SOURCE: Caron, James E. “Grotesque Naturalism: The Significance of the Comic in McTeague.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 31, no. 2 (summer 1989): 288-317.

McTeague came and went furtively, dizzied and made uneasy by all this bustle. He got in the way; he trod upon and tore breadths of silk; he tried to help carry the packing boxes, and broke the hall gas fixture; he came in upon Trina and the dressmaker at an ill-timed moment, and retiring precipitately, overturned the piles of pictures stacked in the hall.¹

Imagine this scene as part of a Buster Keaton film, and its slapstick quality immediately becomes obvious. Although the comic element in McTeague has been noted by Joseph McElrath, he refers to it as an “impure trait that mars the Naturalistic shape.”² Admittedly, laughter is not the response which comes to mind when one thinks of the deterministic philosophy associated with naturalism.³ The Rougon-Macquart series of Emile Zola apparently confirms a judgment that the comic is alien to naturalism; the tone of Zola's work is anything but an invitation to laughter. As a declared disciple of Zola, Frank Norris seems anything but the author of a funny story. In particular, McTeague as a comic text may seem unlikely, given the abuse and murders of both Trina and Maria, the presumed suicide of Zerkow, and the suicidal actions of Marcus and McTeague that leave the former dead and the latter handcuffed to the corpse in the middle of Death Valley.⁴

Nevertheless, I believe McTeague should be read as a funny story, but not one split by its comic aspect. Rather, McTeague offers the intriguing prospect of a close relationship between laughter and naturalism. This essay will explore that relationship as it demonstrates the function of comic elements in McTeague, a narrative funny in both senses of the word: peculiar as well as laughable. Despite changes in the kind of laughter generated, the heartier tones of slapstick giving way to a laughter fugitive and nervous, the comic is an integral part of the narrative presentation of naturalism, a presentation that turns upon the issue of freedom versus determinism. None of the issues and ideas that give naturalism its vitality are inherently a barrier to comic elements, as McElrath's argument implies. In fact, a naturalistic stress on empirical, cause-and-effect explanations for phenomena provided the context for a new theoretic perspective on laughter during the last half of the nineteenth century which included the views of individuals such as Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, Henri Bergson, and Sigmund Freud. McTeague should be read as an enactment of that new theory.

In what follows I shall use “the comic” to refer to a general discourse of the laughable that is based on incongruity. The specific model of what is comic argues that three modes constitute its most important features: wit, humor, and satire.⁵ Continuing the hierarchy, I consider terms such as burlesque, grotesque, mechanical, irony, exaggeration, mock heroic, caricature, understatement, et cetera, as techniques used by an author to create different comic textures within one of the three modes. The differences among the modes can be expressed by the opposition thought/emotion. Thus wit produces a laughter in which the very processes of intellection become the objects of play, and wit refers to the a-musing in its root sense of provoking an enjoyment in thought rather than judgment. Satire and humor represent the poles of emotional laughter: the former produces a laughter designed to appreciate the status quo. Satire laughs at its object, indicates distance and antagonism, and refers to the ridiculous. Humor laughs with its object, indicates proximity and sympathy, and refers to the ludicrous. The modes are seldom, if ever, found in an unmixed state. My attributing basic functions to these comic modes should not be mistaken as an argument meant to preclude ideas about an overarching function for comic laughter qua comic laughter. More than one such overarching function may exist. While that issue cannot be addressed here, McTeague, I shall argue, does elaborate a connection between comic laughter and notions of freedom.⁶

Distance and proximity to the object of laughter make the role of the audience or the reader crucial. In my view, the comic techniques of McTeague comprise the most important component of what Wolfgang Iser has called the implied reader, a “network of response-inviting structures”; these structures function as a control for the reactions of the implied reader to all the main characters.⁷ More specifically, reading McTeague as a comic text requires a shift in the attitude of the reader toward the dentist, as the comic techniques first emphasize the distance of satire and then create the proximity of humor.

In particular one technique deployed by the narrative, the mechanistic, anchors the initial emphasis on the satiric mode by creating a sense of physical incongruity. The mechanistic degrades through a conflation of the human with the inanimate, specifically machines. “We laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing,” says Henri Bergson, or “reminds us of a mere machine.”⁸ There is a basic incongruity between the élan vital that in Bergson's view is the essence of being and any sort of mechanical, inelastic, or automatic behavior. While this analysis, along with his contention that all laughter is corrective, restricts comic laughter unnecessarily by its failure to account for amiable (humorous) or sportive (witty) laughter, the notion that rigidity is laughable provides a way into McTeague as a comic text. The novel begins by establishing and emphasizing the routine quality of the world of Polk Street. As the characters are introduced over the first few chapters through comic techniques that invite the implied reader to laugh derisively, the narrative builds up a sense of their being rigidly controlled.

1

McTeague the dentist personifies this rigidly routine world. His behavior is exemplified by his invariable Sunday routine, and the initial description of him—“crop-full, stupid, and warm” (1)—provokes the ridicule of the satiric mode. Other details reinforce the derogatory picture. He eats like a machine. He is immensely strong, docile, and obedient, like a draft horse. He is “too hopelessly stupid” to benefit from books. He proposes to Trina by repeatedly answering her objections with the phrase, “‘Ah, come on’” (72). Indeed, his life is so rigid that the mere appearance of Trina upsets it. And even when he does something extraordinary, such as going to the theater, he acts like an automaton with his formula for where he wants to sit, unable to adjust it in the light of what the ticket seller tells him.

The other major characters in the story are also represented as targets for satiric laughter because of their rigidity. The rival of McTeague for the affections of Trina, Marcus Schouler, has had a haphazard education, like McTeague, and both men are called bunglers in their professions, though McTeague is the only one referred to directly as stupid. Marcus's literal combativeness has him constantly ready to fight anyone, and his rhetorical combativeness has him always prepared to mouth stock socialist phrases about labor issues without comprehension of their meaning.

Maria exhibits mechanistic behavior whenever she is asked to identify herself: “‘Name is Maria—Miranda—Macapa. … Had a flying squirrel an' let him go’” (18). She also shows this automatism with her tale about the gold plate service, rattling it off each time in exactly the same phrases, “looking straight in front of her with eyes that [see] nothing” (40). Zerkow after he marries Maria will become no less mechanical in his reaction to her story; he must have it repeated over and over again, in effect mentally recording the story in his mania for gold (207).

Old Grannis and Miss Baker present a model of routine: she with a rigid tea time, and he with a habit of binding pamphlets that he never reads (14). Although their uncompromising schedule in effect constitutes “keeping company” together, each aware of the other's every action, they avoid meeting, fostering a ridiculously exaggerated sense of propriety. When Miss Baker, for example, discovers that the wallpaper in their adjoining rooms is the same, suggesting one larger room had been divided to create their respective apartments, she thinks the situation improper because “‘it almost amounts to our occupying the same room’” (16). Only the excitement of Trina's winning the lottery can break through their customs and bring them face to face.

Finally, Trina's family, the Sieppes, are comic in general because of their German pronunciation of English. However, the laughter is mostly directed at Mr. Sieppe, who constantly enacts an ethnic version of the miles glorious, always giving orders in military fashion and conducting the habitual picnics of the family as though they were army maneuvers. The relation of the parents with the older boy August (usually spelled Owgooste) is consistently comic in its slapstick, the boy receiving all the perfunctory blows, as in this instance from the chaos of preparing to move: “There was an incessant going and coming at every moment of the day. … Mr. Sieppe in his shirt sleeves labored among the packing boxes [and] Owgooste was smacked from hour to hour” (133); italics added).

