, Dreiser minimizes the part that dialogue plays in it to a remarkable degree. While Drouet “chatter[s] on at a great rate, asking questions, explaining things about himself, [and] telling her what a good restaurant” they are in, his loquacity is reported rather than shown, suggesting its limited effect on the action being presented. Carrie, meanwhile, merely smiles a great deal; she does almost no talking, and when she does speak to reply to a question, her answers are monosyllabic or absurdly terse:
“What have you been doing?” he went on. “Tell me all about yourself. How is your sister?”
“She’s well,” returned Carrie, answering the last query.
He looked at her hard. “Say,” he said, “you haven’t been sick, have you?”
Carrie nodded.
“Well, now, that’s a blooming shame, isn’t it? You don’t look very well. I thought you looked a little pale. What have you been doing?”
She told him. (SC 45)
And so it goes throughout the scene. Nevertheless, they soon “c[o]me to an understanding of each other without words” (SC
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46); and the manner in which they do so strikingly illustrates a kind of “discourse.”
As Kenneth Lynn has pointed out (1957), in Sister Carrie the “characters’ longings for material objects have a unique animation; not even Scott Fitzgerald talked about money the way Dreiser does. … Expensive clothes and jewels are hungered after by his characters with such an intensity that their desire actually seems to breathe life into what they seek. …”25 When read against the background of the Heideggerian view of language, the lunch episode shows why and how Carrie’s desire for things even enables them to “speak’’ to her. While Drouet is talking to her, she is busy thinking that he “must be fortunate. He rode on trains, dressed in such nice clothes, was so strong, and ate in these fine places” (SC 45–6). The “dim world of fortune,” of which she had imagined him to be “the center” in their initial meeting, now appears clearly visible, as Carrie looks at the restaurant to which he has taken her and hears him invite her to the theater. Having earlier been “disposed … pleasantly toward all that he might do” before her arrival in the city, she is naturally far more “captivated” by him at this time when its life has been revealed — and yet remained all but closed — to her. And under these circumstances, she studies Drouet as if he is a book of revelation about possibilities for herself that he may offer.
In illustrating the way a work of art “authentically” discloses Being, Heidegger analyzes a painting by Van Gogh of a pair of peasant’s boots, mere objects unlocated in any spacial context, to make them a kind of “authentic” communication: “All the strands of a peasant’s life are gathered within [the boots], woven into a fabric and exposed to sight. This is the world in which these boots belong [suggesting the diverse details of the peasant’s everyday existence that the philosopher ‘sees’ in the boots] …” (quoted in H, B, & T 92). The philosopher’s perspective on the painting is meant to convey that the most outwardly commonplace things have a deeper significance that reveals itself to eyes gifted with insight, like those of the “artistic” Carrie. Being open to the message of Beauty, she scrutinizes Drouet in the same manner as Van Gogh studied the boots and as Heidegger perceives the painting. Just as the boots “gather in themselves the whole world” of the peasant, exposing it to sight for the painter and philosopher, so do the clothes and trappings of the drummer manifest his “whole world” to her, making him an alluring symbol of the city. Even Drouet’s gleaming rings acquire a fresh importance when seen in the light of the idea of language as “disclosure,” for they nearly speak to Carrie as he cuts the meat for her. The light reflected from the rings