Do Naturalist depict individuals qua groups or groups qua individuals?

[Erick89]

Hello,

Frequent reader, seldom poster here. I have a college paper I'm working on which argues that Henry James's novella The Turn of the Screw must be read in the context of his literary style, Naturalism, to unfold the ambiguity of the tale. I want to summarize the Naturalist method, but am having difficulty. So do Naturalist depict individuals qua groups -- or -- groups qua individuals? It seems like two sides of the same coin, so the only real difference may be the perspective. Any help is appreciated.

[caroljane]

Naturalism as I remember studying it, depicts individuals and attempts to show each in his social context, which combined with heredity, is different for each individual. Literature to be any good does not depict individuals qua anything except themselves, although it may try to show why they are themselves.

Romanticism as Rand rendered it, showed individuals entirely distinct from any hereditary or social influences and usually at odds with them.

[Selene]

Erick:

Welcome to OL...Out of curiosity, what course is the paper for?

As it turns out, you brought me back to my graduate studies in Rhetoric with the Turn of the Screw...

It was used as a basis for critical analysis of the narrative style as well as the different tropes and rhetorical devices employed by James...

So I ran a search regarding the "Turn of the Screw" and "Rhetorical analysis" to see anything new. You may find this article interesting. It may not be on point for you. However, I found it interesting in light of my past studies:

http://www.urop.uci.edu/journal/journal02/06_CynthiaSimonian/CynthiaSimonian.pdf

For example:

"A prime example of the first interpretation occurs in The American Monthly Review of Reviews, which has this somewhat

simplified reaction to the James story:

There is something peculiarly against nature, something indescribably hellish in the thought of the beautiful little children holding unholy communion with the wraiths of two vile servants who had, when alive, corrupted them.

(rpt. in James, Norton Critical Edition 155)

Adam

The opposition of the “beautiful” on the one hand and the

“vile” and “corrupt” on the other suggests the dualistic

thinking into which a first story analysis inevitably leads.

[Jonathan]

Romanticism as Rand rendered it, showed individuals entirely distinct from any hereditary or social influences and usually at odds with them.

I don't think that's true. For example, Dagny and Frisco were the culmination of heredity, and Rand's characters were not at odds with social influences per se, but just with the dominant, destructive social influences and social vices of the times in which they lived.

J

[caroljane]

Romanticism as Rand rendered it, showed individuals entirely distinct from any hereditary or social influences and usually at odds with them.

I don't think that's true. For example, Dagny and Frisco were the culmination of heredity, and Rand's characters were not at odds with social influences per se, but just with the dominant, destructive social influences and social vices of the times in which they lived.

J

Her brother James was also the culmination of the same heredity-- and both Dagny and Frisco's rejection of the dominant society they lived in, in my view, amounted to their having been uninfluenced by society per se.

[Xray]

Hello,

Frequent reader, seldom poster here. I have a college paper I'm working on which argues that Henry James's novella The Turn of the Screw must be read in the context of his literary style, Naturalism, to unfold the ambiguity of the tale. I want to summarize the Naturalist method, but am having difficulty. So do Naturalist depict individuals qua groups -- or -- groups qua individuals? It seems like two sides of the same coin, so the only real difference may be the perspective. Any help is appreciated.

But doesn't Henry James belong to the literary period called "Realism"?

[william.scherk]

I still don't get the word qua in all its uses. I could not even interpret the topic question at first -- except to recast it in cruder terms:

• Do Naturalists depict individuals in the character or capacity of: groups or Do Naturalists depict groups in the character or capacity of individuals?
  

Still stumped. Naturalists first I associate with the biological/geological sciences, stout and doughty sorts who stalk the cliffs, meadows and wastelands for 'specimens.'

A Naturalist like Charles Darwin, for example, stalked his world for beetles when young, and did terrible things to them, pinning them and classifying them. Later, he did more specimen and note taking, and later still, published his work as a contribution to the science of the day.