The panoramic description of Polk Street that opens the narrative chronicles a general rigidity which matches these individual portraits. Moreover, details from the description convey an aesthetic vulgarity that emanates from the working-class milieu of the street and is clearly meant to be ridiculed. Thus the shop girls, dressing with a cheap smartness and standing in front of second-rate restaurants or shops which display china pigs and cows knee-deep in layers of white beans, always make loud comments upon the passing men, whose lunch baskets are painted to imitate leather. The show at the Orpheum Theater epitomizes this aesthetic. Hymns are played on beer bottles. The singer is hoarse and flat. McTeague's view on the music no doubt is meant to typify his world: “Art could go no farther” (88). The ridiculous aesthetic of Polk Street as well as its equally ridiculous rigidity is represented by the comedians of the show; their “routine” is literally repetitious, inane dialogue. The infamous accident of Owgooste at the theater climaxes all this derisive laughter, which has been building for over six chapters.⁹

The techniques used to create the laughter are the derogatory ones of the satiric mode, meant to present the characters as inferior or less than human in some way, forestalling the sympathy of a reader. Thus McTeague is compared to an animal as well as a machine; Maria, when speaking about the gold plate service, sounds like a tape recorder (as Zerkow does later); Marcus seems to parrot all his ideas about politics; and Polk Street in general is shown to be uncouth. A mock heroic comparison to Damon and Pythias is employed to ridicule the scene in chapter 4 where Marcus gives up Trina for the sake of his pal, McTeague, just as the German nationalism and military pretension of Mr. Sieppe are undermined by reference to Napoleon (131-32). The propriety of Grannis and Miss Baker is burlesqued in its clear excessiveness. The obsession of Mrs. Sieppe with the vaudeville show, causing the neglect of poor Owgooste, fits her into the vulgar aesthetic of Polk Street. Owgooste, repeatedly the victim of his parents' quick hands and a comic misspelling of his name, also has little chance for anything but ridicule. Apparently, everybody is laughable—except perhaps Trina, who is the only character not introduced derisively in the slapstick terms that characterize much of the early chapters.¹⁰

Trina does not completely escape derision, but the narrative is constructed initially to limit such vulnerability. For instance, the circumstance that brings McTeague and Trina together, her missing front tooth, provides the opportunity for a comic description of the gap-toothed maiden when Trina arrives at the dental parlors. The narrative instead focuses on Maria. When a full description of Trina does come immediately after that diversion, her vital beauty is stressed, discouraging any laughter. The comic simile that compares her teeth to kernels of young corn is overwhelmed by the noncomic metaphor that calls her royal hair “a veritable tiara” (19). In a similar fashion the comic potential of Trina answering the first marriage proposal of McTeague from behind a rubber mask and then vomiting is checked by the deadpan comment of the narrator: “It was the not unusual after effect of the ether, aided now by her excitement and nervousness” (29). Asserting the plausibility of the sickness blunts the scene's potential derision. Finally, the part Trina plays in the general hilarity of the Orpheum Theater episode is limited to a pair of gloves split by enthusiastic clapping. The wedding ceremony succinctly dramatizes the carefully constructed difference in the presentation of the characters:

Trina and McTeague knelt. The dentist's knees thudded on the floor and he presented to view the soles of his shoes, painfully new and unworn, the leather still yellow, the brass nail heads still glittering. Trina sank at his side very gracefully, settling her dress and train with a little gesture of her free hand. The company bowed their heads, Mr. Sieppe shutting his eyes tight. But Mrs. Sieppe took advantage of the moment to stop crying and make furtive gestures towards Owgooste, signing him to pull down his coat. But Owgooste gave no heed; his eyes were starting from their sockets, his chin had dropped upon his lace collar, and his head turned vaguely from side to side with a continued and maniacal motion.

(142)

Trina, then, is the only character introduced in a comparatively serious manner, yet she becomes a character who will rival McTeague for producing ridicule. Moreover, Trina is the device whereby the comic presentation of McTeague will slowly alter. As her comic presentation becomes dominated by the satiric mode, his will come to include a measure of the humorous. The contrast Trina provides in the opening chapters and her gradual emergence as an object of satiric laughter which opens a space for a humorous view of McTeague define the importance of her character for understanding how the narrative makes use of comic techniques to organize the reactions of an implied reader within the dynamic of the comic modes.

The presentation of Trina is remarkable in another way: as the chief means by which Norris can elaborate a connection between the comic and standard themes of naturalism as well as alter the tone of the narrative from hilarity to horror. However, if the change in Trina as comic object operates as the main contribution to the tonal change that colors the second half of the story, the accompanying laughter must be quite different from the laughter created by the first half's slapstick, as in the Orpheum Theater episode. A laughing response by an implied reader which functions as a commensurate response to the violence and grimness of the second half of the narrative would resemble instead the laughter of Selina at the grotesque end of the picnic scene.¹¹ “Nobody was paying any attention to Selina. All at once she began to giggle hysterically again, then cried out with a peal of laughter: ‘Oh, what a way for our picnic to end’” (203). What a way indeed. As a result of their wrestling match, McTeague's blood is splattered everywhere and Marcus's arm is broken. The trampled grass, empty beer bottles, discarded sardine cans, and broken egg shells all contribute to the ambiance of destruction. Exactly midway through the book at chapter 11, this scene foreshadows the fight in Death Valley which will close the story. Moreover, the shift in the picnic scene from domestic tranquillity to mayhem and destruction represents the dynamics of Trina and McTeague's marriage, which has been reasonably happy but will soon degenerate. In order to see that the narrative does promote this change in kinds of laughter, yet does not switch from comic to naturalistic, the comic career of Trina must be outlined.

Up until chapter 10, when McTeague and Trina are settling into their married routine, she easily evokes sympathy, given her youth, beauty, and innocence—and the fact that she marries a lout like McTeague. And despite the comic touches mentioned before, her love for McTeague is treated seriously. Indeed, the struggle within Trina over sexual desire and the element of chance associated with something as important as marriage introduce in the early chapters important themes associated with naturalism.

Nevertheless, before Trina is married the narrative hints at the fault that will become comically obsessive: a pleasure in economy. By the end of the first married year, this virtual instinct, born of a “hardy and penurious race” (117), borders on “positive niggardliness” (161-62). Saving money becomes a passion with her: “‘Since I won in the lottery I've become a regular little miser. It's growing on me, but never mind, it's a good fault, and, anyhow, I can't help it’” (180). At this point in the story, her rationalizations may seem acceptable, but when Trina later refuses to send money to help her parents, lies to McTeague about it, and continually blocks attempts to spend money on amusements after McTeague stops his dentistry practice, any such indulgence is halted. The imperious treatment of McTeague by Trina when he loses his second job further reduces a sympathetic reaction; she takes every penny McTeague has and sends him to look for work without even giving him carfare, actions resulting in his drenching by a rainstorm. She has even begrudged the money he spent on food.

In effect, Trina's comic presentation is noteworthy because it has a career; the reader experiences her grotesqueness as process, not as static stereotype. Greed turns her into an automaton, without any free will in regard to her lottery money. When withdrawing her money from her uncle, she acts as possessed as Maria is by her vision of owning the gold plate service. Subsequently, Trina is described in terms that resemble Zerkow, “quivering with pleasure” as she fondles her coins (303), and when she puts money in her mouth (262), she replicates McTeague and Marcus's nonsense with a billiard ball. The resemblance to Zerkow the junkman and Maria the maid emphasizes Trina's social degradation, that descent down the social ladder often portrayed by literary naturalism. Indeed, when Trina becomes a miserly scrubwoman, in effect she is at once both Zerkow and Maria. Trina is reduced emotionally to a masochistic love for McTeague and a fetishistic love for money, and both are suggested in the scene where Trina sleeps naked on her gold (306). By chapter 19, when she dies, the implied reader's reaction to her has come very nearly full circle, moving from a virtually noncomic response, or certainly one marked by the indulgence of the humorous mode, to a comic one informed by the grotesque obsessiveness of a full-blown miser worthy of unrestrained ridicule. Trina has become funny in both senses: she is peculiar and laughable, consonant with the movement of the narrative as a whole. Most important, her presentation allows the comic quality of McTeague to broaden and include the humorous mode.

As with the initial and mostly serious presentation of Trina, the comic portrait of McTeague is not without its alloy in the earlier portions of the story. Hints of her greed are matched by occasional displays of McTeague's common sense. This better side first surfaces in the knife-throwing incident with Marcus. When Marcus demands some of the lottery money that Trina wins, McTeague answers bluntly, “‘It ain't mine to give. … You're drunk, that's what you are’” (123). McTeague shows more insight later in the narrator's dismissal of the whole episode that describes the dentist's thoughts. “What was Marcus Schouler's hatred to him, who had Trina's affection? What did he care about a broken pipe now that he had the Tooth?” (129). Even the gift of the prodigious tooth is not presented as completely ridiculous, for its mysterious light can be read as a symbol of a bright future, both domestic and professional.

Trina's avarice, however, shows McTeague at his best. When he signs a lease for a supposedly unhealthy house and Trina refuses to help pay their way out, McTeague complains: “‘you're worse than old Zerkow. … I'd rather lose [the money] than be such a miser as you’” (177). At this point in the story, her actions may not seem reprehensible. McTeague did act precipitously. But when Trina perversely denies financial aid to her parents despite her large bank account, and when McTeague is charitable toward the Sieppe family, the context is quite different. McTeague shows flexibility in his response to the needs of others, while Trina rigidly refuses to accommodate others.

