the community or species; a sense of the land as exploited, whether mined in California
or in the Klondike. They share a certain skepticism as to the place of humankind as
superior to all other creatures, man as Zola ’ s “ human beast ” instead of what McElrath
describes as
“
a noble creature superior to others in the instinct
-
governed animal
kingdom ” ( Frank Norris Revisited 36). Yet whereas Mac ’ s story is a story of degenera-
tion, Buck ’ s becomes, through his own “ authorship ” of his destiny, one of regeneration
and freedom, though this cannot take place within the realm of the civilized, modern
world.
In contrast to McTeague and The Octopus, or London ’ s Martin Eden (1909), for that
matter, in The Call of the Wild the presence of romance and tragedy do not interfere
with the indictment of modern capitalistic society nor distill the concentrated natu-
ralistic bleakness, the “ white silence ” of Nature that is, in the end, the only arbiter
of survival – impartial, uncaring, ever - evolving Nature. In McTeague this silence sur-
rounds the dumbfounded and doomed dentist, having murdered his wife and his
friend for the gold he lusts after, now fi nding himself handcuffed to a corpse in the
middle of the white - hot Death Valley. But Mac has no understanding of how he got
there, and he hears no call to a new self. His fi nal confrontation with Nature is his
end, symbolized by the dead canary. Buck in The Call of the Wild escapes the machin-
ery of men that is fueled by the desire for gold, the machinery that kidnapped and
sold him into slavery, and in the end he embraces the stern facts of the frozen North
instead. His is a joyous leap into the future, an embrace of his destiny, and not a
handcuff.
These novelistic echoes and counter - movements between naturalists Norris and
London are sharply crystallized in a pair of short stories that are among their author ’ s
best: Norris ’ s “ Fantaisie Printani è re ” (1897) and London ’ s “ The Apostate ” (1906) . Like
Crane, Norris and London also died young, but despite their short careers they each
produced scores of short stories in the popular magazines of the day, in addition to
their novels. These are two gems.
Frank Norris and Jack London
179
Norris, though better known for his novels, McTeague , The Octopus , The Pit (1903),
and Vandover and the Brute (1914), was a talented and prolifi c writer of short stories,
though they are mostly unknown today. These early works feature Norris ’ s sharp
observations of life on the streets and in the parlors of San Francisco and other new
urban settings. Norris published sixty short stories in the San Francisco literary maga-
zine The Wave from 1891 to 1898. This magazine appealed to readers who were
educated, upper middle - class, and inclined to enjoy iconoclastic and satiric pieces,
especially when they violated social taboos left over from the past (and from the East
Coast). His use of strong detail in The Wave stories demonstrates his growing knowl-
edge of the city and its ways, as well as his experimenting with subject, point of view,
dialogue and dialect, tone, and theme in fi ction, much derived from his journalistic
perspective.
Norris ’ s stories run the gamut of genres and parodies of genres. “ The Jongleur of
Taillebois ” (1891), one of his earliest written works, is an epic set in medieval France,
wherein his characters confront murderous and vengeful ghosts. Many of his tales are
humorous sketches fi lled with dialect humor, but many are brutally naturalistic and
somber in tone, offering scathing critiques of economic and political power structures
in the modern city and countryside. Like The Octopus , “ A Deal in Wheat ” looks closely
at the effects of rampant capitalism from various political and class viewpoints. Real-
izing he is only a cog in a game played by the power brokers, a Kansas wheat farmer
is ruined by market traders in Chicago. “ A Deal in Wheat ” suggests what Norris
might have done had he completed his proposed trilogy with a third novel after The
Octopus and The Pit . Because of his political expos é s of capitalists, Norris, like Upton
Sinclair, was called a “ muck - raker ” for his sensationalistic attacks. But his writings
were a factor in attempts to make the Congress act to curb the grotesque excesses he
portrays. “ A Deal in Wheat ” is highly typical of Norris ’ s insistence upon repeating
themes of injustice and class consciousness. One can appreciate his infl uence upon
contemporary and later writers such as London, Dreiser, Fitzgerald, and Steinbeck.
Other stories display strong evidence both of Norris ’ s naturalism and also of his
romantic sense of the primal, the healthy, the rural, as opposed to the corrupt, the
urban, the effete. However, like London, Norris also sees “ Nature ” not only as that
which inhabits the forest or the countryside, but also nature as human nature, a much
more frightening apparition, with all of its seemingly senseless, unnatural cruelties.
Like “ A Deal in Wheat, ” several of his stories contain in embryonic form ideas that
would later be treated maturely in his novels. For example, the gold in “ Judy ’ s Service
of Gold Plate ” foreshadows the use of that element as a symbol for greed in McTeague .
But most closely related to McTeague and to his overall naturalistic vision is “ Fantaisie
Printani è re , ” which seems like a partial draft for McTeague that was never used in the
novel, but that in itself offers a sardonically bleak portrait of the lower class as well
as some unsettling questions about authorial intention and reader response.
