Henry Adams and the American Naturalist Tradition

199 Pages·2017·8.02 MB·English

by  Harold Kaplan

Originally published in 1981 by the Chicago University Press.
Published 2011 by Transaction Publishers
Published 2017 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2010012822
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kaplan, Harold, 1916-
[Power and order]
Henry Adams and the American natural tradition / Harold Kaplan.
p.cm.
Originally published under title: Power and order : Henry Adams and the
naturalist tradition in American fi ction. Chicago : University of Chicago
Press, c1981.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4128-1423-2 (alk. paper)
1. American fi ction--19th century--History and criticism. 2. Adams,
Henry, 1838-1918--Criticism and interpretation. 3. Power (Social sci-
ences) in literature. 4. Order (Philosophy) in literature. 5. Naturalism in
literature. I. Title.
PS374.N29K36 2010
813’.009’12--dc22
2010012822
ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-1423-2 (pbk)
For learning,
to my mother and to Raymond Sanford

Contents
Preface ix
1. Th e Myth of Power 1
2. Th e Naturalist Ethos 13
3. Henry Adams: Th e Metapolitics of Power and Order 37
4. Th e Dehumanization of Politics 65
5. Naturalist Fiction and Political Allegory 85
6. Vitalism and Redemptive Violence 115
7. “Godlike Reality”: A Testing and Truthful Violence 131
Notes 169
Index 183

Preface
To treat of the relation between literature and politics has its obvi-
ous dangers, apart from the risk of becoming easily drowned in
controversy. Even the most sophisticated political theory works at
odds with the literary imagination, for discursive politics has an
irrepressible tendency to create abstractions, while any literature of
merit moves almost always toward the rejection or revision of those
general ideas that have entered the public domain as stereotypes.
This is a warning to be kept in mind by all students who engage
in the project of seeing literature from the perspective of politics. It
seems to me, however, that the reverse way of putting the issue
helps toward the solution of the difficulties. To see politics from the
perspective of literature is to find the ground where they actually
coexist, that is, where they share a source in cultural myth. Modern
theoretical politics in the West has been led by an ambition to
achieve metaphysical status and philosophic universality. At least
since the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century, ideol-
ogies have taken on the character of secular religions, and the
strongest political currents of this century and the last have surely
confirmed and heightened that development. Marxism, for in-
stance, as generally practiced and as it has influenced intellectual
life, has made as wide a claim for relevant authority in all spheres of
human existence as any universalist myth or dogma that we know,
including that of the Virgin of Chartres, even as she was drawn in
Henry Adams's imaginative portrait of her and her civilization.
This is again to suggest that the politics that meets literature on the
deepest level, beyond mere description or propaganda, is a meta-
politics, one founded on premises that link nature and human
history and approach teleological design.
I was drawn to the study of American naturalist fiction written at
the turn of the century exactly because it offered an unusually
instructive example of how such a system of thought, founded on
neoscientific premises and offering neopolitical conclusions, could
affect the literary imagination. The works of Dreiser, Crane, and
Norris that I treat here were all published within a period of eight
years, beginning in 1893, with Crane's Maggie, and ending with ix