“Fighting Against the Earth Itself ”
Sadism, Epistemophilia, and the Nature of
Market Capitalism in Frank Norris’s The Pit
Adam H. Wood, Salisbury University
Earth, I am thine again!
—Faust, from Goethe
Fairly late in Frank Norris’s The Pit, Curtis Jadwin is struck by a peculiar
memory:
Somewhere, in a long-forgotten history of his brief school days, he had
come across a phrase that he remembered now, by some devious and
distant process of association, and when he heard of the calamities that
his campaign had wrought, of the shipwrecked fortunes and careers that
were sucked down by the Pit, he found it possible to say, with a short
laugh, and a lift of one shoulder:
“Vae Victis.” (307–8)
The phrase—translated as “woe to the vanquished” or “woe to the conquered” and taken from the Roman historian Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita—is
attributed to Brennus, leader of an army of Gauls who assaulted Rome in
390 bc. Realizing the inevitability of their defeat, the Romans offered to
ransom their city, agreeing to pay Brennus one thousand pounds of gold.
When the Romans brought forth their gold, though, they noticed that
the counterweights on the scales being used by the Gauls were fixed to
under weigh their gold and complained to Brennus that they were being
cheated. Brennus, so the legend goes, drew his sword and added it to the
counterweights, declaring “Vae Victus!” and demanded that the Romans
now bring even more gold to balance the scales. The vanquished, according to these laws of “victor’s justice,” have no rights, and their suffering is
therefore the mere plaything of the vanquisher. Jadwin’s memory, then,
is one not only related to the notion of conquest, but more essentially to
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a particular constellation of conquest through which pleasure—“a short
laugh, . . . a lift of one shoulder”—derives from the suffering of others;
that is, to the distinct constellation of sadism.1
While critics have discussed the sadism of Norris’s McTeague, they
have paid little attention to the role of sadism in his later novels.2 As Bert
Bender argues, sadism is less prominent in his later work because of a shift
in his attitudes about the “sexual instinct” and the influence of “the courtship plots of novelists like Howells, James, and Harold Frederic” (83). Indeed, Bender asserts that, while in novels like McTeague, we see Norris’s
“determination to . . . bring the sexual beast to life,” in his later works we
see a desire “to subdue it or cleanse it of its grosser animal features” to such
an extent that by the time we get to The Pit, “there is scarcely a remnant
of the ‘foul stream of hereditary evil,’ the ‘panther leap of the animal,’ or
‘the fury of a young bull in the heat of high summer’ that had awakened
in McTeague” (82–83). While Bender correctly contends that The Pit eschews the overt sexual violence found in Norris’s earlier works, the explicit
physical violence of McTeague is displaced by the more subtle violence of
sadism in The Pit, especially as manifested through philosophical form.
Here, then, Norris’s preoccupation with violence is less about the domination of one person by another and more about a fuller sense of nature’s
sadistic force—and it is this sadistic force that informs The Pit and, more
specifically, animates the very being of the speculator Curtis Jadwin.
Just before the “devious and distant process of association” brings
forth the memory of vae victis, Jadwin reflects that “[h]e was too rich, too
strong now to fear any issue” (307). And yet, in spite of this unassailability, when confronted with “more and more of these broken speculators”—
that is, those that Jadwin has himself broken—Jadwin recognizes that
“a vast contempt for human nature grew within him” (307). For a man
who, earlier in the novel, is described by his good friend Mrs. Cressler as
“[t]he kindliest, biggest-hearted fellow,” who even “passes the plate in our
church” and “was talking about supporting a ward in the Children’s Hospital for the children of his Sunday-school that get hurt or sick” (67–68),
Jadwin is now driven “to the verge of self-control” by the “alert, eager deference, [the] tame subservience, the abject humility and debasement of
[the] bent shoulders” of “his beaten enemies” (307). Indeed, Norris writes,
“[t]he more the fellows cringed to him, the tighter he wrenched the screw”
(307). Where there once was kindness and compassion, faith and philanthropy, now there reigns cruelty and a zest for the domination and degradation of his victims. Jadwin derives pleasure not only from seeing others
suffer, but also from intensifying that suffering.
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But sadism, properly defined, connects not only to a desire to inflict
pain on another, but also to a distinctly sexual desire. And while we do
not see sexuality directly addressed in this moment (beyond, perhaps, the
suggestive language that Jadwin was driven “to the verge of self control”),
we do find it just a page earlier when, presaging the language of “the tighter he wrenched the screw,” Jadwin begins to have some sort of waking
nightmare or, as Norris writes, “a new turn had been given to the screw”:
This was a sensation, the like of which he found it difficult to describe.
But it seemed to be a slow, tense crisping of every tiniest nerve in his
body. It would begin as he lay in bed—counting interminably to get
himself to sleep—between his knees and ankles, and thence slowly
spread to every part of him, creeping upward, from loin to shoulder, in
a gradual wave of torture that was not pain, yet infinitely worse. A dry,
pringling aura as of billions of minute electric shocks crept upward over
his flesh, till it reached his head, where it seemed to culminate in a white
flash, which he felt rather than saw. (305–6)
The language here is clearly sexual: this “sensation” begins “between his
knees and ankles,” moving “from loin to shoulder” and finally “it reached
his head . . . culminat[ing] in a white flash.” While the language is certainly orgasmic, it is also coupled with a “wave of torture that was not
pain, yet indefinitely worse,” indicating the inseparable relationship between physical suffering and sexual culmination. But who is being dominated, punished, here? While Jadwin’s body is surely the phallus, is he
doing the “screwing” or is he being “screwed”? Is the repetition of the
rhythmic “pulse” of “Wheat-wheat-wheat, wheat-wheat-wheat” before
this image the movement of Jadwin’s body on “the tame subservience, the
abject humility” of “these broken speculators,” or is it instead the force of
the wheat—of nature itself—dominating Jadwin, evidenced mere pages
later by his declaration that “It’s the wheat that has cornered me!” (308)?
If we read Jadwin as the dominator here, we remain within the realm
of sadism. However, if we read Jadwin as being dominated, then we appear to move into the realm of masochism. Indeed, in the earliest formulations of sadism outlined by Richard Krafft-Ebing in Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), the shift from the sadistic realm to the masochistic realm is to be
expected in that “lust in the infliction of pain and lust in inflicted pain appear but as two different sides of the same psychical process” (150), a sense
that Freud would reiterate in “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” (1905): “Masochism,” Freud argues, appears to “invariably arise from
a transformation of sadism” and, therefore, “masochism is nothing more
than an extension of sadism turned round upon the subject’s own self ”
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(158). The result, Freud concludes, is that “[a] sadist is always at the same
time a masochist,” and the transformation from sadism to masochism
rests largely on the notion of expiation: the sexual gratification achieved
through the infliction of pain, which results in a “sense of guilt” born of
“disgust and shame” and which in turn necessitates a corollary punishment (158–59).