Like Crane and Dreiser, Norris often seeks to disorient the reader and help him or
her into a new sensibility. Though many of his stories are quite genteel, others con-
tinue to shock. “ Fantaisie Printani è re ” is one of these. As McElrath has noted, on the
180
Jeanne Campbell Reesman
one hand, it appeals to a reader ’ s petit bourgeois sympathy with “ the unfortunate ” as
well as a voyeuristic, superior sense of spectatorship at their melodramas, similar to
the dual sense we get at Crane ’ s portrait of slum life in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
(1893) coupled with his tongue - in - cheek portrait of Maggie ’ s mother (see: www.
georgetown.edu/faculty/bassr/heath/syllabuild/iguide/norris.html ). Despite the des-
perate situation of the two abused women in “ Fantaisie Printani è re , ” the fact that they
quarrel over their husbands ’ wife - beating skills invites us to examine Norris ’ s own
shockingly humorous point of view on their struggles; that is, is Norris ’ s lack of
disapproval evidence of decadence on his part, or is he trying to poke fun at the typical
Victorian moral smugness when it came to helping the poor? Does he wish to show
how the sins of the men (who are at fi rst the feuding pair) are visited upon those under
their power (their wives, who take up their own feud, thereby settling the men ’ s)?
Or is his use of the absurd point of view aiming at something else, a sense of the
meaninglessness of life, an idea that evolved out of the failures of Victorianism
and
Western values and the advent of modernism and naturalism? We should feel out-
raged at the characters ’ sadomasochism, and we might, but we also cannot escape the
sardonic humor of the narrator. Norris could write tragedy, and he did, in The Octopus ,
but, as in McTeague , in this story he offers an alternate response to horror. Yet what
kind of reader would fi nd the situation actually comic?
The words Norris uses to describe the neighbors, the McTeagues and the Ryers,
evoke a dismal atmosphere: their “ squalid ” block lies at “ the disreputable end ” of Polk
Street. A huge red gas drum at the gas works nearby leaks a “ nasty brassy foulness ”
into the air, compounded with “ the odors of cooking from the ill - kept kitchens, and
the reek of garbage in the vacant lots ” ( “ Fantaisie ” 175). And the stench is still there
in the end, after the story ’ s shocking events have unfolded in the Ryers ’ tiny, fi lthy
kitchen, as dirty a space as the motivations of the characters.
In McTeague we witness the decline and fall of Mac the dentist due to the greed
and violence that destroy his marriage, friendships, career – and ultimately three lives
including his own. If we follow McTeague ’s chronology, this story seems to occur at
some point after his loss of his dental parlors and during his alcoholic attempts at
escaping the downhill slide his life has taken. In this story the men and women are
beaten down by a variety of factors we infer are primarily social, but also others that
are also all - too - recognizably human: like Zola, Norris gives us human beings strug-
gling fundamentally to survive, and this struggle give rise to the human failings of
fear, false pride, and venality, as well as to alcoholism and wife - beating. This is the
human drama at its basest, its stupidest. McTeague ’ s neighbor, Ryer, has also been
banished from a career by sheer greediness and a sociopathic lack of regard for society:
he was censured by the Board of Health for feeding his hogs on “ poultices obtained
from the City and County Hospital ” ( McTeague 175). The adulteration of food by
unscrupulous capitalists was one of the era ’ s great scandals, as witnessed by Upton
Sinclair in The Jungle (1906).
Like warring primitive tribesmen, McTeague and Ryer carry on a feud, which
Norris satirizes by a comparison to the Capulets and the Montagues, a feud which
Frank Norris and Jack London
181
arose from a bar - room brawl over how the lines of latitude and longitude converge at
the poles, a fi tting argument for people to have who are trapped in their own spaces
without any understanding of themselves, let alone the larger world around them.
Ryer beats his wife when sober; McTeague when drunk. Norris ’ s description of these
beatings leaves nothing to the imagination: McTeague uses fi sts, feet, and a club,
while Ryer employs rawhide and a rubber hose fi lled with gravel
–
“
his nature
demanded a variety of sensation ” (176). Unlike the “ colossal, clumsy ” blows of the
dentist, Ryer fancies himself more a gentleman, and as a result “ Ryer was cruel,
McTeague only brutal ” (177), this an invitation to gentlemen readers to consider the
difference.
The only sign of spring “ Fantaisie Printani è re ” offers is the appearance of three
dandelions that sprout “ in the vacant lot behind the gas works, ” drawn upwards by
spring warmth which also makes the garbage stink even more and the men stay out
to drink. Trina and Mrs. Ryer usually come out on such a day to share the “ hated
ritual ” (177) of washing, not a rite of spring. Instead of singing nymphs or warbling
birds, we heard these two “ calling shrilly to one another as their backs bent and
straightened over the scrubbing - boards ” (177). When Mrs. Ryer does not show up,
Trina goes through a hole in their fence and into the Ryers ’ kitchen to investigate.
