SOURCE: St. Jean, Shawn. “Social Deconstruction and An American Tragedy.” Dreiser Studies 28, no. 1 (spring 1997): 3-24.

[In the following essay, St. Jean explores how a deconstructionist approach to Dreiser's An American Tragedy illuminates his focus on the relativism of truth in the novel.]

Of all major aspects of his work, Theodore Dreiser's social criticism is perhaps the most elusive and has therefore received the least sustained critical attention. It cannot be called obvious at any level, else readers would not be forced to wonder over such basic issues as whether a book like The Financier (1912) is a celebration or an indictment of capitalism. We know of “Dreiser's full endorsement of the Communist party and its goals from the early 1930s to his death in 1945” (Pizer, Cambridge 12), and with almost equal surety accept the historical truism that “During the twenties … the act of rejection of American cultural codes and economic values (a rejection most clearly enacted by the expatriates' self-exile) was almost a requirement for serious consideration as an artist” (Pizer, Cambridge 9). Certainly Dreiser's bids for the Nobel prize for literature for An American Tragedy (1925) demonstrate his wish for “serious consideration.” Yet, even though the author extended a tour of Russia from a week to three months in 1927-28, he returned promptly to live out his days as a staunch American. Six of Dreiser's novels predate his later definitive commitment to the alternative political ideology of his day and the last two appeared twenty years later, at the end of his life, and have not been considered to be reliable indicators of the author's attitudes in his prime, or, indeed, worthy of much critical scrutiny at all.¹ Nor do any of his major works contain the kind of overt treatments of communism achieved later by writers like John Steinbeck and Richard Wright.

Thus, scholars dealing with “Dreiser's Politics” should have less confident recourse to biography than theoreticians have recently brought to bear on the author and his work in the realms of feminism and psychoanalysis.² Critics must, as ever, turn to his works themselves. And the high degree of ambiguity wrought by seeming conflicts in events and language—for example, Frank Cowperwood's philanthropic endowments versus his cutthroat financial tactics, Carrie's rise to fame and fortune offset by her loneliness—have not deterred some from commenting decisively on Dreiser's social agendas. Philip Gerber writes that, in An American Tragedy,

the structure of American society itself was attacked; the book's readers would find themselves disclosed as participants in a tragic situation of immense proportions; they would soon discover themselves responsible for a hero who was a murderer. Although in paying the highest penalty for his crime Clyde preserved at least the facade of official justice and morality, Dreiser was calculatedly and openly set on a bold attempt to exonerate the boy, lifting the responsibility off his shoulders and placing it squarely upon the inhabitants of every city and hamlet in the nation.

(Theodore Dreiser 148)

My reading of the novel proceeds from similar assumptions, though Gerber's Theodore Dreiser (1964, revised in 1992) was too broad in scope to offer detailed evidence for his claim. However, I would emphasize that Dreiser's complex interweaving of Clyde's potential free agency with external forces like societal conventions and chance inspire in me no such confidence that Clyde was to be cleared completely of responsibility. Certainly we lack proof that Dreiser's society accepted it squarely, for, as Gerber says, Clyde's execution apparently satisfies “official” or popular morality. Widespread acceptance of complicity on the part of Dreiser's contemporaries is further belied by information from Vrest Orton's book Dreiserana. Shelley Fisher Fishkin summarizes:

The opinions of readers as to what “really happened” in the rowboat were so strong and diverse that Boni and Liveright decided to capitalize on them by running a contest. The essay contest they ran, on the topic, “Was Clyde Griffiths Guilty of Murder in the First Degree?,” drew hundreds of entries from readers across the country and was eventually won by a law professor in Virginia. Because of the special openness and ambiguity with which Dreiser narrated the death of Roberta, readers were attracted to the idea of constructing interpretations of the event on their own.

(133)

The pervasive fascination with the death scene which concludes Book II and the focus on Clyde's culpability, it seems, tended to diffuse in many people's minds “the recognition of society's guilt and the agonized questioning of Clyde's share in it at the end of the novel” (Hussman 131).