But it is really no surprise that common sense comes off better than greed, even if the common sense is as limited as McTeague's seems to be. Curiously, and of far more interest, what makes McTeague most satiric and worthy of derision at first—his rigidity—can be construed as humorous and worthy of sympathy in the wake of the betrayal of Marcus. “McTeague had continued to work, acting from sheer force of habit; his sluggish, deliberate nature, methodical, obstinate, refusing to adapt itself to the new conditions” (225). His refusal to “quit for just a piece of paper,” a phrase he repeats again and again, sounds a note that could elicit admiration for its defiance instead of laughter mixed with scorn for its rigidity. Such indulgence can possibly also cover the sudden relapse of McTeague into old habits. In any case automatism now generates not only the derisive laughter of satire but also some measure of sympathy, even though the description of him in this context is exactly the same as the opening portrait: “crop-full, stupid, and warm” (243-44). The dentist does not lose his comic aspect; he becomes more complex and human than before. McTeague will at subsequent moments still act less than human, as when he demonstrates his hatred for Trina by “rolling upon the bed and biting the mattress” (312), just as Zerkow showed his anger at Maria by rolling on the floor and scratching himself (265). But his rigidity can also produce sympathy, as when McTeague obstinately refuses to sell his canary and concertina. The mode of satire is thus leavened with the more tolerant perspective of the mode of humor. Once McTeague stops practicing dentistry, his character generates this complex laughter.

2

If the comic organizes McTeague in ways more elaborate than has been previously shown, McElrath's contention that it clashes with naturalism nevertheless remains. Yet any apparently clear antithesis between the presumed gaiety of laughter and the dark facts of naturalism disappears if McTeague is placed in the context that provides it and literary naturalism with their philosophical underpinnings: evolution. The idea of evolution was not new in the nineteenth century. Cynthia Russett comments that it was Darwin's specific explanation which, by using the concept of natural selection, avoiding metaphysics, and providing a vast amount of data, met scientific criteria and thus revolutionized biology.¹² Moreover, Darwin's formulations created a way of thinking that permeated other disciplines and provided a theoretic context which not only gave naturalism its scientific approach and materialistic bias but also stimulated new explanations of the comic relevant to a discussion of McTeague. Before the change in theorizing about the comic which took place in the nineteenth century, one usually spoke of comedy and emphasized a literary production; the new century spoke of laughter and emphasized a physiological production. By the time Norris heard the lectures of Le Conte at Berkeley in 1892, Darwinian ideas had become what Michel Foucault calls “transdiscursive.” Within that context is located the larger function of McTeague's comic element.¹³

The model of laughter elaborated by Herbert Spencer in 1860, under the title “The Physiology of Laughter,” was the most influential of this new “scientific” approach. According to Spencer, all stimuli make an impression on the nerves which in turn discharge that excitation into three “channels”: the muscles, the viscera, or other portions of the nervous system. This “liberated nerve force” must be wholly used up in one or more of these channels, thus producing an “equivalent manifestation of force” in motion or thought and resulting, via either activity, in relief from the excitement of the nerves.¹⁴ When that excitement cannot be fully discharged in thought or purposeful muscular motion, then the apparently purposeless muscular motion of laughter is the consequence. Laughter, then, is a relief from a quantity of “nervous energy” that has become excessive because other channels are blocked. This relief promotes a beneficial somatic equilibrium between stimulus and response.

Darwin also postulated a beneficial effect on the health of individuals. Laughter is a serviceable habit, that is, an aid to the survival of the organism, a way of adapting to the demands of the environment.¹⁵ To adapt is to fit in, to become fit, to become congruous with the surroundings. If incongruity is the chief source of laughter, as I have maintained, the goal of laughter from the perspective of evolution is to transform that ill fit into an aptness. Laughter is part of “the survival of the fittest”; the comic and naturalism are far from incompatible.

In Expression, Darwin was concerned with more than just biology. He was trying to articulate links between a psychology and a physiology. Spencer also felt that the physiological analysis used in the case of laughter exemplified a basis for a materialist psychology.¹⁶ Though Thomas Hobbes had outlined such a psychology in the seventeenth century, it was the success of evolutionary biology that provided a lasting authority for physiology as a foundation for psychology. The ideas of Spencer and Darwin about evolution suggested that detailed analyses of physical states could explain mental and emotional states to a far greater degree than was thought possible before. The same approach was used later in the nineteenth century by others who were also interested in psychology, including John Dewey, whose discussion of laughter is couched within the notion that physical behavior causes emotions; laughter is a “sudden relaxation of strain [in which] the energy accumulated is set free from a seemingly outside source.”¹⁷ An essay by psychologist G. Stanley Hall, which bears the mark of evolution theory throughout, describes laughter in a similar fashion, as a discharge of “pent up energy.”¹⁸ Though Hall is not as complete a materialist as Spencer or Dewey, his analysis makes the basic point: laughter explained from the perspective of evolution is a relief from physical and/or mental tension which functions as an aid to survival.

Sigmund Freud also employed a discharge theory with a notion of aptness in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905). In the section titled “The Motives of Jokes and Jokes as a Social Process,” Freud explicitly borrows Spencer's model to tie together the phenomenon of laughter and the evasion of critical reason by joke work in order to explain the dynamics of jokes, revealing a link to evolution in his quest to develop a model of the human mind: “the hearer of the joke laughs with the quota of psychical energy which has become free through the lifting of the inhibitory cathexis; we might say that he laughs this quota off.” The periodic and momentary circumvention of the necessary censoring by reason allows an individual to recover lost primary pleasures, promoting a psychic health by providing relief from the “repressive activity of civilization,” a temporary freedom which keeps the psyche flexible.¹⁹

These thinkers were among the pioneers of modern psychology. Interested in a scientifically conceived relation of mind to body, they included commentary on laughter in their theories of psychology because it is obviously a mental and physical phenomenon. These discussions rested ultimately on general laws of science that were thought to explain all phenomena and on specific laws of biology formulated by Darwin, laws which in literary naturalism veer toward a deterministic view of existence. Yet the nucleus of the commentary on laughter includes a notion of freedom. Sometimes that freedom merely means relief from a physical tension; sometimes it becomes liberation from psychic repression. The narrative of McTeague embodies this peculiar combination of evolutionary law and comic freedom.

3

In his explanation of the dynamics of jokes, Freud makes a distinction between psychic energy released in the joke maker (first person) and the audience (third person). The pleasure that jokes provide by economizing on the expenditure of psychic energy is greater for the third person because he or she uses no energy to make the joke nor to repress the idea produced by the joke. The complete pleasure of joking, however, is analogous to a circuit that begins with the formation of the joke by the first person, passes through the laughter of the third person, and returns to the first person to attain a “general relief through discharge.”²⁰ This part of Freud's model has an important bearing on my reading of McTeague. If the mostly satiric rigidity demonstrated by the analysis of the major characters reveals a correspondence to what Freud calls the “comic” (a comparison of ego and object person which results in a sense of superiority for the ego) then analysis on a thematic level places the implied reader in the position of the third person in the dynamics of jokes. McTeague in effect jokingly presents the implied reader with ideas derived from evolution about fundamental aspects of existence which he or she would otherwise repress and provides a momentary relief from critical reason. In other words, the comic dimension of the narrative allows the reader an opportunity to indulge the liberating effect of laughter in a response to the deterministic tendency of naturalism.

The courtship and marriage of Trina and McTeague represent one aspect of that determinism: no one can escape the imperative of sexual reproduction. Neither of them is to blame for their passion because sex is part of the changeless order of things, a “delicate, invisible mesh” (48) which catches everyone, even a pure-minded girl like Trina. “‘It's a queer match,’” Trina comments to Miss Baker when she hears of Maria's engagement (184), but such ridicule includes the “romance” of Old Grannis and Miss Baker as well as her own marriage to McTeague. “‘What a pair,’” Miss Baker says of Trina and McTeague (102, 238), a remark that might be amended to what a laughably grotesque pair, suggesting the power of libidinal drives to overcome even so obvious a mismatch as theirs. All together the three couples parody the sentimental love story which represses sexual passion, inviting laughter at the necessity of reproduction.

Trina and McTeague also invite laughter at environmental strictures by demonstrating the tyranny of socialization with a caricature of bourgeois values, specifically the drive to succeed. McTeague represents the idea of rising in social status, the miner who becomes a professional and learns the finer points of living through a good marriage. Thus he improves his outward appearance, elevates his tastes, both culinary and aesthetic, and acquires a broader interest in civic issues. The culmination of his aspirations is classically patriarchal, centering on children and grandchildren, all gathered in his own home (163ff). Trina, introduced as “this little bourgeoise” (20), represents the idea that hard work and thrift enable a person to attain the American dream, but both values are ridiculed through grotesquerie when her savings are described as a “monstrous, roc-like nest egg” (162). The embodiment of the American dream, of course, is a home of one's own. Though Trina and McTeague never buy that home, they do find it, complete with a “hideous Queen Anne style, all scrolls and meaningless millwork” (172). This ridiculing of taste and implied values by the narrator has already condemned the furnishings of the first residence. Its predictable sentiment is found in the pictures that “inevitably [involve] very alert fox terriers and very pretty moon-faced little girls.” The core of bourgeois capitalism is repetition, the mass production and consumption of goods, an idea represented literally everywhere in the apartment: “The wallpaper was admirable [the narrator says]—hundreds and hundreds of tiny Japanese mandarins, all identically alike, helping hundreds of almond eyed ladies into hundreds of impossible junks, while hundreds of long-legged storks trailed contemptuously away from the scene” (137). The downward course of McTeague and Trina—the one losing job after job until he spends his days fishing and his nights drinking, the other so obsessive about work and money that she destroys her marriage—parodies the bourgeois success story of popular fiction as surely as their sexuality parodies the sentimental love story. Repetition, caricature, and parody are all used to direct laughter at bourgeois values, providing the implied reader with an opportunity for a temporary respite from the very things to which he or she usually submits.

