Kingsley Widmer
POETIC NATURALISM IN THE
CONTEMPORARY NOVEL
Americans traditionally long for a mythic depth of awareness
which they helplessly call
experience:
the-way-it-really-happened, the–
truth-of-the-matter, honest-to-god-experience, real-life.... By some pe–
culiar historical breeding, the pragmatic, sensible, fact-to-fact flow of
actuality has often been joined, for Americans, with salvational fervour,
idealism and lyric exaltation.
The tough and professional ideological terms of European literary
creeds, such as "realism" and "naturalism," have undergone odd sea–
changes before being beached on the sentimental realism of a Sinclair
Lewis or the mystic naturalism of a Theodore Dreiser. Or one might
contrast the recurrent quasi-literature of American and continental ver–
sions of the excremental vision: the boozy love of Henry Miller as
against the hopped-up hatred of Louis-Ferdinand Celine. Or, at a more
serious literary level, compare the restrained and polished English "novel–
of-manners"- even when currently "angry"-with the crudely heroic
yet insistently Keatsian
The Great Gatsby.
Isn't some analogous quality
to be found in Thoreau's poignant desire to live "life to the full" when
actually pursuing ascetic and alienated contemplation of the essence of
things? Or in Melville's fantastic desire to conjoin the harsh actuality
of the maritime proletariat, the mammoth physical reality of cetology,
and poetic ruminations on the ambiguous non-existence of the divine?
The strange fusion of raw actuality and lyrical adoration would seem
to have an insistent recurrence in American imaginative prose that can
be matched in no other literature.
There is also the increasing degeneration of poetic naturalism in
the
love-of-life-and-Iove
tradition, which is naturalistic in its materials
and revelations of motives but naively and sententiously poetic in its
methods and aims: from the awkward insights of Sherwood Anderson
through the sentimental sights of William Saroyan and Thomas Wolfe
