PROGRESS WITHOUT PEOPLE
Silent Film and U.S. Naturalist Literature: Time, Narrative, and Modernity (2016)
Typically, studies of early cinema’s relation to literature have focused on the interactions between film and modernism. When film first emerged, however, it was naturalism, not modernism, competing for the American public’s attention. In this media ecosystem, the cinema appeared alongside the works of authors including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jack London, and Frank Norris. Drawing on contemporaneous theories of time and modernity as well as recent scholarship on film, narrative, and naturalism, this book moves beyond traditional adaptation studies approaches to argue that both naturalism and the early cinema intervened in the era’s varying experiments with temporality and time management. Specifically, it shows that American naturalist novels are constructed around a sustained formal and thematic interrogation of the relationship between human freedom and temporal inexorability and that the early cinema developed its norms in the context of naturalist experiments with time. The book identifies the silent cinema and naturalist novel’s shared privileging of narrative progress over character development as a symbolic solution to social and aesthetic concerns ranging from systems of representation, to historiography, labor reform, miscegenation, and birth control. This volume thus establishes the dynamic exchange between silent film and naturalism, arguing that in the products of this exchange, personality figures as excess bogging down otherwise efficient narratives of progress. Considering naturalist authors and a diverse range of early film genres, this is the first book-length study of the reciprocal media exchanges that took place when the cinema was new. It will be a valuable resource to those with interests in Adaptation Studies, American Literature, Film History, Literary Naturalism, Modernism, and Narrative Theory.
Praise
In her insightful study of shared formal and thematic devices in U.S. naturalist literature and silent film, Katherine Fusco examines the ways in which the human relation to time shaped both the narrative structures of U.S. literary naturalism and the formal techniques of early film. Using Jack London’s well-known story “To Build a Fire” as a case in point, Fusco analyzes the interplay between two different temporal modalities, man’s and nature’s: as opposed to individual interpretations of time as a finite, manageable source, natural time is an infinite force that moves inexorably forward. The inexorability of natural forces is a well-established topos in naturalist literature as well as naturalism studies. What renders Fusco’s study highly original (and much anticipated) is a carefully nuanced expression of this topos in temporal terms, which, in turn, allows her to trace not only thematic but also formal structures that are analogous in early cinema and U.S. naturalist novels. Fusco extends the scholarship on literary naturalism and early film beyond adaptation studies, placing both the literary and the cinematic in the context of early twentieth-century discourses that sacrificed individual subjects on the altars of temporal management and industrial efficiency. For Fusco, this translates into the naturalist emphasis on plot over character, as seen in novels by Frank Norris, Jack London, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
— Studies in American Naturalism
Katherine Fusco is absolutely right to remark on the near absence in American literary scholarship of “comparative studies of naturalism as a genre coexisting with the emergence of cinema”. This is an astounding oversight when we recall, as Fusco encourages us to do, that during “the 1890s and early 1900s, the cinema competed for public attention with the works of Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jack London, Frank Norris, and Edith Wharton”, most of whom also contributed in not insubstantial ways to the upstart industry. For Fusco, what literary naturalism and early motion pictures share is an interest in time: that “force located beyond human intervention.” Fusco concludes that literary naturalism and much silent cinema (both narrative and non-narrative) are modes that do not simply respond to, engage with or represent time but, notably, manage it. As a result, she argues, naturalism and early cinema “came to privilege progress over people and plotting over character”.
— Sarah Gleeson-White