Several Things // McTeague

Throughout McTeague there seemed to be a constant triangle to situations as well as a consistency of things coming in threes—be they phrases or single words in the dialogue, or even Norris himself writing a sentence three times.  No, I do not have every instance marked.  Initially I did not notice, but once I did I started marking things as “x3,” and I will be glad to share tomorrow.  As far as triangular situations go, we can start with the love triangle itself among McTeague, Marcus, and Trina, soon followed by Maria Macapa, Zerkow, and gold/greed.  Once McTeague and Trina are married, the third angle is the money situation.  It is not simply a union between a man and woman, but a trinity of man, woman, and her money—though it should be theirs. 

I found the Irish setter and Scotch collie to be an interesting image in the novel.  It reminded me a little of the way John Steinbeck passes through The Grapes of Wrath by alternating each chapter from an outside-though-somewhat-related situation, then somehow mirroring it in the plot with the following chapter.  While Norris does not quite do that, this quarrel between the dogs has a similar effect.  They appear to be symbolic of Marcus and McTeague in some ways, at least they are mentioned quarreling in the yard or street before each time Marcus and McTeague hash it out.  The difference between the dogs and the humans is that the dogs resist a physical fight, though the people watching strongly desire it and encourage it; but when the two humans fight the humans observing end it, discouraging it.

Norris is fond of repetition it seems, as several passages are copies of previous passages, and he often reuses a phrase to describe something from a different perspective than it was mentioned in previously.  Naturally, I thought of Kierkegaard: “Repetition and recollection are the same movement, only in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward; whereas the real repetition is recollected forward.”  I found this to also be reminiscent of the dogs.

Sex and the consciousness appear to me to be opposite of their portrayal in The Portrait of a Lady.  Where Mazzella says sexual possession is a threat to the consciousness, it seems Norris is saying sex brings the stupid and unconscious to their consciousness.  Where marriage was a detriment to Isabel’s consciousness, Trina and McTeague are more conscious within marriage…or Trina is at the very least.