McTeague - LIVE!

         This blog entry is a little more conceptual and imaginative in nature, but is based in my close reading of the text so bear with me.

           As we all saw in class last Monday, a silent film directly based on McTeague was created back in the 20’s called Greed, and while it was built up to be and was received as a critical success it was a failure in the box office. In my opinion, I think it could do better as a stage production or even an opera, where, unlike the director of Greed, one has more licenses to be lengthy and may create truly something truly artistic & inspired, which is much harder to accomplish in Hollywood. McTeague, or perhaps an alternative title of Animals, would take its cues directly from the major parts of the text and would be structured as follows:

               
Act I: Meet McTeague – lottery winner – the wedding night (Ch.1-9)

Act II: Start married life – start of poverty – Trina’s death (Ch. 10-19)
Act III: The mines – the wasteland – finale (Ch. 20-22)

The first act introduces us to the main characters and the primary setting of San Francisco, the dramatic premise starts to develop (greed and lechery), the inciting incident occurs (the lottery), and it ends with McTeague and Trina’s honeymoon scene. The second act begins with the two living happily initially but sharply spirals into poverty and madness, finally ending with Trina’s brutal murder at Mac’s hands. In this act we have the lowest valley of the novel and its greatest complications to the story (poverty, Trina in bed with her money, McTeague’s fall into animalism) and ends with the novel’s most damning and dramatic decision (Trina’s murder). The significantly shorter third act takes place entirely in the desert and the focus here is on McTeague as a runaway, digging for gold in the wasteland and dealing with his guilt, which gives the audience a false sense of denouement before his frenzied flight through the alkali flats and the climactic final confrontation with Marcus puts on the edge of their seats and them shocks them with its terrifying and absurd conclusion.
          The tone of the play is intense and gritty, dark without being gothic in nature, and ultimately tragic without being sympathetic. Think something in line with a Tennessee Williams or an Arthur Miller and you know the direction that I'm going for. This all to argue my point that it is better to reinterpret a novel onstage than on film, especially a naturalist novel.

Frank's Fourth Circle of Hell

            In the first half of McTeague by Frank Norris, one passage summarizes the progression of McTeague and his friends:

“All at once there was a report like a pistol. The men started in their places. Mrs. Sieppe uttered a muffled shriek. The waiter from the cheap restaurant, hired as Maria’s assistant, rose from a bending posture, a champagne bottle frothing in his hand; he was grinning from ear to ear . . . Hardly one of them had ever tasted champagne before. The moment’s silence was broken by McTeague exclaiming with a long breath of satisfaction: ‘That’s the best beer I ever drank . . . .’” (132)

Norris juxtaposes high society, represented by champagne, with the lower class and unintelligent McTeague. His sudden draft into the high society opportunity, provided by his new wife’s small fortune, upsets the balance that he maintained before.

             The worst part is McTeague’s gradual but inescapable loss of his friend Marcus. Although he imposes himself upon McTeague early in the novel, Marcus provides the friendship McTeague desires. When Trina wins her money, however, Norris introduces a responsibility no one can handle. The money becomes everyone’s idol. Trina herself controls the money and does not surrender it to her husband. The effort appears noble, but (just as Dante illustrates in his fourth circle) a miser and a prodigal are equally greedy. One could even argue the unspent sum corrupts the group more, becoming an unseen ideal prize.

            McTeague could normally preserve hope, as he did desire Trina before she had money, but Marcus’s monetary greed forces the reader to reexamine each character’s motives. Could McTeague have wanted Trina just because Marcus had her? Norris certainly introduces the question. The rest of the novel may tell.

            

Uncomfortable Moment

         McTeague starts out innocently enough. Norris uses words that indicate a city that never changes or diverges from its schedule. McTeague himself never changes the way he does things or the day on which he does those things.

It was Sunday, and according to his custom on that day, McTeague took his dinner at two in the afternoon at the car conductors’ coffee joint on Polk Street. He had a thick, gray soup; heavy, underdone mean, very hot, on a cold plate; two kinds of vegetables; and a sort of suet pudding, full of strong butter and sugar. On his way back to the office, one block above, he stopped at Joe Frenna’s saloon and bought a pitcher of steam beer. It was his habit to leave the pitcher there on his way to dinner. (1)

Within the first paragraph, Norris shows how McTeague spends his Sundays going to the same places, eating the same foods, and doing everything exactly the same as every other Sunday. However, this repetition leads to McTeague not knowing how to handle himself when something changes. This is especially true when that something includes a beautiful young woman under anesthesia. When McTeague first puts Trina under anesthesia, he feels strange animalistic urges begin to grow in him and he has to try to fight them. However, his inner struggle is one of the most uncomfortable scenes that I have ever read. I was not sure that I was really reading the words that were on the page. When he kisses her, I felt sick to my stomach. And then, he asks her to marry him. Who does that kind of thing? What was Norris trying to do? Because I really have no idea what he is trying to insinuate. I will continue reading this novel because I think I have a good paper topic for this next paper, but I am very reluctant to finish it because I know that it will only get more uncomfortable for me and I am not okay with that.

Animal Rights

           Before settling on the title of McTeague, Frank Norris had considered entitling his novel Greed instead, but I offer another alternative title that would prove just as appropriate: Animals. Animals run wild throughout the novel, either directly mentioned or implied indirectly by Norris’ syntax, and it is one of his primary means of conveying his critical intentions.

