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University Microfilms International 30C Norm .'e e u Roaa Ann Aroor Micinyan 48106 USA Si Jonns Road Tyler s Green HiCjn WycomDe Bucks England tiPlO bnf-i 7« l9b 07 HANELINE# 0 011G L A S LAT hAM THE SWING HF THE P E N f 1U L U M I NATURALISE CONTFHPHRARV AMERICAN LITERATURE, THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY, PH.D., 197R © Copyright by Douglas Latham Haneline 1978 THE SWING OF THE PENDULUM: NATURALISM IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Douglas Latham Haneline, A.B., M.A. A * * * * The Ohio State University 1978 Reading Committee: Approved By Thomas W. Cooley Richard M. Weatherford John M. Muste Adviser Department of English ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks are due to the following: Georges Borchardt, Inc., for permission to quote from The Warriors, Copyright 1965 by Sol Yurick, Per tig, Copyright 1966 by Sol Yurick, The Bag, Copyright 1968 by Sol Yurick, Someone Just Like You, Copyright 1972 by Sol Yurick, and An Island Death, Copyright 1975 by Sol Yurick; Grove Press, Inc., Tor- per­ mission to quote from Last Exit to Brooklyn, Copyright 1957, 1960, 1961, 1964 by Hubert Selby, Jr. and The Room, Copyright 1971 by Hubert Selby, Jr.; Vanguard Press, Inc., for permission to quote from A Garden of Earthly Delights, copyright 1966, 1967 by Joyce Carol Oates and them, Copy­ right 1969 by Joyce Carol Oates; James R. Giles^ Tor per­ mission to quote from his unpublished "Naturalism and Ex­ perimentation: The First Five Novels of Joyce Carol Oates"; D. B. Graham, for materials, suggestions, and encouragement Thanks of another sort are due to Howard M. Munford, Professor Emeritus of American Literature at Middlebury Col lege, whose teaching first inspired my interest in the study of literature, and to John M. Muste, Professor of English at Ohio State University, whose encouragement, sug­ gestions, and patience have helped me at every stage in the completion of this work. VITA September 14, 1948. Born--Greenwich, Connecticut 19 70 ......................... A.B., Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont 1971-1972 ................. Graduate Teaching Assistant, Department of English, Univer­ sity of Delaware, Newark, Dc1 aware 19 72 ......................... M.A., University of Delaware, New ark, lie 1 a wa r e 1972-197S ................. Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio Eli;EDS OE STUDY Major field: Twentieth Century British and American Liter­ ature. Professor John M. Muste Minor fields: American Literature to 1900. Professor Richard M. Weatherford Biography and Autobiography. Professor Thomas W'. Cooley Nineteenth Century British Literature.Profes- sor Richard D. Altick i i i TABLE OT CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.......................................... ii VITA ........................................................ iii CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION.............................. 1 CHAPTER TWO: JOYCE CAROL OATES ...................... 4 5 CHAPTER THREE: SOL YURICK.............................. 91 CHAPTER POUR: HUBERT SELBY, J P ...................... 154 CONCLUSION ................................................. 212 LIST OP R E F E R E N C E S ....................................... 215 IV CHAPTER ONE, INTRODUCTION It is true, as psychoanalysts con­ tinually point out, that people do often have "the increasing sense of being moved by obscure forces within them--selves which they are unable to define." But it is not true, as Ernest Jones asserted, that "man's chief enemy and danger is his own unruly nature and dark forces pent up within him." On the contrary: "Man's chief danger" today lies in the unruly forces of contemporary society itself, with its alienating methods of production, its enveloping techniques of political domination, its international anarchy-- in a word, its pervasive transformations of the very "nature" of man and the con­ ditions and aims of life. - -C. Wright Mills, The Soc i ological Imag ination For thirty years, we have been told that American li­ terature has turned inward to gaze upon the psyche, and left to the social sciences the contemplation of the out­ side world. Though reaction to this turn has varied from resignation to relief, its reality and persistence have gone largely unquestioned. Most critics have echoed the sentiments of Nona Balakian and Charles Simmons, who tell us that it is "no wonder 'the novel of manners'--and by ex­ tension, the novel of social criticism--is dying, as was demonstrated some time ago. And not only because in our fluid, diversified society the writer has no base from which to view the human comedy. It is dying chiefly because the writer has ceased to believe that the social world can 2 reveal the direction of man's soul."" The inutility of examining the social world has been exaggerated by the enemies of literary realism, just as its friends have mourned its death with too hasty a certainty. In fact, as Edmund Wilson remarked nearly fifty years ago, literary history is never so neat as its analysts present it to be; "what really happens, of course, is that one set of methods and ideas is not completely superseded by anoth­ er; but that, on the contrary, it thrives in its teeth. American fiction of the past fifteen years suggests tJmt realism remains vigorous in this country; in this study 1 want to suggest that contemporary writers have turned to what we call literary naturalism to express what they wished to say in literature, and that their choice of nat­ uralism has helped to clarify our ideas of what that phe­ nomenon is . To Joyce Carol Oates' A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967) and them (1969), Sol Yurick's The Warriors (1965), Fert ig (1966), and The Bag (1968), and Hubert Selby's Last Ex it to Brooklyn (1964) and The Room (1971), I have devoted closer attention in the body of this study, but first it is necessary to discuss something of the nature and history of literary realism and its offspring, literary naturali sm . In his exhaustive and valuable Documents of Modern L i t c r a r v Realism (1 965), George Becker suggests that the various meanings we have attached to the word "reality" may be grouped in four basic categories: (1) absolute es sence (what Plato meant in his use of the term; something perfect, unchanging, and eternal, that in the next world of which things in this world are imperfect and temporary imitations), ( 2)that which is "unique in ind ividual exper­ ience and has its essential being out of time" (the reality Proust recovers/creates in Remembrance of Things Past) , (5) "that which inheres in external phenomena," and (4), "that which has its being in some k ind of relation between external reality and perceiving consciousness." Three and four, Becker tells us, are the sources of what is called literary realism, though (4) tends to find its expression 4 in "psychological realism." In a sense, of course, as Erich Auerbach and others have demonstrated, the representation of reality has been present in Western literature since the Old Testament, but literary realism, as we commonly use the term, is a phenome­ non that appears first in French literature in the time of Stendhal and Balzac. Auerbach tells us that when these two 4 took random individuals from daily life in their dependence on current historical circumstances and made them the subjects of serious, problematic, and even tragic representation, they broke with the classical rule of distinct levels of style, for according to this rule, everyday practical reality could find a place in literature only within the frame of a low or intermediate kind of style, that is to say, as either gro­ tesquely comic or pleasant, light, col­ orful, and elegant entertainment. Several accounts of this change in aesthetic practice have been advanced; most of them, Marxist or otherwise, em­ phasize the realization by artists that "the social base .