SOURCE: "Frank Norris' 'The Puppets and the Puppy': LeContean Idealism or Naturalistic Skepticism?" in American Literary Realism, Vol. 26, No. 1, Fall, 1993, pp. 50-9.

A good deal has been written about Frank Norris' philosophy. Since the turn of the century, in fact, more attention has been given to the understanding of his thought than to the qualities—period and personal—of his literary artistry. This began to change by the late 1970s. Happily, the growing emphasis has been upon his salient traits as a prose fictionalist. Yet novels like Vandover and the Brute, McTeague, and The Octopus inevitably lead critics of all persuasions back to considerations of Norris' Weltanschauung and the identification of his themes. This is due largely to the idiosyncrasies of Norris' narrative techniques—particularly his use of free indirect discourse—and their complications of point of view. While progress is being made in this area, however, Norris scholars have not yet reached a consensus as to how he tells his stories; and, to attempt definition of one of his works still means, perforce, reliance upon an experimental a priori model concerning the intended intellectual content. The goal is to articulate an hypothesis concerning both technique and theme which can be persuasively verified. What kind of writer was Frank Norris? At the same time that this question is posed, one must ask, what kind of thinker was he?

If one sees the mind behind The Octopus the way Warren French did in 1962 in Frank Norris, it makes all the difference in how one describes and evaluates Norris' art. For, as an alleged Emersonian and Thoreauvian thinker, Norris did a miserable job propagandizing for optimistic idealism. If he was, instead, making sense of life as the disciple of philosopher Joseph LeConte, the way Donald Pizer pictures him in The Novels of Frank Norris, he fares better. But Pizer's LeContean idealist, believing that all things work for the best and are irresistibly effecting improvement over evolutionary time, is finally a second-rate Browning who fails to convince us that all's right with the world. Indeed, The Octopus makes us certain that just the opposite is true, and it invites us to reflect that the LeContean tail may be wagging the Norris dog. Why would Norris write such a grimly Naturalistic novel only to conclude it with such unconvincing cheer? Further, could the American Zola have been so much of a theist as to buy LeConte's essentially Pauline view that man's vestigial animality will be overcome by the spiritual self growing more dominant over the centuries? Finally, should Norris at all be termed a Zolesque Naturalist if his vision was as spiritualistic and perfectionist as Thoreau's or LeConte's?

"The Puppets and the Puppy" is an 1897 short fiction piece by Norris which has received remarkably little attention from commentators on his philosophical position. And yet, it provides a major datum for those attempting to fix Norris' position in American intellectual history. For this touchstone document was published three years after Norris left Berkeley, and is one of his fictions which most overtly raises philosophical and theological questions of the kind to which he presumably was exposed when at the university from 1890 until 1894. It appeared in the San Francisco weekly, The Wave, on 22 May 1897; and, rather than a token of Transcendentalism or fidelity to the Berkeley philosopher, it appears as Norris' sardonic rejection of all such benign metaphysical perspectives on life as purposeful and meaningfully directed by the Christian deity. Or, it perhaps suggests that, by 1897, LeConte's influence—whatever it was—was not positively measurable. Norris, after all, never did mention LeConte's name or refer directly to his philosophy. For example, LeConte is not the thinker to whom Norris directs the attention of the reader of "The Puppets and the Puppy." In the subtitle, the dedication is to Annie Besant; or, rather, it is "disrespectfully dedicated" to this little-remembered follower of the well-known theosophist, Madame Blavatsky.

The story concerns a boy's toys—a lead soldier, a doll, a mechanical rabbit, a queen's bishop from a chess board, and a wooden mannequin named Japhet from a Noah's Ark set. They are reflecting upon the meaning of their existence in the play-room in which they find themselves the night after Christmas: they wonder about their origin, present situation, future disposition, and, as Stephen Crane phrased it in "The Open Boat," the "ethics of their condition." That they are mere play-things of "the Boy" does not appear to be a satisfying explanation; like human beings, they look for a more personally meaningful sense of their situation than that afforded by the Olympian scenario of the Greco-Roman tradition. It is denied them. Despite their various self-consoling ratiocinations and spiritualistic conclusions about their lives' ultimate significance, they are suddenly and ruthlessly dispatched when a puppy unpredictably appears and renders their deliberations mere sound and fury. There seems, then, to be no significance to their brief roles as play-things—except that they are thinking creatures doomed, like humans, to frustration over the riddle of their existence.

The materialistic bishop appears to have been closest to the truth: when the puppy tosses him down the heating register in the floor, his final view of the unintelligible, "'vast, resistless forces of nature'" at work is confirmed for the reader. The bishop's perspective at the end represents a final insight in two ways, though. Norris gives him the last, Naturalistic words. But as he utters them, he abandons the less mordant perspective he enjoyed earlier when insisting on the value of his individualism and his exercise of free will.

