"Dubliners" by James Joyce

 

James Joyce 1882-1941

For several weeks, we've been tracing the development and influence of naturalism, a literary movement that broke with the conventions of Victorian prose style. Naturalism is a crucial link between nineteenth century prose and the development of modernism that defined literature in the twentieth century. Naturalist prose introduced a more streamlined writing style and explored taboo themes and portrayed people, their motivations, behavior and the environment in which they exist in a more objective and realistic way.

First, we looked at Irish author George Moore's novel Esther Waters, a book that took a frank, unflinching look at the life of a single, illiterate mother in nineteenth century London. Moore questioned entrenched cultural beliefs about poverty, morality, religion and the social and economic hardships faced by the poor. We also explored Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, a rags-to-riches story (and vice versa) that openly questioned the American dream of economic and social mobility that equates ambition with virtue and poverty with moral failing.

Then we backtracked to explore A Sportsman's Sketches, a collection of short stories by Russian author Ivan Turgenev, a book that explored the harsh realities of life for Russian peasants during the waning days of Russia's feudal landowning system. After that, we traced the naturalist influence to another of George Moore's works, The Untilled Field (1903), another collection of short stories about life in Ireland about twenty years before independence that was directly influenced by Turgenev's book. In this work, Moore's stories show us a nation searching for its identity as the Catholic church's intrusive influence on the everyday lives of Irish peasants, deeply rooted economic problems and widespread emigration to America threatened Ireland's future.

Now we come to another collection of stories that follow the naturalist thread in James Joyce's Dubliners (1914), a book that helped to secure Joyce's reputation as one of the world's most accomplished and influential authors while putting Ireland on the world cultural map. George Moore set the table for the emergence of a unique, distinctly Irish literary voice which turned out to be that of James Joyce. His work helped pave the way for modernism, a stylistic tide that spilled well beyond Ireland's geographical and cultural borders to influence world literature. Not bad for a guy who struggled for a decade to even get his stories published.

Dubliners (1914) by James Joyce

The mere mention of his name puts fear in the hearts of undergraduates, but don't worry; Dubliners is the most readable of James Joyce's works, although his prose is densely packed with meaning more implied than stated. By withholding information through the literary device of gnomon, the parts that are missing tell the real story. As a result, these stories break with narrative tradition by not resolving dramatically. He doesn't tell you what to think of the characters he draws, but relies on your ability to draw your own conclusions. Joyce would further shed conventions as his stream-of-consciousness narrative style became more pronounced in the novels Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. a brilliant but notoriously difficult and inscrutable work that still confounds even the most adventurous of readers. Nine out of ten people who claim to have read it are trying to impress and/or seduce you. (Just for the record, I haven't read it. I glimpsed a few pages once and became a little dizzy for a day or so, but I'm okay now.)

Whereas Turgenev's Sketches depicted the Russian peasantry as oppressed by an inherently unjust feudal system and Moore's book targeted the Catholic church's stranglehold on the mind and soul of the Irish peasant and explored the roots and consequences of Ireland's cultural identity crisis, Joyce concentrates on the day-to-day life of those in the urban Irish middle class. Many of the same forces are at work in Dubliners, but the conflicts are played out in psychological terms as each story gives us a view of the world from the main character's limited but revealing perspective. Joyce's protagonists wrestle with existential problems like inertia, crises of conscience, mental illness, alcoholism, family dysfunction and abuse, political conflicts, social ambition, piety, marriage and death--a veritable laundry list of issues dealt with in the next hundred years of fiction.

Dubliners contains thirteen unrelated stories, but taken linearly, these stories span the major stages of life from childhood to old age.  Each major character undergoes an epiphany about themselves and their circumstances, Sometimes these personal revelations are realistic, sometimes misguided, but always profound. I could write an essay about each of the stories, but here I'll limit myself to an overview of some of the stories and their themes.

Right from the get go, there's something distinctive about Joyce's words, as though his stories were pieces of sculpture. In Dubliners, fiction, like sculpture, is a subtractive medium, and we are to make sense of what the author hasn't taken away.. In "The Sisters", the passing of a mentally ill priest gives a young boy who was close to him his first experience of death and family and friends speak only indirectly about the man's troubles. Two boys encounter an odd. possibly perverted old man while playing hookey from school in "The Encounter", which deals with childhood friendships. Gnomon is consistently at work. We're as much in the dark about what befell the dying priest as the young boy, although as readers, we pick up on clues that he would miss; something sinister is implied in a way that has greater impact than explicitly stating it.

Young, idealistic love is the subject of "Araby", in which a teenage boy experiences the painful self consciousness of infatuation in a culture of sexual repression. His trip to a fair to buy her a gift ends in frustration and he returns home empty handed. The depth of his disappointment is in proportion to his unrealistic idea of love. This is the first of several foiled journeys that bring characters back full circle when they try to leave or change their circumstances.