And while Freud is certainly correct in identifying certain similarities between the sadistic and masochistic tendencies, more recent critical explorations have questioned the apparent simplicity of the model of
transformation. In Coldness and Cruelty, a detailed study of sadism and
masochism, Gilles Deleuze argues that although sadism and masochism
“are analogous [this] need not mean that there is an evolutionary link between them” and, further, that “[e]ven though the sadist may definitely
enjoy being hurt, it does not follow that he enjoys it in the same way as
the masochist” (46). Thus, while Freud’s breakthroughs in understanding the nature of sadism and masochism are indisputable (and, in terms
of sadism, will influence my discussion below), Deleuze clarifies that
“[t]he sadist and the masochist . . . [are yet] enacting separate dramas,
each complete within itself, with different sets of characters and no possibility of communication between them, either from inside or from outside” (45). In this way, while the primary drive of sadism is for one to
obtain sexual gratification from inflicting suffering on others, there is a
secondary drive in which the sadist derives pleasure from being punished
that is not, however, linked to a sensation of guilt: “[t]he [sadist] is not
afraid of being treated in the way he treats others. The pain he suffers is
an ultimate pleasure, not because it satisfies a need to expiate or a feeling
of guilt [as it does with the masochist], but because it confirms him in his
inalienable power and gives him supreme certitude” (39). Or, in the Marquis de Sade’s words, “he rejoices in his inner heart that he has gone far
enough to deserve such treatment” (qtd. in Deleuze 39). Thus, to be dominated and punished is, for the sadist, proof positive that the sadist has
been “successful” enough in his cruelties to warrant some sort of retribution. Given that Jadwin never experiences the sensation of guilt in relation
to his actions, his dream cannot be read as an expression of expiation and
therefore remains securely within the realm of the sadistic.
This is not to say, though, that Jadwin should be viewed as a complete
sadist in the same way as Sade’s libertines should be; instead, Jadwin’s sadism reflects a part of him which is “accessed” or “unearthed” as the novel
develops. Indeed, Jadwin remains much more in line with a number of
Norris’s other characters who begin as decent enough people, only to “de-
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generate.”3 That is, much as with McTeague where there is within the title
character a battle between two selves—the higher, more civilized against
the “perverse, vicious thing that lived within him” (22)—so too is there an
idea of two selves present within The Pit. And while Norris never directly
addresses the notion of two selves within Jadwin, he often relies on the
language of dual selves to delineate Laura and, in a more useful sense in
relation to Jadwin, Landry Court who, Norris tells us, “had a double personality” (83). Consequently, as Laura reflects on “the vast, cruel machinery of the city’s life, and of the men who could dare it, who conquered it,”
she realizes that although Landry was “so young, so exuberant, so seemingly innocent” that “[h]e, too, then had this other side” (58). And this
“other side” is as horrifying—if not even more so—than the “vast cruel
machinery”: “Those who could subdue it to their purposes, must they not
be themselves more terrible, more pitiless, more brutal?” (58). Thus, while
Laura believes that Landry is “this clean, fine-fibered young boy,” Landry
himself suggests that “Inwardly I’m a ravening wolf ” (49, 50). While in
McTeague, the introduction of sexuality unleashes the hitherto recessive
more brutal self, in The Pit the city’s (economic) life calls forth this other
self. More importantly, not only are weaker forms of human life susceptible to this evocation of cruelty, it is “the strong and the brave,” “the warrior, who strove among the trumpets, and who, in the brunt of conflict,
conspicuous, formidable, set the battle in a rage around him, and exulted
like a champion in the shoutings of the captains” (60). Perhaps this is why
Norris would declare earlier in McTeague that “the brute” faced McTeague
“as sooner or later it faces every child of man” (22).
In this way, Norris anticipates the great discoveries of Freud, who
would write twenty-five years later that
men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, . . . they are, on the
contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for
them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who
tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his
consent, so seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain,
to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus. (Civilization and Its Discontents 68–69)
In describing the sadistic impulse, Freud suggests that while for most humans this “instinct of destruction” is effectively “moderated and tamed,
and, as it were, inhibited in its aim,” this force is in no way eradicated:
“the inclination to aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual dis-
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position in man” (81). Even when this sadistic impulse temporarily abates,
Freud insists that it “waits for some provocation” or “circumstances that
are favourable to it, when the mental counter-forces which ordinarily inhibit it are out of action” and then “reveals man as a savage beast to whom
consideration towards his own kind is something alien” (69). Thus, while
McTeague’s beast can be seen to be “provoked” by Trina’s sexuality, Jadwin’s beast emerges in the midst of “circumstances that are favourable to
it”: that is, through the “vast, cruel machinery” of market capitalism. Norris does not suggest, however, that market capitalism is a “cause” to which
the instinct toward sadism merely a responds; rather, capitalism is a system which functions most effectively by harnessing this “inclination to
aggression.”4
But what is the process whereby Jadwin becomes sadistic? While we
recognize that his emerging sadism is not inaugurated in the same fashion
as it is with McTeague—where “suddenly the animal in the man stirred
and woke; . . . a crisis that had arisen all in an instant” in response to an
overt sexual stimulus—what is it that triggers the shift from the Jadwin
who is “[t]he kindliest, biggest-hearted fellow” and Christian philanthropist to the Jadwin who revels in “the abject humility and debasement”
of those weaker than he?5 Perhaps, though, it is less of a turn to sadism
than a development of a latent tendency: if we look to earlier descriptions
of Jadwin we find certain nascent sadistic tendencies in his personal life
that would emerge later in his financial life. Indeed, early in his courting of Laura, “Jadwin was aggressive, assertive, and his address had all the
persistence and vehemence of a veritable attack” (101), and a mere few
days later what seems to begin as a plea actually takes on a controlling,
dominating tone: “Don’t you think you would love me in time? Laura,
I am sure you would. I would make you” (113). Significantly, Norris italicizes the word “make,” for it betrays a fundamental refusal to be rebuffed,
an assertion of domination and singularity of vision, nearly identical to
Jadwin’s approach to dominating the market. Where Jadwin symbolically
works to corner the market, he literally corners Laura: “She was not even
allowed to choose her own time and place for fencing, and to parry his
invasion upon those intimate personal grounds which she pleased herself
to keep secluded called upon her every feminine art of procrastination
and strategy” (101).6 Viewed in this way, we can perhaps address Donald
Pizer’s complaint that “[t]he love story of The Pit . . . seems unrelated to
the novel’s epic theme of nature’s power and benevolence,” rendering the
“work as a whole . . . disjointed” (176).7 That is, while the love story and
the economic story do seem “disjointed” in terms of the narrative progres-
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sion of the novel, they are fundamentally united in Jadwin’s “instinct for
mastery” (Freud’s term). It is thus not their narrative coherence that is essential here, but rather their structural coherence.
