The Gospel of Wealth in the American Novel (Routledge Revivals)

The Rhetoric of Dreiser and Some of His Contemporaries

Arun Mukherjee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138799325
• eBook ISBN: 9781317629139
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Business and the businessman have had a fundamental place in American society since the inception of the nation. This tenet, the 'gospel of wealth', is a central concern in the novels of Theodore Dreiser and his contemporaries. First published in 1987, this study sets this group of writers in their historical context and shows how they elaborated the idea of wealth as an object of quasi-religious quest. What had previously been associated with disease and darkness, avarice and dishonour, now came to emblematise the virtues of thrift, prudence and diligence. The underlying argument is that the dominant group of a society legitimises its power through the appropriation of the vocabulary of religion, and the American business leaders were successful in doing this both in their own practice and through the more insidious medium of art. A detailed analysis, this reissue will be of particular value to students of American literature with an interest in the relationship between linguistic symbols and social order, and historical attitudes towards wealth in literature.

Chapter One
Introduction

Business and the businessman have had a central place in American society ever since the inception of the nation. The way of life which the British landed gentry had always looked down upon and considered culturally and spiritually deficient, not only found its justification on the American soil but its champions, in turn, aggressively attacked the cultural hegemony of the landed aristocracy and successfully replaced it with their own, at least in America.

Though a few studies of American business ideology could be mentioned, few scholars have undertaken to study the culture and ideology of American business. Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was, of course, the pioneering study to explain this way of life. In addition, Richard Hofstadter traced its historical development and late nineteenth century flowering in his Social Darwinism in American Thought.

Of course, there is no dearth of studies on American capitalism. However, these studies fail to take into consideration the cultural peculiarities of American capitalism, such as its "rags-to-riches" parables and its rhetoric of individual freedom that retain a transcendent appeal for Americans. By not taking the language employed by American business into account, such studies fail to grasp how ideology becomes concrete as symbol and rhetoric and gets expressed as a way of life.

It is not surprising, then, that literary critics have also turned their backs upon the businessman and the artists who were perceptive enough to understand the central place of the businessman in American life. While the businessman continues to reign supreme in the seats of power, the American literary establishment has expelled him from the literary arena. It has done so by two means: first, by creating a canon that excludes the works of social realists, valorizing Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, James, Eliot, Frost and Pound at the expense of Howells, Dreiser, Herrick, Lewis, Sinclair, Sandberg and Masters, not to speak of the Black and other minority writers, and secondly, by stressing the formal autonomy of the literary text while disregarding its historical context.

This ideological innocence on the part of the mainstream American critic has resulted in a particularistic, reductive and ahistorical criticism. It celebrates the formal beauties of the text in an aesthetic accessible only to an elite. When it concerns itself with making value judgements, it does so in words like sin, guilt, soul, love and loss of self, and never in terms of race and class conflicts, social power, democratic rights and justice. As Edward Said puts it, "It is not too much to say that American or even European literary theory now explicitly accepts the principle of non-interference, and that its peculiar mode of approaching its subject matter . . . is not to appropriate anything that is worldly, circumstantial, or socially contaminated."(1)

The result of this "non-interference" has been a total disregard of, not only the relationship between texts and their historical contexts, but also of the relationship between the language of the text and that of the social environment in which it was created. Though much is written these days about discourse, I have yet to see a work that undertakes to bring out the subtle interconnections between literary and social discourses. The dominant method of literary criticism tells us more about a writer's private symbolism, patterns of this and that, esoteric allusions, textual paradoxes and ambiguities than about how literary texts appropriate the discourse employed by the social powers of their time.

I believe that without this context, which is not simply a knowledge of historical events but a knowledge of the words they were put and presented in, we not only grotesquely misread the texts - I strongly disagree with the reader-response critics who claim that multiple and contradictory readings are inevitable - we also remain unaware of the role literature plays as a social institution which interacts with other institutions in adversarial or hegemonic ways.

In this book, I have attempted to demonstrate how literary texts become subversive, or supportive, by appropriating the language used by those who wield social power. When a literary text subtly mimics and contradicts the received myths and ideologies of the ruling class, it undermines their authority by making us laugh at them. On the other hand, the ruling class always manage to attract some creative artists who provide the legitimation that the former seek. Literature and art, thus, are as much divided according to ideological and class lines as the rest of the society, a fact which is consistently ignored by many literary critics.