After reconsidering the scene and its surrounding events, I will argue that the close reading practiced by Dreiser's initial audience might profitably be recast in a theoretical mode heretofore untried by Dreiser scholars: deconstruction. The theory is most helpful in dramatically demonstrating that the ambiguity of Clyde's responsibility—which if proven unsolvable (or undecidable, to use the deconstructor's term) forces the emergence of alternate possibilities like public complicity—is the social nexus of the novel.³ Particularly concerned with undermining the implicit claims of textual works to establish static meanings based on language, deconstruction combines close scrutiny of even single words and phrases with the premise that “no text is capable of representing determinately, far less of demonstrating, the ‘truth’ about any subject” (Abrams 203).⁴ Far from claiming the text is meaningless, then, a deconstructive reading of An American Tragedy furthers Dreiser's own efforts to show that the massive search for “truth” about Clyde's agency in Roberta's alleged murder prosecuted by individual characters, as well as the public within and outside of the novel, is misguided and doomed to failure.

It should also prove useful to examine how Dreiser prepares for Roberta's death and the subsequent investigation. By casting Clyde's wanderings after the “American Dream” in such tenuous language that he appears hardly to have any autonomous goals, Dreiser portrays his protagonist as partial free agent and partial “sleeper agent,” unconsciously pursuing agendas set by others.

Book II begins with Clyde having moved to Chicago under a concealed identity, following the death of the child in Kansas City. He has already limited his options by adopting this fugitive existence: everything he says and does must protect his secret. But his chance encounter with his uncle Samuel Griffiths opens a new door to him. In response to Clyde's suggestion that he might be of use in Samuel's collar factory in Lycurgus, New York, his uncle makes a place for him:

Accordingly, about a week after that, the nature of Clyde's work having been finally decided upon, a letter was dispatched to him to [sic] Chicago by Samuel Griffiths himself in which he set forth that if he chose he might present himself any time now within the next few weeks.

(AT [An American Tragedy] 176, my emphasis)

Clyde can hardly be said to make the choice indicated, though it is undeniably available. His response is instantaneous: “And upon receipt of this Clyde was very much thrilled and at once wrote to his mother that he had actually secured a place with his uncle and was going to Lycurgus” (AT 176). Thus passes (so fleetingly we scarcely notice) one of many ironic instances in which Clyde, while attempting to widen the options of an unclear future (in this case, to mount the corporate ladder) actually limits his future agency.

It could be argued that because Clyde has been conditioned by earlier experiences in that monument to capitalism, the Green-Davidson Hotel, and by the manipulative demands of Hortense Briggs, no choice can be made. Clyde simply cannot help mindlessly pursuing the American Dream as he conceives it: better jobs bring more money and possessions, hence higher social status. I don't mean to imply that Clyde should be blamed for going to Lycurgus—only that he has started down the path that will end in Roberta's murder without considering alternatives or costs and without consciously choosing although, according to the text, the choice is his to make. It is a modest but crucial beginning, posing as it does the murky question of Clyde's responsibility for the direction his life takes. From here, he embarks on a career of unsuccessful bids for freedom which backfire because each, as we see by cruel dramatic irony, is tainted by his desire for freedom without responsibility.

Clyde places himself in a position of obligation to his family, although he thinks this will open up his future. He is, of course, mistaken. He must now maintain a more respectable standard of living, barely within his means, of dress, of behavior, all to protect the sacred name of Griffiths. He even limits himself sexually, and by seeking and obtaining promotion at work he exposes himself to more temptation and less freedom to fulfill it as supervisor of a department of women—he has been forbidden by his cousin Gilbert to fraternize.