           
          As Sam has correctly noted, Norris intentionally uses the Irish setter and the Border collie to characterize Marcus and McTeague, pointing out not only the dignity of the actual beasts in relation to their human counterparts but how the two men bark and fight each other as if they were dogs. McTeague in particular is given the most beastly characterization in the novel, depicting his life before Trina as brutish and simplistically sensual and his effect on her to be one of trepidation and powerlessness. It is much like King Kong and Ann Darrow, except in this story Ann Darrow becomes just as frightening as McTeague except for much different reasons. The language employed by these people is gruff and weighty, and the motivations of most of these characters in base and pleasure-focused, designed to emulate the temporal passions of mere beasts, and in the same way that a beasts’ life is devoid of spirituality and purpose thus falls the Sententia of our central characters (a few characters’ stories will end happily, but I’ll just avoid that for now).  There is no positive connection to nature or our possible origins as animals, but a somewhat Renaissance-esque understanding of the superiority of humanity to animalism and how far we can fall into primalnality.

           All of these examples of animal behavior are meant to distinguish a difference between the realization of how humans should interact and be motivated and the stark reality of how they actually live. There is no positive connection to nature or our possible origins as animals, but a somewhat Renaissance-esque understanding of the superiority of humanity to animalism and how far we can fall into not the banal but the primal instead. It is a portrait of how humanity has been perverted by the American Dream and how we foolishly pursue base desires and hurt others in the name of greed. Norris is not interested in idealism or sentimentality, however, and uses direct imagery and clarity of purpose to create what he feels is an honest (re: negative) portrayal of the West as it has become.

Romanticism and Sexuality, Respectively

If you could combine Charles Brockden Brown with Nathaniel Hawthorne and add a pinch of “The Death of a Salesman,” I think you might get something similar to Theron Ware.  I had to keep reminding myself that I was not reading Hawthorne, this was not Young Goodman Brown, and that I was taking an America Realism and Naturalism class, instead of returning to American Romanticism.  For all its naturalism, there was so much romanticism.  But for all its romance it was romanticism explained, and I think that is what constituted to the naturalism.  To me it was like watching a scary movie without the edits, and the film crew kept popping up on the screen reminding me that it was not as romantic as I had initially thought—maybe even the TBS facts bar that kept popping up and telling me that the Soulsbys were really sideshow specials.  Things happen ever so “seemingly,” the imagery of darkness and forests that we become so familiar with in CBB and Hawthorne are immediately debunked one paragraph or page later. 

And is it just me, or are all of the male protagonists consistently somewhat dense during this literary movement?  Meanwhile, you have Isabel Archer trying to save herself and save the world without being incredibly stupid.  If you had McTeague and Lapham in the same room, we might have one lazy afternoon with some Keystone Lights and a bug zapper on a front porch in Alabama, while Theron is quite another ordeal.  He is a prude, though he doesn’t seem to want to be or at best not look like he is a prude.  I think he wants to be like Celia Madden, who reminds me an awful lot of what Isabel would like to be if she had the opportunity—but, Theron is too incredibly dense.  I just can’t help but wonder what the difference with the sexes could be at this time.  The women seem to get it, but the men don’t…meanwhile, I don’t even know what it is.  In terms of naturalism and its need to scientifically break everything apart: what is science saying about the genders, and of sexuality itself? 

I know this became more of a rant, and frankly, studying literary sexuality is not my preferred Sunday afternoon, but I can’t exactly ignore the elephant anymore.  So, Mitchell: can we talk about this gender/sexuality issue?

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.  

                                             Much Less Ministry

           

          Harold Frederic presents Theron Ware as a typical, young minister, who is fresh into the field that he supposedly dedicated his life to. As one choice leads to another, this man is eventually damned and led out of the ministry. This is the result from him trying to change who he is for the sake of pleasing others. He is a shallow and hollow man at heart; he is lucky to have his wife with him at the end of the story. Frederic presents Theron in such a way that it would appear that his circumstances are what damns him, but this is not true. Theron damns himself through and through, with one of the main reasons being his mistrust of his wife and his intellectual infatuation with Celia Madden. She partially damned him, but it is his own fault for fantasizing about her and raising her to the level of a goddess in his mind. This craven man has no substance to call his own, and he is so worried about what others may think about him that it eventually tears him to pieces.

            It is easy to see why Theron cannot make it in the ministry, but why did Frederic put him there in the first place? Theron has so much potential to be a great minister, but he gets swept away by the world and his own desires before he can fully realize his position as a minister. Theron later claims that he is not built for the ministry, but the real issue is that the ministry is not built for him. He begins as a down to earth man who trusts his supportive wife; they live on little, and that is enough for them. But after he sees the luxury of Father Forbes, he begins falling morally. This fall is climaxed during his evening near the piano of Celia and then even further at the two separate church meetings in the woods, where he sees Catholics drinking alcohol and then wanders off with Celia. Theron does not know how to guard his heart against fleshly desires; a weak-hearted man like him can never thrive as a minister, who is supposed to lead his flock by example. Frederic permits Theron to fall in order to show the reader that innocence can be easily lost when a person succumbs to the pressures of the world. Though one could argue that Theron was never innocent to begin with, but merely playing the part of the innocent Christian man. The poor cretin might have made it as a pastor if he just relied on God and his wife more, rather than being so heavily influenced by others. One could also say that he does not honor his marriage as a Christian man should, and this is the reason that he damned himself. Either way, Frederic permits Theron to fall because he succumbs to the desires of his flesh and betrays his position as a minister. He is an example of the world getting the best of a weak Christian, and this is why Frederic puts him in a position to have his faith tested.