One of the problems attending the definition of any novel as Naturalistic is that the mere use of the term activates a set of axioms which form the character of one’s critical response. No one, of course, fully accepts Vernon L. Parrington’s helpful but too broadly phrased six-point definition of Naturalism; but it seems that many commentators approach McTeague still thinking along roughly the same lines. Because McTeague is a novel of degeneration depicting an individual as a victim of forces, hereditary and environmental, beyond his control and even his comprehension, readers look for related Naturalistic traits in Norris’s vision and technique in that work. And those readers usually manage to find them, more or less. Thus we read in critical literature on Norris that he is somewhat amoral, objective, pessimistic, and coldly serious in tone—though not purely so, as the classic Naturalists are. That Norris’s impure Naturalism was the result of lack of restraint in style and an apparently compulsive need to moralize is the qualification that commentators offer when defining his place in American literary history.

I would like to examine here one of those impure traits that mars the Naturalistic shape of McTeague and suggest that that impurity is actually one of the better features of the novel. I would also like to point out how the strict application of traditional critical tenets concerning Naturalistic fiction can, in its effects, ruin McTeague for the modern reader. McTeague is Naturalistic, but it is many other fine things we well. I propose that it is also a comic book—deliberately conceived and executed as such—and that the major critics have overlooked or distorted this characteristic because in their approach to the work they do not allow for the simultaneous presence of comedic and pathetic authorial intentions. Ridiculous, grotesque, laughable events transpire in McTeague (as they do in Maggie also), and they are not the lamentable results of Norris’s ineptitude, lack of taste, or stupidity.

An appreciation of the humor of McTeague hinges upon one’s perception of Norris’s attitude toward his hero. McTeague, clearly, does not immediately resemble Henry Fleming, Martin Eden, Hurstwood, or Nick Adams. In fact, as we read the first half of McTeague, it proves difficult to make use of the word hero at all. For McTeague is a colorful oddity, a bumpkin, a clod, a fool—"a clown with ass’s ears" as Norris terms him (p. 66). As we become familiar with our principal character, the allusion to Shakespeare’s comedy rings true: the dentist is kin to Bottom, inhabiting the stage of comedy and, for a good while, quite remote from the stage of Macbeth and Hamlet. In no other novel that I know has an author directly termed his main character "stupid" and employed the adverb "stupidly" so many times as Norris does, to make clear just what his attitude toward him is and to prompt the reader as to what attitude he should assume. As Norris sits back and repeatedly roars at the behavior of the dentist, we too are to enjoy the show that McTeague and his equally grotesque comrades put on. Mad Maria Macapa, insanely avaricious Zerkow, loud-mouthed and empty-headed Marcus, and the geriatric lovers Old Grannis and Miss Baker join in to create the broad farce of a strange but true comédie humaine. I simply cannot understand why no one has yet written in earnest about the antics of these characters as comedic.

An apparent reason for the repeatedly mirthless reading of McTeague is that observers seem to approach the work with a strong preconception as to what a Naturalistic work should be like. It seems presumed that Mac should be viewed as though he were a Hurstwood. Consequently, these readers see Norris, from the first page on, as exclusively interested in seriously constructing a pathetic hero who, through a series of unfortunate incidents, suffers a terrible fall and is worthy of our unreserved sympathy. When it turns out that the narrative tone of McTeague does not quite correspond to such an alleged authorial intention, and when Norris thus seems to be violating the alleged purpose of the novel, these readers are quite naturally disconcerted and disappointed. One reading McTeague as straight Naturalism throughout may be especially alarmed when the tragic situation being developed is suddenly counterpointed by what sounds like a faint, somewhat sinister, authorial snicker. And the cacophony that that reader hears gives cause for outrage and amazement. Who is this Norris to be laughing at the plight of poor McTeague? Who is this Norris who, like a Naturalistic fiend, is self-complacently pulling off the wings of his specimens, chuckling at their unlikely gaits?

Norris thus becomes a writer with unfeeling, aristocratic airs, offensively expressing his ironic disdain for the lowly proles. And we thereby encounter a critical response similar to what might result if a reader had decided to respond to Falstaff as though he were King Lear. As that Shakespeare critic might, the Norris commentator gets huffy about Norris’s inappropriate levity, and he ultimately chides Norris for a nigh incredible degree of smugness.