Naturalism's comic potential is also discovered in the relationship of the individual to the environment by considering the term “stature” on two levels: the literal which signifies physical size and the figurative which signifies social status. On the literal level, no one individual can ever be anything but grotesquely small in a naturalistic world. Trina's repeated plea to McTeague to “love me big” (117, 125), as if she could literally gain in stature from his affection, suggests the anxiety which a physical sense of insignificance can create. McTeague's repeated assertion, “You can't make small of me” (employed against the theater ticket seller, the rival dentist, Marcus, and against Trina three times), suggests a hostile yet anxious bid to maintain social status, a struggle against anything that whittles at the self, at individuality. Even the enormous gilded tooth represents a desire for social status, in this case the hope for a Brobdingnagian status as a dentist. Curiously, this ever-present diminution of self, an important thematic of naturalism, seems to be reversed when McTeague flees San Francisco for the wide-open spaces of Placer County: “The still, colossal mountains took him back again like a returning prodigal, and vaguely, without knowing why, he yielded to their influence—their immensity, their enormous power, crude and blind, reflecting themselves in his own nature, huge, strong, brutal in its simplicity” (329). The identity between Humanity and Nature represented in this passage, which recalls the figuration of the mountains themselves as the “vast, unconquered brute of the Pliocene epoch” (322), approximates a Wordsworthian harmony, albeit in a very different key. Once McTeague is out of the city, Nature, like the gilded tooth, apparently serves to inflate the self, not pare it away. In effect, the identification with the mountains replicates Trina's “love me big” plea. Yet the text comically undercuts both desires.

An identification of Humanity and Nature at the level of substance is, for romanticism, figured by anthropomorphism. For naturalism, however, the typical figure to embody such ontological identity is naturalization, exemplified when the miners in the mountains are called “lice on mammoths' hides” (322-23).²¹ While naturalization, as naturalism's chief figure, identifies at the level of substance, it does so by reversing romanticism's use of anthropomorphism: naturalization assimilates the term “humanity” to the term “nature” and not vice versa, as in anthropomorphism. The general economy of romanticism and naturalism is the same in that both assert a fundamental link between Humanity and Nature. Their difference lies in which term dominates. Moreover, naturalization both proposes identity (Humanity and Nature are animals), yet undermines it by reintroducing grotesque physical disproportion—the stature of people is laughably insignificant—as well as social alienation—work reduces people to the level of parasite, since extracting gold is “sucking blood” (323).

This undermining points back to romanticism's strategy of anthropomorphizing to overcome a sense of rupture between Humanity and Nature. Even that strategy, however, is not safe from comic presentation in McTeague, as another figure shows. In this example, also rendered during McTeague's time in the mountains, nature is scripted as the dental patient when mining becomes analogous to dentistry: “It was the same work he had so often performed in his ‘Parlours,’ only magnified, made monstrous, distorted, and grotesqued, the caricature of dentistry” (328). Here Nature is anthropomorphized, named as a member of Humanity, and in a fashion that suggests not just ontological identity, as in the “lice” figure, but a social stature of equals: community not alienation. In this sense McTeague's analogy (for it is he who thinks of it) parallels the Wordsworthian, “reflected nature” figure given earlier by the narrator and all such representations of romantic, man-in-the-open-air myths.

I say “myths” because both figures are actually a foolish and doomed desire, a nostalgia for a pre-Darwinian concept of Humanity's relationship with Nature. The comic quality of this nostalgic identification with the mountains is realized when one conflates the Nature-as-dental-patient figure with the Nature-as-brute figures, which yields the wildly absurd image of Nature as a mammoth or a Pliocene mountain sitting in a dental chair while McTeague as dentist/miner works on its (gilded/gold) teeth. The image underscores rupture, not harmony, and destroys through comic grotesquerie the identity these figures have tried to maintain. No primordial relationship with Nature can be recovered. Only a fundamental incongruity exists between the social world, which contains dentists and their patients, and the natural world, which contains brute animals. Within naturalism, the dynamic of Nature and Humanity is never an anthropomorphic one such as ailing patient and healing dentist represent. Instead, the figure that degrades people to parasites represents naturalism's dynamic: “lice on mammoths' hides … sucking their blood.” Such typical figurations embody the basic point: the grotesquely small physique of people compared to the environment and the element of alienation in the relationship. The final image of the narrative culminates this incongruity; McTeague does indeed seem grotesquely small and alienated in the indifferent immensity of Death Valley.²²

Although the identification of McTeague with the mountains is ultimately ironic, it also makes sense in that naturalism insists upon humanity being part of nature. These two perspectives suggest the double bind of humanity in a naturalistic conception of existence. Ontological monism can lead to a rigid determinism; biology and environment hold people fast. Yet this embrace is also a thrusting away, for people are alienated from nature too. The scenes of McTeague in the mountains and desert can therefore be read as rewriting the figure so beloved by the Age of Enlightenment, the Great Chain of Being, which posits mankind's divinely endowed superiority to and harmony with nature, transforming it to the Fetter of Biological Determinism. This new figure implies a science able to explain all events by empirical data and cause/effect methodology. Mankind becomes homo sapiens. Man and woman become phenomena explained not by free will but by brute instinct, a rigid form of behavior which seemingly cannot be escaped. It can be laughed at, however. The “instincts” of McTeague during his flight into the mountains and desert are funny: he is smart as a fox, always ahead of the law, yet stupid, always carrying a bird cage around, which makes him easy to spot and remember.

McTeague and Trina, then, are comic in a profound sense. They are caught in the universal net of sexual passion, driven by the Horatio Alger ideology of American culture, alienated from and made grotesquely powerless by the natural world. In the face of these “truths” and their laughable presentation, the implied reader as the third person in Freud's model for jokes is invited to laugh not just at characters but at the ideas that give them their force. If the circumstances of existence are as constricting as naturalism argues, then the individual must fit him- or herself to them, must adapt to the situation in whatever way possible. Laughter, as conceived by “scientific” theorists of the comic, provides a way to adapt by offering a respite, a temporary release, from the bonds that are postulated by naturalism. The implied reader is presented with an unblinking view of evolution which refuses to sentimentalize but does offer the refuge of laughter's freedom from resultant psychic or somatic dis-ease.

This expansion of what is laughable from the odd, individual character to the all-encompassing sweep of naturalistic forces in some ways is anticipated by Bergson: “What … is requisite to transform all [that is serious in life] into a comedy? Merely to fancy that our seeming freedom conceals the strings of a dancing-jack and that we are as the poet says ‘humble marionettes / The wires of which are pulled by Fate.’”²³ The hereditary trait of Trina for hoarding and the hereditary trait of McTeague for drinking are the wires which seem inevitably to assert complete control over their behavior. The comic naturalism of Norris parallels the ideas of the French philosopher. I shall return once more to Bergson on laughter, but now I want to suggest that the comic presentation by Norris of the hard facts of naturalism has its roots in the comic tradition of America as it developed on the frontier earlier in the nineteenth century. If the naturalism of Norris is comic, the frontier comic tradition of American has its naturalistic elements.²⁴

One similarity involves the inability of McTeague and the backwoodsmen who populate the comic stories of the frontier to learn from their mistakes. McTeague of course is too stupid to benefit from books, and often the characters in naturalistic stories exhibit minimal thinking capacity. The backwoodsman, in stories involving bear hunting, typically misses his opportunity to kill the bear. Often this failure is due directly to his own clumsiness; sometimes the fault is attributable to pure chance, as in a misfire of the gun. (When McTeague fires a rifle at the park, he was not able “even to hit the target itself,” 195.) If the bear is killed, it is usually due to a marvelous shot which also emphasizes mere chance. In short, the backwoodsman displays little conscious will in his actions, or if he does, the environment, portrayed as hostile or capricious, thwarts him. Ultimately, people are shown to be victims of circumstances, a situation which, however comic the consequences, projects the image of an individual attempting to overcome a forbidding environment, much the same as McTeague tries to rise above his circumstances but cannot.

