Keenly Observed

According to Morris Dickstein,

To understand the changes that shook the modern world, my students and colleagues have returned in recent years to long-neglected writers in the American realist tradition, including William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Sinclair Lewis, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. For readers like me who grew up in the second half of the 20th century on the unsettling innovations of modernism, and who were attuned to its atmosphere of crisis and disillusionment, the firm social compass of these earlier writers has come as a surprise.

Dreiser, Crane, Wharton, and Cather are "long-neglected"? As far as I can tell, the latter two especially have become increasingly popular, both among academics and ordinary readers, over the past two decades. This must be just another anti-modernist rhetorical gesture--surprisingly, from someone who has in the past written insightfully about both modernism and postmodernism. (See his Gates of Eden, actually one of the very best books about American fiction in the 1960s.)

I can't really see that the "unsettling innovations of modernism" provide a very clear opposition to the "firm social compass" of the writers Dickstein lists. The modernists didn't lack a social compass, did they? Joyce? Faulkner? They simply weren't as interested in "social fiction" as Dreiser or Lewis. Their "innovations" were directed elsewhere--to the depiction of consciousness, the fragmentation of form, etc.

Dickstein continues:

Like Henry James before them, they saw themselves less as lonely romantic outposts of individual sensibility than as keen observers of society. They described the rough transition from the small town to the city, from rural life to industrial society, from a more homogeneous but racially divided population to a nation of immigrants. They recorded dramatic alterations in religious beliefs, moral values, social and sexual mores and class patterns. Novels like Dreiser's "Sister Carrie" and Wharton's "House of Mirth" showed how fiction paradoxically could serve fact and provide a more concrete sense of the real world than any other form of writing.

Were these writers really as immodest as to consider themselves "keen" observers? Isn't it only literary critics who want to confine such writers to their putative powers of observation in the first place? Did Crane or Dreiser or Wharton believe this was their primary talent as writers? Was mere "observation" all they had to offer?

The rest of Dickstein's paragraph actually does no service to any of these writers. It makes them sound like journalists or historians, but not like novelists that anybody would voluntarily read. If you want information about "the rough transition from the small town to the city" and "dramatic alterations in religious beliefs, moral values, social and sexual mores and class patterns," why not go straight to the historians? Why bother with novelists? Just for a little dramatic illustration? Is this any reason why readers interested in literature rather than history or sociology would now turn to these writers? And exactly why do we need a "concrete sense of the real world" from our writers? Don't our own eyes put us in contact with this world every day? Besides, what other world could novelists be writing about? Where else would their subjects come from?

Dickstein concludes:

This is how most readers have always read novels, not simply for escape, and certainly not mainly for art, but to get a better grasp of the world around them and the world inside them. Now that the overload of theory, like a mental fog, has begun to lift, perhaps professional readers will catch up with them.

How does Dickstein know "how most readers have always read novels"? Exactly how would he have gleaned this information? Professor Dickstein wouldn't be generalizing from his own reading habits, would he? Or those of other "professional readers"? I've known many more people who say they indeed read novels for "escape" rather than something as earnest as "a better grasp of the world around them." For that matter, if this latter were indeed the reason why most readers turn to fiction, would Lewis, Howells, et. al. be as "neglected" as Dickstein contends? Wouldn't they be the most beloved writers in the American canon?

How disdainful is that "certainly not mainly for art." Disdainful of those readers who do seek out "art," disdainful of the possibilities of fiction as art, implicitly disdainful of "most readers," who apparently couldn't appreciate it even if it were present. Unfortunately for Dickstein, it's precisely the lack of "art" in the work of writers like Howells and Lewis (and sometimes in Dreiser and Cather) that accounts for whatever "neglect" they have suffered. No matter how thoroughly the postmodern fog lifts, they're not going to be rediscovered as anything other than than the dreary documentarians they were.

Comments

[Kevin Holtsberry]

Yes, I meant My Antonia. Combination brain freeze and typing to fast. Plus, should be "elevate" not "ellevate."

[David Milofsky]

I'm not a huge Howells fan but A Hazard of New Fortunes is an important book that no one (or almost no one) reads anymore.

[Dan Green]

I would honestly say that Howells hasn't been neglected. Or if he has, that it's entirely justified.

[David Milofsky]

You do mean My Antonia, don't you, or perhaps O Pioneers, but not O Antonia. In any case, I can't see the outraged objection to what Dickstein says, which is mainly true, except for the fact that Dreiser wasn't a realist but a naturalist. Would you honestly say that Howells hasn't been neglected, even if we agree that neglected is only a word for those who are presently out of fashion. The notion that those who are being read currently are in any way "better" is just silly. Faulkner, Melville, Fitzgerald and others were out of print at their deaths, but came back later as readers discovered them. And I don't think Dickstein means that art and morality are mutually exclusive just that in the past perhaps more than now people did read books to provide models and instruction for daily life. On this, read Gardner's comments about great literature being paradigmatic. In fact, what's most interesting about what Dickstein says is his admission that his earlier criticism had important blindspots. Would that all critics were similarly attuned to their failings.

[Kevin Holtsberry]

The ironic part about Dickstein's comments about art, is that it is only through art (IMHO) can novelists truly expand the readers world. Fiction like art, again in my opinion, can be both an escape and a way to expand your world. But I find neither particularly enjoyable if they don't focus on the art first.

I can read O, Antonia and appreciate its skilled and evocative use of language. I can view it as a way to escape to a world so different than my own. I can view it as a fictional depiction of the past and use it to help me understand that past. And I can do all three and even at the same time.

But it is the quality of the art - the combination of skill and immagination - that will allow it to appeal to readers across time; that will ellevate it from interesting historical marker to classic novel.