So while a linkage exists between McTeague’s turn towards the sadistic
and Jadwin’s emerging cruely—there was always already present, it seems,
a sadistic tendency “below the surface”—we must still account for Norris’s depiction of the progression whereby Jadwin’s sadistic tendency becomes manifest. Or rather, whereas Norris presents McTeague’s turn to
the sadistic as “a crisis that had arisen all in an instant,” Norris presents
Jadwin’s becoming-sadistic as a more gradual and developmental process,
the ultimate outcome of which is the sadistic tendency. To understand
Jadwin’s process of becoming-sadistic, however, we must begin by broadening our consideration of sadism from that of deriving pleasure from
inflicting pain to that of being more fundamentally grounded in a desire
for mastery. That is, while the commonly conceived notion of sadism as a
pleasure achieved by inflicting pain is certainly a correct one, we must understand that this is most effectively conceptualized as a later development
of the larger goal of mastery. Since Jadwin later becomes “completely master of the market as of his own right hand” (302), we must now investigate
the route whereby he becomes such a master and, more importantly, the
impetus for such mastery.
It is crucial to note that Jadwin does not return to speculation out of
some interest in financial gain (he is already “very rich . . . having made his
money in Chicago real estate” [13]), but rather by the promise of acquiring
a sure thing based on “what the reporters call ‘exclusive news’” (77). Even
though Jadwin initially balks at the prospect—“I had sort of made up my
mind to keep out of speculation since my last little deal” (78)—Gretry responds that “this ain’t speculation. You can see for yourself how sure it is”
(78; my emphasis). And while Jadwin is not completely convinced, he apparently leaves the decision to chance, declaring “I’ll flip a coin for it.” Yet
Jadwin recognizes that it is not actually a matter of chance, but really a
matter of certainty: “But as he balanced the half-dollar on his thumb-nail,
he was all at once absolutely assured that it would fall heads. He flipped
it in the air, and even as he watched it spin, said to himself, ‘It will come
heads. It could not possibly be anything else. I know it will be heads’”
(80). And, Norris instantly follows, “as a matter of course it fell heads”
(80). Of course, “in the end the ‘deal’ was brilliantly successful,” which
leads Jadwin to tell a chiding Cressler (and repeating nearly verbatim the
earlier conversation with Gretry), “Charlie, this wasn’t speculating, . . . it
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was a certainty. . . . If I had known a certain piece of real estate was going
to appreciate in value I would have bought it, wouldn’t I?” (99).
Norris establishes here how Jadwin’s (re)immersion into the market is
grounded less upon an acquisition of money than it is an acquisition of
information, of specific knowledge. Or rather, we must understand that
any financial gain Jadwin acquires is secondary (if not largely trivial) to
the primary goal of understanding the market; as Howard Horwitz notes,
“Jadwin does not even care for the money gained, which would seem the
true object of speculation, but cares mainly for the process of manipulation in which he participates” (222). Even after Jadwin has thoroughly
become “blooded to the game” and “no longer needed Gretry’s urging to
spur him on,” and that “[h]e was now so rich that a mere half-million
bushels was not a matter for anxiety,” Norris tells us that “[i]t was the
‘situation’ that arrested his attention” (168, 169). In his pursuit to understand the “situation” Jadwin’s quest for knowledge increases exponentially:
he moves from feeling “in the plexus of financial affairs . . . a difference”
to “watch[ing] the weather, and . . . keep[ing] an eye on the reports from
the little county seats and ‘centres’ in the winter wheat states” to “confirm
his suspicions,” to pouring over “reports” of weather from Iowa, Kansas,
Illinois, Ohio, Missouri and Indiana, to finally “watch[ing] Nebraska, the
State which is one single vast wheat field” where “[t]he wheat had been
battered by incessant gales, had been nipped and harried by frost; everywhere the young half-grown grain seemed to be perishing. It was a massacre, a veritable slaughter” (169–71). Beyond even the conditions relating
to the growth of American wheat, Jadwin’s quest for knowledge extends to
the conditions in Europe where, though they were expected to be good,
“the marvelous, golden luck” comes that “[t]he French wheat crop was announced as poor” and “[i]n Germany the yield was to be far below the normal” (200). But even this information gathered from the “trade papers” is
insufficient to satiate Jadwin’s desire for knowledge and he soon declares
to Gretry that “I want to have my own lines out—to be independent of
the trade papers. . . . I want you to get me some good, reliable correspondents in Europe . . . and I want them to cable us about the situation every
day” (201). And it is, indeed, every day that Jadwin spends in his quest for
knowledge, to such an extent that his wife Laura complains that “even Mr.
Gretry says that you don’t need to be right in your office every minute of
the time . . . and that you only go . . . because you can’t keep away from La
Salle Street and the sound of the Wheat Pit” (199). While Jadwin initially
questions this assertion, he does come to realize that his “eye and ear were
forever turned thitherward” (199). But again, it is the quest for informa-
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tion stored in his office to which “eye and ear were forever turned” rather
than the quest for financial gain; in fact, Norris writes as nearly an afterthought, “[m]eanwhile he was making money” (199).
And yet to what use is this obsessive amassment of information to be
put? In the most obvious sense, we would say to succeed in the financial
market, and yet we have also seen that the financial motive is, at best,
a secondary concern. Thus, just before we discover that “Jadwin bought
a seat upon the Board of Trade” because “[h]e was no longer an ‘outsider,’” Norris tells us of Jadwin: “He guessed it, felt it, knew it” (202).
While we might be inclined to read the three terms—“guessed,” “felt,”
and “knew”—as simply synonymous, we can now understand them as the
outline of the process of Jadwin’s accumulation of information: what begins with a single bit of information leads to a guess (his sense of “Luck”
and “Chance” [79]) and develops, with the aid of further information,
into a sense of feel (“he felt . . . a difference” [169]) and finally into (what
he feels, at least is) a knowledge: “Confident, secure, unassailable, Jadwin
plunged in” (202). Or, as Jadwin declares after one of his largest maneuvers: “‘Oh, I knew it,’ he cried, with a quick gesture; ‘I knew wheat was
going to go up. I knew it from the first, when all the rest of ’em laughed
at me. I knew this European demand would hit us hard about this time. I
knew it was a good thing to buy wheat; I knew it was a good thing to have
special agents over in Europe’” (224; my emphases).
Jadwin expresses what Freud would later describe as epistemophilia, or
the desire—and, more specifically, the obsessive desire—to know. Epistemophilia, Freud contends, is fundamentally connected to scopohilia, or
the desire to see because, according to psychoanalytic critic Peter Brooks,
“[s]ight is the sense that represents the whole epistemological project; it
is conceived to be the most objective and objectivizing of the senses, that
which best allows an inspection of reality that produces truth” (96). Scopophilia, in this sense, is an essentially passive operation—we may think
of the voyeur who watches or observes, but does not act—and therefore
can be seen as an early stage in the epistemophilic drive: we see in order
to know. And while epistemophilia can be seen as an essentially passive
impulse in and of itself in that it appears to be a desire to know for the
sake of knowing, it also bears an active component in that the individual
is not only observing but seeking knowledge. But both of these desires,
Freud postulates, are closely linked to (or are components of ) a higher order of desire which is the desire for mastery, which is a more completely
active endeavor given its connection to possession and control: therefore,
Freud argues in “Three Essays,” epistemophilia’s “activity corresponds on
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the one hand to a sublimated manner of obtaining mastery, while on the
other hand it makes use of the energy of scopophilia” (194). Consequently,
there is a move from the wholly passive desire to see, to a semi-passive desire to know, to the wholly active desire to master. Indeed, for Jadwin, the
ultimate question is “how [to] control the sluice gates of that torrent he
had unchained?” (306).