In "Eveline", a young woman desperately seeking to escape her abusive father by marrying a sailor and sailing for Buenos Aires lacks the courage to follow through. Joyce draws our attention to descriptive details of her home and her possessions which give clues to her history and inner struggles.  In "A Little Cloud", unrealized dreams of a literary life haunt Little Chandler after dining with a friend who is a successful writer. He returns to his home in a foul mood, reminded of the shackles placed on him by his wife and child. Chandler's responses to his environment--in this case, drinking a bit too much in the presence of his former friend and being driven to the brink of brutality by his infant son's cries--tell us more than any explicit account of his state of mind. His fate, it would seem, was sealed by decisions he made long ago.

Three stories deal with social ambition. "The Race" is about a young man eager to impress his new, rich friends from school and to be successful in business. In "A Mother", Mrs. Kearny alienates those around her by being pushy as she zealously advocates for a promised performance fee at a charity variety show on her daughter's behalf. The proprietor in "The Boarding House" and her daughter craftily manipulate a lodger into marriage. It's interesting to note that he protagonists of these stories are, not surprisingly, the least inclined to struggle with the moral implications of their actions, and so we gain perhaps a little less insight into their thoughts and feelings.

Joyce's well chosen words evoke a nausea-free pathos that makes potentially melodramatic situations poignant rather than pathetic. Death, grief and guilt are dealt with squarely in "A Painful Case" when a circumspect middle aged man rebuffs a married woman's advances and is stricken with remorse when he learns of her pitiful, alcohol-fueled demise a few years later. His efforts to try to do the right thing result in doing a far greater injury. "Counterparts" depicts a scrivener's demise from drink and the resultant domestic abuse frankly and directly. He is a man paralyzed by his habits that endanger his job, his finances and his family. Anyone raised as an Irish Catholic, practicing or otherwise, can recognize the heavy burden of living with the moral implications of even well intentioned actions gone wrong, and no one portrays the psychological clash of intention versus consequences mixed with grief and alcoholism in quite the way Joyce does.

Three stories deal with community life, specifically the uncertainty and insecurity that arises when people see themselves in relation to those around them and whose actions fall well short of their ideals and beliefs. "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" deals most directly with the struggle for Irish independence as a small group of men campaigning for an upcoming election find themselves lacking in the looming shadow of deceased Nationalist leader Charles Parnell. "Grace" finds a group of middle class men giving lip service to the merits of temperance and spiritual values in the most agreeable, superficial and often erroneous ways. During a spiritual retreat intended to renew their commitment to spiritual values, even the priest reinforces their limited vision of themselves and their responsibilities. "The Dead", a novella-length story, is the most famous piece from this collection due to numerous adaptations for film and the stage. At a Christmas party (celebrating, in fact, the Feast of the Epiphany--get it?), Gabriel is painfully self conscious, so concerned with how others see him that after hearing his wife tell him the story of a former lover who died young, he considers whether dying young before having the chance to accrue more misdeeds and blunders is better than growing old.

This was a difficult work to put in a nutshell, but reading it is pure pleasure. Joyce's work has been analyzed to the hilt by many folks far more qualified that I am. There's no shortage of material about Joyce's works out there. If this book speaks to you, there are plenty of resources out there.

Next time, we'll conclude our series about naturalism by looking at Thérèse Raquin, the 1867 novel by naturalist granddaddy Émile Zola.

Download Dubliners from Project Gutenberg

"The Untilled Field" by George Moore

Last time, we traced the roots of realism and naturalism back to one of its sources, Russian author Ivan Turgenev. On this St. Patrick's Day, we're going to look at what  effect Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches had on the development of the Irish short story, specifically George Moore's 1903 collection of stories, The Untilled Field.


The Untilled Field (1903) by George Moore

First, a subjective opinion: This is an excellent collection of stories and it's a crying shame that George Moore's work has been so neglected. His prose is perfectly measured and his characters draw you in. There is subtle wit,  real compassion and outrage within its pages, and the way the stories dovetail one another gives a satisfying feeling of completeness. If it were a pop-up book, opening its pages would reveal an intricate, interwoven whole, like a piece of Irish literary origami.

George Moore was allegedly influenced by Ivan Turgenev's collection of short stories, A Sportsman's Sketches, a book focused on the plight of the Russian peasantry at the hands of landowners in a feudal system that was nearing its close. The narrator of those stories is detached, the characters are allowed to tell their own stories amidst lush natural surroundings, and the stories themselves are loosely connected by a single narrator.

By contrast, Moore's book centers around the plight of the Irish peasantry at the turn of the twentieth century--a time of great change as Ireland struggled for independence and to form its own identity. Turgenev's influence can be seen more in concept and form than in style. Both works center around the lives of oppressed rural people in a time of great economic and social change. The narrative voice shifts, although detachment is maintained, symbolism and allegory are frequently employed, and taken together, the stories are more cohesive. 