Second, the frontier comic tradition contains characters whose physical grotesqueness bears a resemblance to the figurative comparisons of people with animals that naturalism habitually makes. Among many such backwoods characters, probably the best known is Sut Lovingood, whose homely face and spindly legs are his chief physical endowments. The legs are described by Sut as being disproportionately long, and he claims they are the result of his mother's being frightened by a sand crane while pregnant.²⁵ Comic narratives of the frontier are more literal than naturalism in their grotesquerie (no doubt a major reason why one kind of story is more obviously funny than the other), but the poetics of both traditions transgress the boundary between the human and the animal worlds, or between a normal and an abnormal human body. (One might recall the description of Jeanlin in L'Assommoir, for example.)

In McTeague these transgressions of the grotesque can be seen on a small scale in the repeated instances of “pop-eyed” behavior from Marcus, Owgooste, and McTeague. Resembling McTeague's stone dog, which has “goggle eyes” (235), these characters are portrayed again and again with eyes that roll in their heads or start from their sockets or bulge out, as though squeezed by some enormous external force. The physical stature of McTeague harbors comic potential, revealed by the ludicrous juxtaposition of his six-foot-two frame with the petite stature of Trina and figured by a pair of synecdoches: his huge “salient jaw” and her “adorable little chin.” More than merely odd, they are the grotesque couple, an impression that does not escape even McTeague on their wedding day (139). As the marriage deteriorates, one of the things that irritates McTeague most is Trina's size, the very attribute that made her so attractive at the beginning: “so small, so prettily made, so invariably correct and precise” (261; cf. 20). When McTeague, wanted for murder, leaves San Francisco, the constant presence of his tiny canary heightens the air of comic grotesqueness he creates, as though he had traded one petite and invariable companion, his wife, for another one even smaller.

A final connection between the frontier comic tradition and the naturalism of McTeague makes the dentist a latter-day version of a comic hero, someone like the legendary Mike Fink. Both are associated with immense strength and heavy drinking. The obligatory comparison of McTeague to animals is matched by Fink and the standard backwoods boast of being half horse and half alligator. According to accounts gathered by Walter Blair and Franklin J. Meine, Fink enjoyed fighting as a favorite pastime, and though McTeague must be provoked into fighting Marcus during the picnic, once begun, the fracas quickly becomes a frontier rough-and-tumble fight, complete with ear biting.²⁶ And even if McTeague does not fight like a backwoodsman, he does indulge in that favorite narrative of the backwoods, the tall tale, prior to his fight with Marcus. He boasts about his strength by telling how he knocked down a heifer with one blow from his fist, “exaggerating the effect of his blow, inventing terrific details” (196). Indeed, this is the only time in the novel that the usually reticent dentist becomes garrulous. This link between comic and violent elements is also illustrated by the yarns Maria and Trina spin for each other about the abuse given them by their respective spouses. “They exaggerated, they invented details, and, as if proud of their beatings, as if glorifying in their husbands' mishandling, lied to each other, magnifying their own maltreatment” (264). The exaggeration of the tall tale functioned in part as a way to match the power of the natural world. Even though this match-up was in fact doomed to fail, the comic intent of the tall tale provided a brief, liberating moment from that failure even as it acknowledged its inevitability.

On the biologic and social levels as well as in the relationship of an individual to the natural world, the narrative of McTeague deploys a logic of severe constraint, as if people were pop-eyed, wind-up toys, driven by the spring of lust or greed and unable to release that tension. The fight between Marcus and McTeague at the picnic, a result of competition for Trina and her money, does nothing to purge their antipathy. Trina herself cannot be satisfied no matter how much money she acquires. We have seen how theorists of the comic in the nineteenth century argued for the power of laughter to liberate, even if it is only a temporary psychic or somatic relief. Mikhail Bakhtin's idea about the comically grotesque realism of the carnival argues a similar function for laughter, though on a greater scale. Laughter at the grotesque, for Bakhtin, is a force that liberates people from official social strictures, after it liberates from the “great interior censor.” In McTeague the opposite seems true, the narrative projecting a comically grotesque naturalism whose laughter cannot release inner tensions. While the medieval grotesque was a degradation of the spiritual to the material level, it is not merely destructive. The spiritual is not hurled into the void but into the productive “material bodily lower stratum.”²⁷ Thus the medieval concept of the grotesque, as Bakhtin sees it, has as its ultimate goal regeneration. In contrast to this vitality, which rests philosophically upon an idea of cosmic unity, the grotesquerie of McTeague emphasizes the material level but without any corresponding link to the metaphysical. The natural world instead becomes a Death Valley. McTeague and Trina have no children; Maria and Zerkow's baby dies within days of its birth; and Old Grannis and Miss Baker are beyond reproduction. Regeneration is lost.

The final image of Trina confirms this sterility due to a failure to release tension, confirms the sense of extinction due to an inability to adapt: “Toward morning she died with a rapid series of hiccoughs that sounded like a piece of clockwork running down” (320). A number of previously discussed ideas are entailed in this description, such as the link between comic and violent elements found in the comic frontier tradition. The image dramatizes the machinelike, and thus ridiculous, behavior of Trina, obsessed with keeping her money despite knowing the clearly violent consequences of refusing McTeague's demands. This in turn implies the bourgeois command to acquire and maintain wealth and status. Indeed, her greed is virtually a hereditary mechanism, an instinct from which there is no escape. Similarly, her fatal sexual attraction to McTeague is portrayed as instinctual, mechanically repeated despite his abuse. As if life itself were the ultimate cause, she dies machinelike, grotesque not in the medieval context of joyful and triumphant hilarity but in the thoroughly modern context of sterility and satiric derision.

The clockwork rigidity of Trina highlights once again her crucial role in the narrative, for it causes her failure to adapt to the new situation of McTeague's having to get a license to practice. Before the official notice forbidding McTeague to continue as a dentist, her leading character trait—a proficiency for saving—is the mainspring for their prosperity. Yet when she must invest money she fails. If she invests in McTeague's education, he could obtain his degree and practice legally. McTeague's stupidity does not matter; the point is that Trina is not flexible enough to try. They might conceivably survive if she changes from saver to investor. This failure to be flexible when circumstances change is accompanied by a loss of the play and laughter which had been shown by the couple before the notice arrives.²⁸ In one sense the dramatization of the impossibility of release and subsequent adaptation can be viewed as the failure of the American comic tradition as it developed on the frontier to provide a laughing response to a hostile environment when virgin wilderness became the urban dynamo of the latter nineteenth century. McTeague could be read as a tall tale flattened out, without comic buoyancy, the dentist as the raconteur silenced by his own inarticulateness.

4

The absence of play demonstrated by McTeague (which should also be read as representative of all the characters) results from a thorough control by forces outside his ken. In Freudian terms, he is insignificant, unknown to the world at large, unknown to himself, because he has been pushed into the unconscious, repressed by critical reason. Yet joking temporarily obviates repression. Presumably, such escape would happen if McTeague could be made to laugh. Such escape would also presumably happen if he himself could make jokes at his own expense, if he had a sense of humor. But he never makes a joke (the closest he comes is his unintentional howler when he mistakes champagne for special beer), and after he is forbidden to practice dentistry, he never laughs. The implied reader cannot laugh with him, only at him. He is an object within what I call the mode of satire: we compare ourselves to him and realize his inferiority and laugh at him. But if McTeague is “repressed” by outside forces analogous to Freud's critical reason, then paradoxically one of those forces is a lack of that critical reason which could contend with the libidinal drive, which starts the story of his downfall. McTeague seems doubly deprived, then. He unconsciously acts, either in the sense that his actions are random, or in the sense that his actions are unconsciously controlled by his id, the locus of the libidinal drive. Thus all the forces controlling McTeague are “outside” forces, even when they come from within.

This double bind is similar to McTeague's being at once a creature of chance as well as of controlling determinisms. As Aristotle phrases it, “in a way, nothing occurs by chance.” Freud, who claims there is nothing arbitrary or undetermined in psychic life, would agree.²⁹ The conscious is always linked to the unconscious. The actions of McTeague stem from those repressive forces—chance as well as heredity and the environment—which give naturalism its deterministic quality. Even when he seems to act randomly, without much forethought or planning, McTeague acts instinctively.