One may speak of a kind of derision to which Norris subjects his characters. One may. But if derision it is, it is phrased in the broadly humorous tones of burlesque, and there is no more serious "derision" than is to be found in Spenser’s attitude toward the clownish Braggadochio or in Wilde’s attitude toward his outrageous characters in The Importance of Being Earnest. Consider the scene in which Marcus—egomaniacal buffoon that he is, who never has thought seriously of Trina Sieppe in terms of love—steps aside for Mac to plight his troth. Marcus is clearly becoming vicariously involved in the romantic bathos that any 1890s American might have enjoyed, and learned, when viewing staged melodrama like Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda or when reading popular romances like Davis’s The King’s Jackal.

The scene continues and what ensues is clearly mock heroic. Norris employs the time-tested comic device of placing the ignoble in the context of nobility, dressing two dunces in the garb of heroic personages. And in the first of the following sentences Norris asks the reader to recall that it is Mac—stupid, ox-like Mac—who partakes in the melodrama that Marcus has initiated: "It was a great moment; even McTeague felt the drama of it" (p. 42). That lead, "even McTeague," bears consideration in light of the somber response

usually afforded a work that is supposed to be monolithically Naturalistic. We may recall what Marcus and McTeague are actually like before proceeding. For Norris pulls out all stops and develops the comic inflation in earnest.

McTeague then holds forth in this heroical context:

What could be more conscious, deliberate, and obvious than the humor generated here? Norris is not snickering up his sleeve or malevolently barking dark laughter; he openly invites us to share in the absurdity of the moment as two jackdaws are made to strut in peacock feathers.

Moreover, who is the object of these heroic sentiments? What damsel of Petrarchan sublimity is it our Damon and Pythias worship in courtly fashion? Trina enters the story as a young lady who "had fallen out of a swing the afternoon of the preceding day; one of her teeth had knocked loose and the other altogether broken out" (p. 17). She is the loved one who happens to vomit during the scene in which McTeague unexpectedly blurts a proposal of marriage as she shakes off the effects of anesthesia. Consider her portrait as she refuses the proposal—screaming "No, no" through a rubber dam in her mouth, cringing in the dental chair as the Neanderthal beau leans toward her (p. 24).

McTeague abounds in such silly moments. It is low comedy, but it is there and should be recognized as such. Auguste wets his pants at the vaudeville show to the embarrassment of our polite heroine; Papa Sieppe marches a family party to the picnic grounds in military fashion, blows up Auguste’s toy boat, and initiates his daughter’s wedding procession with a command of "Vorwarrts!" Zerkow marries Maria to feed his crazed imagination with the story of her family’s

gold plate, only to have her become sane and declare, "I don’t know what you’re talking about, Zerkow. . . . There never was no gold plate, no gold service. I guess you must have dreamed it" (p. 175). Grannis and Baker step from a Mary E. Wilkins Freeman tale into McTeague to flutter timidly through an unlikely courtship. McTeague drinks champagne at his wedding supper and pronounces it the best beer he has ever had, to the merriment of all—all, that is, except literary critics who suppose that Naturalism precludes the possibility of such elements being present in a book like McTeague.

Ironic inflation is the major comic device that Norris employs. Enjoying his rise in fortune and status, McTeague envisions himself as someday becoming a venerable patriarch, the head of a dynasty with a son named Daniel "who would go to High School, and perhaps turn out to be a prosperous plumber or house painter" (p. 141). The technique is simple: create a context and then drop the inappropriate, the unexpected into it. Making even more obvious the humorous intent are Norris’s tongue-in-cheek direct comments, like the one concerning his hero’s taste in music as revealed at the vaudeville theater. "‘That’s what you call musicians,’ [McTeague] announced gravely." Norris then intrudes: "‘Home, Sweet Home,’ played upon a trombone. Think of that! Art could go no farther" (p. 75). A third comic device is that of the non sequitur, one of which introduced this essay. Another, involving Mac and Trina, merits full quotation to indicate the way Norris plays his characters for good fun. It is an uneasy moment, early in their courtship, when hero and heroine seek to make a favorable impression upon each other. McTeague has just disclosed to Trina that he has never attended a picnic.