His involvement with working girl Roberta Alden is an ill-conceived attempt to regain some freedom for himself, an outlet and test for his growing financial (and hence social) means and desires for self-gratification. However, from the first the affair is secretive, to protect his position at the factory and hers. The more they taste of the freedom the other's company brings, the more agonizing the realization that they cannot be together publicly. Dreiser takes pains to establish that, while this relationship may be engendered and driven by mutual desire, the terms of its development are set exclusively by social convention, which always manifests itself in unstable language. This tension is seen dramatically when Clyde's pressure for a sexual union, which he veils in euphemisms like “stop in for a little while” (AT 289) and “take a fellow to her room if she wants to for a little while” (AT 290), begin to overpower Roberta's resistance:

The state of Roberta's mind for that night is not easily to be described. For here was true and poignant love, and in youth true and poignant love is difficult to withstand. Besides it was coupled with the most stirring and grandiose illusions in regard to Clyde's local material and social condition—illusions which had little to do with anything he had done to build up, but were based rather on conjecture and gossip over which he had no control. And her own home, as well as her personal situation was so unfortunate—no promise of any kind save in his direction. And here she was quarreling with him—sending him away angry. On the other hand was he not beginning to push too ardently toward those troublesome and no doubt dreadful liberties and familiarities which her morally trained conscience would not permit her to look upon as right? How was she to do now? What to say?

(AT 293)

Hardly a sentence or phrase here does not reveal how the developing relationship is socially (verbally) defined and hence without the stable meaning language claims for itself but cannot deliver. First, Dreiser's narrator admits difficulty of casting Roberta's mental state (which is temporary and conditional, “for that night”) into words at all, since she is experiencing a tug-of-war between love and morality, both linguistically elusive concepts. Even the phrase “true and poignant love,” because repeated, calls attention to the fact that it has no referent but “here.” “Here” might mean “in Roberta's mind,” but it could also mean “in Clyde, as Roberta saw him,” especially since she finds his entreaties “difficult to withstand.” The second meaning tends toward irony, since as readers we doubt if Clyde's feelings ever qualify as love, let alone “true” (a word which, as always in the novel, is subverted and rendered useless: “love” and “true love” amount to a tautology). Jacques Derrida describes the kind of interpretational tension conjured here by the word “here” as différance, in which meanings are disseminated into multiple or infinite possibilities, a process which precludes any single one as correct.

Additionally, we recognize how, even to his intimate Roberta, Clyde depends on his connection to the wealthy Griffiths for definition and identity, a process designated twice in the passage as illusory. Because her own connections do not “promise” anything, Roberta turns more to Clyde, thus substituting potential happiness expressed through metaphor (“promise”) for potential happiness based on “conjecture and gossip” (“illusion”). But Clyde, ironically, makes no promises, least of all for marriage.

Further, Roberta imagines Clyde's efforts in physical terms (“beginning to push”) and her own defense as verbal (“quarreling,” “sending him away”). But this is merely a semantic distinction, since in the entire book Clyde never accomplishes anything except through verbal persuasion or coercion, with the possible exception of running away. She wonders if she should do or say anything, and naturally chooses the latter because easier.⁵ Her “morally trained conscience,” that is, the inner voice which expresses learned codes of right and wrong, articulates little beyond the fear that “I will be a bad girl if I do” (AT 293). Both social ostracism as a fallen woman and private moral degradation compete as signifieds in the epithet “bad girl.”

The inevitable consummation takes place, Roberta's “protest[s] gainsaid” by Clyde (AT 299).⁶ However, only under the questionable ties of a verbal contract do events proceed:

Yet the thing once done, a wild convulsive pleasure motivating both. Yet, not without, before all this, an exaction on the part of Roberta to the effect that never—come what might (the natural consequences of so wild an intimacy strong in her thoughts) would he desert her, since without his aid she would be helpless. Yet, with no direct statement as to marriage. And he, so completely overcome and swayed by his desire, thoughtlessly protesting that he never would—never. She might depend on that, at least, although even then there was no thought in his mind of marriage. He would not do that.

