Katherine Anne Porter

Porter, Katherine Anne. Ship of Fools.

Porter sets Fools on a mixed passenger-cargo ship she designates as travelling between Mexico and Europe between very specific dates in 1931. The piece advertises itself as allegory, but isn't heavy-handedly so.

Writing during WWII (the novel was first published in 1945) Porter means to deal with people demographically, so various national, religious, and social groups are represented. The book saunters 500 pages through various classes of bigotry. As nearly as I can tell, Porter had considerable cultural range, both as a judge of dialect and of attitudes. Her English impressively renders various Mexican and hispanic prejudices quite distinctly. At various points one or another strangely unEnglish word choice reflects her decision to graft a very specific word from the Spanish.

On the other hand, I was disappointed in her rather harsh attitude towards her characters. I don't mind her calling us all fools: it's at least as true as it is false. I don't doubt that she's at least savvy enough to act like she considers herself another fool among us, which seems a fine and generous attitude for someone so obviously observant to take. But the people here seem inherently stupid as opposed to being victims of systemic folly and greed -- something Porter seems to have been quite aware of and may have treated elsewhere.

I think my sense of harshness has to do with the distance her narration maintains from her characters. She's following a kind of narrative that reminds me of Virginia Woolf, but she does not reveal more than flashes of intimacy with any one character. Specifically, Porter narrates in 3rd person. She jumps from focalizer to focalizer quite quickly, blending 3rd person descriptions of the focalizers with third person observations by the focalizer of various people and surroundings. Several times she took me aback with one or another bigoted statement; in each case, I eventually had to recognize that statement and attitude belonged to the focalizer, and that she had shifted from the Porter description of the focalizer to the next focalizer's view of the previous focalizer. In the midst of these shifts and the casually judgmental terms bandied about, it's difficult to get a sense of any social or psychological dynamic behind the characters' stupidities -- which left me feeling that the book was an unnecessarily skillful presentation of petty bigotries that remained inexplicable, though sharply observed -- the kind of text that makes me long for a good dostoyevskian confessions to clear the air. To be fair, presentation of this kind of material on the level of Ulysses might have taken another decade to accomplish, but I would have gladly accepted limitations of a different sort to accomplish that.

I'll be interested in seeing what the short fiction's like. Anyone have a suggestion as to which collection to start on?

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.

WIlliam Dean Howells

The Rise of Silas Lapham
A Hazard of Fortunes

The gist in Lapham seems to be a realism and representationism, a mimesis, but a mimesis of things that cannot be seen or heard or smelt. Howells appears overwhelmingly certain of his Categories. The effect seems unconsciously idealistic. The following statement of aesthetic comes from the mouths of his characters. One really feels that Howells hopes to "get at" the "good citizen" by an by.

"We non-combatants were notoriously reluctant to give up fighting," said Mr. Sewell, the minister; "but I incline to think Colonel Lapham and Mr. Bellingham may be right. I dare say we shall have the heroism again if we have the occasion. Till it comes, we must content ourselves with the every-day generosities and sacrifices. They make up in quantity what they lack in quality, perhaps." "They're not so picturesque," said Bromfield Corey. "You can paint a man dying for his country, but you can't express on canvas a man fulfilling the duties of a good citizen." "Perhaps the novelists will get at him by and by," suggested Charles Bellingham. "If I were one of these fellows, I shouldn't propose to myself anything short of that." "What? the commonplace?" asked his cousin. "Commonplace? The commonplace is just that light, impalpable, aerial essence which they've never got into their confounded books yet. The novelist who could interpret the common feelings of commonplace people would have the answer to 'the riddle of the painful earth' on his tongue."

There have been also considerable reflections that have to do with the novel as a form, previously. Howells seems to consider it to be still in considerable doubt as haute couture. His very conservative Bahston society argues on about its validity in general.

Howells does excercise worldly observation of various socioeconomic classes. His people function primarily as vectors of class interest. He instantiates their character, but these remain clearly instantiations. In both novels, the comparison of the mores engendered by class interest carries most interest. The Rise of Silas Lapham gently pits 1800's yankee capitalism against euro-centered aristocracy, favoring the former, but not without nuance. The aristocrats' disapproval of "vulgar" Silas comes across as unexplained and fairly inexplicable; one wonders whether Howells didn't know better. The class-based aspirations of both are treated somehow as completely understandable, no matter how immaterial and vapid. But a failure to properly criticize his independent New Englanders appears in A Hazard of Fortunes as well. March's daughter Alma Leigh treats Beaton badly, yet Howells shows nothing but respect for her wisdom. Likewise, editor and papa March is presented as straightforwardly idealistic and, to use a terrible anachronism, "politically correct."

The most painful point in Howell's overappraisal of March comes with March's dismissal of the Lindau's radical politics before March's son. Howells gives Lindau enough text to show that Howells has some familiarity with Marx and Bakunin and so forth, but Lindau only gets to sputter and pontificate, although what POV he does express reads as far more logical than March's homilies. March's son appears in no other function throughout the novel, since he cannot function as a romantic interest for the male principals, as do everyone's daughters, and since he does little except join with March in an outwardly humane condemnation of Lindau, the left, and the working class.

March (and Howells) stand somewhat in protest to Dreyfoos' hiring Pinkerton's to kill strikers, but not much. March appears noble for standing up for Lindau, whereas Lindau only appears daft or wounded or tragic for standing up for himself. The policeman who kills him for speaking barely rates a couple lines; he's seen as doing his duty impassionately. Howells' use of the southern plantation owner is similar. We get reference that such ideas exist, the comparison with wage-slavery is in the air, but nowhere does the Colonel get to vie seriously with Dreyfoos or with Fulkerson or March, for that matter. Everyone's polite, but the old slave-owner is politely dismissed, patronized even by his daughter.

Altogether, Howells seems a petit-bourgeois New England boy, and he prefers folks of his own class. Dreyfoos is a rich idiot who has mysteriously put money ahead of his family, although he doesn't seem to know how he's earned the money. Silas Lapham is by far a more interesting and realistic character. The fairy-tale ending, with Dreyfoos inexplicably giving away his interest in the magazine, rings moralistic and false in part because his struggles against his children have been so hollow. This is a critical kind of error. We don't get the struggle within Dreyfoos when he drives her beloved Beaton away, ostensibly for her own good, or when he begs Beaton back, also misguidedly. The scene wherein he strikes his child needs a Dostoyevsky to handle, and Howell isn't up to it. Dreyfoos barely speaks, saying nothing of interest while the entire error of his life confronts him. Howells does not seem so much unaware of what the old man's inner struggle must have been (he repeats that it exists over an over again, but without giving it detail), but just uninterested in it. For Howells, it may be there to excuse poverty and the Pinkertons.

In this novel, with its persons who barely seem to work, and drift from drawing room to drawing room discussing an performing issues of politeness, poverty may be referred to, but does not even appear, even in the person of Lindau, who's a gentleman pauper at worst.

Howells employs a gentle humor throughout, and has a worldly touch with social classes and situations, including some apt observations. He provides an interesting picture of the times, not the least for what he cannot or would not show.