The desire for mastery, therefore, is a projection of the epistemophilic urge: to master is both to know what is (and has been) but also, and
more importantly, know what will be, the ultimate truth: “That mysterious event which long ago he felt was preparing, was not yet consummated. The great Fact, the great Result which was at last to issue forth from all
this turmoil was not yet achieved. Would it refuse to come until a master
hand, all powerful, all daring, gripped the levers of the sluice gates that
controlled the crashing waters of the Pit?” (228). Thus (and we will shift
from Freud’s usage of Greek etymology to Latin), we come to recognize
that what begins with seeing—or spectating from the Latin root of spectáre, “to look”—when coupled with the epistemophilic urge—becomes
speculating—from the Latin root of speculárí which is defined as “To observe or view mentally; to consider, examine, or reflect upon with close
attention; to contemplate; to theorize upon” and, further, “To engage in
thought or reflection, esp. of a conjectural or theoretical nature” (OED).
Indeed, this ability to project his knowledge into the future ultimately
drives Jadwin, as he illustrates to Laura: “When you know how to swing
a deal, and can look ahead, a little further than the other fellows, and can
take chances they daren’t, and plan and manœuver, and then see it all
come out just as you had known it would all along—I tell you it’s absorbing” (205). Jadwin clearly connects the scopophilic and the epistemophilic
impulses—being able to “look ahead” and “see it” is inherently linked to
having “known it . . . all along.” Even when Jadwin briefly removes himself from speculating, he cannot abandon his epitsemophilic impulse and,
further, his powers of projection: “Each morning brought him fresh dispatches, each evening’s paper confirmed his forecasts” (229). And once
he has returned to speculating, his ability to see, to know, and to “look
ahead,” Jadwin feels, is completely cemented: “I’m watching this thing.
You can’t tell me anything about it. I’ve got it all figured out . . . ” (303; my
emphasis).8
In response to this epistemophilic declaration, Gretry responds, “Well,
then you’re the Lord Almighty himself.” While Jadwin insists that he
“don’t like that kind of joke, it’s blasphemous,” it is exactly this god-like
status that Jadwin claims for himself when he declares that “nothing in
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this world can stop me now” (303). And in the world in which Jadwin
moves, it is understandable how this sense of invincibility could so easily become internalized, for we are aware by this point that “[e]verything
stopped when he raised a finger; everything leaped to life with the fury
of obsession when he nodded his head. . . . Out of the ranks of the conquered there issued not so much as a whisper of hostility. Within his own
sphere no Czar, no satrap, no Caesar ever wielded power more resistless”
(302). The process from seeing to knowing to mastering has now reached
an apex in his conviction of omnipotence—a conviction, Freud suggests,
inherently linked with the desires to see, to know, and finally to master.9
Consider Jadwin’s justification for his conviction of omnipotence: beginning by having Gretry “look here,” Jadwin “for upwards of two hours . . .
argued and figured, and showed to Gretry endless tables of statistics to
prove that he was right” (303). Indeed, omnipotence becomes the expression of a nearly mathematical equation of the three desires: scopophilia (“look here”) linked with epistemophilia (“endless tables of statistics”)
leads to a sense of mastery (“to prove that he was right”).
At this point, we must articulate exactly what Jadwin (at least thinks
he) has mastered. While we might initially assume that it is the market—
the Pit that Norris would use for the novel’s title—we must understand
that the object of Jadwin’s epistemophilia is, in fact, much larger and is
indicated by the rest of Jadwin’s statement that he’s “got it all figured out”:
“I’ve got it all figured out, your ‘new crop’” (303; my emphasis). Or rather,
while the Pit is the site where the implications of Jadwin’s epistemophilia
come to bear, Jadwin realizes that the ultimate truth he seeks is yet beyond
these confines. That this knowledge is connected to the Pit is elemental,
and yet the Pit—like the money that circulates within it—becomes a secondary concern when compared to the primacy of the Wheat: the Wheat
stands not merely as a metaphor for the market of the Pit in some reified
sense (though this is how most of the other characters view it), but rather
the Wheat is, for Jadwin, a metonymic extension of the holistic force of
Nature. Thus, when Jadwin expresses his omnipotent conviction in his
attempt to run the price of wheat up even higher (despite the fact that
“farmers all over the country are planting wheat as they’ve never planted it
before”), Gretry declares “Great Scott, J., you’re fighting against the earth
itself ” (304). “Well,” Jadwin responds, tellingly, “we’ll fight it then.”
Jadwin’s quick concession to Gretry’s assertion is telling in two distinct
and yet interrelated ways. First, it verifies that the actual object of Jadwin’s
violent desire for knowledge and mastery is ultimately Nature. Second,
and perhaps more important, Jadwin’s declaration exemplifies his particu-
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lar view that Nature emanates from an ontological force of primordial
violence. Jadwin’s view of nature as violence is not a result of his desire
for mastery; rather, his view of nature as violence grounds and animates
his desire for mastery. Indeed, well before his conviction of omnipotence
in embracing a war with Nature (and even before Gretry’s first tempting), Jadwin, “unimaginative though he was, had long conceived of some
great, some resistless force within the Board of Trade building” (72). This
“force,” upon Jadwin’s initial consideration, seems to be the Pit itself (literally at the center of the Board of Trade building), “a great whirlpool . . .
sucking the life tides of the city, sucking them in as into the mouth of
some tremendous cloaca, the maw of some colossal sewer” (72). But on
further contemplation Jadwin begins to sense that the Pit is essentially an
effect of something even greater:
It was as if the Wheat, Nourisher of the Nations, as it rolled gigantic
and majestic in a vast flood from West to East, here, like a Niagara,
finding its flow impeded, burst suddenly into the appalling fury of the
Maelstrom, into the chaotic spasm of a world-force, a primeval energy,
blood-brother of the earthquake and the glacier, raging and wrathful
that its power should be braved by some pinch of human spawn that
dared raise barriers across its courses. (73)
The Pit, then, emerges merely as the barrier through which the infinitely
more powerful Wheat breaks through. Or, perhaps, the Pit is the peephole
through which “the chaotic spasm of a world-force, a primeval energy”
can be “seen,” its truth be known.