(AT 299)

As in scores of other passages, the favorite Dreiserian device “yet” repeatedly subverts and qualifies previous statements. And few passages in Dreiser more effectively illustrate the highly conditional nature of “truth” as a product of verbal subjectivity. Without explicitly stating marriage as her goal, Roberta relies first on her belief that Clyde and she share the same understanding of possible pregnancy and contingent validation by marriage; second, on an ambiguous promise from Clyde, who gives his “word” that he will not desert her. To him this promise does not signify marriage, or anything really, since his protest is “thoughtless.” Roberta has “exacted” nothing, since to Clyde words are only a tool to be used and later abandoned, much as Roberta herself is. They both pointedly avoid the most obvious and stable word, “marriage,” since it denotes irrevocable commitment and would undermine the effect of carefully rendered rhetoric on each side. Thoreau once asked “Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?” (Walden 10). Though he admired such romantic sentiments, Dreiser's answer rings clear in his novels: unfortunately not. The medium of imperfect utterances binds us together and, because imperfect, makes tragedy possible. Ironically, Clyde's pressure for sexual consummation against Roberta's will (pushing for his freedom at the expense of hers) does result in her pregnancy, an event that leads into an even more constrictive funnel of diminishing choices.

The most radical of Clyde's efforts at free agency is his attempt to move from the world of Roberta Alden to the world of society girl Sondra Finchley. To Clyde, Roberta and her child are merely a social and linguistic dead end because they represent action and responsibility. Roberta's letter to him at Twelfth Lake, threatening to expose him to the world, forces him to reply with a false commitment to her. Meanwhile, Sondra represents a path by which decisive action can be deferred indefinitely (he will marry her “someday”). By making one effort, eliminating Roberta, he can retire to a monied life in which meaningful choices will never again be required of him. However, he must do it in a manner that will preserve appearances. This paradox embodies perhaps the most devastating irony of Dreiser's novel: That freedom, for people who lack it, is thought to reside in wealth and social status, by means of which one is supposedly immune from the pressures that bear on ordinary people. This notion is partially borne out by Sondra's protective designation only as “Miss X” at the later trial. However, unknown to people like Clyde, wealth and status, as constructs of vast systems of human interaction, entail a greater investment in those systems. The Griffiths and Finchleys are later all forced to leave Lycurgus for fear of guilt by association with Clyde (AT 745). Thus, the more perceived freedom, the less usable autonomy.

Clyde's conflicts reach their dramatic climax on Big Bittern, the lake to which he brings Roberta in order to dispose of her. He typically goes through his routine of delay: rowing around, chasing water lilies, eating lunch, taking pictures. The surprising thing about the scene is that, as much as it is internalized to Clyde's point of view, his agony is not generated a fraction as much by morality (his inner self is too inarticulate for this) as by the prospect of finally doing something:

Yet why was he waiting now?
What was the matter with him, anyhow?
Why was he waiting?
At this cataclysmic moment, and in the face of the utmost, the most urgent need of action, a sudden palsy of the will—of courage—of hate or rage sufficient … a static between a powerful compulsion to do and yet not to do.

(AT 491-92)

This last sentence portrays Clyde as a perverted Hamlet figure: his future “be-ing” depends on “doing”; but unlike the prince of Denmark, Clyde has no moral quandary to mask his lack of courage. Now why is Clyde's crisis described as a “palsy of the will”? If will is the countering force of desire, Clyde should have no crisis here since his desires control him. Answer: In this instance, mere desire is not enough; Clyde must act (make a willful effort) to realize his desire, yet, again, he will not. At this moment he seems neither a determined being nor a free agent, since he does nothing. His cognitive paralysis during the “need of action” that will achieve his desire indicates the lack of a force operating on him, yet conversely, it also shows his lack of will. As with Hurstwood in Sister Carrie, before we find out what would have happened had the protagonist made the fatal choice, the conflict is resolved “by accident”—a scene I will later treat in detail. Clyde himself doubts whether he is responsible: “And the thought that, after all, he had not really killed her. No, no. Thank God for that. He had not. And yet (stepping up on the near-by bank and shaking the water from his clothes) had he? Or, had he not?” (AT 494). Clyde's own wonder is a linguistic expression of unresolvable tension, of différance, and yet the overwhelming question⁷ obtrudes itself: Is he guilty? This is precisely the question Book III concerns itself with: a massive search for the “truth” which leads to the trial and the jury's verdict.