The presence of nature so prevalent in A Sportsman's Sketches is not as important here. Rather, priests and parishioners are engaged in a struggle of reason versus instinct that typifies Ireland's problems. Landlordism was outlawed in the year this book was published. Ireland had very little industrial infrastructure and much poverty, and its population seemed to move en masse to America for lack of opportunity and want of personal freedom. Incongruously, new churches were being erected as villages emptied. Clerical life was a way to escape poverty, but as the church acquired more and more land, built more churches and absorbed more of the remaining population into celibacy, the prospect of repopulating and rebuilding Ireland looked dim. Moore openly questions the church's role in Ireland's decline and looks at the lives of those who still remained.

There are thirteen stories here. "In the Clay" begins the collection, telling the story of John Rodney, a Paris-trained sculptor who has been commissioned by Father MacCabe to create a statue of the Virgin and Child for a new church. He enlists a nude model for the work, the beautiful seventeen-year-old Lucy Delaney, the daughter of a cheese-monger. Unaware that artists need to use live models for even sacred works, MacCabe, while visiting Rodney's studio, recognizes Lucy's face when he sees the work in progress and informs her parents. Rodney enters his studio to find the statue destroyed, suspecting the priest, but learning that it was in fact Lucy's brothers who defaced it after overhearing their parents and the priest discussing her involvement. Rodney, convinced that puritanical Ireland is no place for an artist, decides to leave his home country for good. This sets the tone of the book: As Ireland struggles for a new beginning, the best and brightest are driven from its shores by attitudes and practices out of step with the changing modern world. This story and "The Way Back" begin and end the collection, the latter providing some closure on what happened to the artist and his model after leaving Ireland for London.

"Some Parishoners" is about Father Maguire, an overly zealous priest who has taken it upon himself to police his parishioners, decrying their fancy for dance and drink from the altar, confronting and separating men and women from walking together and even arranging marriages between those in his care whom he considers to be disruptive to the moral order of the community--usually beautiful and outspoken single women.  Maguire charges impoverished villagers exorbitant fees for performing marriage ceremonies, mostly to raise money for the construction of a new church. Biddy, an elder chicken farmer, has managed to save enough money to pay for a stained glass window in the new structure. Her fixation on the new window is a source of irritation, but the rapturous visions she sees when the window is installed pays dividends by drawing attention and prestige to the parish. We see a priest detached those he serves and whose priorities are skewed away from their spiritual health and towards the solvency of his parish.

"Julia Cahill's Curse" is another story of one priest's failed plan to protect his parish from the influence of a beautiful and independent woman. "The Exile" and "Home Sickness" deal with the tantalizing allure of America and the beckoning of a new life that make the here and now of Ireland even more unbearable. "Letter to Rome" is a charming and dryly funny story of a priest who decides that the best solution to Ireland's problems is to allow priests to marry. Reasoning that a population with an inordinate number of celibates faces a very limited future, he writes a letter to the Pope asking to give his idea consideration. "So On He Fares" is a touching story of a little boy who leaves his abusive mother to become a river bargeman, only to return home a decade later to find another little boy with the same name living in his place, and "The Clerk's Quest" takes the form of a parable in which a middle aged office clerk is driven to ruin after becoming obsessed with a woman he knows only through her perfumed checks.

The longest and most engaging story is "The Wild Goose", in which the internal struggle of Ireland to come to terms with itself are embodied in the relationship between a man and a woman. Ned Carmady is an Irish American journalist who returns to Ireland with high hopes for reform after his experiences in Cuba fighting against the Spanish. He meets Ellen Cronin, a beautiful, educated and religious girl who sees in Ned the potential of being Ireland's political savior. They marry, and Ellen begins to prime him for public office, writing speeches for her husband. But a rift develops between them about religion. Carmody sees the clergy as the source of Ireland's troubles, and as his anticlerical viewpoint becomes more publicly pronounced, his marriage suffers. Their failed marriage is an apt allegory for the schism that troubles the country.

Through Moore's eyes, we see a nation unable to reconcile its Gaelic roots, language and traditions with a religion that seeks to blot out its proud pagan past at the expense of the present. Both the Catholic church and America cast long, imposing shadows over the Irish people, forcing them to move into the light by either embracing or abandoning their country and their faith.

The Untilled Field was written twenty years before Irish independence, giving us several views of complex economic and cultural forces in at the heart of Irish rural life. In 1914, James Joyce would publish Dubliners, another collection of short stories that looks at the urban middle class and their struggle to forge a new identity and understanding of itself. We'll look at that short story collection next time.

Download The Untilled Field from Project Gutenberg

Naturalist Roots: Ivan Turgenev's "A Sportsman's Sketches"

In the last post, we looked at a handful of books written in the naturalist style. Now I'd like to trace the realist and naturalist influence back to one of its sources, the Russian author Ivan Turgenev.


