Frank Norris

Norris, Frank. Octopus, McTeague.

I'm interested, reading Norris, what separates him from the great voices. At times it seems so fine a distinction that I find myself wishing he had lived into his fifties at least, to see what he might have done.

McTeague feels like Zola gone west, its confident positivism terse with Judgment and Morality determining all actions even when unspoken, its self-conscious abnegation of the aspects of human character deemed Romantic. Thus, while crushes his wife, his passion remains opaque to him. His dullness remains a central observation for Norris, who breaks narrative often to remind us of it and who seems to have invented McTeague's very size and features as signal of its nature as inevitable essence. We see poverty and greed for lucre as factors that drive McTeague and his wife, but the consequences require considerable dullness and unwillingess to speak that nowhere gets examined. McTeague's character in murder is described as animal, yet the animals that return after months or years to specifically rob their wives are human. We should experience McTeague excusing his behavior to himself; we should find him a mass of considerations muted, repressed, twisted. The plot requires a Dostoyevskian character, but none can be found. In the absence of such, we find the sorrows of the poor reduced from their baroque iteration to a blanket Poverty viewed by a blanket Realism that in denying them nobility goes far to deny them subjective status.

In The Octopus, Norris seems notably farther along. All the old forms remain, but Norris seems concerned to allow his characters some range of feeling. Readers still get descriptions of Presley and Annixter and Vanamee, but they are still viewed from without. None of the fresh relations between author and page -- not Whitman nor Joyce or Faulkner, who come later -- have arrived. Allusions are quite openly and naturally integrated in The Octopus: Norris' characters read Dickens and discuss Homer. But we see then Norris' models: a realism willing to confront oppression but unable to exorcise the ghosts of Romanticized Christianity, unwilling to release the preferential subjectivity of artistic Comment, still-confident of its supposed objectivity.

But, feeling Truth open to him, Norris twists violently against his limitations. Vanamee's bizarre powers represent a kind of subjectivity that Norris apparently cannot imagine without some metaphysic. Presley's misbegotten desire to write the West to hexameters must represent an ironically skewered self-appraisal of Norris' own efforts in this the first volume of a projected trilogy.