Teaching Guy de Maupassant's "The Necklace"

In Mammonart Upton Sinclair memorably interprets Guy de Maupassant as an Emile Zola "without social vision and revolutionary hope." As a result what one ends up with is a technically brilliant "master of the short story, better able than anyone else" to "pack . . . meaning into a brief episode, to give you the whole life and import of a character in a couple of thousand words" . . . but absolutely nothing else, teaching the student of writing nothing but "the tricks of the trade." This had much to do with Maupassant being "one of the fighting art-for-art's-sakers, to whom the idea of morality in an art-work is an insult."

A very plausible interpretation indeed, I think, which has made me reflect on my experience using the story in the classroom. This was in the more advanced composition class at the college I taught at, which had a greater accent than the starter course on textual analysis, and used to that end a literary component as preparation for a general education course on literature the students had to take later.

The students almost invariably insisted that the story was a little homily about "Being grateful for what you have"--in that had Mathilde Loisel not borrowed what she thought was a diamond necklace to wear at the ball in the hopes of "not appearing poor in front of rich women," she would not have lost what little comfort she had in her life as she (and her husband) sacrificed all to replace what they mistakenly thought an exceedingly expensive piece of jewelry.

I do not deny that it is possible to read the story that way--especially if one is still callow enough to expect stories to all be centered on presenting a single, tidy, utterly conservative and conventional moral; if they think that "There is no such thing as society"; if they know nothing about French realism or naturalism, or Guy de Maupassant, and how cold-eyed this literary current can be as it presents characters in the grip of larger forces; as indeed they did not.

But what about when someone tries to explain to you all these things? Explain that literature, and life, can be more complicated than that, as this story is? After all, the reason to pick this story over many of the alternatives in the limited selection of the anthology was that, besides being brief and accessible (it was a composition class, after all, and one could give only so much time to the literary element), it seemed to me to offer a lot to talk about, and write about, when it was time to display the compositional skills the class taught by turning in a written essay. We had de Maupassant's sense of what a fragile, tenuous, thing life can be. ("How life is strange and changeful! How little a thing is needed for us to be lost or to be saved!" the narrator remarks at one point.) We had here some hard realities of class, and class mobility; we had the celebration and glamorization of wealth and the illusions and deceptions that go with that; we had the anxieties and aspirations of the marginally middle class--all things that seemed to me to very "relatable" today. We had what it meant to be in debt in this earlier era, and how different that was from the present. And so on and so forth.

However, they brushed all this aside as they insisted on the simple, "moralistic" reading that would have appalled Maupassant.

It does not seem to me incidental that this let them moralize sanctimoniously about Mathilde's conduct--her being ungrateful for what she had, her "not knowing her place" and wanting more than life had given her.

How sanctimonious was evident at grading time. Far from being "grateful for what they have" and "knowing their place" they constantly showed themselves ungrateful as they came to demand of their instructor (usually in the most disrespectful manner) that anything they got that was less than an "A" be changed an "A" in the apparent belief that I was singlehandedly keeping them from their destiny to be a CEO of a Fortune 500 company by giving them anything less than that "A."

Alas, the fictional portraits of the teaching profession rarely present those scenes--and how far from rewarding they are for practitioners of a profession whose members society at large expects to do the job out of convenient social virtue.

Upton Sinclair on Guy de Maupassant

In the chapter of Mammonart that Upton Sinclair devotes to the career and work of Guy de Maupassant Sinclair pays tribute to de Maupassant's technical command of the short story--the French writer "master of the . . . form," for "No one has been able to pack more meaning into a brief episode, to give you the whole life and import of a character in a couple of thousand words." However, Sinclair also treats him as terribly limited in other ways, asking of the "young writers of short stories" who study his work to learn from that master "What has he to give them--aside from the tricks of the trade?" and answering, as he holds that de Maupassant himself would have answered, "Nothing." In spite of his "art for art's sake" views Maupassant has a "propaganda," a Message, just "as definite, as deeply felt, as persistently hammered home as that of a tub-thumper like John Bunyan or a prophet like Tolstoi," but alas, a worse than worthless one, namely "that life is a cheat and a snare," a view that Sinclair sees as not just leaving his work a body of brilliant technique and no more, but as having destroyed Maupassant himself (put him "in a strait-jacket at forty," and in his grave in Paris' Montparnasse Cemetery not very long after).