A Sportsman's Sketches (1852) by Ivan Turgenev

Nineteenth century Russian books have a reputation for being long, difficult works with far too many characters and impenetrable cultural contexts that might bewilder new readers. But if you're curious about Russian fiction, this collection is a good place to start. The individual stories in A Sportsman's Sketches are intense and entertaining, and taken together they form a satisfyingly unified whole. While this book is very much of its time, the sheer humanity of its characters cuts across cultural and temporal divides. Much of what you need to know about history to appreciate this collection can be found within the text itself.
 
Turgenev wrote about a feudal system in decline; landowners were once prosperous, but the glory days have long since passed. Many once thriving estates are crumbling and the descendants of wealthy landowning families find it increasingly difficult to manage their properties successfully--often because of their own shortsightedness. 

Pastoral Russia is as much a character in these stories as anyone residing in its woods. Turgenev's vibrant descriptions of the natural world are some of the most lovely and engaging of their kind in all of literature, and his style and tone had a pragmatic as well as aesthetic advantage; by employing the naturalist device of the disinterested narrator, he was able to get provocative ideas past the censors to speak directly to his audience about the many injustices of Russia's feudal system.

Each piece is about the people the narrator meets and the stories he hears while hunting in the countryside. In "Raspberry Water", the narrator encounters two elderly men fishing, both former house serfs, who embody the region's fading past. Styopushka, a homeless former serf is humble and directionless, foraging for his daily bread and living on the former estate of a wealthy landowner through the charity of a peasant family who currently lives there. Tuman (Russian for "frog"), is a freed house serf who tells stories about his former master's abundant estate and his sometimes severe manner with the servants. While talking to the two old men, another serf, the middle aged Vlass, arrives home from a long journey visiting his landlord in Moscow. Joining the conversation, he laments the recent death of his son and his inability to get his absentee landlord to allow him to move to a smaller piece of land that he can afford. His landlord reprimands him for not taking the issue to the bailiff first. Vlass' story gives us a glimpse of the plight of peasant farmers who can barely make a living under the feudal system and were subjected to many abuses by landowners and their employees. In "Bailiff" we learn about the kind of blackmail and manipulation often committed by those who manage the landowners' estates, giving us a pretty good idea of why, in the earlier story, Vlass was reluctant to deal directly with his master's employee.

"Two Country Gentlemen" gives us a closer look at the landed gentry. Retired General Hvalinsky is a man of austere habits with a serious countenance who is an inept manager of his affairs. He keeps his inferiors at arm's length and supplicates his betters, but prefers to play cards with his inferiors. He enjoys his status, but is self-conscious about appearing to be too ostentatious. The opposite is true of Mardary Apollonitch, a jovial, friendly man with only a superficial interest in the affairs of his large estate. He is a landowner of the old style to whom appearances are of primary importance while in stark contrast, his servants live in squalid, ruinous huts overlooking his property.

Turgenev also brings in elements of traditional folklore in "Byezhin Prairie", a charming story about a group of boys by a campfire telling each other tales of faeries and ghosts. There is dark humor in these stories as well: "Lgov" is about a fishing trip gone wrong as a party of fisherman capsizes in a borrowed boat led a foolhardy fisherman named Vladimir.  "Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District" lampoons the pretensions of the landowning elite through the story of one of their ranks who has realized the meaninglessness of his social standing, and "Tatyana Borisovna and her Nephew" is a wryly comic story of a woman whose nephew is whisked away to St. Petersburg by a rich benefactor. He leaves his aunt's home as an art prodigy and returns as a boorish, lazy, drunken lout. Now that's realism!

The longest piece of this collection is the two part story found in "Chertopkhanov and Nedopyuskin" and the sequel, "The End of Chertopkhanov", It is a tale of misfortune and existential terror in the heart of a landowner whose family and fortunes are on the wane. In these stories can be found, part and parcel, the very stuff of Russian storytelling: destitution, death, torrid romance, a fine horse, obsession, loss, drunkenness and insanity.

I found a wonderful contextual clue while researching this book: A Sportsman's Sketches was published in the same year as Harriet Beecher Stowe's landmark novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. Both of these works highlighted the injustices of slavery. The popularity of Turgenev's collection helped to raise awareness of the plight of Russia's peasantry, leading to an abolition of serfdom in 1860. The realism of Stowe's novel brought the horror of the enslavement of blacks into the public consciousness of Americans, and the change in public opinion ultimately led to the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. Both authors used clear language to communicate stark truths that influenced the social and economic trajectories of their respective countries. The combination of plain words, good intentions and a willing audience can actually affect real change.

This is, of course, a best case scenario. Individual results may vary.