After Clyde is captured, District Attorney Mason, unable to extract a plausible story from him, confers with Coroner Heit about the case:

“Well, then that means an autopsy,” Mason resumed. “As well as medical opinion as to the nature of those wounds. We'll have to know beyond a shadow of a doubt, Fred, and before that body is taken away from here, whether that girl was killed before she was thrown out of that boat, or just stunned and then thrown out, or the boat upset. That's very vital to the case, as you know. We'll never be able to do anything unless we're positive about those things. …”

(AT 521)

Here Mason's voice seems to echo the reader's, who “can't do anything,” that is, form an interpretation, without being sure of what exactly happened in the boat. Ironically, none of the choices Mason offers here, and clings to later, is entirely accurate according to the narrative. And he is the novel's crusader for truth: a man prejudiced by a “psychic sex scar” and his own political ambitions (AT 504).

In one of his many conferences with Clyde, the lawyer attempts to ply the truth from the defendant by expressing a sentiment later exploited to its fullest by Clyde's own lawyers:

Lying or just foolish thoughtless denial under such circumstances as these can't help you in the least. It can only harm you, and that's the truth … it just occurs to me that there may be something in connection with this case, some extenuating circumstances, which, if they were related by you now, might throw a slightly different light on all this. …

(AT 561)

Of course, at the trial, Clyde will be forced to relate the story of his life, all the “extenuating circumstances” that Dreiser painstakingly relates in Book I. The sum of Clyde's earlier (and later) life is reconceptualized as refracting to and from the one moment on the lake, “throw[ing] … different light.” However, all this talk of the truth is only rhetoric to Mason, who schemes to use whatever information he gets from Clyde to form his prosecution.

Meanwhile, Clyde's lawyers, Belknap and Jephson, decide that the story they have heard from him will never do if he is to be exculpated. Chapter XVI is devoted to a scene in which together they shed their own light on Clyde's actions prior to Roberta's death. Fearing that Clyde won't be able to stand the pressure of cross-examination against this newly concocted story, Jephson attempts to brace him up: “You're not guilty! You're not guilty, Clyde, see? You understand that fully by now, and you must always believe and remember that, because it's true. … You know what the truth is—and so do we. But, in order to get justice for you, we've had to get up something else—a dummy or substitute for the real fact …” (AT 631). We know from Jephson's and Belknap's private conversations that they both doubt Clyde's innocence, which is why they anticipate a jury's negative response to the story as they know it and concoct a new one. The lawyers know that Clyde's story of a “trance,” or inability to control his own actions, will not be believed by others (AT 596). Why not? Because no one else feels determined, even among other characters who inhabit the world of the novel. No one can sympathize with Clyde because of an ideological disjunction: people tend to interpret the effects of forces on all people by their experience of those forces on themselves. However, Dreiser calls this drive for consistency into question through the facts of Clyde's life. He is ultimately convicted on a critically fallacious notion of the uniformity of “truth.” This is precisely why heredity and environment play such prominent roles in determining some characters and not others: they are different for everyone and everyone is affected differently by them.

Several minor misrepresentations contaminate the trial. Mason persists in his attempts to prove that Clyde deliberately hit Roberta on the head before she fell into the water. A lock of Roberta's hair placed by Burton Burleigh in the camera is produced as false evidence for this. Jephson, Clyde's own defense counsel, suppresses a letter from the captain of bellhops at the Green-Davidson that supports Clyde's good character. Finally, the one demurring juror is threatened into voting guilty. The reader, who has all these bits of information, is in a position to see the dramatic erosion of truth even in the face of its attempted reconstruction, the inaccessibility of what Dreiser calls “the distant pole” of truth (SC [Sister Carrie] 73).

What no one in the courtroom can appreciate is that the situation requires more complex considerations than “guilt” or “innocence”—because it is absolutely impossible that the murder scene occurred as described by the narrator. Returning to the text in question:

Yet (the camera still unconsciously held tight) pushing at her with so much vehemence as not only to strike her lips and nose and chin with it, but to throw her back sidewise toward the left wale which caused the boat to careen to the very water's edge. And then he, stirred by her sharp scream, (as much due to the lurch of the boat, as the cut on her nose and lip), rising and reaching half to assist or recapture her and half to apologize for the unintended blow—yet in doing so completely capsizing the boat—himself and Roberta being as instantly thrown into the water. And the left wale of the boat as it turned, striking Roberta on the head as she sank and then rose for the first time, her frantic, contorted face turned to Clyde, who by now had righted himself. For she was stunned, horror-struck, unintelligible with pain and fear—her lifelong fear of water and drowning and the blow he had so accidentally and all but unconsciously administered.