“But the truth is not of easy access,” Brooks tells us; “it often is represented as veiled, latent, or covered, so that the discovery of the truth
becomes a process of unveiling, laying bare, or denuding” (96). Thus
the epistemophilic impulse seeks as its telos a final and complete revelation, and this impulse is not lost on Norris who reflects that, just before
Jadwin’s realization that he can corner the market, “[t]he event which all
those past eleven months had been preparing was suddenly consummated, suddenly stood revealed, as though a veil had been ripped asunder, as
though an explosion had crashed through the air upon them, deafening,
blinding” (235). What we have here, then, is a supreme expression of the
epistemophilic impulse to truth; note the linkage between Brooks’s and
Norris’s language of veils and unveiling and, more importantly, of sexuality: Jadwin has “denuded” in order to “consummate.” That the ultimate
object of Jadwin’s epistemophilic desire is nature is unsurprising for, according to Freud, the epistemophilic instinct is grounded in the child’s
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attempt to understand procreation. For Freud, the child desires to know
from whence it came or, more specifically, to understand the powers of
the body of the mother, but since this body is ultimately unknowable, the
child then shifts the focus to his own body, the result of which is an autoerotic exploration of self (an exploration which remains futile because
of the child’s inadequate sexual development). In this way, Jadwin’s desire
to understand Mother Nature’s body (what Jadwin later calls “the Great
Mother”) is ultimately futile; he has recourse only to try to understand his
own body. Therefore, in relation to the sexual dream mentioned above,
it is quite possible that it is neither Jadwin screwing the wheat nor the
wheat screwing Jadwin, but rather that Jadwin is masturbating to the very
thought of the wheat. Indeed, as Freud posits in “Notes Upon a Case of
Obsessional Neurosis” (1909), within the logic of epistemophilia, “[t]he
thought-process itself becomes sexualized, for the sexual pleasure which is
normally connected to the content of thought becomes shifted on to the
act of thinking itself, and the satisfaction derived from reaching the conclusion of a line of thought is experienced as a sexual satisfaction” (245).
But even the sexual satisfaction derived from the epistemophilic instinct
is grounded in violence given that what the child’s desires involve, in the
thought of psychoanalist Melanie Klein, are “phantasies of getting inside
the mother to find, and often to take over and destroy, the riches within”
(The New Dictionary of Kleinian Thought 323). It is of little surprise, then,
that the subject matter of Jadwin’s dream is so overtly sexual and occurs
at the height of Jadwin’s epistemophilic drive just after he asserts to Gretry (however falsely), that he’s “got it all figured out.” (Perhaps, too, this
is why Norris would tell us that Jadwin was “as completely master of the
market as of his own right hand.”)
Whether we see the Pit as the site through which the Wheat erupts or
the opening through which Jadwin first glimpses the body of Mother Nature and is forced to confront his own body in relation to it, the result is
the same: the Pit is merely an aperture through which the primal force of
nature’s violence moves. That is, either way, we encounter the Pit, for all
of its violence, dwarfed by the “vast flood from West to East” that is the
Wheat. Either way, too, the Wheat constitutes a figure of both opulent
provision and potential violence, literally akin to the destructive force “of
the earthquake and the glacier,” yet also worse somehow in that it is conscious enough to be “raging and wrathful” towards the attempts of “feeble
humans” to control the “appalling fury” of its power. And this particular
image of wheat as nature as violence ultimately comes to dominate Jadwin’s thoughts: “It stirred, it moved, it was advancing. It came with insen-
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sate fury; now it was at the corner, now it burst into the entrance of the
hotel. Its clamour was deafening, but intelligible. For a thousand, a million, forty million voices were shouting in cadence: ‘Wheat-wheat-wheat,
wheat-wheat, wheat’” (283).
In both the epistemophilic urge to know and master nature and the
ontology of nature as “primeval” violence, Norris connects Jadwin to the
story of Faust; indeed, it is a version of this story which opens the novel.
And while the particular Faust alluded to in the first chapter (and alluded
to repeatedly elsewhere in relation to Laura and her sense of the romantic) is the bastardized and romanticized operatic version of the tale created by Charles Gounod, it seems clear that Norris’s real interest in relation to Jadwin is in the Faust of Goethe, whose singular desire is to force
“[t]he powers of nature all around [to be] reveal[ed]” (I, 87).10 (Interestingly, Faust declares this desire after opening “this book of mystery / By Nostradamus’ proper hand” [I, 66–67]—Nostradamus being the most famous
prophet of the future.) Despite Faust’s nearly limitless knowledge of philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine, and theology (not to mention science
and necromancy), however, he is consistently met with the realization that
“To be unveiled . . . she doth refuse” (I, 325). Undeterred, however, Faust,
in an act of epistemophilic rage, sells his soul to Mephistopheles (and, like
Jadwin, unwittingly sacrifices his love in the process) for the satisfaction
of his quest for the knowledge of nature. And Mephistopheles obliges,
though it is not the ordered knowledge (or the knowledge of order) that
Faust has desired: as Denton Jacques Snider notes, whereas Faust insists
upon a theory “of orderly development,” a “totality of the whole” where
“the final tendency of Nature . . . is to master her negative principles”—
in short, to be contained in (and mastered by) an ultimately rationalist
philosophy—Mephistopheles establishes that Nature’s “origin is of Hell”
and that it functions by “convulsions and upheavals” and that, ultimately,
“Violence is the sole principle” (313–14). Thus, even when Faust’s epistemophilic impulse toward nature appears to be satiated, the knowledge
that is “unveiled” is that of a nature where, as Mephostophele declares,
“chaos reigns” (ii, 1239). This realization leads Brooks to conclude that
epistemophilia “shall be frustrated at its very roots, setting up a model of
the desire to know as an inherently unsatisfiable, Faustian project” (9).
Yet Faust, in spite of coming to an understanding of nature as violence and chaos, still refuses to abandon his omnipotent attempts to impose order on it even though these attempts can only reinforce what has
now been revealed as the fundamental law of nature. As Thomas Davidson and Charles Bakewell argue in their The Philosophy of Goethe’s Faust,
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while Faust, with the aid of Mephistopheles, eventually does free “his subjects from nature, it is only by subjecting them to the yet more dehumanizing tyranny of an industrial system” (136). That is, while Faust has perhaps subverted Nature’s violence and chaos, he achieves “nothing less than
the founding of industrial despotism, . . . perfectly violent and capricious”
(136), thereby reinscribing—and, ultimately becoming—the very violence
and chaos he sought to control. So, too, do we see this process in The Pit.
Whereas initially Nature herself embodies a power capable of a violence
so tremendous that it can not only destroy the Wheat as a part of itself
and therefore the people who need this Wheat to live—“The Wheat had
been battered by incessant gales, had been nipped and harried by frost:
everywhere the young half-grown grain seemed to be perishing. It was a
massacre, a veritable slaughter” (171)—it is now Jadwin who wields such
command. As Jadwin describes his endeavors to Laura, we find a telling
exchange: when he highlights the tremendous need for “his” wheat by the
peoples of Europe—“They’ve got to have the wheat—it’s bread ’n’ butter
to them”—Laura pleads, “Oh, then why not give it to them? . . . Give it to
those poor people—your five million bushels. Why, that would be a godsend to them” (206). While Jadwin responds, “Oh, that isn’t exactly how
it works,” we recognize that this is—exactly—how it works. Jadwin has
become the ultimate embodiment of what Cressler describes earlier in the
novel: if “the Chicago speculator, who raises or lowers the price out of all
reason . . . send[s] the price of wheat down too far, the farmer suffers, . . .
if [he] sends it up too far, the poor man in Europe suffers” (115). In short,
Cressler illustrates, “It’s life or death for either of them” (115).11 Where nature once either graciously provided or violently denied, now does Jadwin.
