1 - The Novel as Ironic Reflection

Summary

Novelists as different as Henry James and Theodore Dreiser began the twentieth century as they ended the nineteenth, torn by conflicting allegiances. On one side, their openness to what Henry James called the “strange irregular rhythm of life,” and thought of as the “strenuous force” that kept fiction on its feet, drew them toward history and a shared story of conquest, the taming of a continent and the making of a new nation and a new people, as we see in a range of titles, including James’s The American (1877), William Dean Howells’s A Modern Instance (1882), Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! (1913), Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans (1925), Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925), John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. (1938), and Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940). On another, they were drawn toward what James called the “romantic” and described as the “beautiful circuit and subterfuge of our thought and our desire” – things, he added, that “we never can directly know.” Like Flaubert, James wanted to tidy up the loose, baggy traditions of the novel. Even more than Flaubert, he associated the novel’s looseness with history. Simply by placing human thought and desire under the aspect of the “beautiful,” defined in terms of order and subtle indirection (“circuit and subterfuge”), James evoked the lyrical tradition of the nineteenth century, in which self-examination became a prelude to self-transcendence and the journey toward the self’s interior became a covert preparation for a journey up and out of time itself, for the solitary reader as well as the solitary singer.