"The Puppets and the Puppy" begins as it ends, pessimistically and non-teleologically. The lead soldier initiates the dialogue by negatively viewing what is to him the mysterious purpose of their presence in a playroom: "Well, here we are, put into this Room, for something, we don't know what; for a certain time, we don't know how long; by somebody, we don't know who. It's awful." What we now term the existential predicament most memorably pictured in Waiting for Godot is thus anticipated, as it frequently is in Naturalistic art. The doll, however, faintly discerns some purpose to it all; the reason for their being in the playroom has something to do with "the Boy," she announces. The mechanical rabbit shares this faith, and—like human beings positing a God whose existence gives a higher meaning to life—the rabbit views the Boy as "a glimpse into the infinite." Thus Norris begins his allegory concerning mankind. At this point, via the doll and the rabbit, he is potentially in harmony with both Besant and LeConte, whose theisms are central to their teleological thought on the human condition.

The bishop is the skeptical epistemologist undercutting such theism. He appears to be a new toy, for he has not seen the Boy, and he reacts accordingly. "There is no Boy, except that which exists in your own imaginations," he tells his fellows. At most he can visualize only a "Force" governing life, a "certain vague power, not ourselves, that shifts us here and there." And yet, he goes on to reflect, there is a positive qualification which is necessary. It is here that he articulates the point of view overturned at the end of the drama. He asserts that, because one has his "individualism," his "own will," that Force in nature is not omnipotent. To illustrate what he means, he observes that a chess-piece individuated as a bishop like himself cannot be moved as a rook—the implication being that the diagonal moves of a bishop on a chess-board are a consequence of his identity as an individual willing to move diagonally.

Norris first exercises his sense of irony thus, inviting the reader to begin logic-chopping, by creating a figure who confuses his putative "own will" with the predetermined diagonal way in which a bishop must be moved, according to the laws of the chessboard. The human analogue in the allegory is, of course, the delusion that one chooses to act in a particular way when natural laws, or the laws governing one's nature, actually determine the same. The second irony is the bishop's assumption that laws of the chessboard, which allow him and others to predict future "moves" or developments in the game, always and uniformly apply. The human analogue in this case is the assumption that the "game board" of life is as simple as a chessboard and that immutable rules—like those of supply and demand cited by Shelgrim in The Octopus—are in place and tame life to predictable developments. In fact, the bishop seems to have forgotten that he is not upon a chessboard this evening, and the "laws" do not apply in such a case; further, even if he was on the board, natural developments such as the chance appearance of the playful puppy can at any moment render such "laws" insignificant. As in Darwin's portrait of the biological world, so in Norris' allegory: unanticipatable, random events make dubious the reassurance derivable from a perceived design which in fact can prove mutable at any moment. In Norris' major works of fiction, "coincidences" abound, and they are not mere literary devices. Unforeseeable for Vandover is Ida Wade's suicide; Trina Sieppe wins a lottery prize; Dyke never suspected that the railroad would raise its shipping rates for hops; and for Curtis Jadwin it was unthinkable that ignorant hayseeds in the West would do him in by planting so much wheat. The uncertain nature of experience is a constant in the Norris canon.

When the doll next responds to the bishop's initial reflections on life being governed by a mysterious force, one can understand her position without reference to Annie Besant. We can easily discern the faith-versus-reason dialectic Norris creates when the doll tartly categorizes the bishop as a scientific materialist who cannot rise above a delimiting, empirical notion of Force governing life. "Ah, you think you've solved it all—you, with your science and learning." She opts for faith over reason, proclaiming that there "is a Boy," and deducing that she is "made in his image." She offers no proof—not surprisingly, for none is needed by, or expected from, a spiritualist with such traditional notions. Despite the leap of faith, she draws to her side three allies: the lead soldier (who has seen the Boy), Japhet, and the mechanical rabbit who reasons that someone must have put in him the cymbals-changing mechanism he has and must have wound him up.

Again, knowing who Annie Besant was is not essential. At the same time, though, Norris did not expect his 1897 readers of The Wave to be unaware of the fact that fourteen days earlier, on 9 May 1897, the internationally famous theosophist had addressed San Francisco at the Metropolitan Temple and displayed the same attitude as the doll and the mechanical rabbit. Norris assumes the reader's familiarity with what Besant represented in his cultural context and in light of the detailed record of her lecture that appeared in the San Francisco Examiner on 10 May.