Where did Maupassant's come from? As it happens Sinclair significantly arranged his book so that the chapter on Maupassant came immediately after the chapter on Emile Zola and began with the question "What would Zola and his naturalism have been without social vision and revolutionary hope?" with de Maupassant's life and work the answer. Especially given what Sinclair has to say about artistic pessimism in his subsequent book, Money Writes!, there is a fairly obvious, if implicit, social criticism in that, namely that the writer taking the social world as it is, and accepting that this is all it can be, ever, can scarcely feel anything but pessimism--with, perhaps, the life-as-a-cheat-and-snare aspect of that pessimism saying something of capitalism specifically, or at least aspects of its essence that were to become clearer later and elsewhere than in the France of Maupassant's day. An economic system that lives on the basis of an individualistic aspirationalism that is endlessly exploited and endlessly disappointed, an advertising-consumer culture that ceaselessly cultivates intense desires for products that can never live up to expectations and whose satisfactions are designed to be disposable so as to keep the consumer on an endless treadmill of wanting and getting, can seem to very easily produce a "cheat and snare" view of life in a person without social vision, for which what is really just "society" is instead Life.

Is it "Life" That's Not Fair, or Just Society?

"There is no such thing" Margaret Thatcher famously said of society. She was, of course, wrong--in this as in pretty much every other thing of which I am aware. Yet there is no denying that her perspective is the conventional one--which produces a good deal of muddle in the minds of the conventional. When people speak of "life" the truth is that they really mean the world as it exists around them at that very moment, which for the most part means the social arrangements of that moment, which in their unimaginativeness and ignorance they think of as eternal--as, indeed, simply "life." Society's failings thus become "life's" failings, and a society's unfairness "life's" unfairness, which authority figures, and other similarly callous and stupid persons, delight in tauntingly throwing in the faces of the victims of that unfairness, who are all too often the victims of the personal actions that society put those authority figures into a position to commit.

The Cynicism of the Phrase "Life's Not Fair"

Not long ago I remarked the phrase "Life's not fair."

Considering it my first thought was of the evasion of responsibility involved. An authority figure could help you, but refuses because they simply don't want to do so--and then tosses out that tired pseudo-observation, as if to say "It's not me, it's the universe that's like this!" when the universe has nothing to do with it.

However, one can also regard it as an exercise in that cheapest of philosophical stances, nihilism.

Instead of "It's not me, it's the universe that's like this!" they are saying "The universe isn't fair, so why do I have to be?"

Behind which is, "I have the power here, you don't, I'm going to do what I want, and you can [EXPLETIVE DELETED, EXPLETIVE DELETED, EXPLETIVE DELETED, EXPLETIVE DELETED, EXPLETEIVE DELETED]."

I'm not sure there's much to choose from the two. If the first rationale for "Life's not fair" is lazy, dishonest, cowardly, the second is brazen in its meanness. And I'm disinclined to strain to pick one out as better than the other. Instead it seems to me quite reasonable to just say that they are both disgusting attitudes to take toward others--and as commonplace as they are disgusting.

The Lameness of the Phrase "Life's Not Fair"

For as long as I can remember I have despised the phrase "Life's not fair."

This is not because every last conceivable usage of the phrase is entirely without truth. Ontologically speaking there certainly seems to be nothing in the structure of reality that guarantees fairness.

Rather the problem is that the statement is usually irrelevant to the situation at hand and insulting to the intelligence of the person to whom it is spoken.

Usually when people say "Life's not fair" the subject under discussion is not ontology. Rather we are far more likely to be seeing an authority figure defend the arbitrary exercise of their will. They could have opted to act fairly in this situation. But instead they opted to act unfairly, most often because this was convenient for them.

The issue in this case was not "Life," but their use--typically their indefensibly self-serving misuse and abuse--of their power. Trying to change the subject from practical, immediate, realities to the higher planes of philosophy, in this case as in so many others (as with those evading responsibility by hiding in epistemological ambiguity), is an unbelievably shabby move absolutely deserving of contempt.

Of Generalizations, Sweeping Generalizations, and the Idiots Who Refuse to Respect the Difference Between Them

The word "generalization" may be defined as "a general proposition about the world, typically obtained from observation of the world, and perhaps even rigorous induction.

A "sweeping generalization" is a generalization which admits of no exceptions.

One may put the difference between them this way--where a generalization may admit of exceptions, perhaps significant exceptions, as by saying some aspect of the world that "It is usually like this," or even just that "It is commonly like this," a sweeping generalization says, if only implicitly, "It is always like this, every single time."