Should this be read seriously? It can be. There is nothing necessarily hilarious about Mac associating "sailing" with fishing for cod from a tugboat, and no one need fall off his chair with laughter as slow-witted McTeague fails to keep up with the pace of Trina’ s comments on picnics, drowning, "crawly and graceful" snakes, and swimming. But I think that we would miss something that Norris intended should we pass over the rambling, loosely connected dialogue as little more than filler, the main value of which would be the incrementation of background on Mac’s early life at the Big Dipper Mine. Surely Mac’s preoccupation with a Frenchman-named-Andrew’s twitching, in the context of a courting scene, merits some response.

The response need not be that Norris’s laughter is sardonic and that his laughter is chillingly condescending. It is not the mirth of Nathanael West or Joseph Heller. The laughter is hearty, as much as McTeague’s is at the vaudeville show, when he goes on until his eyes fill with tears. For vaudevillian in spirit is just what McTeague is for at least half its length: it is a quick-moving panoramic display of the colorful, the quirky, the lively, and the entertaining.

Norris’s pre-McTeague writings reveal a sensibility in awe of the incredible variety of life: its dynamism, its oddities, and its naturally spontaneous sensationality. Surprise and delight are not uncommon tones in the pieces published in The Wave; and comical sketches such as "Fantaisie Printaniere" and "Judy’s Service of Gold Plate"

are not chance deviations from the norm. McTeague begins with an expressed fascination for the life of Polk Street and the strange, interesting collection of characters who live and work near McTeague’s dental parlor. It’s a Story of San Francisco—to Norris a place where anything can happen, a "story city" where fact is often stranger than fiction. And for near two-hundred pages Norris romps on with one of the most bizarre, humorously eccentric groups one might imagine. It is not until after the midpoint that things turn dark, when Trina becomes deranged, Maria is murdered, Zerkow drowned, and McTeague clutched by the horrible working out of unfortunate circumstances.

It is these later events, occurring after Norris has switched from a humorous tone to one of darkening seriousness, that commentators seem to remember most when writing about McTeague. That is, critics may not be simply applying preconceptions concerning Naturalistic fiction when distorting the character of the first half of the novel. The real force of the dark second half may be coloring the first in the commentators’ memories, and the conclusion may shape the critics’ responses to the first half upon a subsequent reading. 1890s reviewers of McTeague expressed the same reaction as modern critics, describing the novel as a tale of unrelieved suffering. But there were some reviewers who did not blur the halves and who praised the light, comic moments, declaring that Norris was clearly capable of good humor in scenes like the wedding supper.

Now, Trina hiccoughing in a pool of blood is no laughing matter, nor is McTeague’s truly pathetic state during his decline. But what we should note is that by the time Norris begins straightforwardly developing McTeague’s pathos—by the time that McTeague begins to solicit credibility as a suffering human being in the manner of Hurstwood and Martin Eden—Norris has stopped calling him "stupid," a "gigantic, good-natured Saint Bernard," and an elephant wagging his head from side to side. When the novel ends with McTeague chained to Marcus, "stupidly looking around him" (p. 324), the connotation of the adverb is totally other from that in the first half. The extended joke was good, but Norris ended it when life began to close in upon the McTeagues.

Reading McTeague, then, should involve recognition of the active presence of two authorial tones, the one eventually being replaced by the other. The latter tone, the Naturalistic, has been emphasized too much at the expense of the first. To view the novel in terms of both tones will, at the least, explain the function of the Grannis Baker episodes which have troubled commentators from William

Dean Howells on. The comical-sentimental episodes do not belong in a consistently developed, monistically pure example of Naturalism (if there is, indeed, such a creature). But they do belong in McTeague which is more than merely Naturalistic. The recognition of the gradual transition from comic, to serio-comic, to pathetic in the authorial perspective and narrative tone of McTeague seems a necessar5’ first step in revising our critical view of that work. It may be the means by which we can appreciate all that Norris offers us, the tart and the sweet.

FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

NOTES

    ¹Frank Norris, McTeague: A Story of San Francisco, edited with an Introduction by Carvel Collins (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1950), p. 10. Subsequent references to the text of this edition are made in parentheses in the body of this essay.