Henry Adams and the American Naturalist Tradition

Harold Kaplan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138524781
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351516006
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: Literature

The naturalist tradition in American fiction was a product of the tremendous changes wrought in late nineteenth-century America by the development of science and technology and by the intellectual upheavals associated with the ideas of Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. This book is an account of naturalism, perhaps the strongest and most influential intellectual tradition or, as Harold Kaplan would argue, mythology to affect modern American literature and culture.Kaplan approaches the naturalist writers through a study of Henry Adams. He sees in Adams the paradigmatic intelligence of his time a prophetic mind, though not a seminal one and a man absorbed with the twin notions of power and order. Adams's major work illustrates the joining of a literary imagination and moral temperament with an almost obsessive response to the science, economic life, and politics of his world. Adams's work exemplifies what Kaplan calls the myth of metapolitics a view of human struggle and fate profoundly dominated by naturalist concepts of power.Kaplan then turns to the fascination that power in its various manifestations material, moral, social, political held for writers such as Dreiser, Norris, Crane, and others. Their dramatic plots, characters, and allegorical images are examined in detail. In wider reference, this book should concern those who are interested in problems of modern ethics and politics in the effort to harmonize concepts of value with images of power and natural order.

1 The Myth of Power

The assumption guiding my study and a large area of literary interpretation could be stated in some blunt words of Anthony Burgess’s. “Literature,” he said, “is recognizable through its capacity to evoke more than it says ... [it] suggests a theology or metaphysic of which the story itself is a kind of allegory.”¹ One thinks, yes, a serious literature does evoke large-scale meaning in this sense, and modern writing in particular has, since the turn of the century, seemed to act in unique concert in reaching toward allegory. The better term for so weighty a suggestiveness might be myth, but, in any case, if there are metaphysical allegories in modern literature of the kind implied by Burgess, we would not look for their source in theology. Henry Adams, an intellectual amateur in many fields but preeminently a man of letters, leads the way for my study in finding in science the modern inspiration for metaphysical language and story. The bridge to the humanities from science was direct in his case but was multiplied many times by intermediate passages through politics and social thought. In this he was most characteristic, long before Bertrand Russell made the theme his own at the outset of his book entitled Power, where he said,

I shall be concerned to prove that the fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.²

So simple an observation seems obvious, yet its really awesome implications for practical behavior and imagined values in our culture have been relatively neglected, possibly because those who study culture are often the ones most dominated by Russell’s premise. It is for the latter reason that I feel confident there are important discoveries to be made beyond the confines of this study. I search for the expressive qualities of a myth of power or what can be called a metapolitics of conflict and power. Our century’s claim on metaphysical and moral inspiration has its root in the nineteenth, when scientific positivism first became the breeding ground for interpretive allegories in politics. The concept of power, as Russell suggests, had its source in physics but found its chief resting place in the political and economic ideologies that dominate two centuries.

A sensitive judgment of this major transition in normative thought came from George Santayana, who, though he called himself a skeptic and a naturalist, spoke soberly of what he saw as the mistaken effort to encode values on the terms of natural existence.

Religion may falsely represent the ideal as a reality, but we must remember that the ideal, if not so represented, would be despised by the majority of men, who cannot understand that the value of things is moral, and who therefore attribute to what is moral a natural existence, thinking thus to vindicate its importance and value. But value lies in meaning, not in substance; in the ideal which things approach, not in the energy which they embody.³

Much of the program of modern critical realism and naturalism in literature could be described as the systematic exposure of idealities that are false, demonstrably unrelated to “natural existence.” But more deeply, and extending far beyond the conventional definition of literary naturalism, there is an ethos, perhaps the strongest semblance of one in modern writing, which must be understood as the effort to value things for the energy they embody.