(AT 492-93)

Lee Clark Mitchell notes a “surprising inconsistency” in this same passage: that Roberta's resurfacing for the “first time” is not followed by a second (Mitchell 55, 56). He makes the convincing suggestion that Dreiser “meant” this as a sign of the complexity of repetition—Roberta's body rises a second time only after her death. However, even this close a reading overlooks the even more surprising impossibility of the blow to the head that stuns Roberta.

The narrator states that she falls to the left wale of the boat, causing it to “careen to the very water's edge.” Clyde rises to go to her—on the left—and the boat capsizes. The text doesn't say which way the boat flips, but we can be sure it isn't stern (Roberta's position) over bow (Clyde's position) or bow over stern, since rowboats simply don't do that by design. Since the left wale is at “the very water's edge” with Roberta's weight, and Clyde is going towards her, the boat must flip in that direction, meaning the opposite (right) wale would rise in the air and come down hard, the boat now upside-down. The left wale would merely spin on a nearly stationary axis, with virtually no downward movement or force for a blow. Yet the narrator states that the left wale strikes Roberta on the head. There is no way for this to happen, even if Roberta falls straight down into the water, which is unlikely. There simply is no motion in the left wale that would cause it, even if her head were there—and she is far more likely to be at least a few feet to the left with the inertia of her fall—about where the right wale comes crashing down.

Once the impossibility of the scene reveals itself, the word “left” becomes a concentrated, extreme manifestation of the public's and Clyde's own questions about his guilt. Did he do it, or not? It forms what deconstructionists call an aporia, or central knot of indeterminacy in a text—a point at which the text breaks down, where language fails to provide stable meaning and where multiple interpretations are made possible. Now, the obvious explanation here is that it is really the right wale that strikes Roberta, and the text is in error (Dreiser was notorious for textual errors). However, such an explanation matters very little from the deconstructionist point of view. According to J. Hillis Miller:

The deconstructive critic seeks to find, by this process of retracing, the element in the system studied which is alogical, the thread in the text in question which will unravel it all, or the loose stone which will pull down the whole building. The deconstruction, rather, annihilates the ground on which the building stands by showing that the text has already annihilated the ground, knowingly or unknowingly. Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself.

(qtd. in Abrams 206)

The text has read “left” at least since the first edition, and even were it shown to be a corruption of the manuscript the word stands as part of the received public artifact. Donald Pizer has used a similar notion to argue that the first published edition of Sister Carrie, even if censored, provides the best text for a critical edition.⁸ Also, the possibility that Dreiser made such a blatant error in a passage that is obviously so carefully constructed for its ambiguity (as supported by Mitchell's observation above, besides being the critical scene of the novel) seems unlikely. As a matter of fact, the inclusion of the specific “left” is remarkable for its unambiguity in the passage. However, whether Dreiser meant “left” or “right” is not really at issue;⁹ only what the text says, thereby failing to say.

We must account for the blow to Roberta's head. It is a fact of the narrative, as established by coroner's evidence at the trial. However, despite Mitchell's assertion that “other than Clyde, only the reader has been present at the scene itself” we now have no direct way of knowing how the injury was really sustained (Mitchell 63). We cannot rely on the narrator, whose “omniscient” point of view has been exposed as erratic at best. Perhaps Clyde does strike Roberta with an oar as he had planned and Mason later asserts. Or maybe there is more than one blow with the camera. The possibilities are now limited only by the reader's imagination.

Unreliable narration is nothing new. However, the narrator is usually a character in the story—not omniscient. If we can't trust him at such a crucial moment, how many other details might be inaccurate? Clyde could be more guilty—or more innocent—than we have previously imagined. He could be insane. What would that say about the system that convicts and executes him?