This means that one may much more easily refute a sweeping generalization than a "mere" generalization, because all they have to do is come up with a single counter-example to prove a sweeping generalization wrong. By contrast, to refute a regular generalization allowing of exceptions a single counter-example may be so inadequate as to be meaningless. Rather they would have to be able to produce evidence that no, it is not usually like this, no it is not commonly like this.

In short, the bar for the would-be debunker of the claim is a lot higher.

But idiots do like shooting their mouths off, and telling people they are wrong, and--as they never hesitate to make a "straw man" out of the other side's argument--are prepared to misconstrue a generalization as a sweeping generalization just so that they can trot out their one counter-example, tell the other party they "blew their argument out of the water" or some other similarly obnoxious thing, and feel smug.

If you are one of those who actually care about fact and reason, avoid such persons if at all possible (admittedly, a thing easier said than done as they are so numerous and aggressive).

The Phrase "Blow Out of the Water"

The use of the phrase "blow out of the water" has long annoyed me, because I associate it with fools who credit themselves with having "blown out of the water" someone else's position in an argument.

I suppose this is because it combines an obnoxious rhetorical bombast--something the stupid substitute for soundness of argument--with an equally obnoxious display of self-satisfaction; with a person arguing very badly, and then being very pleased with themselves for having argued badly as they give themselves the laurels of victory.

Have the First Shots Already Been Fired in This Culture War?

I recently wrote about how amid the continued metastasizing of America's culture wars we have seen much that recalled the rancor of Japan years or decades earlier--in particular that over young people and young men in particular "dropping out of life," and what it means for the economic and demographic base. So it seemed to me again as the matter of "virtual girlfriends" has become more topical amid advances in artificial intelligence, the first outbursts of moral panic over the matter already behind us--certainly as of Liberty Vittert's piece about the matter in The Hill last year in which she claimed that "AI Girlfriends Are Ruining an Entire Generation of Men" (this actually the title of the item). The "data scientist" backed up this claim with no evidence whatsoever apart from a few unsourced figures indicative of social disengagement among males 18-30 that include their greater singleness (without explaining how it is that 60 percent of women that age are in a relationship while only 30 percent of men that age are), and reference to the existence of some users for an AI bot by an "influencer" named Caryn. Far from establishing causation, she did not even do much to evidentiate correlation--but it was quite enough for her to plug it into the familiar moral panic-over-cyber-stuff narrative (cross out "video games," write in "AI girlfriends"), as she rushed to connect this with what some regard as a crisis in natality, and that in turn with the collapsing support ratios calling into question the viability of Social Security and Medicare (in a spirit of "just saying," I guess).

Of course, in a reminder (as if any were needed!) that technocrat credentials, personal platform and a willingness to say the "right" things count for infinitely more than saying anything actually worth hearing, here was her piece in this publication, and its receipt of respectful mention in publications running the gamut from CNN to Business Insider to the Guardian.

So far as I know it was only in TechDirt that we got a more critical stance toward Ms. Vittert's argument, Mike Masnick pretty much tearing it apart in every way that it could be, from showing up her questionable use of the data, to her use of familiar narratives bankrupt in the eyes of many, while even throwing in the obvious Futurama reference for good measure.

That was a reminder of how far off the beaten path one has to go to get some real perspective on such matters--with this unlikely to be the last time we need it on a subject about which we seem likely to hear a lot more in the years ahead.

Virtual Girlfriends for a Generation Raised in a Virtual World

The idea of a "virtual girlfriend" is not new, the first having been introduced to the world at least two decades ago. Still, the concept has got more attention with the recent advances in generative artificial intelligence, because of its apparent potential to endow virtual characters with unprecedented verisimilitude.

Of course, this is a subject one cannot discuss without acknowledging the enormous baggage almost everyone brings to the idea, which makes a snicker seem obligatory for many--all as a good many anxieties swirl behind the irony, because even as they shame anyone who would find such an idea attractive, they know not everyone shares the feeling they affect, and dread the implications. "How can the process of starting and building and maintaining a real relationship with a real person, with their own needs and demands, and the resulting doubts and uncertainties and tensions and compromises and frustrations that go with it, compete with that?" they think--and know that all other things being equal, it can't.

But all other things are not equal, of course, with the most obvious answer to those worries the fact that virtual partners are non-corporeal (at least, given the state of the art in 2024). They can never actually be "there," with all that implies for the limits of their interaction. And my first thought was that this would limit their having any very significant appeal to only a very few.

