Silent Film and U.S. Naturalist Literature

Time, Narrative, and Modernity

Katherine Fusco

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138183483
• eBook ISBN: 9781317293194
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Typically, studies of early cinema's relation to literature have focused on the interactions between film and modernism. When film first emerged, however, it was naturalism, not modernism, competing for the American public's attention. In this media ecosystem, the cinema appeared alongside the works of authors including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jack London, and Frank Norris. Drawing on contemporaneous theories of time and modernity as well as recent scholarship on film, narrative, and naturalism, this book moves beyond traditional adaptation studies approaches to argue that both naturalism and the early cinema intervened in the era's varying experiments with temporality and time management. Specifically, it shows that American naturalist novels are constructed around a sustained formal and thematic interrogation of the relationship between human freedom and temporal inexorability and that the early cinema developed its norms in the context of naturalist experiments with time. The book identifies the silent cinema and naturalist novel's shared privileging of narrative progress over character development as a symbolic solution to social and aesthetic concerns ranging from systems of representation, to historiography, labor reform, miscegenation, and birth control. This volume thus establishes the dynamic exchange between silent film and naturalism, arguing that in the products of this exchange, personality figures as excess bogging down otherwise efficient narratives of progress. Considering naturalist authors and a diverse range of early film genres, this is the first book-length study of the reciprocal media exchanges that took place when the cinema was new. It will be a valuable resource to those with interests in Adaptation Studies, American Literature, Film History, Literary Naturalism, Modernism, and Narrative Theory.

1 Unnatural Time

Frank Norris at the Cinema’s Beginnings¹

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the links between seeing time and being subject to it knit closer and closer together, fundamentally changing what it meant to be an embodied member of humanity. The body became an important site for battles over time’s representation because it was through this fleshy substance that thinkers measured temporality. Additionally, the failings and vulnerability of the body motivated various time management projects. Preserving the worker’s body from undue wear justified industrial management, and the desire to penetrate a world unseen by limited human perception inspired new narrative formats and visual technologies.

This chapter explores the ways in which embodiedness and its susceptibility to temporal illusions positions the human, for French philosopher Henri Bergson, uncomfortably close to the machine and, for American naturalist novelist Frank Norris, uncomfortably close to beastliness. The matter of human vision’s replacement or supplement by mechanical perception was of particular concern to Bergson, who located free will in the experience of duration. It was also a matter of concern to Norris, whose first novelistic effort began the same year that projected films appeared, and who championed the power of the novelist-observer to access life’s most important truths.

Like many of the figures in this story, Bergson saw time as a problem of representation. For Bergson, who was writing against materialist philosophers, time’s representation had consequences no smaller than free will itself. However, Bergson also believed that representing duration (pure duration, as he termed it) tended to pervert the substance, giving rise to confusions about the self as it exists in time. When he penned the 1888 preface to Time and Free Will, Bergson highlighted the limitations of his medium: “language requires us to establish between our ideas the same sharp and precise distinctions, the same discontinuity, as between material objects” (xix). This would make language, the philosopher’s tool, singularly problematic for wrangling with time. Bergson would call attempts to present time through continuous mediums, particularly divisible space, an “illegitimate translation” of “quality into quantity” (xix). More than language, though, the cinema and its predecessors were particularly guilty of bad translations because they conceived of duration through movement; that is, they spatialized time. When he later had the opportunity to consider the new media form, he would find its implications very disturbing indeed.