Obviously this could not occur without a great shock to the traditional ethical wisdom. Julien Benda was a more committed moralist and man of faith than Santayana, and so he reflects the change more sharply and as a matter of controversy. In doing so he is also closer to the active spirit in modern literature:

It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of a movement whereby those who for twenty centuries taught Man that the criterion of the morality of an act is its disinterestedness, that good is a decree of his reason insofar as it is universal, that his will is only moral if it seeks its law outside its objects, should begin to teach him that the moral act is the act whereby he secures his existence against an environment which disputes it, that his will is moral insofar as it is a will “to power,” that the part of his soul which determines what is good is its “will to live” wherein it is most “hostile to all reason,” that the morality of an act is measured by its adaptation to its end, and that the only morality is the morality of circumstances.⁴

Benda’s statement can serve well as my introduction, because he was one of the first to realize that modern naturalism would breed moral systems, determining “what is good” according to the norms of power, circumstance, and the “will to live.” As he said, this was a turning point “in the moral history of the human species,” but his theme has not been sufficiently heard for the simple reason that most naturalist thought is regarded not as moralizing but as the stoic effort to teach harsh truths. However, in the literature influenced by naturalism the principles Benda describes are clearly visible as normative, myth-making standards.

One could emphasize the historic reversal by illustrations taken from the myth of the genesis of morals, which forms the substance of Aeschylus’s Prometheus trilogy. In that work Aeschylus developed a legend of the progressive moral education of the gods, which brought their purposes into harmony with the interests of humanity. Zeus, at the beginning of the story, rules the universe with the aid of his daimons, Might and Violence. Prometheus, bound on his rock, has played the crucial role in defense of man, opposing force with intelligence, the arts of civilization, and the sense of justice. The one surviving play of the trilogy predicts a future accommodation between the sovereign power of Zeus and the values Prometheus defends, one that will usher in the essential story of civilization.

The modern myth of power reverses the narrative logic of Aeschylus’s story and tells the determinative story of civilization in terms of conflict relationships and power realities. The world turns back to its primitive origins, and the only gods are Titans. The story of the pre-Olympians seems intended to shock the idealizing imagination of the Greeks with the most abrupt and savage contrasts. Cronus, for instance, was the Titan overthrown by Zeus, his son, as he himself had overthrown and then castrated his father, Uranus. He also met his sister in incest and climaxed his unrestrainedly primitive behavior by cannibalizing his own children.

Such a legend of genesis is a most impressive reading of the primordial human condition, and there will always be something ambiguous in its juxtaposition with civilized standards. However brave the defense of the latter, they take on exactly a defensive quality when the authority of science, whether in biological evolution, in anthropology, or psychology, is constantly evoked in comparisons of the primary and the secondary, the natural and the* invented, the “raw and the cooked.” My theme in this book begins at this point, where the effort is made to coopt the revelations of science, or naturalist truth, on behalf of overt or covert values. Cronus becomes a teacher more instructive than Prometheus, for the task is not directly that of achieving freedom and justice but a maneuver by which the monster god becomes tamed through the displacement, transference, or sublimation of the violent natural powers he represents.

In the effort to understand the necessary reductivism of a science-dominated culture, we must begin with its vocabulary, where, as Bertrand Russell suggests, the word of greatest importance is “power.” Another is “order,” which, in this context, most simply means control of power. Other words are “force,” “energy,” “conflict,” “struggle,” “unity,” “chaos,” “destruction,”-”violence,” “birth,” “growth,” “decline,” and “death.” It would be a study of some worth to examine the frequency and the relationships of the words of that vocabulary in literary, scientific, and political writing as well as in popular journalism and entertainment. I limit myself here to a few texts from the literature of America in the early twentieth century, a crucial period in a most significant place; but it is in literature, even minor literature, that the unmeasured implications of a deep system of belief, a myth, become accessible.