However, considering that I realized that I was thinking in terms of the expectations and standards of a different era. After all, we live in an age in which young adults have never known life without a smart phone in their hand, and consider the demand that they turn their phone off for so much as a few minutes a profoundly unreasonable imposition. Meanwhile at this point even persons who are much older, who did know life in a pre-smart phone, even pre-Internet, world, have nonetheless been shaped by the newer world. They spend life with their noses stuck to their phones, as the bulk of their interaction with others occurs through this medium--even their interaction with people they know in person, with whom they share households. All by itself this suggests physical presence may not be quite so important to them as it would be for someone not so immersed in such experience of the world, even where this particular type of relationship is concerned. (After all, it may be that a non-negligible proportion of the population has already experienced "intimacy" through this medium--maybe much more than non-negligible, to go by how many high-profile figures, old enough to have known life before the web, have got themselves scandalized and divorced this way.)

Of course, the common retort to that is that the people they interact with electronically in these ways are at least "real" in the sense that they have a physical existence, and that even if they have never met them in person, could potentially do that. But when the interaction is exclusively, or even principally, through a screen, it seems plausible that this distinction will matter less to a great many persons, especially if they like what they see on that screen and hear through the device's speaker. Indeed, considering this I am put in mind of Edward Castronova's thoughts about the "virtual reality" of World of Warcraft. The technological media through which the user experienced "VR" was primitive next to the '90s-era hype about what it would be looked, but for all that people were immersed, hooked, so much so that Castronova was to shortly write of an "exodus to the virtual world" from this one.

Again, all this was two decades ago--and so far as I know nothing has come along to refute his expectation. Indeed, in a world where postmodernist epistemological nihilism has been thoroughly mainstream for as long as anyone can remember they can that much more easily answer "What's real anyway?" They can even answer, "Who cares?"--especially as this pertains to the personal, emotional, sphere, where the sorts of hard material facts that don't go away no matter how much you want them to simply do not intrude so much. History has seen many arguing for alluring illusions over reality, those "French poetry majors" that the STEM fetishists so love to bash likely to know something of the writing of Charles Baudelaire, and just which one of the human faculties was queen over the rest.

Quite in line with such expectations, in figures like Toru Honda the age of the virtual girlfriend would already seem to have a start on its philosophers, arguing for the validity of this course on the basis of Platonic idealism. His views will hardly convince the skeptical--but at the very least seem likely to hint at the shape of things to come. However much those who disapprove would like for that to go away.

Japan Yesterday, the World Tomorrow, and the Philosophy of Mr. Toru Honda

I have over the years remarked just how much developments in Japan seem to run a bit ahead of developments elsewhere in the world--Japan's today, or even yesterday, often importantly indicative of the tomorrow of the rest of the advanced industrialized world.

Consider what has happened in Japan since the 1980s. A bout of historic speculative frenzy, substantially connected with real estate, ended with a colossal crash that marked the beginning of a long period of economic stagnation (the "lost decade," which turned into "lost decades") that upended not only economic but also political, cultural, social life--with just one of the consequences a trend of young people who, amid diminished prospects in an ever more materialistic culture with an ever less attainable bar for "success," withdrew from social life (most notoriously, the hikikomori), and a sharp decline of marriage and birth rates, feeding the country's culture war, and helping make old-fashioned concern with natality a hot topic in the process.

So has it gone elsewhere in the advanced world, and beyond, with the crash of 2007 and its aftermath in the "Great Recession" doing for it generally what the crash of 1990 did for Japan, with America no exception, the country since discovering its own "hikikomori", in which a reported decline of marriage, falling birth rates and natalism have become major issues, all of which has fed into its own culture wars. Still, there have been differences between the situation of one country and another, with an interesting case Japanese cultural critic Toru Honda, who quickly emerged as a figure of sufficient note to get interviewed for the Asahi Shimbun (Japan's equivalent of the New York Times, or at least what the Times used to be) in the wake of the (within certain circles) controversy over the popularity of the Densha Otoko franchise. His position was that capitalism had done to romance what it had done to everything else, in the process devaluing much of the population such that it had no hope of getting anything by involvement in what may be called the "dating" or "marriage" market (just as many are unemployable in the labor market, and not incidentally thereby rendered hopeless in the dating/marriage market too), and that it was an entirely valid response to reject it--and indeed, to accept as a substitute for an unattainable love with a "3-D" human being one's emotional relation to a "2-D" character.

