GARY STEPHENS
77
burden upon the writer became unbearable. One feels in realistic writing
the claustrophobia of the single imagination up against this immense
problem.
This sense of claustrophobia is registered most profoundly in the
realist's creation of character, for a major theme of realist fiction is the
powerless situation of the little man and the artist who identified with him.
As the realists cautiously, hopefully, tried
to
create adequately detailed
portrayals of human life as correctives to the thin and simply optimistic
versions of heroism found in popular literature, they created neither hero
nor anti-hero but sympathetic normal characters whose tales turn out
to
be
loser's stories, stories about the common person's inevitable powerlessness,
stories in which the reassurances of the melodrama are shown to be a lie .
These characters are powerless and trapped in time; each moment of their
lives is conditioned not by imagination, but by the dumb face of meaning–
less things. Their situation is one of spiritual claustrophobia marked by the
slow tick of time. Time, divorced from any significant spiritual message,
was simply and inevitably deadly.
The anxiety of the situation is revealed by the distance between the
initial hopes of a character and the actual state of his life as shown in
conclusion. The distance between initial expectation and the ultimate lack
of fulfillment is characteristically so extreme that the protagonists find
themselves confused, out of their depths, unable to comprehend and
explain, and the writer is similarly bewildered and unable to conclude his
account clearly. The ambiguous location of Huckleberry Finn within his
"civilization" at the conclusion of his
Adventures,
the impoverished situa–
tion of Silas Lampham at the end of Howells's
The Rise ofSilas Lapham,
and
the death in the electric chair of Clyde Griffiths near the close of Dreiser's
An American Tragedy
are all typical expressions of the fundamental impo–
tence of the little man and the artist who hoped
to
create a decent order for
him. The flat response of the narrative voice to the concluding situations in
these works indicates a crisis of faith in the power of literature in American
culture. For the response is neither a call for passionate social action nor for
irony and acquiescense; it is more the expression of a blank anxiety atten–
dant on a religious mystery . And perhaps it is the quasi-religious quality of
this literature, the possibility of salvation glimpsed even in the most
pessimistic vision, that despite the failure of the realists' public goals, and
despite their deep private anxiety, gives their writing a power that tran–
scends their failure .
As a consequence of its aspiration for success in a particular time,
realism
is
a notoriously time-bound, period piece body of fiction. Yet to
read a realistic work, which is laden with the failure of the writer and with