Chance as a hidden cause, a Freudian slip of the tongue which reinforces a sense of control despite its spontaneous appearance, is represented by the lottery, that most crucial of random circumstances in the story. In effect the lottery symbolizes Fate. “Don't it kind of scare you?” Trina asks when she learns she has won (105). Although the lottery may transform an individual, which is certainly the message of the stories the agent tells, her apprehension suggests that as a “beneficent machine” (99) its function may be to confirm and compound what is already present, even if that is detrimental. Those at the party to celebrate Trina's luck laugh at one point because “anything was funny at a time like this” (97). Their laughter is potentially a liberating response to constriction, but it also contains an uneasy undercurrent which Trina's comment inaugurates and which will fully surface first in Selina's laughter. Anything seems funny—laughable and peculiar—because the world of naturalism is partially organized by an apparent randomness which nevertheless contributes to an enslavement of the individual. (In these terms, the lottery functions as a parody of the principle of natural selection.) Gaiety no doubt is the chief component of the laughter of the characters at the party, suggestive of the freedom large sums of money are supposed to represent. However, the lottery can also be read as the not-so-hidden cause of Trina's being reduced to the single-mindedness of the miser, a cosmic joke whose technique is the satiric one of degradation. McTeague's repeated phrase, “You can't make small of me,” expresses an aggressive response to the general insult, a response which might come from any character and which represents a general lack of the joke work able to fashion aggression into comic repartee.

Fear, anger, laughter—all are responses to a rule of chance which is one more brick in the wall of determinism. McTeague could be read as a warning of what can happen if laughter as divertissement and amusement is ignored, for the story diverts the tensions of readers and amuses them too, makes them think. An organism must respond to its environment in a flexible fashion in order to adapt and survive. The discharge or relief theory of laughter, whether applied on the physiological or psychological level, claims the comic and its laughter as an aid to promoting and maintaining such flexibility. The maintenance of flexibility by correcting rigidity with laughter is exactly the point of Bergson's theory, though his emphasis, unlike Spencer's or Freud's, is flexibility in the relation of an individual to society. Moreover, laughter for Bergson serves the living suppleness of élan vital. When that suppleness becomes encrusted with mechanical, absentminded behavior, laughter corrects the defect in order to return people to the attentiveness that keeps them adaptive, flexible, and free. Though Bergson in Laughter (1899) does not make the connection explicit, his system of thought implies that laughter will not only keep a person socially flexible but could also help to contact the durational self of Time and Free Will (1889), a second self present in everyone, ideally free from the purely mechanical, social requirements of clock time.³⁰ Thus if the characters of McTeague were aware of why the implied reader laughs at them, they might change and become flexible and thus better integrated into society. They might even escape their controlled state by coming into contact with their durational self, a kind of ultimate free zone of Being. Such a function represents the apex of claims for liberation made by the relief or discharge model of laughter. However, whatever laughter the characters of McTeague possess early in the story quickly evaporates, apparently blocking opportunities for any kind of liberation, any kind of self-understanding, any sense of humor, a conclusion dramatized by the clock image used to describe Trina as she dies.

If in Darwin's terms McTeague dies because he could not adapt and therefore is not part of a survival of the fittest, in Bergson's terms McTeague fails because he lost the suppleness of élan vital which defines a living being. He, like Trina, is not of the fittest because at the end he has not fitted himself to the demands of that part of the environment known as other people, to the flow of social existence in Bergsonian terms. Earlier he had shown such attentiveness in his charity to the Sieppes. But stealing Trina's money twice in effect transforms McTeague into a miser:

… and once in the northern part of Inyo County, while they were halted at a water tank, an immense Indian buck, blanketed to the ground, approached McTeague as he stood on the roadbed stretching his legs, and without a word presented to him a filthy, crumpled letter. The letter was to the effect that the buck Big Jim was a good Indian and deserving of charity; the signature was illegible. The dentist stared at the letter, returned it to the buck, and regained the train just as it started. Neither had spoken; the buck did not move from his position, and fully five minutes afterward, when the slow-moving freight was miles away, the dentist looked back and saw him still standing motionless between the rails, a forlorn and solitary point of red, lost in the immensity of the surrounding white blur of the desert.

(333-34)

McTeague clearly has a chance to show his sympathy for Big Jim the Indian. Instead he does nothing, as Trina did nothing for the Sieppes, even though like Trina he has plenty of money. Big Jim, whose physical size presumably matches that of McTeague, functions as his doppelganger. The refusal by McTeague to help Big Jim, then, is a denial of self, a denial of his own humanity, for Big Jim is Everyman in a naturalistic universe where the signature of the deity is illegible at best. Humanity is nothing but a forlorn and solitary point, grotesquely lost in the immensity of its surroundings, unable to know its origins or destiny, deserving of charity. No doubt he presents his filthy, crumpled letter to everyone with mechanical regularity. Big Jim is funny.

But what kind of laughter is aroused? The laughter of a flexible McTeague would be friendly, indicating that he recognizes the obverse of himself in the Indian. If McTeague is the social being who descends to the level of brutes, signifying the doctrine of everyone's necessarily incomplete socialization, then Big Jim is the alienated natural being, his begging letter the sign of his incomplete socialization as well as his alienation from nature. Yet Big Jim's mechanical behavior suggests a derisive response from both the dentist and implied readers. McTeague, however, seems incapable even of that, and so implied readers include in their ridicule the humorless, mechanical, and repressed McTeague, laugh satirically at and therefore create a distance from the obvious rigidity of both the Indian and the dentist. But McTeague also invites laughter at the perspective of naturalism about aspects of life so fundamental that they include the reader as well: sexual reproduction, socialization into the ideology of a culture, and alienation from the natural world. This all-encompassing quality brings implied readers down to the level of McTeague, just as McTeague is on the level of Big Jim, and suggests the proximity of humorous laughter. Everyone is subject to the forces that control McTeague, an idea dramatized by the inclusion of Norris as a character in the mining office scene (325). To fail to laugh with McTeague is to fail to laugh with ourselves. Rejecting the dentist completely, seeing him only as an object of ridicule, replicates the denial of Big Jim by McTeague.

Nevertheless, the laughter of the implied reader exhibits a nervousness about these equivalences. If McTeague's encounter with Big Jim in the desert demands laughing with them both because of a notion of humorous identity, the comforting moral of humanistic charity is not the only possible way to read that identity. The encounter also can be read uneasily, as representing an unavoidable and unchangeable alienation which not only dramatizes our collective foolishness but also our pathetic inability to do anything about it. The peculiar aspect of McTeague as a funny text is its production of this kind of humorous laughter, a laughter which implies an affection for the object, but cannot help including a deep-seated nervousness about such proximity because of the grim, alienating, and deterministic context of naturalism. From this darker perspective, the laughter generated by McTeague cannot be the foundation of a social vision in Bergson's sense, for the society to which one should adapt is itself suspect. Nor is the grotesque found in McTeague subversive, even in the limited sense that Bakhtin's discussion of carnival implies.³¹ The feeling of constriction from both the natural and social worlds is so strong that liberation—if possible—can only be temporary. In this reading the laughter created by the text suggests at best a posture of defensive adaptation.³² Part grotesque satire and perhaps mostly grim humor, the meeting of McTeague and Big Jim the Indian functions as a coda for the complexity of McTeague's comic naturalism.

5

What is the significance of the comic in McTeague? First, the text does not clearly represent a hard determinism, as some critics argue.³³ The satiric mode suggests a soft determinism by virtue of the distance it creates between the characters and the implied reader. From this perspective McTeague and company are a type; they do not represent all people. The humorous pole is more complicated, suggesting both a hard and a soft determinism. The humorous perspective supports the hard position, since it insists upon no distinction between the implied reader and the characters. Everyone is subject to the harsh and degrading circumstances that constitute existence and create alienation, and so all one can do is make grim jokes to ease momentarily the effects of those circumstances. Yet the humorous perspective also allows for a more hopeful position. Precisely because of harsh and degrading circumstances, people can become aware of the need for a flexible charity toward one another, not the blind charity of the lottery machine (99) but the charity of humorous laughter focused by the comic grotesqueness of life, by the misproportion between the strings of the puppet and the freedom of the human being. From this position one laughs at and with the grotesque, naturalistic world which, in Norris's view, twists people “from the ordinary … uneventful round of every-day life.”³⁴ Comic laughter in McTeague, containing an idea of freedom couched in terms of adaptability, can be an endorsement for the production of a moral value that lifts humanity beyond a hard determinism.

As a site for a dialogics of evolution, psychoanalysis, and a Bergsonian reaction against the deterministic application of evolutionary laws, the narrative presents the structure of jokes about laughter told to the reader, one of which possesses a punch line claiming laughter as beneficial on physical, psychic, social, and metaphysical levels. The inability of McTeague and company to understand the joke and laugh measures a failure to maintain their health on these levels. The joke, then, can amuse the implied reader and function as a warning. Yet, as the alienating aspect of the encounter with Big Jim suggests, the laughter produced in the reader is not as obviously healthful as this use of the discharge theory indicates, for the narrative takes its readers right to the edge of the comic and pushes them off. Recall the final image of the story: McTeague standing under the blazing sun of Death Valley, handcuffed to a corpse. When McTeague and Marcus proceed to fight over the gold, having chased the mule and shot it, thus spilling their only water supply, it is palpably ridiculous. But the consequences of those actions are fatal, violating a traditional definition of the comic.

