Re-reading Dreiser

By Tracy

I'm most of the way through a re-read of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (see earlier post) and have to say that it benefits from the better format of the Library of America edition -- good font, good layout and spacing, restful shade of paper... a much less arduous read than the copy I read earlier, underlining for me how much those physical factors can affect my response to a book.

Dreiser's style hasn't changed, objectively, yet I like it better. This is partly a case of getting used to it, too -- the typos or possibly misspelled words (even in this better edition), the odd word-choice on occasion -- and the incessant use of "And... And" with present participles -- are sometimes beyond belief.

The critic Lee Clark Mitchell, back in 1985, actually saw that last stylistic feature as a positive, or at least as belonging in a pattern of repetition counted as part of Dreiser's art:

"Just as characters, events and descriptions overlap, so the prose itself divides and doubles, saved from utter fragmentation by participial clauses and frequent conjunctions that link phrases into parallel structure..."

[Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 19, no.1]

In any case, whether intrinsically flawed or following a pattern many of us have failed to recognise and appreciate, Dreiser's style bothers me much less than it did on first reading, and though undeniably a "big book" (934 pages in this edition), it doesn't seem to drag this time around.

Besides, even if you don't like his style, the vision and expansive grasp of the novel have plenty to offer. Alfred Kazin once wrote:

"With his proverbial slovenliness, the barbarisms and incongruities whose notoriety has preceded him into history, the bad grammar, the breathless and painful clutching at words... he has seemed the unique example of a writer who remains great malgré lui. It is by now an established part of our folklore that Theodore Dreiser lacks everything except genius."

Stendhal's forebears (1)

By Tracy

I started an earlier series of blog posts called "Stendhal's heirs", looking at later texts that seem modelled on his The Red and the Black in connection with fictional crimes committed by characters who are social climbers or parvenus. This one instead considers a predecessor, Marivaux's Le Paysan parvenu (literally the peasant-parvenu or parvenu-peasant; the peasant made good, upstart peasant... though it's been published in English under completely different titles such as Up from the Country and The Fortunate Peasant).

Marivaux was a prolific playwright, but he also wrote novels. This one is unfinished but still substantial enough to have been influential -- and a good, rollicking read. The protagonist, "Jacob" (it's told in the first person & this is the name the narrator is willing to use!) is a handsome young peasant from a wine-growing village who's sent to Paris with deliveries and falls under the aegis of various older and better-off ladies.

It's not a novel in the sense that Stendhal's later masterpiece is, but it's one of those prototypical narratives (begun 1735) that must have influenced him: many of the basic elements are in place, and the "triangular desire" René Girard traces in Stendhal's novel is repeatedly made explicit in Marivaux's tale. Curiously, rather than committing a crime, Marivaux's Jacob is arrested for a crime he did not commit, so that we have prison and judicial scenes even though he's not strictly speaking a "criminal parvenu". (I won't tell the outcome; even an unfinished story can suffer from a spoiler...)

Part of my continuing research on these narratives is to ask why so many of these narratives of upward mobility have their "heroes" commit a crime. In earlier instances it tends to lead to courtrooms and prisons; in contemporary ones they may get off scot-free... on one level.

Is the criminal turn sometimes the result of a conservative ideological bent in the text? (They will be punished for their class-transgression, which makes them intrinsically criminal anyway; their true nature will be revealed as base; they will fall because they tried to rise?)

Or is it in fact something subtler and potentially progressive, critical of social inequality? (The very rigidity of the social and economic structures requires its transgression; the parvenu is criminal because a superior being, outside laws and mores?)

Or is it both? I'll keep you posted on what I uncover.

I've got my eye on another couple of early texts, but later than Marivaux's, which may be even more rollicking reads: Restif de la Bretonne's Le Paysan perverti (1775) and La Paysanne pervertie (1784) -- companion his-and-hers stories that are more directly about the moral corruption of peasants-who-go-to-Paris. The titles probably speak for themselves without translation. (Apparently the word "rétifisme", meaning shoe fetishism, comes from his name -- also spelled Rétif)...

Stendhal's heirs (2)

By Tracy

I recently finished Theodore Dreiser's monumental novel An American Tragedy (1925). I'm not the first by any means to notice its indebtedness to Stendhal's The Red and the Black, though the two novels are also extremely different. I was reading it as part of the "parvenu" or "upstart" thematic list I've set myself.

The protagonist (anti-hero rather than hero) is Clyde Griffiths, a young man raised in poverty and relative ignorance by well-meaning street preachers. Clyde has a longing for a better life in every material sense, and a sensual nature he has difficulty controlling.

Taken into employment at his rich uncle's factory, Clyde finds himself in a social no-man's-land: forbidden to mix with the women workers he supervises, but too lowly for acceptance among his uncle's set. Good-looking and sartorially-minded, he attracts the attention of wealthy young Sondra, but not before he has entangled himself -- compromisingly -- with Roberta, whom he now wishes to be rid of.

The story echoes Stendhal's only in its outlines -- the pride and social ambition realised through a woman's love and attentions, the abandonment of an earlier love -- the crime and trial and the question of capital punishment.

What's more, Dreiser took his plot from a real-life news item, as did Stendhal in his own time, so that both were to some degree fictionalising fact... although to say only that is to misrepresent the phenomenal fictional achievement of both authors.

Dreiser's novel is much less readable than Stendhal's. There were many passages I had to force myself to read simply because of over-telling. Dreiser seems to think he has to state something, then state it again, then re-examine for other ways of stating it. For a modern reader this is excruciating -- but it's not just a matter of being stylistically dated -- plenty of novels of similar age are more readable. It seems to be a deliberate stylistic choice, his own kind of realism.

Most credible critics seem to agree it's a masterpiece, but a flawed one.

Film-makers have made several attempts at it. The only one I've seen is George Stevens's A Place in the Sun (1951), with Montgomery Clift in the lead role (character names are all different, and half the story is missing, but film adaptations have to do that sometimes). A very young Elizabeth Taylor plays the rich love interest, and Shelley Winters the cast-off working-class girlfriend. The film is highly watchable and very disturbing.

Stendhal's heirs (1)

By Tracy

Stendhal's literary influence on subsequent writers is huge, so theoretically this topic could go on forever.

What interests me at the moment is the way so many narratives have picked up on the motifs of The Red and the Black and re-worked them into such different and often compelling stories, or films.

Julien is the paradigmatic upstart whose destiny is crime. I haven't read John Braine's novel Room at the Top, but I have seen the film -- first many years ago in Britain, and then again recently (VHS from Planet, almost the only place you'd find it in Perth!).

Room at the Top follows Joe Lampton as he attempts to make his way up in society. Joe has little in common with Stendhal's Julien except perhaps his youth, his humble origins, his ambition -- and the fact that he loves an older woman but pursues a young woman who's the daughter of a rich and socially important man.

What goes wrong as a result of this conflict is not quite in the vein of Julien's criminal trajectory, and the endings differ accordingly (I don't like spoilers, so that's as much as I'll say!).

But the story shows a clear inheritance from Stendhal's plot, transposed to 20th-century Britain and a different set of class circumstances, with many of the same mistakes and emotions.

It's a finely watchable movie with a poignant performance from Simone Signoret as the older woman and an appropriate cold, callous manner from Laurence Harvey as Joe Lampton.

Apparently a t.v. series based on the character of Joe Lampton, Man at the Top, also written by John Braine but set after the movie narrative's end, was screened in Britain some decades ago (thanks to G. for this info).