This potential for becoming violent allows us to see why in “The Development of the Libido and the Sexual Organizations” (1917) Freud
would describe epistemophilia as “an expression of an instinct for mastery
which easily passes over into cruelty” (327). At this point, though, Jadwin’s
potential for cruelty can be seen as largely unintentional; or, rather, his
goal is still the knowledge and mastery of nature, and he refuses to see that
he is now doing the violence that his Faustian drive sought to eliminate:
“If there was another side,” Norris writes, “if the brilliancy of his triumph
threw a shadow behind it, Jadwin could ignore it. It was far from him, he
could not see it” (293). Thus, even when the recently returned Corthell
relays a story of his European travels in which a boy who, even though
“[h]e knew nothing of the world,” does know of “this Jadwin of Chicago, who has bought all the wheat. We have no more bread,” Jadwin can
only reply “It’s a lie!” (294). Tellingly, though, Norris begins the very next
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paragraph with the word “Yet.” And it is this “Yet” that seems to mark a
moment of change in Jadwin from possessing an unintentional or passive
cruelty into expressing a distinctly active form of cruelty. That is, after
beginning to understand the extent of his powers, Jadwin’s sadistic capacity is finally unleashed. Mere pages after Corthell’s illuminating story
(which is preceded, tellingly, by the first of his dreams of “Wheat-wheatwheat, wheat-wheat-wheat,” though it does not reach the sexual climax
his later dream does), Jadwin unleashes his cruelty onto Dave Scannel,
the speculator who ruined Hargus—a charge to which Scannel replies, in
the identical words of Jadwin’s reply to Corthell, “It’s a lie!” (The parallel
is, of course, obvious in that Jadwin is about, albeit unwillingly, to ruin
Cressler.) Before financially destroying Scannel—a purposeful plan—
“Jadwin’s lower jaw set with a menacing click; aggressive, masterful, he
leaned forward,” and he “could not forbear a twinkle of grim humour as
he saw how easily Scannel had fallen into the trap” (299). Jadwin’s epistemophilia has now transformed into a form of sadism or, rather, the epistemophilia has now revealed itself for what it really is. As Freud explains in
“The Disposition to Obsessional Neurosis” (1913), “the instinct for knowledge can actually take the place of sadism . . . [because] it is at bottom
a sublimated off-shoot of the instinct of mastery exalted into something
intellectual” (324). What paraded as the epistemphilic instinct was—“at
bottom”—always already the sadistic instinct.
To more fully understand the relationship between epistemophilia and
sadism, we must move from the analyst in Freud to the patient in Sade
himself, who also clarifies the inherent connection of epistemophilia and
sadism to nature. While we find this interconnectedness throughout the
works of Sade, it is most clearly expressed by the frustrated chemist Almani from La Nouvelle Justine when he declares:
Yes, my friend, yes, I abhor nature; and I detest her because I know her
well. Aware of her frightful secrets, I have fallen back on myself and
I have felt . . . I have experienced a kind of pleasure in copying her
foul deeds. What a contemptible and odious being to make me see the
daylight only in order to have me find pleasure in everything that does
harm to my fellow men. . . . Her barbarous hand can only nourish evil;
evil is her entertainment. Should I love such a mother? No; but I will
imitate her, all the while detesting her. I shall copy her, as she wishes,
but I shall curse her unceasingly. (qtd. in Klossowski 82)
Almani, in dedicating his life to appropriating nature’s secrets, clarifies
what we have come to find in Jadwin: that the epistemophilic instinct is at
its source a drive for knowledge about nature; that this knowledge reveals
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nature to be an elemental form of violence; and, finally, that the response
to this “unveiling” is, inevitably, sadism. Why should this be? What do we
make of the response to the uncovering of a violent nature—“see[ing] the
daylight”—being both an abhorrence of this nature and “a kind of pleasure in copying her foul deeds?” But what appears to be an incongruity
here—to “imitate here, all the while detesting her”—is in fact the essence
of the sadistic impulse, for as Freud indicates, sadism embodies a twofold
desire: to destroy the object, but also to master the object and therefore
preserve it (“Notes” 239–40).
The hatred of nature (the desire to destroy it, or in Jadwin’s terms the
desire to go to war with it) arises not as a result of a mastery of it, but
rather out of a realization of the impossibility of such a mastery. That
is, the very act of copying or imitating nature presupposes the failure of
the desire for omnipotence that is at the center of the sadistic enterprise.
And not only omnipotence, but the display of it (for what is omnipotence
without a display?). As another of Sade’s heroes, Clairwil, articulates it,
the sadistic dream is of a display—or what Sade calls a “perfect crime”—
“which is perpetually effective, even when I myself cease to be effective,
so that there is not a single moment of my life, even when I am asleep,
when I shall not be the cause of some disturbance” (qtd. in Deleuze 28).
Is this not, too, Jadwin’s true desire? Is not Jadwin’s impulse to “corner the
wheat” animated by a desire to be “completely master” of the wheat and
everything, every being, and every place it touches, to such an extent that
“[e]verything stopped when he raised a finger; everything leaped to life
with the fury of obsession when he nodded his head” (302)? And indeed,
it seems, Jadwin has succeeded in making such a display:
Then at last the news of the great corner, authoritative, definite, went out
over all the country, and promptly the name of Curtis Jadwin loomed
suddenly huge and formidable in the eye of the public. There was no
wheat on the Chicago market. He, the great man, the “Napoleon of La
Salle Street,” had it all. He sold it or hoarded it, as suited his pleasure. . . .
The history of his corner . . . [was] told and retold, till his name was
familiar in the homes and at the firesides of uncounted thousands. . . .
In the press . . . he was assailed as little better than a thief, vituperated
as an oppressor of the people, who ground the faces of the poor, and
battened in the luxury wrung from the toiling millions. (291–92)
Jadwin has nearly realized the ultimate sadistic goal: his power is “authoritative, definite” and “suddenly . . . huge and formidable in the eye of the
public,” the atrocities of “his pleasure” have become historical for “uncounted thousands,” if not “the toiling millions.” Even this accomplish-
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ment is not enough to quench the desire that rages within Jadwin who
declares, in what is only the last of many such instances, “They think
I’ve done something big, don’t they, with this corner? Why I’ve only just
begun” (302). While we might be inclined to attribute Jadwin’s relentless pursuit to a type of obsessive compulsion akin to a gambler (as does,
for example, Cressler earlier in the novel), this craving actually derives
from the sadistic impulse. As Deleuze argues, this relentlessness is indicative of “the disappointment of the sadistic hero, [who is] faced with a
nature which seems to prove to him that the perfect crime is impossible” and who, therefore, “cannot do more than accelerate . . . the number
of his victims and their suffering” (27, 29). This “disappointment,” Deleuze continues, inevitably becomes “rage and despair . . . when he realizes how paltry his own crimes are in relation to the idea” of a “primary
nature,” which is “an original and timeless chaos solely composed of wild
and lacerating molecules” (28, 27)—a sense of nature strikingly similar to
Jadwin’s aforementioned conception of nature as “the chaotic spasm of
world-force, a primeval energy.” Thus, despite what seems to be Jadwin’s
“moment of confidence, his great triumph only a few hours distant,” his
power still pales in comparison to that of “a hollow distant bourdon as of
the slipping and sliding of some almighty and chaotic power” (326).