So, if that isn't what the OT means, I go back. Naturalists in art, perhaps? Naturalists in writing, in books? Well, that lets Darwin back in, but maybe we mean only fiction. In which case a Naturalist would maybe try for a certain objective assessment and detachment from the story and its characters. The Wizard of Oz series are not naturalistic, whereas Jules Verne was? I don't know. Henry James was naturalistic or realist or fabulist or romantic or what?

But hey, let's grab an example. How about some author from a time past, since I cannot think of any Naturalist who speaks large today, save for vexed 'Darwinists'/atheists like Dawkins, but they are out for literature, for fiction.

How about a beetle collector like Zola? How about Tom Wolfe? How about Truman Capote? I don't have a clue of who should be in my focus group of Naturalists.

Anyway, now Angela has wrecked it with her note about that danged Realism. I was thinking that a 'naturalist' like Darwin must have been a hard-headed 'realist' of some kind, since he was looking for beetles and iguanas and barnacles and not fairies in the garden. And if his realism portended a 'tell it like it is' hard-boiled detective approach to incremental events in immensities of time, I do not think he would be telling anything but a realistic story, of what could be demonstrated, a tale throbbing with the engine of natural selection and vast variety commingled and hungry.

So, Zola, with his Darwinism imbibed, could imagine a world like the world of evolution, of struggle, of heredity, of raw humanity oft untutored, of bargemen and underlings and people without shoes. They were real enough, they may even have been a 'natural' part of a poorer time.

So, if Zola looked at the poor scuttling beetles of humanity under his scrutiny, pinned to his board, given identity, is he telling a story of individual scuttlers -- or of hordes, classes, a 'type' of beetle that swarms inside the walls? I don't know. I figure he must have concentrated on a least a few individual specimens, even when he was having them act as an Everybeetle.

I do get the impression that (like strict genetic determinists of yore), a certain fatedness suffuses a Naturalist tale. If man has savage inborn tendencies, and if the universe contains no gods to care for him, then would not his formed nature explicitly determine his future?

I don't think so, not to the nth degree, as human like other willful brutes will push obstacles aside, with his mind and his machines as much as his own shoulder, but I can see a cruder kind of Naturalist narrative going down that path. Can a naturalist cast several scuttlers individual enough to tell a deeper narrative of Humankind in the world?

So, individual cast in group terms, or groups cast in individual terms? I say, tentatively, both. Why not? I bet nouveau Naturalists work both sides of the street.

Now why doesn't the original poster climb back on the stage and give us his musings?

Edited November 4, 2012 by william.scherk

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

William,

You should read The Romantic Manifesto by Ayn Rand.

She placed Naturalism as an aesthetic opposite to Romanticism. The difference between the two is volition, not beauty. In her meaning, Romanticism promotes art with the message that humans can choose their destiny and Naturalism promotes one in which humans are mere products of outside forces.

See the Ayn Rand Lexicon for some easy excerpts: Naturalism.

After that, my suggestion is to read her book, if not to examine the ideas, at least to become familiar with the jargon.

Michael

[Xray]

Now why doesn't the original poster climb back on the stage and give us his musings?

I'd also be interested in the poster's own interpretation of this Jamesian novella.

interesting coincidence: just two days ago, when sorting out/rearranging my books on the shelves, I held The Turn of the Screw in my hands (after an interval of many, many years - it must be about thirty years that I last read it). I recall leaning, back then, toward the interpretation that the governess imagined it all and that what she 'saw' were projections of what she had repressed in her psyche (I was very interested in psychonalysis at that time).

But the fascination of the story lies in its ambiguousness. I'd like to read The Turn of the Screw again - we often perceive a work of literature differently when rereading it after many years, because our interpretation always also reflects what preccupies our mind.

Today my focus would be less on psychoanalysis than on discussing the idea of 'truth' in fiction.

[william.scherk]

I was checking the OL archives for a place where both Tom Wolfe and Charles Darwin were mentioned, and found this thread. Do Naturalists depict individuals qua groups or groups qua individuals?

On 11/3/2012 at 6:12 PM, william.scherk said:

So, Zola, with his Darwinism imbibed, could imagine a world like the world of evolution, of struggle, of heredity, of raw humanity oft untutored, of bargemen and underlings and people without shoes. They were real enough, they may even have been a 'natural' part of a poorer time.