Download A Sportsman's Sketches, Volume 1 from Project Gutenberg

Download A Sportsman's Sketches, Volume 2 from Project Gutenberg

A note on the digital edition: Project Gutenberg has continued to revise their catalog by creating digital editions that work better with modern eReader devices. Currently, this book exists in two volumes, the second of which has yet to be formatted for such devices although it is available in plain text that can be converted to other formats using free eBook authoring software like Calibre. Let's hope that this classic is reviewed and revised into a nice eBook that contains both volumes. They're very busy folks who are doing good work, so we'll give them a break.

Antique Poverty Part 2: Naturalist Novels

Every innovation, every new mode of expression, every attempt to expand the boundaries of art has met with stern opposition. Novel reading was not always seen as an activity worthy of the upstanding, moral middle class. Like most new and enjoyable things, novels were once seen as a gateway drug to immorality. The moral gatekeepers of the Victorian age had very definite ideas of what constituted acceptable literature--usually those works that reinforced their ideal vision of themselves as God-fearing, prudent, self-reliant and industrious people. These are not exactly the ingredients for compelling fiction, and fortunately for us, the most widely read books of the period tended to subtly (and often not so subtly) subvert and question these ideals within their pages despite the objections of prim moralists. By mid-century, strains of a more realistic view of the world began to find a way into mainstream fiction that increasingly expressed the need for social change.

These two novels are examples of naturalism, a movement that sought to overturn conventional Victorian morality and style in favor of more realistic characters, settings and stories that used more direct language. It's beginnings can be seen in the works of Russian author Ivan Turgenev and the works of French novelist Émile Zola.

The thematic breadth and scope of literature during this period expanded while prose became leaner and the narrative voice became more objective. The characters depicted in naturalist novels did real things that most people do, like have sex, drink, gamble, fight, murder, etc. Moreover, the naturalist movement gave an emerging voice to the plight of women, the poor and to other issues of social and economic inequality that characterized the Victorian era. Naturalists saw human behavior as inexorably tied to heredity, class and education, and the behavior of the characters they created were portrayed as natural and inevitable responses to their environments.

As might be imagined, this movement generated its share of controversy. French novels of the mid-nineteenth century were seen as far too saucy and frank for English and American readers, but their influence was to be found in the work of a new crop of reform-minded writers who directly addressed unpleasant truths while attempting to express the commonality of human suffering to a mainstream, middle class audience. Critics saw this new literature as sordid, but by the time these novels were written, naturalism was more or less familiar to readers in both England and the U.S.

These two novels are worth considering side by side:


Esther Waters (1894) by George Moore

Discovering the work of Irish author and playwright George Moore is like discovering a secret. He wrote many novels, short stories and plays, but Esther Waters is his most famous work. Moore's brand of naturalism got him into trouble with lending libraries that refused to circulate his books, but by 1894, the furor had died down and this novel was widely acclaimed.

It's the story of a poor London girl who, lacking any other option and hoping to get away from an abusive family life, goes into service in the home of a well-to-do family whose wealth comes from breeding and racing horses. Her deeply religious background doesn't prepare her for the reality of her new surroundings in which loose talk and drinking among her fellow servants and the gambling obsession that possesses nearly everyone in the household regardless of rank, stands in contrast to the moral lessons of her youth. While below stairs, she falls in love with William, a fellow servant who promises to marry her as soon as his bets start to bring in money, but instead leaves her with child and runs off with a wealthy cousin of the household. She is then forced to fend for herself while caring for her son in a world that has little sympathy for an illiterate servant girl with a bastard child.

Esther's story mirrors the real life struggles of single English mothers of the age. In deciding to keep her son, she has taken on a burden that so stigmatizes her as to make it difficult for her to make even a meager living. She and those around her struggle against a rigid class system that allows for little social and economic mobility. Gambling seems the only chance to escape poverty and toil, but more often it leads to short term gains followed by long term ruin. Esther's religious beliefs become increasingly incongruous to her, representing to her an ideal which she finds it impossible to live up to and difficult to reconcile with the reality she faces.

But this is no artless social criticism or political tract; this is a very finely crafted novel written with great sensitivity and economy. Moore's language is direct and to the point, and that precision is what allows the story to flow in a way that would be impossible with language encumbered by dense Victorian style. This is also a novel that manages to bring itself full circle from beginning to end without capitulating to public taste for a happy ending. And yet, we get closure. That's good writing, and this book is worth reading.

Download Esther Waters from Project Gutenberg


Sister Carrie (1900) by Theodore Dreiser

In contrast to the Englishness of Esther Waters, Sister Carrie is a decidedly American story. Carrie is a middle class girl from rural Wisconsin who goes to Chicago with vague visions of wealth and status, uses men she meets as the stepping stones to sophistication and material success, and becomes a renowned actress in New York. The second of these men, George Hurstwood, is a married manager of a private Chicago dining club who leaves his wife and children, steals ten thousand dollars from the company safe and flees with Carrie, eventually settling in New York where, under an assumed name, they are married, albeit illegally.