The language of power, whether it forms a myth, a metaphysics, a political ideology, or a broad imaginative tradition, can best be located in the work of an early generation of philosophic naturalists and vitalists, among them Marx, Spencer, Nietzsche, Bergson, Zola, and Sorel, all of whom made partial contributions. Although they do not, of course, share a single system, they illustrate a general process of adapting human values to naturalist realities, a process that resulted in covert forms of a naturalist ethic. The passive tendency of a normative realism, I suggest, was to submit to whatever has unassailable existence and unmistakable force. The active alternative to this passivity was a cult of power in which the manifestations of energy and force became awesome signs, sources of true revelation. Conflict was the locus of the chief ritual or practical demonstration of power, and conflict therefore became subject to metaphysical and teleological interpretations, such as the Darwinian theme of natural selection or the Marxian theme of political evolution and redemption. Dramatic values were found in apocalyptic crises of ultimate violence or in the fateful cycle of decline and ascent. These ordeals of fate and violence provided the determinant revelations of historic success or failure, and in personal drama they provided revelations of personal worth. But personal values, at least for the first generation of naturalists, were hardly describable except in terms which reflect biological and political values. The overall literary effect was to subordinate the action of individuals to social process and the character of individuals to the identity of groups.

This, then, is the formula with which I begin. My method, however, is dialectical; it is the distinctions and oppositions among naturalist themes, not their uniformity, that has application to literary subjects. I have limited these subjects to Henry Adams and a number of American fiction writers of the first decades of the twentieth century in order to confine within reasonable limits an almost limitless theme and to provide the most meaningful context of rival traditions, humanist and idealist, in American writing. I start with an extended discussion of Henry Adams’s two major works, conceiving him as a focus for the radical change of consciousness that naturalism effected in America and judging also that he may have the significance for future students that Emerson now has for us in representing his own and later generations of American writers. I go on with a study of the primary American naturalists in fiction, the contemporaries of Adams’s old age: Dreiser, Crane, and Norris. I add Dos Passos to that discussion to indicate the bridge with the continuing naturalist orthodoxy without giving further historical review to writers like Farrell, Steinbeck, the early Norman Mailer, and James Jones and the now obscure and unread school of “proletarian” or Marxist novelists. My approach is topical and intensive, and so the themes of my study should suggest their relevance and value to the larger naturalist tradition. But they also provide, as I suggest throughout the text, an illuminating path of reference to the later modernists, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, who deviate in sharp ways from literary naturalism but whose work cannot be deeply understood without reference to the philosophic context of naturalism and to what I have called the metaphysics of power.

Naturalism remains a useful term for describing a literary practice and a set of programmatic ideas reflecting the laws of thermodynamics, Darwinian theory, and the sociological thought derived from Adam Smith, Malthus, Marx, and Spencer. Nevertheless, any literary tradition that is serious will tend to reject intellectual conformity and be concerned primarily with the dramatic problems generated by the literary imagination. Much that is most significant in the original school of ideological naturalist writing survives in the later generation: the awesomeness of power and its revelations, themes of victimization and passivity, a special concern with the rituals of violence, and the brooding, oppressive sense of naturalist fatality. All this becomes stronger, more sharply accented, because the role of reactive consciousness and response is restored to classic standing. Orthodox or conventional naturalism tended to bury individual response in the stream of causality or to identify the force of human agents with the generalized force of history or nature. Whether realist or antirealist, and whatever the philosophic bias, the later fiction tends to focus on the grandly equivocal issue of conscious freedom, testing qualities of response to the hard neutrality of being and its force and questioning the moral authority of nature. It is possible to say that for the early naturalists nature’s authority was absolute and that the work of Dreiser compares with Emerson’s as the naturalist inversion of transcendental idealism. But to show a most important development, the work of Faulkner compares with Melville’s in returning to the classic existential drama of the ethical will. The writing of Hemingway would add illustration of an intense pathos, relieved by the stoic half-victories of personal bearing, endurance, and awareness. What is fascinating, difficult, and “modernist” in the work of both Faulkner and Hemingway centers on the ordeal of the normative imagination, committed to naturalist revelations yet at odds with them, extracting the deepest lessons from nature yet refusing to remain its mere human function and expression.