Because a self sustains through a series of moments that build on rather than replace one another, duration for Bergson evidences the human agent’s free will. Already in 1888, Bergson had expressed concerns about modernity’s rationalizing tendencies, which perverted senses of time, and thus senses of self: “it is presumed that time, understood in the medium in which we make distinctions and count, is nothing but space” (91). Throughout the treatise, Bergson goes to great lengths to prove such presumptions false, while also noting the powerful temptation to treat duration in such a manner, so that it might be mapped, divided, and managed. Beyond being a matter of bad representation, Bergson sees false appearances of time as capable of degrading humanity: “by invading the series of our psychic states, by introducing space into our perception of duration, it corrupts at its very source our feeling of outer and inner change, of movement, and of freedom” (74). Like many of the age’s thinkers, Bergson saw representation as capable of shifting modes of attention and thought; thus bad, false, and otherwise unnatural representations had moral as well as aesthetic consequences. Throughout this chapter, the matter of truthful representation centers debates about the relationship between human, mechanic, and narrative abilities to render temporality visible.

As an introduction to these debates and to the work of Frank Norris, it is useful to consider not the ghost but the beast in the machine. Two proto-cinematic machines, the zoetrope and Eadweard Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope, used images of Muybridge’s galloping horse to showcase their technological innovations. The series of photographs in which Muybridge captured a running horse forever ended quarrels over whether all four hooves left the ground during a gallop. Using trip wires and a row of twenty-four cameras, Muybridge succeeded in capturing the horse in full flight—visual proof of animal motion. Working backward from motion to stillness, Muybridge not only settled a bet for his wealthy patron Leland Stanford, but he simultaneously froze time and created the opportunity for its reanimation. The experiment also offered the photographer the opportunity to say a few choice words to his fellow artists. In his pamphlet The Attitudes of Animals in Motion, Muybridge chided the art world for failing to take up his camera’s truths: “These invariable rules seem to be neglected or entirely ignored by many of the most eminent animal painters of modern times” (8). As Bergson did, Muybridge positions truth and representation on opposite poles. But to be fair to the animal painters, their vision was human and limited, whereas the “attitudes” Muybridge uncovered were seen by cameras’ more perfect inhuman eyes.

The first proto-cinematic device to feature Muybridge’s images, the zoetrope belongs to a category described as the “philosophical toy”. The zoetrope was a drum with evenly spaced slits around it, through which an inner band printed with a series of still images could be perceived. When the viewer spun the drum and peered through the rapidly revolving slits, the image flickered to life, and the horse began its run. Other devices in this category included the magic lantern, the thaumatrope, the kaleidoscope, and, later, Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope. The title “philosophical toy” is worth taking seriously, even as the parlor-trick nature of such devices might encourage us to do otherwise. Among other thoughts, such devices made the viewer aware of his or her own faulty ocular capacities, since it is by imperfect human visual processing that the trick works. In other words, through human failure, the toy produces unhuman life.²

The relationship between the unhuman and the human centers Frank Norris’s novelistic first effort as well. Vandover and the Brute (1895) follows a young aesthete’s indulgence in drink and gambling, his loss of artistic ability, his fall into destitution, and his eventual change into a barking brute. And though a focus on lycanthropy may initially seem very different than the concerns captured by the philosophical toys and Bergson’s treatise on duration, it was in a media-saturated environment that the “Boy Zola” penned his grotesque tale. Further, considering Norris’s mediatized world sheds light on the two interpretive problems that have most consistently fascinated scholars: Vandover’s bad memory and his degeneration.

Many have taken interest in the protagonist’s bizarre perspective on his life. The novel opens with a provocative epistemological problem: “It was always a matter of wonder to Vandover that he was able to recall so little of his past life. With the exception of the most recent events he could remember nothing connectedly” (Norris, Vandover 3). Vandover’s memory problems and the gambling that leads to him selling personal items and replacing them with signs with indexical instructions such as “stove here” (207) have been central to critical accounts that have revitalized naturalist scholarship by linking the genre to modernity and modernism. To take Michaels’s The Gold Standard as an example, these readings often interpret Vandover’s failed paintings and later substitution of his gambled-away possessions with Magritte-like indexical signs as Norris’s enactment of the modernist aesthetic expressed by the “painting that can represent nothing and still remain a painting” (165). In his assertion that Vandover does not resolve “the conflict between material and representation” but instead exemplifies it (174), Michaels maintains that Norris also “does not choose between Vandover and the brute” (175). Michaels’s reading suggests Norris’s openness to a variety of representational approaches: brutish and human, modernist materiality and realist representation.³

