McTeague and its author are mostly forgotten today, perhaps because the book was published in 1899 and Norris died several years later at the age of 32. It’s an engrossing story, depicting a world that is at once quaint and antiquated, yet familiar. McTeague presages later, naturalistic works such as Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (though not nearly as prolix or dense).
Comprising a compact 186 pages, McTeague not only tells the story of its ill-starred protagonist, an ignorant, self-taught dentist, but it also captures the social milieu of lower middle class San Francisco at the turn of the last century. Reading Norris’ spare yet richly evocative prose, I’m struck by such details as how little everyday speech patterns have changed and even at how many familiar consumer products sold in 1898 are still around today. The novel is remembered partly thanks to commercialism. In a city ever ready to commercially exploit its heritage, literary or otherwise, it’s not surprising that a fair-to-middling tourist bar named McTeague’s Saloon now stands at the putative Polk Street site of its namesake’s dental parlor. I rather doubt that this is how Frank Norris wanted his work to be remembered, though I suppose it’s better than not being remembered at all.
The theme of McTeague is that of materialism’s corrosive effect on human relationships. McTeague falls for Trina, a patient who is his best friend’s girlfriend. McTeague wins Trina over and they are married. As luck would have it, Trina has just won $5,000 from a lottery ticket sold to her by McTeague’s dotty neighbor. Trina’s former suitor Marcus is seemingly more put out at losing the five grand than at losing the girl. Marcus eventually leaves town, but not before reporting McTeague to the authorities for practicing dentistry without a license.
Unemployed, McTeague must live off the interest from Trina’s small fortune and her income from selling scrimshaw to a relative’s toy store. Trina’s miserliness grates on McTeague, who pines for their past affluence. Their relationship deteriorates into McTeague physically abusing Trina. Ultimately, he steals the modest savings Trina had hidden away in their flat and deserts her. Permanently disabled by McTeague’s mistreatment, Trina must take a job as a live-in charwoman at a kindergarten.
McTeague, now a vagrant, learns Trina has withdrawn her $5,000 principal and goes to get what he believes is his fair share. When Trina refuses to help him, McTeague beats her to death and flees empty handed. On the run, pursued by a posse, McTeague is caught in Death Valley by none other than Marcus. Fighting over the last of McTeague’s water, McTeague bludgeons Marcus to death. Before Marcus expires, however, he manages to manacle himself to McTeague. The novel ends with McTeague stranded in the desert, shackled to a corpse, and presumably not long for this world himself.
A parallel subplot concerns McTeague’s unbalanced neighbor Maria Macapa, the one who sold Trina the winning lottery ticket. Maria claims to have come from a wealthy family in Mexico and says she still possesses a gold service owned by them. No one believes her ramblings about her alleged riches except the neighborhood junk man, Zerkow. The two marry. Eventually, after realizing Maria’s story is just that, Zerkow murders her in a foreshadowing of McTeague’s own pyrrhic vengeance.
McTeague resonates because there is so much that is familiar in it, even at a century’s remove. Norris hits a lot of the right emotional chords as well, such as the nearly palpable anxiety McTeague experiences in his desire to get things just right to impress Trina and her family during a night out on the town. The dialogue is natural, and the expressions and speech rhythms of the time do not sound at all stilted to the contemporary reader. Even familiar household brands make an appearance, reflecting the then-emergent consumer society.
The deeper reason for my own fascination with McTeague is that it is part of a rich body of literature that cuts across genres. Societies create personalities peculiar to them, and McTeague represents an American archetype. A striver, McTeague aspires to a higher station than that to which he was born. Ascending the social ladder carries with it the risk of falling, however. McTeague’s professional indignities and loss of employment late in the story provide the kind of anxiety-inducing scenario that is the stuff of our own nightmares.
It’s important to remember that McTeague had an advantage in his work not many people have in a postindustrial economy. He had a specific, “hard” skill. Never mind that he didn’t have a license, in a time when dentistry consisted mostly of pulling rotten teeth McTeague was a skilled practitioner. Nowadays most of us work at the kind of jobs Sartre called “vocations of opinion” in which our reputations are predicated as much on social as on occupational skills. We sell ourselves, not our abilities. This is why McTeague’s fall from grace hits all the harder for the reader. Deep down, we all fear being exposed as frauds.
The fear of exposure is the fear of loss: Lose your job, lose your stuff. There is no worse fate in a consumer culture. McTeague and Trina were as obsessed with possessions as anyone today. Frank Norris certainly wasn’t the first to make the observation and was hardly the last: Cupidity as fatal flaw permeates American popular fiction. Often, it’s offered in the guise of black comedy—Terry Southern’s The Magic Christian and Warren Adler’s The War of the Roses come immediately to mind—but the message is communicated clearly.
We’re happy captives of commodity fetishism: Fateor, ergo sum…I own, therefore I am. Probably even in Norris’ era true personal individuation was becoming a thing of the past; our personalities have become mere agglomerations of consumer preferences. Moreover, the partial migration of commodity fetishism (or perhaps the social analogue of Lacan’s objet petit a) to the virtual sphere has fomented a wholly new form of false consciousness.
If you think that last statement is exaggerated, consider: Most personal Facebook pages contain “Likes” for consumer products, films, books, foods, vacation spots, restaurants, and pop stars. Social media are an essential part of promotion, and by clicking a button you not only signal your preferences to your friends, virtual and otherwise, but to advertisers as well. Its dynamics underscore the transitory, instrumental nature of relationships. We’ve come to the point where our very personalities are commodities. We are in representational symbiosis with the things we own and use, and thanks to Facebook, friends themselves become a commodity to be acquired, with success evinced by the number of people who “friend” us. (Quantity, you see. More is better. You don’t even have to have met the person to be friends.)
That isn’t true of everyone, to be sure. The more perspicacious among us are not comfortable with the pressure to sell out, an occasional literary trope shared by works as diverse as Orwell’s novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying and the Green Day punk operetta American Idiot. The mundane tragedy of course is that one ultimately has no choice but to play the game. In the end, we adapt (or, more accurately, succumb) to our environment. Every life ends up being a corrupt bargain; a corrupt society can only help but produce corrupt people.
What we are left with is a populace composed of individuals lacking the sensitivity and insight necessary for true self-expression, spiritually stunted, befuddled by political and corporate doublespeak, oversated with media distraction, and stultified by religion. Things appear to have changed little since Frank Norris penned McTeague. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that this largely forgotten gem of American literature continues to resonate across a century and a decade. It’s also a reminder that nothing is new and that the good old days never were.
© 2012 The
Unassuming Scholar
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