‘I should send for a doctor,’ said Atherton.
‘Such is the effect of character! And yet, out of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh. Out of the heart proceed all those unpleasant things enumerated in Scripture; but if you bottle them up there, and keep your label fresh, it’s all that’s required of you — by your fellow beings, at least. What an amusing thing morality would be if it were not — otherwise. Atherton, do you believe that such a man as Christ ever lived?’
‘I know you do, Halleck,’ said Atherton.
‘Well, that depends on what you call me. If what I was — if my well Sunday-schooled youth — is I, I do. But if I, poising dubiously on the momentary present between the past and future, am I — I’m afraid I don’t. And yet it seems to me that I have a fairish sort of faith. I know that, if Christ never lived on earth, some One lived who imagined him, and that One must have been a God. The historical fact oughtn’t to matter.’8
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This last remark seems to contradict Halleck’s attempt to locate his self in the momentary present; for the historical fact of his well Sunday-schooled youth authorizes his belief in the possibility of genuine selfhood. But it is consistent with the fear of externality or otherness that characterizes his search for a groundwork of the moral law which, once discovered, will presumably secure his identity. From Halleck’s standpoint, such externality takes two forms. It appears in space as the body, both his own (“out of the fulness of the heart,” etc.) and that of Christ. The historical fact of the god-man’s bodily presence on earth “oughtn’t to matter,’’ Halleck claims, as if the very existence of the body’s particularity calls morality as such into question. Externality also appears as time itself, in the form of an incomprehensible relation between past, present, and future; so conceived, as irrational contingency, the order of events cannot, or rather should not, impinge on the order of ideas Halleck calls morality.9
Halleck’s appeal to the past is nostalgic, then, since he immediately points out that past and present are incommensurable, and that the future is unbound. What remains is the dubious present. If it is momentary, as Halleck suggests, it is of course unknowable. But once we have decided there is no comprehensible relation between past and present, as Halleck has, we have in effect erased the boundaries between them and encouraged one to colonize the other. The pastness of the past, lacking representation in the here and now, will then give way before an imperial present in which everyone, from every time and place, is recognizable as the exemplar of an unchanged and unchanging “human nature.” This present is eminently knowable, for it is the abiding present of the pure self who, as interiorized mind, as living abstraction, is undefiled by externality of any kind, and thus is not so much above as absent from history. Because this present is conclusive, closed, and complete, characters such as Halleck can inhabit it without losing themselves in it. It becomes the groundwork for their metaphysic of morality.
That Howells, like Halleck, believed “the historical fact oughtn’t to matter” is made clear in his criticism as well as in his fiction. By the turn of the century, he was engaged in a rear-guard action against the new historical romances, in which the excesses of affect and incident effaced character altogether. His strategy was to defend the historical novels of Tolstoy and Twain against the historical romances. His defense rested, however, on the grounds that the former depicted the past not as commensurable with but as identical to the present, and thereby preserved the sanctions of the moral law in the present: “There [in War and Peace] a whole
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important epoch lives again, not in the flare of theatrical facts, but in motives and feelings so much like those of our own time, that I know them for the passions and principles of all times. … For a like reason [Mark Twain] is a true historical novelist because he represents humanity as we know it must have been, since it is humanity as we know it is.” Howells concluded his defense by proposing a test of the truth of any fiction: “It is not by taking us out of ourselves, but by taking us into ourselves, that its truth, its worth, is manifest.”10
Howells’s obsession with “the moral law” as the cultural work of fiction should not be equated with narrow-minded prudery. Like every other serious writer of his time, he was attempting to confer meaning on a world that had only recently been desacralized, to find durable significance and purpose in lives that had only recently been liberated from the obligations and constraints of parochial communities. He was attempting, in other words, to illustrate the possibility of morality in the absence of all external authority, including the authority of God. This project required that he demonstrate the sovereignty of the self, yet not concede that morality is purely subjective and contingent, thus strictly a matter of individual preference or “taste.’’ Like Kant, Howells posited a supersensible, extrahistorical realm of mind as a way of meeting both requirements. By taking us ever farther into this infinite present–“not by taking us out of ourselves, but by taking us into ourselves” — he hoped to grasp its truth.
But in such an interiorized realm of pure selves, desire has no place, or rather no function. For, as Hegel suggested, it is precisely desire that takes us “out of ourselves” into the forms of objectivity that realize ourselves: it implicates us in externality, drives us to identify with and become something we are not. Desire, in this sense, is the cunning of reason, the source and medium of the self construed as the “concrete actuality” of self-consciousness. Whitman demonstrated the proposition poetically, by constructing an autobiography of the discursive self that never ignores or represses the body, but instead treats its particularity — its insistent desires — as consistent with an ingredient in a movement toward new consciousness, new identity.
This discursive self goes underground after the Civil War, as the realism of Howells and Twain carries the day. But it erupts from the exhausted soil of American letters in the 1890s, in the form of literary naturalism. Art and philosophy are meanwhile revolutionized by the rediscovery of this same underground (wo)man.11 Naturalism, like pragmatism, foregrounds the sensational, desiring body as the necessary and enduring condition of
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self-consciousness and selfhood. In doing so, it contributes to the inversion — or at least the interrogation — of stereotypes applying equally to women, workers, and African-Americans (e.g., that their complexity is physical, “natural,” sensational, thus beyond the pale of reason, character, and political deliberation). This naturalist notion of selfhood as the effect of entanglement in externality enables a new, discursive model of personality that lives another underground (or rather apolitical) existence from the 1930s to the 1950s, when, in the absence of official apartheid and an institutionalized Left, it reshapes the languages of both popular culture and radical politics.
So the truth embedded in the old-fashioned idea that literary naturalists are vulgar Marxists — the truth that must be included in any reassessment of naturalism — is that they did grapple with the possibility of a correlation between entanglement in externality and external domination. They explored the same constraints on morality and freedom that had obsessed Howells, in other words, and yet remained equivocal about the effects of such constraints. The naturalists sought confirmation of this equivocal stance in the future, not in the present; but they wrote the history of that future by defining the archaic form of romance as their usable past, by adapting the style of realism to the formal properties and implications of romance.
The best way to illustrate these propositions is to examine the exemplary naturalist novel, Sister Carrie. Critics have noted that it contains many levels of writing, but have invariably concluded that it is a species of realism. The typologies of form found in the work of Howells, Northrop Frye, and Fredric Jameson — three unlikely allies — suggest, however, that it should be read as romance. According to Frye, whose argument recalls that of Howells, the “essential difference” between the romance and the novel as a type of prose fiction is the absence of characterization in the former. In the novel, the “characters are prior to the plot,’’ and the question both author and reader address is “given these characters, what will happen?” Romance, by contrast, describes what happens to characters, “for the most part, externally.” Jameson draws on Kenneth Burke and Martin Heidegger to enlarge Frye’s account: “romance is precisely that form in which the worldness of the world reveals or manifests itself, in which, in other words, world in the technical sense of the transcendental horizon of our experience becomes visible in an inner-worldly sense.” More concretely, “in romance the category of Scene tends to capture and to appropriate the attributes of Agency and Act, making the ‘hero’ over into something like a registering apparatus” of external