As Carrie's star rises, Hurstwood finds it difficult to regain the status and wealth he once enjoyed in Chicago. As she becomes more confident and independent, Hurstwood sinks into depression and despair, increasingly relying on Carrie's new found success to support the household. He also gets a glimpse into the reality of the urban poor when he attempts to take a job as a scab streetcar driver during a labor strike. The two undergo a complete role reversal, and their contrasting experiences reflect the reality of millions trying to claw their way to the top or to regain the lives of status and leisure that have somehow slipped through their fingers.

Theodore Dreiser, once considered the premiere man of American letters in the early twentieth century, has fallen out of style. His writing is notoriously turgid, his dialogue can be stiff and unnatural. and his plots are generally underdeveloped and relentlessly linear. Yet this, along with his greatest novel, An American Tragedy (1925), are still read by American high school and college students. Why? Because he pulls no punches about the living and working conditions of the urban poor and the practical and moral dilemmas they faced. Sister Carrie breaks new ground, pitting the optimistic American cultural ideal of material reward for hard work and industry against the gritty, realistic urban backdrop of toil, poverty and degradation that existed at the turn of the twentieth century. Social mobility was--or was at least believed to be--achievable in America, where the ascribed status of family and rank had less meaning. Dreiser sees the pursuit of the American dream as an obsession that sacrifices moral reasoning for material gain in the name of virtue.

Sister Carrie is a novel that is very much of its time, and while it may not have aged well in some respects, it still has something to teach us. The American argument of self reliance versus social conscience still rages more than a century later, and along with the novels of Sinclair Lewis, Dreiser's work serves as a fairly accurate map of American cultural DNA. George Moore goes even further in Esther Waters by examining the incongruent demands of the Protestant work ethic--a doctrine at the core of American values--in light of the grim reality of those without the necessary breeding or education to escape their situation.

Download Sister Carrie from Project Gutenberg


Here are a few other good ones:

McTeague (1899) by Frank Norris

An odd, dark story about greed and animal instinct run amok. This novel has perhaps the greatest ending of all time. This book was adapted for the screen by Erich von Stroheim in the notorious Hollywood epic, Greed (1924), a film widely considered to be one of the greatest silent movies ever made. I can take or leave this novel, but that ending really does pack a wallop.

Download McTeague from Project Gutenberg


The Jungle (1909) by Upton Sinclair

This novel depicts the plight of immigrant workers in the Chicago meat packing industry, the inhuman nightmare of wage slavery and corrupt politics. The reading public's attention was more focused on the unsanitary conditions of food processing rather than the dire living conditions of those who had to work those awful jobs, so while a success, it kind of backfired. Like many Americans, I was forced to read this book in high school. Not for the squeamish.

Download The Jungle from Project Gutenberg


The Call of the Wild (1903) by Jack London

A story about a domesticated dog who is captured to serve as a sled dog in the Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush. This is a truly timeless story of instinct and survival that is a fabulous read. It's also another book that American students are familiar with. Funny how many naturalist novels have become staples of American education, if indeed American school children are even required to read books anymore.

Download The Call of the Wild from Project Gutenberg

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

The free and easy availability of eBooks has pushed a few forgotten classics back into the spotlight. Unlike many, this one has remained more or less in print since its publication, largely because students of economics, history and sociology still read it, or at least parts of it. While it has mostly remained in print, it was not something the average bookseller was likely to stock on a regular basis. Like all of the books on The Overleaf, its public domain status means anyone who wants it can have it. That's a very good thing indeed, because it is a book well ahead of its time--one of those rare works that brings together elements of an original concept, cited research, accessible writing and adept storytelling. How does one begin to describe a book that is so wide ranging? I guess we're about to find out…


Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841) by Charles MacKay

Scottish journalist and author Charles MacKay makes a compelling case for nonconformity in a comprehensive skeptic's almanac that spotlights human gullibility and its widespread effects on the reason and sanity of populations and cultures. MacKay writes, "Three causes especially have excited the discontent of mankind; and, by impelling us to seek for remedies for the irremediable, have bewildered us in a maze of madness and error. These are death, toil, and ignorance of the future—the doom of man upon this sphere, and for which he shews his antipathy by his love of life, his longing for abundance, and his craving curiosity to pierce the secrets of the days to come." 

This passage sums up the book's scope. All of the manias, crises, wars, fads and trends seem to fall into one or more of these categories. He avoids matters of religion, wryly commenting in his introduction that questions of religion and mass delusion would provide enough material "sufficient to occupy a volume" of its own. Indeed. Apart from the Crusades and the craze for relics in the Catholic church, he largely stays away from confronting religion outright.