Reading the novel as the progeny of a nineteenth-century lineage based in social Darwinism, rather than as a forerunner to twentieth-century modernism’s philosophical and aesthetic experiments, other scholars have seen the novel’s focus on devolution as corresponding to Progressive Era anxieties around sexual, racial, and class-based contamination. Such studies emphasize the novel’s San Francisco context and Norris’s description of Van’s “pliable character” (Vandover 201), seemingly capable of adapting itself to any setting. Many critics have argued that Vandover’s decline results directly from his licentiousness or his contact with undesirable others.⁴ However, the morality many such lycanthropy-focused readings ascribe to the novel is complicated by the first matter: the novel’s account of strange perspectives. In his reading of decadence in the novel, for example, Sherwood Williams ties Vandover’s brutishness to his sexual perversity and argues that the novel acts as a counter to Wildean aestheticism, claiming, “As Vandover deteriorates, both he and the narrative return to the fragmentation and unreliability that characterized the preadolescent stage where he ‘remembered nothing connectedly’” (730). But it is unclear that in adolescence Vandover maintains any greater control over his “thought pictures” than he does either as a child or an adult. While Williams is correct to link Vandover’s deterioration to the aging process, the change to Vandover’s memories is quantitative rather than qualitative. According to the narration, as an adult Vandover’s “thoughts, released from all control of his will, began to come and go through his head with incredibly rapidity, half remembered scenes … all galloping across his brain like a long herd of terrified horses” (Norris, Vandover 225–6). In this passage, Vandover suffers from the effects of accretion, not regression. As he ages, the number of “pictures” piled up in his head increases exponentially, and his consciousness becomes more and more chaotic as the number of disconnected memories expands. Drawing upon the popular entertainments of this moment, one might say that as Vandover ages his memory becomes a never-ending actuality program or vaudeville show, with scenes rapidly flickering through his mind.

Turn-of-the-century media environments and San Francisco’s site-specific importance in particular clarify the connections between the two lines of scholarship that focused on Vandover’s bizarre cognitive processing and focused on his degeneration.⁵ It is a beast that makes this connection and that straddles the divide between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the events Vandover cannot remember “connectedly” at the novel’s beginning appear as galloping horses by the end. The fact that horses show up throughout the pages of the novel is not immaterial. The word “horse” appears in twenty-one discrete instances, appearing as a metaphor at crisis points, as an aesthetic object in paintings, as an animal Van purchases and bets on, and as a consistent feature of the San Francisco cityscape.

The link Norris establishes between Vandover’s thoughts and horses also ties the novel to Bergson and film. Already, given that it is in duration that the philosopher locates free will, we should hear the Bergsonian valences in the opening description of Vandover’s thoughts: “It was always a matter of wonder to Vandover that he was able to recall so little of his past life. With the exception of the most recent events he could remember nothing connectedly” (Norris, Vandover 3). This chapter argues that Vandover’s lack of a self that endures is directly connected to the externalized and mechanized temporal engagements that had deep roots in the City by the Bay and which Bergson found so troubling for his theories of free will.

From Muybridge’s work, horses had become a sign of human visual insufficiency, proof of a world undetectable to the bare eye and of a temporality accessible only by way of the machine.⁶ Throughout Norris’s first novel, when horses appear on the scene, they accent perspectival failure. Once, in a moment when humanity appears at the mercy of uncaring machines, “the infinite herd of humanity, driven on as if by some enormous, relentless engine” (Norris, Vandover 242); again, when the titular protagonist cannot gain control over his disordered thinking, thoughts began “galloping across his brain like a long herd of terrified horses” (26); and again, when a fully degenerate Vandover offers to bark for money, “every time that horse tosses his head so’s to get the oats in the bottom of the nose-bag he jingles the chains on the poles and, by God! that’s funny; makes me laugh every time; sounds gay, and the chain sparkles mighty pretty! Oh, I don’t complain. Give me a dollar and I’ll bark for you!” (245). Though the animal figure into which Vandover degenerates shifts around the animal kingdom, it’s worth noting the frequency with which horse imagery appears in a novel supposedly concerned with lycanthropy.