And, in fact, the narrative has been flirting all along with this violation, starting with its heavy investment in slapstick, which entails the dynamic at issue here: violence and laughter. This issue surfaces most dramatically in the presentation of Trina's death, though we have seen it also in the picnic scene, which ends with blood and broken bones and which represents, in the hysterics of Selina, the type of laughter with which one might well respond to the grotesque images of the actual death of Trina and the prospective death of McTeague. The violence of slapstick remains comic only so long as the participants seem to be less than human; that is, pratfalls and collisions are laughable as long as bodies seem to possess the resilience of rubber, as long as they do not bleed or break. In McTeague, people are at once less than human and all too human. A comic presentation of this idea means that the laughter generated will become strained, like Selina's, possibly preventing the sense of liberation which the discharge theory claims is at the core of laughter. Once again we touch the funny, that is, peculiar nature of the comic in McTeague. A comprehensive view of its laughter suggests a trajectory that might cross the grotesquerie of Wise Blood or As I Lay Dying, include the absurdist visions of Waiting for Godot or The Rhinoceros, and perhaps end up with the violent zaniness of The World According to Garp. The trajectory moves out of the salubrious concept of laughter provided by evolutionary theory and ends with a sense of foreclosure of freedom.³⁵McTeague as comic text encourages an exploration of links among such texts. That exploration would investigate the effect of violence on laughter, the loss of the satiric mode's moral force, and the effect of a despair which seeps out of the alienating aspect of the grotesque. The grotesque itself strains against the traditional idea that comic situations have no serious consequences.

The comic in McTeague also encourages an exploration of the limits of the discharge theory, including the problematic connection of a philosophical freedom based on duree with a physiological freedom based on nerve paths. Perhaps another aspect would involve a more detailed unpacking of the “economy of joke-work” within the framework of naturalism: how the frustration of desire (not only for sex but for money, social status, and for a freedom and harmony within the concept of Nature) is linked to the possibility of comic release; how the grotesquely comic may be part of a general representation of that economy.

Finally, McTeague as comic text suggests general studies of how naturalism, in both its European and American variants, functions when mixed with laughter. Would inquiries about the presence of laughter in Zola's and Hardy's works, for example, be worthwhile? Is laughter more possible in twentieth-century uses of naturalism? Is laughter another link between Bergson and Faulkner? Why is laughter so conspicuously absent in Dreiser's work? How does its presence, mostly under the rubric of irony, affect our reception of Stephen Crane's work? Why does Norris use laughter in McTeague but limit it so severely in his other works? The significance of the comic in McTeague as manifested by a grotesque naturalism may be that it raises such questions.

Notes

1. Frank Norris, McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899), vol. 8 of The Complete Works of Frank Norris, 10 vols. (1928; rpt. New York: Kennikat Press, 1967), 133. All subsequent references are to this edition.

2. Joseph McElrath, “The Comedy of Frank Norris's McTeague,” Studies in American Humor 2 (1975): 88-95. In McElrath's view the narrative “switches” tones in the middle, moving from a comic to a naturalistic quality.

3. The degree of determinism a writer shows has been a wide-open debate at least since William James in 1884 made his famous distinction between “hard” and “soft” determinists (“The Dilemma of Determinism,” in Essays in Pragmatism, ed. Alburey Castell [New York: Hafner Publishing, 1948]), 37-64. John J. Conder (Naturalism in American Fiction: The Classic Phase [Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984]) presents some of the issues that underlie such debates. For more discussion on naturalism plus bibliographies, see Harold Kaplan, Power and Order: Henry Adams and the Naturalist Tradition in American Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); June Howard, Form and History in American Literary Naturalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Ronald E. Martin, American Literature and the Universe of Force (Durham: Duke University Press, 1981); Donald Pizer, Twentieth-Century Naturalism: An Interpretation (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982) and Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984); and Charles Child Walcutt, American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956).

4. While Zola's work lacks gaiety, certainly ridicule is abundant, as Jules Lemaitre noticed in 1886 (“Emile Zola,” in Critical Essays on Emile Zola, trans. A. W. Evans, ed. David Baguley [Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986], 44-60), and Brian Nelson has shown more recently (“Black Comedy: Notes on Zola's Pot Bouille,” Romance Notes 17 [1976]: 156-161; “Pot Bouille: Etude sociale et roman comique,” Les Cahiers Naturalists 55 [1981]: 74-92; Zola and the Bourgeoisie: A Study of the Themes and Techniques in “Les Rougon-Macquart” [New York: Barnes & Noble, 1983]). The first generation of Americans usually designated as writers of naturalism—Crane, Norris, Dreiser—has sparked few studies exploring possible comic effects, if an overview of the last fifteen years of scholarship in the MLA bibliographies is a representative sample. Two examples on Crane are Jean Cazemajou, “L'autre visage de Stephen Crane: Le ‘comedian,’” in Linguistique civilisation, littérature, ed. Andre Bordeaux (Paris: Didier, 1980), 88-104, and Joyce Caldwell Smith, “The Comic Image in the Fiction of Stephen Crane,” Dissertation Abstracts International 46 (1986): 3026A. One example on Dreiser is Paul A. Orlov, “Plot as Parody: Dreiser's Attack of the Alger Theme in An American Tragedy,” American Literary Realism 15 (1982): 239-43. Among the major books on Norris, perhaps William B. Dillingham's, Frank Norris: Instinct and Art (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969), typifies the general approach insofar as the comic element is concerned: “Norris's chief concerns in the first six chapters are the descriptions of the Polk Street environment, the meeting of McTeague and Trina, and their somewhat dull courtship” (135).

5. The usual privileged term to name the general field of inquiry is “comedy,” but here its reference will be restricted to the specific dramatic form. “The comic” is meant to suggest a discourse which encompasses all theoretical approaches to the laughable, not just literary ones. Despite differences, both Foucault's and Bakhtin's notions of discourse work here. At a certain level of generality discourse seen as a “practice” imposed upon events (Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” trans. R. Swyer, in The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith [New York: Pantheon, 1972], 215-37) and discourse seen as “dialogic” (Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” trans. Carl Emerson and Michael Holquist, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981], 259-422) converge for my project because both emphasize what I see as irreducible in the comic: its social and heterogeneous qualities.

6. For the ludicrous/ridiculous distinction, see chapter 4 of Stuart Tave, The Amiable Humorist: A Study in the Comic Theory and Criticism of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). As Richard Simon notes, theories about overarching functions of the comic are antagonistic and exclusionary (The Labyrinth of the Comic: Theory and Practice from Fielding to Freud [Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1985], 239-40). Thus laughter is a force for civilization (George Meredith, “An Essay on Comedy” [1877], in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher [1956; rpt. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980], 3-57) and a force against the repressions of civilization (Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious [1905], trans. James Strachey [New York: Norton, 1960]); it corrects aberrant behavior (Henri Bergson, “Laughter” [1899], in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher, 60-190) and does not correct aberrant behavior (Willard Smith, The Nature of Comedy [Boston: Gorham Press, 1930]); is irrational (Wylie Sypher, “The Meanings of Comedy,” in Comedy, 191-255) and rational (James Feibleman, In Praise of Comedy: A Study in Its Theory and Practice [New York: Macmillan, 1939], and Marie Collins Swabey, Comic Laughter: A Philosophical Essay [Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1970]); affirms freedom (Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helen Iswolsky [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968], and George McFadden, Discovering the Comic [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982]) and denies it (Rene Girard, “Perilous Balance: A Comic Hypothesis,” Modern Language Notes 87 [1972]: 811-26). Since comic theory dwells in a tower of Babel, it may be worth noting my own basic definition. The comic comes into being when a perceptual or conceptual juxtaposition creates a playful incongruity which in turn engenders some form of laughing response in an audience. A playful incongruity entails a rule and a transgression of the rule with consequences that are neither grave nor fatal. Cf. Umberto Eco, “The Comic and the Rule,” in Travels in Hyper Reality, trans. William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, 1986), 269-278; Aristotle, “Poetics,” in The Complete Works of Aristotle, rev. Oxford translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, Bollingen Series 71, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2:2316-40.

7. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading; A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 34. The control of an audience or a reader to ensure success for comic materials highlights the close association of the comic with rhetoric, a link discussed more by ancient and medieval commentators than contemporary ones, though reader response theory offers a new way to recognize the power of the comic/rhetoric similarity (see James F. English, “The Laughing Reader: A New Direction for Studies of the Comic,” Genre 19 [1986]: 129-54).