Thus, I am not interested in a simple historical account of how American novelists have treated the American businessman. Nor is it my intention to rate American novelists, as Emily Watts has in a recent study, according to their allegiance to what she calls "the positive values of American capitalism".(2) I wish to explore the way American novelists respond rhetorically to the discourse of the American businessman and his apologists. The pronouncements of the nineteenth century American businessmen provide a sub-text that is encoded in the fictional works of the turn of the century. Thus, these texts are in a dialogical relationship with the contemporary business discourse and their irony, as well as their formal strategies, can only be understood in the context of this discourse.

This rhetorical model of reading literary texts brings us back to the world that the formalist critic had so contemptuously abandoned. When a literary text is seen as rhetoric, it becomes communication, a mediator of relationships between different sections of society. The literary critic who sees literature as communication provides us with insights into what prior utterances and actions provided the impetus for the literary text and how they are woven into the web of the text. The text, according to this approach, is not an "icon" or an "urn" but an utterance, and thus is encased in a context which can only be torn apart at the risk of making the utterance meaningless.

An accidental discovery has led me to this approach. While going through an early twentieth century business textbook, I came upon a passage that was replete with the imagery of knight-errantry as analogies for the exploits of the modern businessman. The passage led me to ask whether the imagery of knight-errantry I had found in the turn of the century business fiction was parodic, a mimicry by the artist of the pretensions of the heroic businessman. This was, indeed, the first time that I had discovered the rhetorical uses of imagery.

To seek an answer to the question I went back to the business spokesmen of the period. Not only did I find extensive use of the imagery of knight-errantry, I also began to identify some other recurrent image patterns that were common to both literary and non-literary texts. When I turned again to the literary texts, I perceived rhetorical sallies, parodies, satire and irony that I had not encountered earlier. Other critics had not noticed these either.

This discovery has radically affected my own critical practice. Academic training had led me to believe that the creative artist used a special language. Imagery, I had been taught, was the special language of the artist. He was unique in his ability to unify disparate realms, make abstractions concrete, and connect thought and feeling through the power of metaphor. Other, non-literary, users of language supposedly did not do these.

I have come to believe that literary language is not only not different from the language of social intercourse, it deliberately appropriates the ideologically-charged language of the people in control of social power in order to subvert and challenge their legitimizing activities. Secondly, I believe that literature also contributes to the language of social intercourse by giving us the terminology with which we can explain ourselves to ourselves and to others. For example, the figures of the knight, the pilgrim and the superman that the businessman has incorporated into his own vocabulary were the contributions of creative artists. Finally, I hold that the struggle to appropriate socially honorific language is the key to social intercourse in a divided society. For example, both Ronald Reagan and Michael Harrington seek to appropriate for themselves John Winthrop's metaphor of "city on a hill."

Language, thus, can be seen as an arena of social warfare where different social institutions try to capture power through ownership of the sacred vocabulary of a society. Literature participates in that warfare, either through creating heroes or undercutting them. It is my belief that we cannot study literary texts by removing them from the din and turmoil of this battlefield and locking them in a soundproof environment where the voices of social discourse cannot be heard.

My analysis is indebted to the work of Kenneth Burke and Hugh Dalziel Duncan who consider linguistic symbols to be the key to understanding social order. Burke's concept of "transcendence" helped me to understand how the dominant group of a society tends to legitimize its power by linking it to a higher principle, through the appropriation of the sacred vocabulary of religion or other important social institutions. In this particular case, Burke's analysis of rhetorical motives made me realize that the American businessman transformed his life in the marketplace by clothing it in a religious vocabulary which portrays man's life in the world in metaphors of wayfaring and warfaring. Burke's notion of "symbolic bridges" was equally illuminating. It showed me how the business discourse of the period under discussion here blended the metaphors of a knightly quest and, later, of a social Darwinian jungle, with the metaphors of pilgrimage from an earlier age. For however disconnected they may seem on the surface, all of them paint the world as a hostile wilderness, a backdrop which is equally suitable for the "trials" of the pilgrim, the jousts of the knight, and the struggle of the "fit" and the "unfit" of the social Darwinian. As Burke and Duncan have demonstrated, a literary text is, first of all, a rhetorical utterance. It is, says Burke, a deliberate and structured "answer" to someone:

Let us suppose that I ask you: "What did the man say?" And that you answer: "He said 'yes'." You still do not know what the man said. You would not know unless you knew more about the situation, and about the remarks that preceded his answer. Critical and imaginative works are answers to questions posed by the situations in which they arose. They are not merely answers, they are strategic answers, stylized answers.(3)

Thus Burke taught me to read figurative language for its rhetorical motives. His analysis of symbolic devices as "eulogistic coverings" on the part of the dominant elite has provided me with a very valuable insight into both the social order and the literary text. He has shown me that literary texts, like other human utterances, are written with a rhetorical motive, whether it be to flatter a patron, to incite one's fellow beings to revolution, or to assuage one's own guilt.