What if the force of repression is so strong that it not only buries the truth from Clyde's consciousness, but from that of the narrator as well and, by extension, the reader? The whole of Book III, especially the recreations of the trial, is concerned with how the truth is altered by repression—and what is the truth here? These questions bear directly on Dreiser's narrative evasions at crucial moments when guilt would normally be assigned, but readers instead feel invited to decide for themselves. However, the novel's deconstructing of the simple polarization of “guilty” and “not guilty,” words with enough power to determine a man's life or death but not enough to approach “truth,” allows us to see two crucial points: (1) Each term has less than static boundaries, and partakes some of the meaning of the other, and (2) because these terms imply totality but cannot deliver it, new signifying constructs, and hence new ways of thinking about human responsibility, are necessary.

Dreiser, in service of creating the most “realistic” form of fiction he can, may be illustrating by sacrifice of the narrator the power of Jephson's words to Clyde: “You know what the truth is—and so do we. But, in order to get justice for you, we've had to get up something else—a dummy or substitute for the real fact …” (AT 631). I would repeat that, whether Dreiser did purposely build unstable signifieds and signifiers into his scenes or not, they do exist and add up to a commentary that no system of explanation can really access the “truth” of human behavior. That is why Dreiser's “variable determinism,” in which characters are alternately determined by external forces and chance, but have some measure of free will, is as enlightening a paradigm as we have: it positions humankind between the two systems we have always relied on. The novel deconstructs both fate and free will, since Clyde embodies both and neither. Dreiser's text creates a new realm of naturalistic thematic exploration: that in a world where action and responsibility are relinquished, the truth itself in its empirical form (if there even is one) is unrecoverable. Dreiser had claimed outright twenty-five years earlier in his first novel that mankind “is even as a wisp in the wind” (SC 73). However, human beings are inevitably drawn toward “the distant pole of truth,” that is, not only toward the triumph of free will over desire, but the mastery of language which expresses both. The as-yet only partial victory in this struggle allows An American Tragedy to function as social critique. We are forced to confront the lingering relativism of “truth” for each of us before we can move toward the common ground of justice for all.¹⁰

Notes

1. The Bulwark (1946) and The Stoic (1947) were both published posthumously. In general, textual scholars doubt whether either exists in the form Dreiser would have finally wanted to present to the public, while critics question their literary merits and note their departure from subject matter and treatment that characterized the author's earlier work.

2. “Dreiser's Politics” is a chapter of F. O. Matthiessen's Theodore Dreiser (1951), the first methodical analysis of the author's social ethics as expressed in his novels. See Miriam Gogol's collection Theodore Dreiser: Beyond Naturalism (1995) for psychoanalytic and feminist readings of Dreiser's works which rely substantially on biographical evidence. Two recently published works, Dreiser's Russian Diary, edited for the University of Pennsylvania's Dreiser Edition by Thomas P. Riggio and James L. W. West, III, and “Dreiser Constructs Russia” by Andrea Wolff, demonstrate that the author's constantly varying pronouncements on the relative merits of capitalism and communism in public and in diaries and letters make documentary evidence of Dreiser's political agendas at any given time dangerous support for critical readings of his fiction. For instance, although books like Sister Carrie, The “Genius,” and An American Tragedy contain apparent indictments of conspicuous consumerism, Riggio's “Introduction” points out that “Conditions at home looked pretty good to Dreiser in 1927. He had finally published a best-seller, An American Tragedy (1925), and this, along with a lucrative film contract, had allowed him to share in the short-lived prosperity of Coolidge's America. Consequently, his inclination was to praise capitalism at the expense of the Russian system” (6). Wolff compares the Russian Diary to the published travelogue Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928) and discerns an “ambivalent attitude,” one by which Dreiser's “reaction to America as well as to Russia was determined by a pattern of rapprochement and withdrawal” (25).

3. Lawrence E. Hussman, Jr., in Dreiser and his Fiction: A Twentieth-Century Quest (1983), offers a detailed nontheoretical treatment of the novel along similar lines. He parts company with Gerber in the degree of Clyde's responsibility: instead of “exonerating” his protagonist, Hussman claims, Dreiser merely “attempt[s] to shift the largest measure of guilt from Clyde to society” (131).