In the most famous section of this book, he examines two financial booms in England and France in the early eighteenth century that were in both cases quelled by the rampant insider trading of an impossibly corrupt aristocracy driven by their zeal to get rich quick. These two case studies are still read by students of economics, and anyone who lived through the real estate bubble that led to the world economic crisis of 2008 will find it hard to suppress a knowing smirk. He also touches on The Netherlands' Tulip Mania crisis, although the astronomical rise in the price of tulips is now believed by modern historians to have been substantially less disruptive to the Dutch economy than previously thought.

Historically, claiming to circumvent the time-honored existential ills of death, toil and the mystery of the future has proven to be highly lucrative, and there was never a shortage of charlatans who sought to profit from any eager seekers they could dupe. Scores of anecdotes are offered of the men and women who were driven to madness and/or destitution in the desire to manufacture gold, talk to the dead and see into the future. But the most fascinating sketches MacKay draws are those of the world's most accomplished quacks, tricksters and schemers who found ingenious ways to seduce people in high and low places to part with their money for unrealized promises. The intrigues and adventures of rogues and rubes make for some great reading.

As MacKay merrily debunks soothsayers and prophets like Nostradamus, "magnetizers" who sound eerily like bogus New Age "healers", witch hunting, haunted houses, dream interpreters and the insane pastime of deuling to settle petty differences, one begins to see hints of the then emerging discipline of sociology via the work of Auguste Comte, Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer. Unlike the works of those three heavy hitters, MacKay's book was written to entertain, and his language is lively and accessible to modern readers.

The extensive piece that depicts the Crusades as a humanitarian crisis caused by a mass delusion is an excellent piece of writing that is well ahead of its time. Errors in collective judgement often lead to ridiculous, painfully comic results, but MacKay was clearly dismayed and appalled by senseless human suffering and envisioned a day when society would grow beyond its tendency to rashly embrace spurious truths and its capacity to destroy each other in the process. Well, it's 2013 and we're still waiting, Chuck. I feel you, man.

MacKay's anecdotal style means that you don't have to swallow this book whole; it can be read piecemeal without any loss of context or continuity. Truth is, you're better off taking it bit by bit. It's as dense as a cheesecake, touching on many subjects over roughly two thousand years of history--so much good stuff, in fact, that I'm probably not doing this book justice in writing about it. But believe me, It's endlessly fascinating and lots of fun. A chapter of this book can cleanse your literary palette between novels or provide a diversion while riding the train to work or waiting for your plane to land. It's much more fun than the in-flight magazine.

A note on the digital edition: The lack of illustrations in the eBook edition is a bit unsettling, since the captions describing them remain, taunting and frustrating readers with the ghosts of rich and compelling images unseen. Project Gutenberg has done a great job of going back into their catalog to refurbish titles to make them play nice with today's eReader devices, often including complete texts with images. This book is a prime candidate for an overhaul. I want to see those pictures!

Next time, I'll get back to writing about novels.

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Books Fatal to Their Authors

Twenty-first century writers have it far, far too easy.

They might think that the critics for the New York Review of Books are difficult to please, but the jibes and barbs of critics are nothing compared to what writers faced in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when publishing a new work often meant taking your life into your own hands. Writers who challenged the status quo faced fates far worse, such as torture, burning, boiling, having various bits hacked off or, in the case of seditious libel, being subjected to a red hot branded "SL" on the cheek--surely a far cry from the cozy world of academia where the worst that could happen is a rejection letter from the Journal Science or a C-minus on your short story for your writer's workshop about your dysfunctional family. Writing used to be serious business, and publishing was not for the faint of heart.


Books Fatal to Their Authors (1895) by P. H. Ditchfield

In modern times, pitching a book that catalogs the demise of dozens of authors and publishers who ran afoul of Papal and civil authorities and were chased, hounded and ultimately put to death for their efforts might be a tough sell for the big publishers, but Ditchfield does a good job of making his subject matter engaging and even entertaining. This is essentially a book of anecdotes that tell of the trials of rogue theologians, historians, political and social critics, fanatics, astrologers, poets, dramatists and publishers. However, this anecdotal approach to the material can be a little repetitive, so this is a book that one might read a little at a time. All in all, this is a merry, dry witted but scholarly romp through lives ruined by censorship.

Consider Polish theologian Cazimir Lisznski, whose claim that "God is not the creator of man, but man is the creator of God" got him executed by order of the Bishop of Potsdam in 1689 and whose ashes were shot out of a cannon. Or Galileo, whose confirmation of Copernicus' theory that the earth revolves around the sun earned him a visit from the Spanish Inquisition--a body whose henchmen were too stupid to even understand his work ("Are these then my judges?" he asked). Or Italian satirist Trajan Boccalini, whose Pietra del paragone politico (1615), a withering criticism of Spanish misrule in Italy, bought him a visit from four big guys who held him down on a couch and beat him to death with sand bags.