When speaking on "The Evolution of the Soul" Besant began, like the doll, with an attack on materialistic science; and, like the rabbit who did not countenance the bishop's refusal to infer a deity from the evidence of natural force, Besant went on to criticize atheistic science for not extrapolating to the idea of a deity active in earthly affairs. She complained that "Science says nothing of the motive force that set the universe going, it is satisfied with things as they are."

Besant's next, disapproving emphasis is on the scientist's premise that devolution will eventually follow evolution, that the individual and the universe itself will eventually lapse to their original conditions. (See .) Norris' drama follows suit, with Japhet reflecting that all toys are eventually thrown away: "Then what?" He answers his own question in a Biblical manner, echoing the "I know that my redeemer liveth" morologue in Job (19:25-27), and proclaiming that "I shall live forever in a Noah's Ark of silver." The scientific bishop proves consistent in his reaction to Japhet: "What phantoms you hug! . . . I shall gradually rot and decay, and fall to dust, and be finally absorbed by the elements." The rabbit agrees that annihilation is his end as well. Besant, however, was famous for the consolation she offered for those tempted by such a gloomy view; her best known article of faith—and the key theme of her lecture—was the reincarnation of the soul. The argument of her lecture was that offered by Norris' lead soldier: "I shall be re-melted and cast again to form another lead soldier, who in his turn shall be re-melted and re-cast, and so on and on, forever and ever." Besant's notion of the continuous evolution of the soul through innumerable reincarnations is then echoed by the lead soldier who explains that "each time I am re-melted and re-cast I become a finer soldier." He also echoes the point Besant made to her audience concerning the uplifting influence of the ever-improving, individual soul on the human race at large: "Thus the race is improved. Immortality is but the betterment of the race."

The dialogue of "The Puppets and the Puppy" then provides reaction to another jibe by Besant at the scientific materialists. Besant had explained that she could not accept the scientists' emphases on heredity and the shaping influence of environment as an explanation of the character of the life of the individual. She preferred to focus, not on the body affected by such determinants, but upon the temporarily immanent soul which finally transcended the indignities suffered by the body. After all, if what counted was the body buffered about by heredity and environment, the fate of the individual defined as unable to determine his or her own progress would contradict the ideas of divine justice and God's love for mankind. Her solution to the problem lies in the idea that the body and soul are not really connected in a meaningful way: individual bodies are merely expedients for the progressive education of the soul when on earth. God is ever just and loving in the long-term view because He is benignly developing the individual soul that does not die but returns to earth to continue its education.

Norris' later response to Besant's theosophical theories may, perhaps, be seen in the spiritualistic thought of Vanamee in The Octopus, composed in 1899-1901. Is the reincarnation of the soul what the irrational visionary has in mind when proclaiming the unreality of death and seeing in Angéle Varian's daughter the proof that the mother did not really perish? Does Vanamee believe that, when Angéle died during childbirth, her soul passed into her daughter's body? In "The Puppets and the Puppy," however, Norris' own position is much more clearly suggested. He sides with the scientists and those troubled by the travails suffered by the individual in the present: he more seriously takes into account the effects of heredity and environment, without reference to soul. That is, Norris has his characters focus solely on the physical and psychological condition of the individual.

The lead soldier, after a pause in the dialogue, initiates this development by introducing a new consideration about the condition in which they find themselves. He asks, "Why was Falling-down brought into the Room? Here is another thing we are all at one upon—that it is wrong to Fall-down. It displeases the Boy." The lead soldier describes a lead drummer twisted by the Boy in such a way that he could not stand; he has also heard of other military figures that could not stand because they were miscast. Why should they be thrown away because they were misshapen? They were not responsible for these flaws with which they began or which they acquired through no fault of their own. The question posed by Norris in McTeague is then paraphrased by this boy: "Were they to blame?" This triggers a Jobian protest among all of the toys. At this point they no longer can articulate any of Besant's theosophy. All feel threatened by the possibility that they may be thrown away because of flaws for which they may not be individually responsible; and they point out that they did not ask to be made the way they were.

When the lead soldier complains that "[a]ccident alone" made him a private while another was a general, Norris brings his drama back to Besant's theory for a final refutation. This toy clings to the one consolation that remains: "In the re-melting, perhaps, he may be cast as a private and I as the general." At this juncture, though, the puppy suddenly appears. The lead soldier is knocked down the register. It seems unlikely that he will ever be found and recast.

