An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Qoholeth Updated (The Wisdom of Winter Looks Foolish in May)

None of us is born knowing what we want. We are taught what we want by other people. We do not choose these other people from whom we learn; they just happen. Our parents also just happen but in general we feel it is necessary to unlearn whatever it is they've taught us to want, especially if it involves "an unimportant-looking family publicly raising its collective voice against the vast skepticism [sic] and apathy of life."

Learning from strangers is frequently regretted in later life but always welcomed as it occurs. What we learn from strangers, what we are taught to want, is what has been identified since ancient times as vanity. Vanity is not only the pleasure we get from gazing at our image in a mirror (although that, too, particularly among Dreiser's women). It is "that old mass yearning for a likeness" as Dreiser has it. Vanity is the compulsion to see what we want ourselves to be in other people and to imitate them however that is possible.

Vanity is the theme of Dreiser's masterpiece, a theme that never loses its relevance or painful personal intimacy. As the ancient writer of the book of Ecclesiastes knew so clearly: inevitably everything is vanity. Also, inevitably, given that it is the core of human existence, pointing it out has little effect; that too is an exercise in vanity.

Dreiser's genius is his ability to track the life-long path of vanity in its toe-curling detail. From our embarrassment about parental idiosyncrasies to our growing faux-wisdom about what is important in life and the meaning of success, his step by step descriptions of the way we are enticed into preferences that we believe are matters of an independent and considered free will are astounding, and disconcerting.

Disconcerting because it is, I think, impossible not to identify at some point in his life with the protagonist, Clyde Griffiths, as he stumbles into a life not his own, yet clung to all the more for that very reason. We in the modern world are expected to honour our own histories. It is "What got us here; what makes us who we are." Wishing any other life would be the secular equivalent of sin, a repudiation of our own independent existence. To have Dreiser articulate the truth that our formation as human beings is a random development is not just uncomfortable, it rocks the foundations of personality.

One might think that experience alone should be enough to alert us, at least eventually, to the hubris of our attitude of self-createdness. But experience never repeats itself. Our experience of youth is not relevant to our experience of adulthood or middle-age. Semper aliquid novum ex Africa is how the Romans put it: There are always new things coming out of Africa. For them Africa, surprisingly to modern minds, represented the future, for which they, and we, are permanently unprepared by experience.

So Clyde is in fact incapable of learning from one stage of life to another. All he can do is reinforce persistent prejudices and abiding fears. He digs himself progressively deeper into his non-life with increasing fervour. This is because Clyde's form of vanity, adopted in youth and refined with maturity, is ambition.

Ambition is not just desire for that which others possess; it is the desire for what others have because they have it. As such it is insatiable, the crack-cocaine of vanity. And it is the most socially acceptable, in fact encouraged, form of vanity. To top it all, ambition provokes ambition in others. The result is as Thomas Hobbes imagined in the 16th century - a constant war of all against each other, waged without quarter.

The tragedy that Dreiser narrates is not the mistakes and false moves that Clyde Griffiths, or we, make as human beings. It is the inevitability of the un-freedom inherent in ambition, that particularly American virtue. Paradoxically, it is the source of the scepticism and apathy that Dreiser was so concerned about. Scepticism is the suspicion that others merely want what we have. Apathy is the lack of interest in what might be important other than what others have. These are very American tragedies indeed.

View all my reviews