8. Bergson, “Laughter,” 97, 79.

9. Don Graham (The Fiction of Frank Norris: The Aesthetic Context [Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978]) pursues McTeague's use of aesthetics in a generally different way than I do, but I agree with his statement that the narrative is “a kind of manual of kitsch art” (47).

10. Though I follow the narrative's focus on Polk Street as an object of derisive laughter, I do not think Norris is mounting a class-oriented satire. The ladies who shop on Polk Street and a wealthy merchant like Trina's Uncle Oelbermann, obviously not working class, are also portrayed as rigid in behavior. As I shall show later, Trina and McTeague both serve as vehicles for a satire on the middle class. McTeague's variety of social roles makes him the focus of derision at the individual level, but as the portraits of other characters suggest, and as I shall elaborate later in the essay, McTeague should be seen ultimately as a comically exaggerated representation of Norris's view of the human condition.

11. Important to my sense of the meaning of the grotesque: Bakhtin, Rabelais; Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, trans. Ulrich Weisstein (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966). In reference to Selina's laughter, grotesque is meant to emphasize a sense of revulsion often associated with the term. The grotesque creates an incongruity through a physical mismatch by mixing the human with other animate forms, both plant and animal, and thus stressing physical oddity, sometimes of monstrous proportions. The grotesque transgresses either the norm for an individual body or the boundary between the human and the plant or animal world. It is a technique of degradation and devaluation that denies humanity a privileged status in nature. Bakhtin connects laughter in a positive way with the grotesque, but see Harpham's comment (71-74) that Bakhtin ignores alienation, an element which I develop later and which has important consequences for my explanation of how naturalism uses the comic.

12. Cynthia Russett, Darwin in America: The Intellectual Response, 1865-1912 (San Francisco: Freeman, 1976), 7. Henry F. Osborn (From the Greeks to Darwin [New York: Macmillan, 1894]) gives an 1890s overview on the subject.

13. Michel Foucault, “Death of the Author,” in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josue V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 141-60.

14. Herbert Spencer, “The Physiology of Laughter,” in Essays Scientific, Political, and Speculative II, vol. 14 of The Works of Herbert Spencer, 21 vols. (1891; rpt. Osnabruck: Otto Zeller, 1966), 455-56. A recent study reinforces the connection between laughter and the discharge of tension (see William F. Fry, Jr., and William M. Savin, “Mirthful Laughter and Blood Pressure,” Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 1 [1988]: 49-62).

15. Charles Darwin, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals [1872] (New York: Philosophical Library, 1955). For Darwin, laughter is an overdetermined phenomenon, attributable to all three of his principles of expression: serviceable associated habits; antithesis; direct action of the nervous system. Darwin most clearly parallels the Spencerian model in the discussion of the third principle (66-82) and quotes Spencer uncritically (198) in the section on laughter.

16. Spencer, “Physiology,” 496.

17. John Dewey, “The Theory of Emotions, Part I,” Psychological Review 1 (1894): 553-69, esp. 559.

18. G. Stanley Hall and Arthur Allin, “The Psychology of Tickling, Laughing, and the Comic,” American Journal of Psychology 9 (1897): 1-41, esp. 19.

19. Freud, Jokes, 149, 101. What is congruous in Freud is what is apt according to the critical judgment. Witz arises when critical judgment is circumvented, thus economizing on the psychic energy required to maintain what is proper and fitting, “economy” indicating the difference between what is disciplined and reasoned and what is playful and pleasurable. Thus the incongruity between the pleasure mechanism and the critical faculties produces laughter (Freud, Jokes, 85, 120). “Freud … was part of the late nineteenth-century materialist effort to use evolutionary theory in placing man's moral faculties and cultural institutions in a wholly naturalistic-historical light” (Frank J. Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend [New York: Basic Books, 1979], 261). Despite the reference to Spencer, Freud's connection to evolutionary theory comes through his knowledge of Darwin (Lucille B. Ritvo, “The Impact of Darwin upon Freud,” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 43 [1974]: 177-92). Robert R. Holt (“A Review of Some of Freud's Biological Assumptions and Their Influence on His Theories,” in Psychoanalysis and Current Biological Thought, ed. Norman S. Greenfield and William C. Lewis [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965], 93-124), as well as Sulloway, develops the thesis that biological concepts underlie Freud's theories.

20. Freud, Jokes, 158.

21. My use of anthropomorphism and naturalization as opposing figures is based on Paul de Man, “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 239-62.

22. The gap created by de Man's distinction between anthropomorphism and trope is narrowed somewhat when he declares that anthropomorphism is “structured like a trope” (242). Perhaps that is why naturalization can function like anthropomorphism, offer itself as a figure of identity. We might read this instability as representing the argument within naturalism about whether the concept of a monism should be implemented at the ontological or the methodological level (cf. Conder, 5-10). My reading of a fundamental irony within Norris's figurations of nature hints at another instability of the narrative. Attempting to construct a rhetoric that is adequate to the principles of naturalism, such as lack of will and disproportion of power between environment and individual, writers may unintentionally create a comic grotesque. The epic quality that is sometimes reached in a presentation of naturalism may be undermined by the figures of that presentation because they strike the reader as silly and far-fetched, too obviously symbolic. In McTeague (and L'Assommoir) this problem of control is also found in an indirect discourse that fluctuates between representing a character's voice and the “objective” voice of the narrator.

23. Bergson, “Laughter,” 111-12.

24. By the comic frontier tradition, I mean those writers who flourished mostly between 1830 and 1865 and provided the base upon which Sam Clemens erected the persona of Mark Twain. See Walter Blair, Native American Humor (1937; rpt. New York: Harper & Row, 1960), and Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill, America's Humor, From Poor Richard to Doonesbury (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), for good overviews of the field. George W. Johnson (“The Frontier behind Frank Norris's McTeague,” Huntington Library Quarterly 26 [1962]: 91-104), anticipates some of the points which follow, such as the comparison with Mike Fink. He also sees some of the comic aspects of the narrative, but, like McElrath, does not always see them as advancing the story.

25. George Washington Harris, “Old Skissim's Middle Boy,” Sut Lovingood's Yarns [1867] (New Haven: College & University Press, 1966), 63-68.

26. Walter Blair and Franklin J. Meine, Half Horse, Half Alligator: The Growth of the Mike Fink Legend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956).

27. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 94, 378.

28. Similarly, Gervaise in L'Assommoir also loses laughter and flexibility in the face of change. What serves her in good stead early in the story—her easygoing nature—is what condemns her once Coupeau stops working. That change demands a change in her; she must get tough with him. When she does not, when she is inflexibly easygoing (to put it paradoxically), she does not survive, first as a shopkeeper and then as a living organism. Before the change in circumstances, there are examples of play and laughter in her relationship with Coupeau, just as McTeague and Trina are shown playing early in their marriage (McTeague, 117-18).

29. Aristotle, “Physics,” in Complete Works, 1:336; Sigmund Freud, “Determinism, Belief in Chance and Superstition—Some Points of View” [1901], in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, trans. James Strachey, vol. 6 of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74), 6:242.

30. See Henri Bergson, “Two Aspects of the Self,” in Time and Free Will, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: Macmillan, 1910), esp. 128-39. Duration might be seen as Bergson's reversal of Spencerian, mechanistic thought, to which Bergson as a student at L'Ecole Normale Superieure subscribed: “At that period … there were … two factions in the university. One, by far the more numerous, which estimated that Kant had asked the questions in their definitive forms, and one which adhered to the Evolutionism of Spencer. I belonged to the second group” (Michel Barlow, Bergson [Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1966], 14; my translation). Jacques Chevalier (Henri Bergson, trans. Lilian A. Clare [New York: Macmillan, 1928]) also notes the link to Spencer (48).

31. Richard M. Berrong (Rabelais and Bakhtin: Popular Culture in “Gargantua and Pantagruel” [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986]) points out that the potentially subversive aspect of sixteenth-century popular culture is greatly overstated by Bakhtin.

32. In Jokes, 233, Freud referred to humor as a defensive process. The idea of laughter as a defensive gesture within the context of evolution is discussed by Janice Porteous, “Humor as a Process of Defense: The Evolution of Laughing,” Humor: Interdisciplinary Journal of Humor Research 1 (1988): 63-80.

33. See Conder, 69-85, for an example.

34. Frank Norris, “Zola as a Romantic Writer” [1894], in The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris, ed. Donald Pizer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 71-72.

35. Cf. Girard's hypothesis about the comic.

I would like to thank my colleagues, Prof. Reinhard Friederich and Prof. Alan MacGregor, for their help while I was writing this article.