“It was the Wheat, the Wheat!” Jadwin realizes, and then, “[f ]or an instant came a clear vision”:
What were these shouting, gesticulating men of the Board of Trade, these
brokers, traders, and speculators? It was not these he fought, it was that
fatal New Harvest; it was the Wheat; it was—as Gretry had said—the
very Earth itself. What were those scattered hundreds of farmers of the
Middle West, who because he had put the price so high had planted the
grain as never before? What had they to do with it? Why the Wheat had
grown itself; demand and supply, these were the two great laws the Wheat
obeyed. Almost blasphemous in his effrontery, he had tampered with
these laws, and had roused a Titan. He had laid his puny human grasp
upon Creation and the very earth herself, the great mother, feeling the
touch of the cobweb that the human insect had spun, had stirred at last
in her sleep and sent her omnipotence moving through the grooves of the
world, to find and crush the disturber of her appointed courses. (326–27)
We find here the ultimate revealing, unveiling, disrobing. Reaffirmed is
the fact that it was “not these [men] that he fought” but “the very Earth
itself.” So too is the reality that Nature’s laws of “supply and demand”
(what we have previously identified as nature’s ability to provide for or violently deny) exist outside of those laws imposed by the masses of human-
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kind, in spite of the self-same designation. And yet discovered anew is the
truth that, no matter how “blasphemous in his effrontery,” no matter how
powerful a single man can become, no matter how close to a position of
omnipotence he can come, “his puny human grasp” could little more than
stir “her omnipotence . . . to find and crush the disturber of her appointed
courses.” Of course, Jadwin is, ultimately, defeated, and despite the belief
of many that “[n]ow they had beaten him, had pulled him down,” Calvin
Crookes—Jadwin’s human nemesis and the only other man to have ever
sensed anything remotely akin to that power of Jadwin’s—affirms his earlier claim that “Your own wheat will do all the killing I want”: “They can
cheer all they want. They didn’t do it. It was the wheat itself that beat him”
(291, 347).
Jadwin’s defeat, however, really changes nothing: “The Wheat,” Norris
tells us, “that had ingulfed Jadwin’s fortune and all but unseated reason itself . . . passed on, resistless, along its ordered and predetermined courses”
(368). Nor is there a change in the human drive to see and know that can
so quickly trigger the capacity for cruelty, for a pleasure in the suffering
of others: as Jadwin’s collapse unfolds, the sound of the “crowd [that] was
packed solidly upon the stairs, between the wall and the balustrades” (332)
of the visitors’ gallery of the Pit to watch the battle unfold—as one spectator shouts, “Lord! I wish we could see—could get somewhere where we
could see something” (335)—is replaced with cheers of savage glee: “In a
frenzy of delight men danced and leaped and capered upon the edge of
the Pit” (345). The sadistic instinct (preceded by the scopophilic and epistemophilic instincts) is in no way reduced; it simply changes hands much
like the worthless pieces of paper that mark some false sense of ownership
of an object known as Wheat.
Of course market capitalism, too, remains unassailed at the close of
the novel, a fact that has led a number of critics to suggest that there is,
to use the words of Walter Benn Michaels, “the deepest complicity” between Norris’s works and capitalism (213). And while much in The Pit
may support such a claim, it is a great mistake to suggest, as does Michaels, “that the subject of naturalism becomes the money economy so
that the economy can become a subject” (178). That is, while an analysis of the money economy certainly exists within The Pit, Norris remains
more concerned with dramatizing the human capacity for cruelty which,
to return to Freud’s language, simply “waits for some provocation.” Thus,
just as we have seen that Jadwin’s financial concern is secondary to his
epistemophilic (and sadistic) impulses, so too is Norris’s concern for the
money economy secondary to his impulse to understand the implacable
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tendency towards violence and domination inherent within the human
condition. Norris here, once again, anticipates Freud’s discussion of this
inherent condition and the relationship it has—or, for Freud, does not
have—to capitalism: whereas “[t]he communists believe that . . . man is
wholly good and is well-disposed to his neighbor . . . but the institution
of private property has corrupted his nature,” Freud counters that “the
psychological premises on which the [communist] system is based are an
untenable illusion” in that “[a]ggressiveness was not created by property”
and while “we cannot, it is true, easily foresee what new paths the development of civilization could take . . . one thing we can expect . . . is that
this indestructible feature of human nature will follow it there” (Civilization and Its Discontents 70–72). Thus we return to the realization that
market capitalism does not cause Jadwin’s sadistic tendencies; rather, as
Freud notes, market capitalism only provides “circumstances that are favourable to it.”
Freud, of course, would produce the bulk of his work well after Norris died in 1902, and of Norris’s exposure to the work of Sade we can only
speculate—though perhaps this was some of the “rotten French” Norris
was exposed to in Paris, as his mother lamented (qtd. in McElrath and
Crisler 82).12 Yet we cannot deny the interest Norris had in the sadistic impulse; and while this force seems most apparent in McTeague, we have seen
that it continues to play a major role in The Pit, too. That there is a change
from his earlier works to his later works—gone is the focus on poverty and
animalism—should not lead us to think that he abandoned his fascination with the human capacities for cruelty and violence. The change, then,
is one of degree and not of kind: while Norris has replaced the poverty of
Polk Street in San Francisco with the affluence of La Salle Street in Chicago, he has enlarged the specific brutality of murder into a more general
“vast contempt for human nature.” Or rather, while we have indeed moved
away from the world of the “panther leap of the animal” that so tortures
the witless McTeague, we are now in a world which is not less vicious but
in fact more so. It is a world which, as Laura reflects, is defined by “the
vast, cruel machinery of the city’s life” and “[t]hose who would subdue it
to their purposes” only by being “more terrible, more pitiless, more brutal.” While the setting has become more genteel, there is no less a quest
to know, as Norris described in “A Plea for Romantic Fiction,” “the unplumbed depths of the human heart, the mystery of sex, and the problems
of life, and the black, unsearched penetralia of the soul of man” (78).
“What matter the silken clothes,” Norris asks in the lines that follow,
“what matter the prince’s houses?”
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NOTES
1. While the source is surely Livy’s given its popularity in educational settings and
its record of the famous “vae victis” quotation, another additional source is possibly
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Histories of the Kings of Britain where, unsurprisingly, Brennus (here, Brennius) is a Britain. Unlike Livy’s version, though, where Brennus is defeated just after his “vae victis” declaration, in Monmouth’s version “Brennius abode
still in Italy, and trampled upon the people thereof with tyranny unheard of ” (47).
For evidence of Norris’s exposure to at least Livy’s account, McElrath and Crisler note
that “he learned of Greek and Roman military history in his Classical Course studies
at the Allen Academy and Harvard School” (81).