Ryer has beaten Mrs. Ryer the night before with a trunk strap, as has McTeague,
who came after his wife with fi sts and hurled boots. Trina fi nds Mrs. Ryer black and
blue and miserable; for the fi rst time they talk about their beatings. But their empathy
soon transforms into envy and pride, and they argue over which husband is the most
effective batterer! They taunt each other over “ ‘ little scars, little fl esh wounds like
that! ’ ” as Trina “ loftily ” observes of Mrs. Ryer (179), until “ suddenly they tore at each
other like infuriated cats ” (181), the comic and racist allusion to the (Irish) Kilkenney
cats not lost on Norris ’ s readers. They are broken up by the amused husbands, who
are able to amend their own feud in raucous laughter at their wives: “ ‘ Fightin ’ over
our fi ghtin ’ them ’ bellowed McTeague. ” “ ‘ Mac, this does beat the carpet, sure, ’ ”
observes Ryer. The source of the women ’ s outrage was Mrs. Ryer ’ s calling Trina “ a
drab, ” and Trina ’ s retort that “ ‘ my kitchen wasn ’ t a place for pigs to live in, ’ ” as Mrs.
Ryer puts it (181). Despite the relocation of the feud to the wives, “ both men continue
to thrash their wives in the old ratio – McTeague on the days when he is drunk (which
are many), Ryer on the days he is sober (which are few) ” (183).
The story is clearly infl uenced by a Darwinian view of human survival in which
atavism – or animalistic characteristics – are revealed. As McElrath observes, the
infl uence of Freud may also be detected, inasmuch as Freudian psychology identifi ed
the dark, unconscious motivations for seemingly unexplainable behaviors (see
www.georgetown.edu/faculty/bassr/heath/syllabuild/iguide/norris.html ). Perhaps, as
Zola and London also supposed, there was an “ abysmal brute ” within all of us. The
McTeagues and the Ryers certainly appear to be driven by uncontrollable violence on
the part of the men and equally perverse submission to violence by the women. They
are primitives in the sense that they behave like brutes; it is as though, in Freudian
terms, they are all id but fool themselves into believing they are all super - ego. Like
182
Jeanne Campbell Reesman
London, Norris described the lowest classes as animal - like, and like London he rec-
ognized the terrible destruction in their lives wrought by alcohol. In the poisonous
and hopeless atmosphere of fear in their households and, one infers, in the entire
lower - class world they inhabit, things will only end in death, with no possibility for
positive change. Norris predicts the despairing absurdism and nihilism of the mod-
ernists in the next generation. His mocking, grotesquely light - hearted tone suggests
the Sweeney poems of Eliot and parts of The Waste - Land (1925), as it also points
toward the dark humor and amoral existentialism of Waiting for Godot (1953).
One also notes the ethnic and racial stereotypes at play: McTeague is Irish and
Ryer is German. These groups were not considered quite white or fi t for democratic
self - government on the American model at the turn of the century; their troubles and
peccadilloes were the subject of cartoons and dialect jokes in all the newspapers. These
and other immigrant groups were thought of as lazy, dirty, and drunk. Th
ese stereo-
types are repellent today, but in Norris ’ s day they were approved by readers such as
those of The Wave who actually had little knowledge of the lower classes. He certainly
departs from the earnest social reform writings of the previous generation, such
as those of Rebecca Harding Davis, and resembles in his pessimism and distance
his contemporary Ambrose Bierce (see
www.georgetown.edu/faculty/bassr/heath/
syllabuild/iguide/norris.html ).
The most important infl uence upon Norris ’ s amoral naturalism is, of course, É mile
Zola, whom he deeply admired and imitated. All human life, he would have agreed
with Zola, is open to the writer; nothing need be hid. In tracing the story of his
doomed lovers in Th é r è se Raquin , Zola says, “ I simply applied to two living bodies the
analytical method that surgeons apply to corpses ” ( “ Preface ” 23).
Unlike Norris ’ s, London ’ s short fi ction is still widely read and taught. Stanford
University Press issued The Complete Short Stories of Jack London in 1993, offering for
the fi rst time a complete scholarly collection. New editions and critical studies of his
short fi ction continue to be published in ever - increasing numbers, so that although
his stories have remained popular around the world, they are occasioning a renewal
of interest from American critics and professors. Like “ Fantaisie Printani è re , ” “ The
Apostate ” offers a portrait of slum life as a place of brutality, poverty, meaningless
labor, domestic violence, and family breakdown. London
’
s portrait of factory and
working
-
class life is as depressing as Norris
’
s, but in contrast to Norris
’
s story,
London ’ s allows the naturalistic hero – shown in his full misery and fully at the mercy
of economic forces he cannot control – an escape into nature in a Transcendental
moment of self - determination.
Ironically, as in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , in London ’ s tale apostasy to society
means a renewal of a spirit of freedom and new possibilities for living. As with
Norris ’ s story, the title is ironic. London lived an early life remarkably similar to his
A Companion to the American Short Story Page 40