Norris' attitude toward Besant is clear. But what of Joseph LeConte? The question arises because of the widely-held belief that LeConte is the key to the Norris canon and, contradictorily, because of the total absence of a viable theory of evolutionary progress in "The Puppets and the Puppy." Why didn't Norris modify Besant's evolutionary ideas concerning man via reference to a LeContean alternative? That he did not feel like it at this time may be as good an answer as any, and it will allow one to continue with the assumption that LeContean thought clarifies Norris' canon, with the exception proving the rule. But, while this is conceivably the case, the possibility is at least called into question when one notes that Besant and LeConte—the imaginative spiritualist and the spiritually-oriented geologist and zoologist—did have some things in common. Indeed, there are essential similarities. First, they shared a teleological evolutionary view assuming that a deity was directing and insuring the positive development of the human race. The opposite point of view emerges in "The Puppets and the Puppy"—as it also seems to in Norris' novels where the deity is conspicuously absent from human affairs. Second, Besant employs the same Pauline-Victorian view of "lower" and "higher" states of human nature as that for which Pizer has made LeConte famous in Norris scholarship.

Besant describes three stages in the evolution of the soul. The young soul passes through a phase in which sensation is all and consciousness is only beginning to form from the images and then ideas associated with experiences of pleasure and pain. Next, conscience begins to develop and is in constant conflict with the passions that still have the power to affect one; and here we find the view of the conflict between the vestigial animalism in man and the more spiritual side of his nature—the LeContean formula for man in conflict with himself which is alleged to have so profoundly influenced Norris' view of human nature. Besant now rises to the next state in the evolution of the soul, using even more imagery associated with LeContean thought:

This brings us to the third stage. Now the soul has become the conqueror[;] having become master of the animal nature[,] it draws strength from the higher world. It has mind power, art power, moral power, which show themselves as the guiding forces. Such men are found among us, our leaders in the world of thought, of morality, of great art achievements, making the world better and more beautiful. . . . Onward and onward grows the soul out of the ordinary track of human evolution, the higher powers are showing, man has grown pure in his thought, built up his mental and moral character. Such [a] soul is nearing the goal of its evolution.

This soul in a particular body can no longer be numbered among "the lowest, the vilest" of men in whom "the brute" is so apparent; it no longer suffers conflicts, for it has "subjugated the lower nature"—just as LeConte's evolved humanity will sometime in the future.

The question, then, is: did Norris reject the point of view of Annie Besant and at the same time embrace Joseph LeConte's version of theistic evolutionary optimism? Or was such progressive developmental idealism acceptable if reincarnation was eliminated from the paradigm? To say yes in either case is to ignore the total situation of the toys, since the questions they raise, the self-consolations they attempt, and the nullifying effect of the unpredictable forces that the puppy symbolizes indicate more problems with the Weltanschauung in question than the unlikelihood of reincarnation.

Almost a year before Annie Besant delivered her lecture and a year closer to Norris' direct experience of Joseph LeConte in the lecture hall, Norris made clear what was involved, intellectually, in his discipleship to Zola. In "Zola as a Romantic Writer" he described the typical plot—and representative picture of life—of a Naturalist. The description squares with what one finds in "The Puppets and the Puppy" and The Octopus:

Terrible things must happen to the characters of the naturalistic tale. They must be twisted from the ordinary, wrenched from the quiet, uneventful round of every-day life, and flung into the throes of a vast and terrible drama that works itself out in unleashed passions, in blood, and in sudden death.

The themes that emerged from Zola's fiction revealing his "love of the extraordinary, the vast, the monstrous, and the tragic" cannot be confused with those of the likes of spiritualists such as Besant and LeConte. If they are, one should consult immediately the anti-metaphysical theses advanced in Zola's Le Roman Expérimental. And when one is tempted to see Vanamee and Presley as the spokespersons for Norris in The Octopus, or to interpret as Norris' the sanguine views of inevitable evolutionary progress espoused by Sheldon Corthell and Laura Jadwin in The Pit, he should remember the confusion pictured in "The Puppets and the Puppy" and described as an essential of Naturalistic art in "Zola as a Romantic Writer."

Might one transcend such confusion? Yes, Norris did—to produce an art which pictures and makes sense of it in the way that Aristotle described tragic drama as doing so. The effect of great art, intellectual clarification of the human condition, occurs. Did he transcend it to visualize a divinely-originated program for amelioration worthy of a metaphysician with a systematic philosophy like Besant's or LeConte's? Norris' canon, read in light of "The Puppets and the Puppy," indicates that his characters might do so on occasion, but to as little satisfactory effect as is seen in The Octopus. Norris' characters frequently seek some panacea. Some, like Vanamee, experience nirvana. As with Zola and Stephen Crane, however, Norris' own focus is on a particular kind of confusion: how idealists delude themselves when seeking for a benign order amid "the throes of a vast and terrible drama."