A History of American Literature

Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 273

natural landscape – the ocean, the desert, the plains, the polar wastes – or into frail

victims of social circumstance, rising to success or falling to failure more as a matter

of accident and event than of ability or will. They are lost in the social landscape, the

anonymous, seething mass of the city, or in a natural landscape governed by what

Norris termed “the vast rhythms of the seasons” and the “eternal symphony of

reproduction.” A character in The Sea-Wolf (1904) by Jack London puts the same

perception rather more brutally. Life is “unmoral,” he insists:

It is like a yeast, a ferment, a thing that moves and may move for a minute, an hour,

a year, or a hundred years, but that in the end will cease to move. The big eat the little

that they may continue to move, the strong eat the weak that they may retain their

strength. The lucky eat the most and move the longest, that is all.

Sharing intensely in this perception, Frank Norris had more than one term for its

realization in fiction. Sometimes he called it “naturalism with all the guts I can get

into it.” More often, he called it “Romance.” “Realism,” Norris argued in “A Plan for

Romantic Fiction” (1903), “notes only the surface of things”; it “bows upon the

doormat and goes away and says. ... ‘That is life.’ ” “To Romance,” on the other hand,

“belongs the wide world for range, and the unplumbed depths of the human heart,

and the mystery of sex, and the problems of life, and the black unsearched penetralia

of the soul of man.” What Norris was after, effectively, was a Naturalism that

combined the dedication to empirical facts found in realism with the devotion to

truth – which, for him, meant scientific truth – that he claimed to find in romance.

In pursuing that kind of Naturalism, Norris was prepared to assault conventional

taste: to show, for instance, how the brute instincts in human beings were an integral

element of them, and played a necessary part in the social struggle. He was also eager

to combine a detailed notation of often sordid social detail with an almost poetic

celebration of the primal rhythms that, as he saw it, drove through nature and the

primal urges that pulsed through man. Admittedly, his earlier work, like the long

poem Yvernelle: A Legend of Feudal France (1892) and the sea story Moran of the

Lady Letty (1898), showed a predisposition toward a more conventional kind of

romance and, in particular, the influence of Sir Walter Scott. But his 1899 novel

McTeague had a naturalistic contemporary setting and revealed a quite different

influence, Emile Zola (whom Norris chose to call “the very head of the Romanticists,”

using that term, of course, according to his own, enlarged definition of “Romance”).

It tells the story of a man, the McTeague of the title, who descends into primitivism,

surrenders to his primal instincts, when his precariously assembled world is brought

down by greed and spite. Like one of Norris’s later posthumously published novels,

Vandover and the Brute (1914), it describes the power of the “lower” instincts – the

“brute” in man which, as Norris had learned from his teachers at the University of

California, needed to be acknowledged and harnessed to the development of the

“higher” self. And, in portraying the regression of its hero, it combines vivid realism

of social detail – in, say, the account of McTeague’s life as a dentist in San Francisco –

with an almost Gothic romanticism, designed to search out and expose “the brute.”

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