But this frequency is not surprising: The great galloping horse debate and its settling were widely discussed, and in the early 1880s Muybridge’s zoetropes sold in photography magazines “as an attraction for the studio or reception room for the relatively reasonable price of 2.50 for the machine and just a dollar for a set of images”, which promised to show “the continuous movement of the subject with life-like accuracy” when placed in “The Wheel of Life”.⁷ More than the average American, the San Franciscan novelist would have likely been familiar with Muybridge. The photographer’s infamous benefactor was none other than horse aficionado, university founder, and railroad tycoon Leland Stanford. One of California’s original “Big Four” railroad men, Stanford and his Southern Pacific became the basis for Norris’s later novel The Octopus (1901).

But in 1895, Norris wrote a novel more concerned with photographic horses than iron ones, and likely had his own opinions on the Muybridge experiments, for he was himself a great horse lover and a visual artist. In 1887, Norris had gone to art school in London, a choice informed by his interest in study with experts in animal painting (McElrath and Crisler 74), and his early writings in The Wave show his passion for all things equine and their faithful representation. What was “faithful” to Norris, however, included some wiggle room for departure from what was factually accurate.

In 1897, Norris expressed his admiration for the work of Frederic Remington, writing, “Perhaps no other artist who ever lived understands horse action so well as this American illustrator of ours; and, as for character, one has only to compare them with the stuffed melodramatic lay figures of Rosa Bonheur to note how absolutely true they are, how thoroughly faithful to nature, how indisputably equine” (qtd. in McElrath and Crisler 74). The idea that a horse’s equine status might be under dispute is less silly than it sounds. Along with fellow artist Thomas Eakins, Remington was an early adopter of the information provided by Muybridge’s studies, and depicted galloping horses accordingly. On the other hand, Remington also saw limits to correctness, arguing, “the artist must know more” than the camera and thus present the horse as “incorrectly drawn from the photographic standpoint” (qtd. in Samuels and Samuels 84). Norris likely would have agreed with the artist’s statements. Facts and details newly accessible by technology were not always the same thing as truth for either artist. In an 1895 report on a polo match, Norris, confessing to not understanding the sport’s technicalities, said it was better to leave some things shrouded in a veil of mystery and to take them “whole without asking questions, as one would shrimps” (qtd. in McElrath and Crisler 86).

Read by the lights of the proto-cinematic and cinematic innovations at the turn of the century, we might take seriously the potential connection between the “long herd of terrified horses” in Vandover’s head and Muybridge’s horse, the latter mechanically fragmented into many horses galloping endlessly round and round the Zoetrope’s insides, forming a strange, modernist herd of animal life. While on the one hand the horses galloping round and round seem part of a continuous time—a “long herd”—their appearance depends precisely on the oversegmented, overrationalized view that both Remington and Norris, given their preference of taking some things “whole” as shrimps, caution artists from adopting.

For Bergson and the young Norris, the mental processing of temporal experience evidences humanity, that is, the capacity for self-reflection and free will. Filmic technologies and proto-filmic devices such as the zoetr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Progress without People
• 1 Unnatural Time: Frank Norris at the Cinema’s Beginnings
• 2 Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show: Frank Norris, D. W. Griffith, and Naturalist Editing
• 3 Made of Leavings and Scraps: Jack London, Jack Johnson, and Racial Time
• 4 Systems, Not Men: Processes without People in Utopian Factory Films and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Eusocial Feminism
• Epilogue: Scaling up to Modernism
• Works Cited
• Index