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PARTISAN REVIEW
describes in his novel . But Howells condescends to his main character and
his condescension undermines the integrity of the idea he dramatizes . The
concern for humanity is buried under the concern for ideas, and the
suffocation is palpable in the work . The mystery oflife, whether beneficent
or malevolent , is sensed perhaps by Lapham, but never by the reader, who
remains too aware of Howells's attempt to maintain control. Moreover,
because Howells so adheres to his fixed vision and , unlike his friend Twain,
cannot give imaginative energy to animate the vital and perverse force
which animates a character like Sawyer , Howells's fiction is static. The
conflict is not embodied in a vital character who lives on .
The obvious contrast here is the work of Dreiser , in which the creation
of a more "real" picture of life results from an enthusiastic identification
with the imaginative activity of the little man about whom he writes. In
Dreiser's account of that activity , the real is forced out through the popular
stereotype which the little man uses to envision his own life . In
An American
Tragedy,
for example, the characters define themselves by constructing and
living out a fiction about their identities, a creation parallel to Dreiser's act
of writing the novel. The quest for reality, then, both in the minds of the
characters and in the mind of the author creating those characters, is a
function of the ongoing vitality of the imagination, a matter of finding an
appropriate story . Although Dreiser has a reputation for naturalistic ideas,
and scientific determinism, the sheer quantity of phenomena in his novel
undermines such explanatory models . Instead, we are given fictions–
within-fictions, accounts of people living out their delusions in a world of
no clear order . We are given a sense of the vertigo produced in lives lived
out as sheer imaginative constructions .
Clyde's lawyer , Jephson , is an example . As he reconstructs for the jury
a narrative of Clyde's supposed motives, the man is motivated by his
self-conscious adaptation of the role of "the country lawyer. " With all of the
craft that goes with that role , he takes the bits of information which Clyde
can supply and through intuition fashions an account that will seem
persuasive. But as he does so, we realize that his imaginative activity
parallels Dreiser's process of thinking out his own authorial account of the
original murder scene . Jephson's fiction-making within Dreiser's made
fiction heightens the problem basic to the novel-the problem of what is
"real ." And since the two accounts are equally plausible, yet not the same,
and it is very difficult to tell how they differ, the problem is increased
further. For the difference is crucial ; it might help to decide if or how Clyde
was guilty.
Clyde's own attempt to discover what is real, what he did do, what he
should have done, why he did what he did , and what is happening to him
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