Notes on Recent Reading 35 (Scott, Norris, Jacobs)

Ivanhoe (Scott)

     Scott like Trollope is a popular and conventional writer I consistently enjoy. The reader must accept that his narratives are romances rather than realistic novels. For this reason their predictability, their reinforcement of received ideas, and the bipolar simplicity of their heroes and villains are rather generic characteristics than faults. One might well quibble, as critics did in Scott’s own time, about the improbable revival of Athelstane or the errancy of the novel’s historical premise, but I for one would prefer to swallow it all. In Scott the formal tightness and exacting plot design make him seem almost a late Neo-classicist, while his regionalism and celebration of fine feelings would suggest a Romantic. Though once thought the equal of Byron, his poetry is little read today. The novels enjoyed a lively second life in Hollywood films, but even these are too corny to attract contemporary attention.
     The fact is that literature may equally attack, interrogate, and affirm readers’ ideas. I would argue that the development of a critical attitude toward conventions and conventional beliefs is a phenomenon of the last few hundred years, and that not only such modern works as this one or, say, a musical like Oklahoma (or Gold Diggers of 1933), but also virtually all oral, folk, and, popular art are highly conventional and similarly bear themes that reassure the consumer of the rightness of his pre-existing attitudes. Still, I cannot deny that Scott richly deserved Thackery ‘s satirical sequel Rebecca and Rowena and Mark Twain’s comment in Life on the Mississippi that Scott was “in great measure responsible for the war.” Later, in his “Disappearance of Literature” speech, Twain said Ivanhoe could be read only at the ages of eighteen or ninety but not between. I would dispute the latter number with him.


McTeague (Norris)

     Norris’ novel brings old San Francisco to life, describing the McTeague’s Polk Street neighborhood with precision. But while Norris the naturalist, a conscious disciple of Zola, thought he was tracing the deterministic course of an individual’s fate with cool objectivity, the reader is more likely to be impressed with the pregnant dream-like symbols, though one might easily object that Norris goes altogether as mad as his characters with gold the symbolic significance of which mounts far beyond verisimilitude: the giant tooth, Maria’s imaginary gold dining service, Trina’s cache of double eagles, the canary, the sudden rich vein in the earth he discovers before fleeing.
     We are without doubt in Frye’s low-mimetic mode. Was there ever such a lurid anti-Semitic character as Zerkow? For that matter, Norris insists upon McTeague’s stupidity to the point of constantly representing him as wondering what is going on. It is sometimes a bit hard to take. The final confrontation between Marcus and McTeague is anything but realistic; indeed, it is utterly unlikely, but nonetheless perfectly right. Their possibilities vanish one by one as the alkali sands of Death Valley get the better of them in an artificial but elegant ending with a theme and scene that recalls the denouement of B. Traven’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Though Norris also conceived of himself as an artist engagé, society is assigned little blame here. If Uncle Oelbermann is thoughtless, that is merely because the rich so often are. Poverty’s suffering is here portrayed, but with no suggestion of a practical alternative. The novel is, of course, the source of Von Stroheim’s great film Greed.


Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Jacobs)

     Once, in a university library with open stacks, I recall stumbling upon the reminiscences of one-time slaves collected by workers in the Federal Writers’ Project of the WPA. I was staggered simply by the reflection that, during the 1930s, many people were still alive who had experienced the full rigors of America’s peculiar institution. Such narratives provided powerful propaganda prior to the Civil War when slave autobiographies fueled support for the abolitionist movement – at least sixty-five were published before 1860. These texts, along with Native American autobiographies, provided the first relatively authentic voices from these oppressed American minorities. (Indeed, as in this work, the distortions and inaccuracies are themselves meaningful.)
     While far less rhetorically grand than Frederick Douglass’ Narrative, Harriet A. Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl possesses considerable power based on the story it records. Jacobs as a woman personally suffered the sexual exploitation inherent in the system. The mixed-race complexions of so many Americans socially considered black testify to how very commonplace such brutality had been. Before she was able to make her way northward, she hid out under her master’s nose for almost seven years, an ordeal that would have sounded barely credible were it not for similar stories from fascist Spain and Nazi Europe. Her experiences make it plain as well how unfree the non-slave-holding North was, especially after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act.
     The Harvard Press edition is edited thoroughly and expertly by Jean Fagan Yellin.