Just as in Japan the U.S., amid a deterioration of the economic situation, has seen young people become more critical of society's expectations of them, not least in as they interact with gender roles. There has even been some talk of people frustrated with an unpleasant contemporary reality preferring a virtual one to "Real Life" (Edward Castronova and Jane McGonigal, indeed, warning of the possibility of an "exodus" here). However, so far as I know no analysis to compare with Honda's has got a remotely similar level of attention--for reasons that seem quite telling. Much as American commentators smarmily speak of how "liberal" American society is relative to "conservative" East Asian cultures like that of Japan, in America, one may not speak of the prevailing economic system except to glorify it and abase oneself before it. Meanwhile the gender politics prevailing in the American mainstream mean that the expression of male grievance (which is how Mr. Honda's view is taken, even if what he says about the alienations of "love capitalism" and the viability of "2-D love" would go for women as for men) enjoys about as much mainstream tolerance as criticism of capitalism.

The result is that one only sees any criticism of the expectations regarding relationships of this kind from the alt-right, which is of course where criticism of capitalism is least tolerated. Indeed, where one might look at Honda's theorizing and plausibly see some hint of later alt-right thinking, one ought never to forget that in contrast with Honda they criticize feminism, not capitalism (absolutely ignoring or attacking any suggestion that it may have something to do with the situation they find untoward), while the alt-right does not prioritize individual happiness the same way. Rather it sets traditionalism, and natalism, above personal happiness, and tells men to "get out there and talk to a girl" (and brooks no excuse for failure) rather than retreat into a world of "2-D love," so that one would expect them to be dismissive of Honda's ideas. Still, given that neither the country's economic troubles, nor its fraught gender politics, seem likely to change anytime soon, all as "artificial intelligence" may be making "2-D love" more alluring for some. (Indeed, returning to Japan it seems notable that the maker of what may be the country's most popular "dating app," citing disinterest in dating among the young, launched a "virtual girlfriend" app that it thinks will be more appealing to many.) Amid all that it seems plausible, even probable, that we will hear more from those who think along the lines that Honda did two decades ago--and on this side of the Pacific Rim as well.

The Sanctimonious Self-Importance of the Press

If still fairly young when he began and not in the business for very long Theodore Dreiser still got a deeper understanding of that business than almost anyone will admit to in our day. As he tells us near the end of his recounting of the experience, A Book About Myself, he tells us that even at that early point in his life in which he was trying to make it as a journalist in New York he "knew about the subservience of newspapers to financial interests, their rat-like fear of religionists and moralists, their shameful betrayal of the ordinary man at every point at which he could possibly be betrayed"--and at the same time their "still having the power, by weight of lies and pretense and make-believe, to stir . . . up" that common man "to his own detriment and destruction," a power that they used to the full. Indeed, he confesses to having been "frightened by this very power, which in subsequent years I have come to look upon as the most deadly and forceful of all in nature: the power to masquerade and betray."

It would seem that that "power to masquerade and betray" was in part founded on the press' "air of assurance and righteousness and authority and superiority which overawed and frightened me."

So does all this remain the case today--the news media retaining its powers, and using it in the same irresponsible, corrupt, vicious way, while displaying the same "air of assurance and righteousness and authority and superiority," as we see whenever, in the wake of living down to the lowest expectations of them in the event of the most world-historic of crises, they pat themselves on the back for what a "good job" they did, and smugly brush off any criticism anyone would make of the "mainstream media," sure that the problem must lie with the critics and not such upstanding "adults in the room" as themselves in that self-satisfied centrist way displayed by rags like the New York Times in its degeneration.

One may wonder if these days more people are not sick of the subservience, the cowardice, the betrayal, of which Dresier wrote, and which his contemporaries were already analyzing in detail in ways that ring not just true but depressingly familiar today. After all, even the Establishment-coddling middle-of-the-roaders are looking like they have had enough of these days, to go by what Rebecca Solnit says.

Alas, in the face of the criticisms it seems that they have just gone on getting worse in every way rather than better as they go on congratulating themselves for what a good job they are still doing, and continue to insist that anyone who disagrees with their flattering self-assessment is stupid or deranged or otherwise less than a functional "adult."