So, if Zola looked at the poor scuttling beetles of humanity under his scrutiny, pinned to his board, given identity, is he telling a story of individual scuttlers -- or of hordes, classes, a 'type' of beetle that swarms inside the walls? I don't know. I figure he must have concentrated on a least a few individual specimens, even when he was having them act as an Everybeetle.

I do get the impression that (like strict genetic determinists of yore), a certain fatedness suffuses a Naturalist tale. If man has savage inborn tendencies, and if the universe contains no gods to care for him, then would not his formed nature explicitly determine his future?

I thought a few readers might get a chuckle out of a thorough rubbishing of Tom Wolfe's book The Kingdom of Speech**. 

From Tom Wolfe's Reflections on Language, at 3AM magazine. This is high snark, working against Wolfe's own high snark bashing of poor old stupid Darwin (and Chomsky):

You may be wondering, just how did Wolfe come to witness this humiliation of slow Darwin at the hands of his much brighter students? Was it a steampunk time machine that took him back to the 19th Century? Or was it a secret NSA surveillance tool – a Jules-Verne-o-scope – that allowed him to spy on Victorian classrooms? And did Darwin actually hold a teaching position ever? Well, no, it seems that the whole passage is a riff on a letter from Darwin to the naturalist J.D. Hooker. Fortunately for us, Joshua Leach took the trouble to look up what Darwin actually said, and it went thus:

“It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present.— But if (& oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia & phosphoric salts,—light, heat, electricity &c present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter wd be instantly devoured, or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.”

This is the language that Wolfe has glossed as “I don’t know.”

But hey, who wants to hear about ammonia and phosphoric salts and proteins and complex changes? That is just window dressing for what we all know is the core of Darwin’s actual position: No clue. But it wasn’t for lack of trying! “Darwin often thought about it, but it made his head hurt.” Wolfe goes on to tell us that Darwin’s hypothesis about the origin of life is “typical of the more primitive cosmogonies.” Indeed, we are assured that Darwin’s idea is precisely the structure of an Apache creation myth.

Yes, all this is actually in Wolfe’s book. Let’s set aside the part about Darwin’s hurting head and focus on how Darwin’s proposal was “typical of primitive cosmogonies.” The Apache creation story, Wolfe tells us, is this: “Way up in the void arrives a disk. Curled up inside the disk is a little old man with a long white beard. He sticks his head out and finds himself utterly alone. So he creates another little man, much like himself.” Long story short, they play with a ball of dirt, and then a scorpion appears and the scorpion starts pulling things out of the ball etc. Now if this is or was someone’s creation story I have no quarrel with it. My only point here is that it is decidedly NOT the same proposal that Darwin made in is letter to Hooker. For one thing, Darwin left out the agency, and yes that kind of is important. He is talking about life emerging from undirected chemical processes (more on this later).

Can you appreciate a writer's skill, or admire his style, or even love his tone and stance, but remain unconvinced by his arguments? In earlier years in life I had admired the skill, wordsmithing, unique punchy vaudeville of Wolfe. But this one could be a righteous stinker. 

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

** 

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"A great journalist with a whip-like satirical prose style...Wolfe's great gift is to make the heavy seem light and this book is such an entertaining polemic that I read it in a day and immediately wanted to read it again." (Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times). Tom Wolfe, whose legend began in journalism, takes us on an eye-opening journey that is sure to arouse widespread debate. The Kingdom of Speech is a captivating, paradigm-shifting argument that speech - not evolution - is responsible for humanity's complex societies and achievements. From Alfred Russel Wallace, the Englishman who beat Darwin to the theory of natural selection but later renounced it, and through the controversial work of modern-day anthropologist Daniel Everett, who defies the current wisdom that language is hard-wired in humans, Wolfe examines the solemn, long-faced, laugh-out-loud zig-zags of Darwinism, old and Neo, and finds it irrelevant here in our Kingdom of Speech.