In this book I have chosen to analyse the works as addresses to the reader who is expected to place them in the context of other addresses. I see these works as "strategic" and "stylized" answers to the dominant discourse of the period. Although I sense that this approach has some similarity to the currently popular semiotic approach, I find that Burke's terminology is much less cluttered with technicalities and is much more political.

While the major portion of the book is devoted to the work of Dreiser, the writer most sensitive to the ideology of business, I have discussed four of his contemporaries in some detail in order to establish the validity of my point about the socially shared nature of language. All these writers participate in, and contribute to, the rhetoric common to their time.

Chapter Two examines the historical shift in attitudes towards business and the accumulation of wealth in the light of the pioneering studies of Max Weber and R. H. Tawney. I have considered the statements of business and religious leaders for their rhetorical implications. I have proposed that the changed attitude to wealth is brought about through a symbolic shift. What had previously been associated with disease and darkness is now symbolized as a religious quest. Similarly, censorious terms such as greed, rapacity and avarice are replaced by honorific ones like thrift, virtue, prudence and diligence. I have compared this rhetoric with that employed by two writers of the period, namely Hawthorne and Frances Hodgson Burnett, to demonstrate how literary texts interact with the dominant discourse of the period.

The following three chapters deal with Dreiser's response to the rhetoric of business. Chapter Three analyses Dreiser's autobiographical writings from the viewpoint of examining his youthful allegiance to, and later disillusionment with, the dominant ideology of his society. Chapter Four looks at the Cowperwood trilogy and proposes that Dreiser, instead of being an unabashed extoller of the superman of business, was a harsh critic who satirized his heroic pretensions by employing the mock-heroic mode. I propose that his irony has not been noticed by his critics because the discourse that he parodied has been disregarded by them. Chapter Five examines three other works by Dreiser in order to look at his portrayal of the overall effect of the "symbolic environment" created by this "heroic" businessman. Thus, in his Sister Carrie, The "Genius" and An American Tragedy, Dreiser probes the impact of business ideology on the lives of ordinary men and women who must perforce live in the jungle world created by the businessman's metaphors. The lives of Carrie, Eugene and Clyde are determined by their acceptance of the heroic world as truth on the one hand, and their inability to live up to its demands on the other.

Chapter Six compares Dreiser's response to the heroic metaphors of business with those of some of his contemporaries. The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells, Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son by George Horace Lorimer, The Pit by Frank Norris and A Life for a Life by Robert Herrick give an indication of the prevailing climate of opinion. While Howells and Herrick are critical of the businessman's appropriation of an exalted vocabulary, Lorimer and Norris approve of it and use it in their own novels. Whatever may be the difference in their attitudes, however, all these novelists employ the prevalent metaphors, whether to mock or to exalt them.

My endeavour, thus, is admittedly ambitious. I have laid claim to analysing literary texts with the purpose of uncovering the ideological underpinnings of American society. My emphasis, therefore, falls on those areas of the texts that are referential and communicative. I have supplied verifiable historical evidence which allows us to go back and forth between literary and non-literary texts to see their interconnectedness. And I have sought to speak in a much more rigorous language than that of critics who vaguely speak of "materialistic values of American society" and the "search for the self".

In Literature as Social Discourse, Roger Fowler remarks that "there has so far been little detailed linguistic research into sociologically and ideologically interesting language."(4) I feel that this study is a modest effort in that direction.

Notes

1. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1983) 3.

2. Emily Stipes Watts, The Businessman in American Literature (University of Georgia Press, Athens, 1982) 151.

3. Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 2nd edn. (Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1967) 1.

4. Roger Fowler, Literature as Social Discourse (Batsford Academic and Educational Ltd., London, 1981) 27.

Chapter Two
Knights and Pilgrims: Businessman’s Self-Images

The usual place assigned to seekers of wealth in literary typology has been the darkness of the bottomless pit. Working wit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• 1. INTRODUCTION
• 2. KNIGHTS AND PILGRIMS: BUSINESSMAN'S SELF-IMAGES
• 3. THE BUSINESS CULTURE: DREISER'S EXPLORATION OF A MYTH
• 4. THE COWPERWOOD TRILOGY AND THE HEROIC MYTH
• 5. DREISER'S "HALF-EQUIPPED KNIGHTS" IN SISTER CARRIE, THE "GENIUS" AND AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY
• 6. DREISER'S CONTEMPORARIES: SOME OTHER VOICES
• 7. CONCLUSION
• Index