Riveting stuff, indeed. Ditchfield isn't above expressing his own opinions or displaying a few sparks of wit, either. "Whether to burn a man is the surest way to convert him," he writes, "is a question open to argument. " The infamous Bastille is referred to as a proven  "reformatory for audacious writers". His off-the-cuff critiques of religious works and theological tracts reveal his bias as a minister in the Church of England, proclaiming some authors and works as ridiculous (in all fairness, some of them were ridiculous), but strongly arguing against censorship. He was a man of his time.

Ditchfield presents authors and works both well known and extremely obscure, preferring to cite the original titles in Latin, French and Italian and sometimes quoting these works at length in their original language, but readers can get through the rough spots in context easily enough. And it's okay to skip longish passages of Latin, French and Italian without feeling as though you're cheating. Good bathroom reading.

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Two Novels About Different Guys Named Guy

"So these two Guys walk into a castle…"

Sir Walter Scott pioneered the historical novel, writing dozens of books centered around his native Scotland that enjoyed a worldwide audience and the acclaim of his peers. William Harrison Ainsworth also wrote historical novels, and while he was a lesser writer than Scott and the flame of his popular and critical notoriety burned out much more quickly, both of these authors have found parity in the degree to which their works have been neglected by readers and academics. Scott's Ivanhoe and Ainsworth's The Tower of London are the most famous works by these two men that are still read (the former considerably more than the latter). 

But both of these guys wrote novels that were fun to read: Scott wrote richly plotted, lush romantic tales of his native land with the skill and grace of the poet he was, and Ainsworth wrote action-packed tales plucked from English history with a sharp eye for historical detail and the broad popular appeal of Hollywood blockbuster movies.

For our purposes, what both of these guys really did was to write novels about guys named Guy.


Guy Mannering (1815) by Sir Walter Scott

Despite what the title might suggest, this is not an etiquette guide for bachelors. This was Scott's second novel, the follow up to the enormously successful Waverley--a difficult act to follow, as first novels often are. While Waverley focused on the Jacobite uprising of 1745, this novel takes place a few decades later, roughly between 1760 and 1780, in southwest Scotland.

Guy Mannering, a Colonel in the British army who dabbled in astrology as a young man, drew a horoscope that boded ill tidings for Harry Bertram, the newborn son and rightful heir of a Scottish magistrate whose estate Mannering happened to visit on a trip to Scotland. The five-year-old Bertram becomes the victim of a kidnapping plot that contributes to the downfall of his family's fortunes. The heir's return does not bode well for those who seek to gain from keeping his true identity a secret. But that's not even the half of it. This is a very difficult novel to synopsize for all its layers of plot and characterization. Bertram's troubles spring from a power struggle between magistrates, lawyers and smugglers. Add to all this the haunting presence of the gipsy Meg Merrilies, one of the most striking and evocative characters in all of English literature and the only character in the novel who sees through the deceptions and lies that keep Bertram from assuming his rightful position as head of his family estate.

This is a fine novel, and for what it lacks in the sheer emotional power that made Waverley such a gem, it makes up for with an intriguing story and unforgettable characters. If you like inventively plotted, exciting and mysterious tales, Guy Mannering is for you. As usual, there's lots of authentic Scottish dialect used here, but you'll get the hang of it if you can give it a chance.
 
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Guy Fawkes (1841) by William Harrison Ainsworth

The first of Ainsworth's series of very successful historical novels, this is the story of the famed Gunpowder Plot in which the notorious Guy Fawkes and a group of English Catholics tried and failed to blow up Parliament in 1605--an event celebrated with bonfires every year in England on the fifth of November.

Ainsworth was a meticulous researcher whose attention to accurate historical detail in matters of dress, custom and architecture gave his readers an uncanny, vivid sense of time and place. But he was also equally reckless with the details of the real life events he portrayed, and gleefully rearranged the facts and characters to create a compelling story that would appeal to his readers--largely middle class folks who read for pleasure rather than intellectual stimulation. Purists may scoff and titter at Ainsworth's tinkering, but mixing fact and fiction in this way is precisely how legends have been created in nearly all cultures for centuries. Ainsworth's historical novels are part of a time honored tradition of storytelling.

The Gothic and supernatural touches he adds make this novel read like a lushly illustrated comic book. The action moves well and the pages turn of their own volition, but don't look too deeply or you won't enjoy the ride. Though this is probably not "great literature" in the strictest sense, I have much affection for Ainsworth. Historical novels superimpose the values and prejudices of the eras in which they were written upon the eras that they portray, and like all of his historical romances, Guy Fawkes mythologizes English historical events in a decidedly Victorian way that reveals much about how the people of the nineteenth century viewed their own collective past. A modern-day novel of the Guy Fawkes legend would reflect our own times, and the results would be markedly different. Something to ponder, anyway.
 
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Here, you can watch an amusing BBC documentary about Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot.

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Happy New Year, everyone!