4. I rely for my argument on some basic concepts of Jacques Derrida's model of deconstruction, for which the seminal texts are Of Grammatology, Speech and Phenomena, and Writing and Difference (all 1967). By no means have I attempted a comprehensive view or implementation of this complex method, but have adhered to the principle expressed by Paul de Man that close readings of the past can always be made closer. For expediency and clarity's sake I refer to M. H. Abrams' cogent summary of the theory in A Glossary of Literary Terms (1988).

5. Dreiser's characters often attempt to substitute words for actions, even when actions become absolutely necessary. Most learn of the ineffectuality of language only when it is too late and effective action has been precluded. A pervasive example is the “wavering” and delay characteristic of Carrie Meeber, George Hurstwood, Lester Kane, Eugene Witla, and Clyde, always accompanied by some kind of rationalization (whether spoken or not).

6. The objection that Clyde's sexual adventures logically have little to do with Dreiser's social criticism might naturally arise at this point. Interestingly, Clyde associates women not only with freedom but with money. Such “bacchanalian scenes” (AT 61) as make his hair tingle, if not to be had by direct purchase (as in the case of the prostitute who initiates him), still cost. He becomes suitor to Hortense Briggs, who schools him in the ways that materialism is bound up with desire:

   Later, and without having yielded anything more to Clyde than a few elusive and evasive endearments—intimate and languorous reclinings in his arms which promised much but always came to nothing—she made so bold as to indicate to him at different times and in different ways, purses, blouses, slippers, stockings, a hat, which she would like to buy if only she had the money. And he, in order to hold her favor and properly ingratiate himself, proceeded to buy them. …

   (AT 86-7)

7. Dreiser's modernist contemporary T. S. Eliot had J. Alfred Prufrock avoiding a cryptic “overwhelming question” in 1917. The question itself is never expressed: “Oh, do not ask, ‘what is it?’ / Let us go and make our visit.” The gap Eliot insists on leaving in the text opens the door to some obvious speculations, but also to infinite interpretations of the poem, yet simultaneously the lines imply that the question is not the point. As my thesis suggests, Dreiser too felt the “overwhelming question” should not be circumscribed and directed at one individual.

8. See the Preface to the Norton Critical Edition of Sister Carrie (1991) edited by Pizer and his essay “Self Censorship and Textual Editing” for an elaboration of his choice of copytext versus “the questionable claims of the Pennsylvania Edition” (“Preface” x).

9. Coincidentally, the aporic reading “left” carries a connotation of a “liberal” or radical social agenda, which demonstrates further a crucial point about deconstruction. While claiming that the author “left” or planted the word in his text as a bit of wordplay, a free signifier referring to simple direction, political leaning, or other possibilities might seem plausible in a discussion of a writer like James Joyce, it would appear out of the realm of Dreiser's known authorial techniques. However, the deconstructive reader, in revealing how reliance on unstable language undermines any author's circumscribed intentions, is free to offer alternative interpretations of that language as evidence, including interpretations that appear ahistorical, anachronistic, or to ignore biographical and bibliographical fact. The point of this is not to ridicule or parody the author, other methodologies, or the scholars that use them, but to open up the boundaries of texts and the possibilities for readers' involvement in them. If anything, texts are made more “literary” by this process since they appeal to more people in all times.

10. A version of this essay was presented at the International Theodore Dreiser Society's open session at the American Literature Association's annual conference in San Diego, May 1996. My thanks to Clare Eby, Lewis Fried, Philip Gerber, Yoshinobu Hakutani, and an anonymous referee for their valuable comments on earlier drafts.

Works Cited

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———. Dreiser's Russian Diary. Thomas P. Riggio, James L. West, III, eds. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1996.

———. The Financier. New York and London: Harper, 1912.

———. Sister Carrie. New York: Penguin, 1986 (reprint of the Pennsylvania Edition of 1981.)

———. The Stoic. Garden City: Doubleday, 1947.

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———. Theodore Dreiser Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1992.

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———. “Self-Censorship and Textual Editing.” Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation. Ed. Jerome McGann. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. 144-61.

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