What the "News" Media Gave Us Then, What the News Media Give Us Now

Remarking his time working in Pittsburgh not long after the bloodbath that was the crushing of the Homestead steel strike (1892), where Big Business control of the newspapers seems to have been even more repressive than elsewhere, Theodore Dreiser considered the kind of "service . . . my employers craved," which was harder to discern than what they did not. The elephants in the room were numerous and colossal, and for obvious reason. ("We don't touch on labor conditions except through our labor man . . . and he knows what to say," while there was "nothing to be said about the rich or religious in a derogatory sense," the city editor explained, acknowledging that "[t]he big steel men here just about own the place, so we can't.") Gossip ("a wedding . . . in high society," "the visit of a celebrity"), and violence or tragedy of a purely personal-seeming, irrelevant-to-the-"big picture" nature ("[s]uicides, occasional drownings, a brawl in a saloon"), were "the pabulum on which the local readers were fed." If there was some acknowledgement of weightier matters it had to be consistent with the line of the masters ("labor or the unions" spoken of in terms of makers of "unholy anarchistic demands," for example). But above all they wanted "idle feature stuff which they could use in place of news and still interest their readers."

"Idle feature stuff in place of news."

Not news, but a substitute for news intended to be acceptable to the powerful.

"So much for a free press in Pittsburgh, A.D. 1893!" Dreiser quipped while describing the constraints under which he and his colleagues had to work.

So much for a free press in America, A.D. 2024, one may say today, as the mainstream of that media barrages us with what is less news than a substitute for news, even where it may seem most like it is presenting us with news--helped by the inability or unwillingness of so many of those who would regard themselves as intelligent and educated to tell the difference between the campaign horse-race crapola" the media love so much, and coverage of what really matters in public life, or recognize the muddling of the insight that the personal is political and vice-versa that enables the media to pass off the shabbiest of personal scandal as material worthy of dominating the headlines. Meanwhile the editorial line would not seem to have changed one iota, the news editors groveling before the robber barons of our times just as they did in Dreiser's day.

Theodore Dreiser and How People Really Feel About Work

In A Book About Myself Theodore Dreiser observes at one point that "after security, nothing seems to be so important or so desirable to the human organism as rest, or at least ease," and acknowledges that "[t]he one thing that the life force seems to desire to escape is work." It is a thing too rarely admitted--because since the beginning of civilization, even as those in power have been distinguished by their freedom from the obligation to work and indeed showing off that freedom, the obligation to toil has traditionally been recognized as something inimical to a dignified and full and truly human existence, and humans not born to that privilege that allows for such an existence have always clawed and struggled after the privilege of not working and looked upon those who did not succeed in that as unworthy (those lacking a "competence" literally "incompetent"), acknowledgment of the desire to not work as natural has been anathema to those in power given that their not working has required having the slaves work for them, the more willingly the better. Indeed, that desire of the individual for ease rather than toil is so contrary to how society has been organized for millennia, and especially to the prevailing "schema of values" in the modern, capitalist, world (which ceaselessly tells those who work most for least that a lifetime of alienated labor and little if anything else is what is right and good for them, and they are scum if they question anything at all about the arrangement), that Dreiser can quip that "[o]ne would think that man had been invented against his will by some malign power" which "harried" the species "along ways and to tasks against which his soul revolted and to which his strength was not equal."

The rare lack of hypocrisy about such things is one of the book's most attractive traits--and I think critical to his ability to produce a masterpiece like An American Tragedy.

Meanwhile the rarity of that lack of hypocrisy is why, almost a century on, that book remains not some musty classic of sole interest to those whose reading list is driven by what was historically important, but strikes many who pick it up now as all too relevant in a world that, contrary to what Dreiser hoped later in life, has changed very little since his day.

Theodore Dreiser on Natalism

In A Book About Myself Theodore Dreiser, reflecting upon his romantic outlook during the courtship of a woman who later became his wife, declares that the "world . . . has trussed itself up too helplessly with too many strings of convention, religion, dogma," not least "rules . . . all calculated for the guidance of individuals in connection with the propagation and rearing of children, the conquest and development of this planet." Is there no more to life than that? Dreiser asks. What about those of us who are simply not interested in participating in that project, especially on the monogamous terms that he criticizes as possibly repressive ("Is it everybody's business to get married?" he wonders), but perhaps on any terms at all, for ? "[c]annot the world have too much of mere breeding? Are two billion wage slaves . . . more advantageous than one billion, or one billion more than five hundred million?"