2. While it is simply accepted that the sadistic element is, inarguably, present
in McTeague, the fullest consideration of this complex is William Freedman’s “Oral
Passivity and Oral Sadism in Norris’s McTeague.” For other discussions, see Bender’s “Frank Norris on the Evolution and Repression of the Sexual Instinct” and Karen F. Jacobson’s “Who’s the Boss? McTeague, Naturalism, and Obsessive Compulsive
Disorder.”
3. The earliest example of this “degeneration” into sadism is “A Case for Lombroso,” published in 1897. Interestingly, like Jadwin, Stayne begins the tale as a decent,
upstanding citizen, only to become a sadist when exposed to certain stimuli—namely
the “hot, degenerate blood” of Crescendia Hromada.
4. This position is, of course, anathema to a Marxian conception of capitalism.
Indeed, for Marxism, it is the system of capitalism which is the cause of cruelty. This
formulation is rife throughout Marx’s work; see, for example, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, especially 124–26 and 156–57 where Marx notes that
“[w]ith such wealth contempt of man makes its appearance” (156). While establishing
a connection between Marx and Norris is not my intention here, it is interesting to
note the similarity in Marx’s and Norris’s language in relation to Jadwin, who feels “a
vast contempt for human nature [growing] within him.”
5. Perhaps, though, the difference between Jadwin’s earlier philanthropy and his
later cruelty is not as great as it seems. As Nietzsche argues in The Gay Science:
Benefiting and hurting others are ways of exercising one’s power upon
others; that is all one desires in such cases. . . . When we see somebody
suffer, we like to exploit this opportunity to take possession of him; those
who become his benefactors and pity him, for example, do this and call the
lust for a new possession that he awakens in them “love”; and the pleasure
they feel is comparable to that aroused by the prospect of a new conquest.
(Aphorisms 13, 14)
For Nietzsche, then, the philanthropic act is not altruistic in nature but rather an
expression of “our desire for power or for the purpose of preserving our feeling of
power” (Aphorism 13). Or, as H. L. Mencken summarizes, Nietzsche’s position
is fundamentally that “[t]he philanthropist gives away millions because the giving
visualizes and makes evident to all men his virtue and power” (107). Jadwin himself
even hints at this when he refers to his “little micks [who] are not interesting—to
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look at nor to listen to”: “It seems to suit me to get down there and get hold of these
people” (110).
6. Karsten H. Piep sees Jadwin’s courting quite differently. In “Loves Labor’s Regained: The Making of Compassionate Marriages in Frank Norris’s The Pit,” Piep asserts that, in direct contrast to Corthell’s courting of Laura which “not only reduce[s]
her to an object of sexual desire, but also delimit[s] her ability to fulfill her expanding ‘womanly’ duties within industrial society,” Jadwin’s courting is grounded more
in a “self-assuredness [that] make[s] her feel more comfortable” (44). To illustrate
her point, Piep cites Laura’s reflection that while “relations with Corthell could never be—so she realised—any other than sex-relations . . . Jadwin made her feel—or
rather she made herself feel when he talked to her—that she had a head as well as a
heart” (Pit 34). That this is the case early on is certainly true—Laura expresses this
upon her first encounter with Jadwin at the opera in the novel’s opening chapter—
but Piep limits her reading of Jadwin’s “progressive” courting to this single encounter.
While Piep’s larger argument about “the companionship model of marriage proposed
by Norris and many of his progessivist contemporaries [which] is presented as indispensable for the ‘normal’ functioning of capitalist society” may indeed turn out to be
the case at the close of the novel, I am more interested here in Jadwin’s later courting
as an indication of his instincts of control and domination.
7. Pizer is not the only prominent critic to feel that the novel is “disjointed.” Along
similar lines, see Walcutt, who feels that “the story breaks completely in two . . . [in]
the division between romance and economics” (154), a sentiment that Joseph Katz
describes as “representative of the consensus” (168n1). See also Horwitz, who believes
“the novel’s real failure . . . is a failure of commitment” (223).
8. Horwitz, though from a very different vantage point, comes to a similar conclusion. Utilizing Thorstein Veblin’s analysis of “Modern Business Capital,” Horwitz
argues that “[w]ith value putative and immaterial, an interminable and shifting process of valuation, the distinction between credit and capital vanishes, and all business
activity becomes in some respect ‘speculative,’ a matter of inferring distant and future
trends and needs” (217).
9. See “Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis” 233–34, where Freud suggests that “all obsessional neurotics behave as if they shared this conviction . . . [of an]
overestimation of their powers.” And while I have chosen not to use the language of
“obsessional neurosis” here, Freud notes that “the epistemophilic instinct is a preponderant feature in the constitution of an obsessional patient,” connected inherently to
“the important part played by the sadistic instinctual components in the genesis of
obsessional neurosis” (245).
10. While there has been considerable discussion of the importance of Gounod’s
version of Faust in relation to The Pit, there has been little discussion of Goethe’s. The
only exception is David A. Zimmerman’s “Frank Norris, Market Panic, and the Mesmeric Sublime” where, in an endnote, he refers to Goethe’s version. However, within
the body of his essay, Zimmerman refers to the Gounod version playing at the opera
house during Laura and Jadwin’s first meeting in chapter one (see 65 and 85n7). For
other discussions of the importance of Gounod’s version, particularly as they relate
Adam H. Wood
173
to Laura’s conception of romance, see Katz’s “Eroticism in Literary Realism” 44–49;
Hochman’s “Coming of Age in The Pit” in The Art of Frank Norris, Storyteller 99–
125; and for a brief discussion of Norris’s initial exposure to Gounod, McElrath and
Crisler’s Frank Norris 81. Finally, for interesting analysis of Norris’s use of the opera
Faust as a model for “dynamic narrative voice that reveals the structural bases of performance and social interaction,” see Rachel Cordasco’s “Listening to the Narrative
Voice in The Pit and The Age of Innocence,” especially 66–71.
11. While we never get to actually “see” the poverty and starvation caused by Jadwin’s actions (beyond Corthell’s story) in The Pit, Norris effectively conveys this (at
least for a farmer and his wife ruined by the vicious lowering of wheat prices) in “A
Deal in Wheat.”
12. There are, of course, other possibilities to account for Norris’s understanding of sadism beyond the (perhaps remote) possibility that he read some of Sade’s
works. Obviously, as indicated by his story “A Case for Lombroso,” Norris had at least
a passing familiarity with Lombroso’s work, wherein—especially in Criminal Man
(1876)—there are to be found numerous references to sadistic tendencies (see especially chapter 2). Another possibility is that Norris’s sense of the sadistic was gleaned from
Zola, whose 1890 novel La Bête Humaine centered around certain sadistic tendencies
of the “human beast” or “human animal” Lantier; indeed, Norris even seems to allude
to this potential source when he mentions in The Pit the “inexplicable vagaries of the
human animal” (179). (For a discussion of sadism in La Bête Humaine, see Feldman’s
“Zola and the Riddle of Sadism.”) A final possibility stems from the 1886 publication
of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis in which he suggested that sadism
was but one of many forms of paraesthesia. As Norris himself never addressed his
sources for his understanding of the sadistic tendency, it is ultimately impossible to
know which of these possibilities is the most likely. It seems, though, that in the late
19th century, sadism was all the rage.
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