The American Context

The authority of the eighteenth-century democratic revolutions, in America as well as France, was based on a most daring effort to link ethical and naturalistic truths. In natural-rights theory, democracy gains support from nature for the two basic ideals of equality and freedom. Equality cannot be demonstrated from the experience of social or acculturated man. Quite the opposite: intrinsic equality has to preexist known human societies, at least conceptually, and be the objective to be regained in revolutionary or reformist societies. In the same vein of Enlightenment thought, natural freedom is the accompaniment of natural reason; it is the medium in which reason can function, just as reason is required for the success of freedom. The human capacity for reason guarantees that free acts will harmonize with the rational structure of the universe. And it is reason, as Thomas Paine proclaimed, that is the chief resource against superstitious and traditional authority.

Transcendentalism and the American versions of romantic naturalism were even more absolute for freedom. Here freedom is the function of consciousness and inspiration. Human spirit responds to the spirit in nature, to assure an ultimate harmony between the profound motives of men and the design of things. The more free, the more connected with nature, Emerson would say. The more willing the mind is to entertain the “soul,” or consciousness, the more closely it is linked with reality. And the more personal and individual the source of inspiration, the more authentic is its realistic authority.

This was an intellectual tour de force by which subjectivity and individualism not only were harmless but were welcomed for their ability to establish communication with actual nature or with the spirit in nature and the spirit in other people. That romantic faith was more extreme in America than elsewhere because a democratic culture already felt threatened by the increasingly strong determinism of science and the amoral realities of business and politics. The primacy of persons was being opposed by concepts of group power and social process, and the species language of Darwin and Marx was only a few years away from its triumph. The method of science, of categorical statistics and empirical history, was threatening to isolate all subjective experiences, particularly those t)f the imaginative conscience, and denigrate them as anthropocentric solipsism. But democracy was impelled by the primacy of the individual conscience and the privileges granted to it in the name of that primacy. This conscience guarded not only the franchise but free expression; and if the authority of conscience were threatened, who could imagine the consequences for a democratic culture?

For these reasons the study of modern naturalism assumes particular importance in the history of a democratic country and its literature. To understand the tensions within the tradition, we should examine the most extreme contrast possible, with Emerson at one end of the nineteenth century and Theodore Dreiser at the other. Emerson was quite consciously a man of the pulpit, with secularizing impulses; he was really as bold as Whitman in the latter’s pronouncement, “The priest departs, the divine literatus comes.” Indeed, the secret of the surviving vigor of Emerson’s work lies in the unrestrained zest of his anthropomorphic spirit. The God he reverenced was incarnate in his own skin; he could assume that the same God listened in others as he spoke:

there is a responsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man works;.. .a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the centre of things. [“Self-Reliance”]⁵

That was metaphysical ballast enough, but a transcendental humanism also asked for teleological design in both individual experience and the history of the race. In this way it paralleled, or, more likely, pointed to the romantic source it shared with, optimistic evolutionary theory and the social teleologies of naturalist politics, like that of Marx. In any case, Emerson’s faith is the right context in which to study later developments. Ironically, he lays a basis in these words for the harsher confidence or stoic passivity of naturalist fatalism:

All things are moral. The soul which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law.... Justice is not postponed. A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts of life.... Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed in silence and certainty. [“Compensation,” ECW 2:102]

Dreiser was able to express with even greater simplicity his sharp reversal of the Emersonian faith—the faith that characterized romantic naturalism. The reversal was easier than it seemed; it required in some respects only the removal of the Emersonian stress on “intelligence” and “spirit.” (One is inevitably reminded here of Marx’s inversion of Hegel.) Emerson could ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• 1 The Myth of Power
• 2 The Naturalist Ethos
• 3 Henry Adams: The Metapolitics of Power and Order
• 4 The Dehumanization of Politics
• 5 Naturalist Fiction and Political Allegory
• 6 Vitalism and Redemptive Violence
• 7 “Godlike Reality”: A Testing and Truthful Violence
• Notes
• Index