Indeed, Dreiser saw in this treatment of reproduction as central in life as devaluing much else--as with the value of "the mere contact of love" that "produces ideas, experiences, tragedies even" as against the "raising a few hundred thousand coal miners, railroad hands or heroes destined to be eventually ground or shot in some contest with autocratic or capitalistic classes," the sustenance of what we would today call the "prime working age" labor supply and the age cohorts suitable for military service that are really the concern of elites for whom, in an age of democratic hypocrisy, the broad population is merely a means for their ends of profit-making and the success in realpolitik power games crucial to it.

In recent years the matter of natalism has become topical again--but it is reflective of the tenor of today's politics, and especially its "cultural warfare," that few of those questioning the exhortations to have more children in anything like this way, the dialogue as cowardly as it is dumbed down and disoriented by the phantoms of contemporary imagination.

The Non-Conformist in the Conformist Crowd: Some Thoughts on Theodore Dreiser's Youth

As Theodore Dreiser's memoir A Book About Myself draws to its close Dreiser remarks "the professional optimists and yea-sayers, chorus-like in character" who were "constantly engaged in the pleasing task of emphasizing the possibilities of success, progress, strength . . . for all, in America and elsewhere," all while "humbly and sycophantically genuflecting before the strong, the lucky, the prosperous," and how he felt himself constantly oppressed by a sense of being surrounded by apparent believers in that propaganda in which he could not bring himself to believe. Instead of throwing himself into the "fierce contest" of success-striving with the cheer and gusto society demanded of its young men he saw it as a hateful thing and regarded his participation as an unfortunate necessity for which he had no enthusiasm, and fewer hopes, never feeling very good about his chances. Considering the difference he speculated that "certain fortunate circumstances attending their youth and upbringing" made for optimism about the contest and their likely outcome in it--many of them having had more privileged backgrounds than he ("at least a dozen" of his peers at the newspaper where he was working "swaggering about in the best of clothes, their manners those of a graduate of Yale or Harvard or Princeton," which made it the easier for "their minds [to be] stuffed with all the noble maxims of the uplifters"). If with less evident confidence, he wondered, too, if part of the difference lay not in a lack in himself but in a lack in those others, particularly a lack of insight into realities of the world of which he already knew something.

It seems to me that there is a great deal of truth in Dreiser's view--those who have been less privileged less likely than others to "succeed," and generally knowing it; while those who have been less sheltered from life's vicissitudes, and who are the more introspective and questioning of the world around them, are likely to have a harder time accommodating themselves to "the battle" by which the preachers of get-ahead conformism set such great store, the more in as they know the odds are terrible for anyone, and against them that much more. They may have a harder time accommodating themselves to it, too, because they have a clearer idea of what they really want out of life, as against what society tells them to want, and requires them to say to themselves and others they want (the more in as the fittingly named "Rat Race" is such a dehumanizing and ugly thing for all involved). Dreiser knew that he had none of the taste for the contest itself that so many hypocritically affect (again, to themselves as to others), and really desired only the rewards of really grand success in the contest, the attainment of which he knew were an extreme longshot for everyone, but especially someone like him without any head start in the race--position, status, wealth, security, ease.

For such persons that propaganda that, as Lawrence's Willie Struthers had it, endeavors to instill in every donkey the faith that he will be the one donkey in the five thousand to actually get the carrot with which they are all being made to pull capitalism's big cart, that, as Upton Sinclair had it, tells every one of the little fish they will be the one to grow into a pike, does not satisfy and fails to take--making the endurance of the contest that much less bearable. And as it happened, even if Dreiser tells us that as he thought these thoughts he was "not in the mood of one who runs away from a grueling contest," the reality was that he was not long for the newspaper game, his involvement with which terminated just a few pages later. Just as the book begins with the start of Dreiser's career as a journalist, it closes with the end of that career--but also the earliest beginning of that other career for which we really remember him, as a novelist who produced some of the greatest novels of American literary history, above all the justly celebrated An American Tragedy. It seems to me that Dreiser's self-knowledge here, which made his continuing in the path of a newspaperman so difficult, was an enormous asset there, without which he could never have given the world his masterpiece--all as his insights into his own condition seem to me all too relevant in a society where the chorus of the professional optimists and yea-sayers and sycophants of what society so euphemistically calls the "successful" dominate popular thinking as much as ever they did, the more in as, in this era, so many young people seem to be challenging that "conventional wisdom" in a way they have not done in a long time.