Capitalism, nationalism, and the American short story - Critical Essay

Studies in Short Fiction, Fall, 1998 by Joseph Urgo

Short stories, like houses--or cars for that matter--should be built to last. They should also be pleasing, if not beautiful, to look at, and everything inside them should work.

--Raymond Carver

A good deal of the vitality and energy associated with the American short story originates at the intersection of two fundamental forces in the United States: capitalism and nationalism. From its earliest form in the sketch and tale, through its later manifestation in the magazine story, the collected edition, and the MFA thesis, the short story has been a profit-making literary genre for authors, publishers, and corporate interests. Moreover, the genre's demands for efficiency of form, cohesiveness, and economy of scale parallel in remarkable fashion the demands of managerial capitalism. A tightly written short story enacts the very same sense of what is good and what is valuable as does the efficiently run textile mill, railroad line, or port authority. At the same time, from its earliest form in Washington Irving's sketches of life in New York, through Bret Harte's California tales and James Baldwin's stories of black America, the short story in the United States has served a nationalist function. As early as 1830, American short stories were reprinted in England to help explain the new nationality called "American"; throughout the nineteenth century, Eastern magazines paid premium prices for tales of the South, the Southwest, the Pacific coast, and any other backwoods or bordered region claiming a distinction between insiders and outsiders. In the twentieth century the short story in the United States continues to serve the insatiable appetite of the American reader for tales of the marginalized, as the genre works to define the range of human phenomena included within the national borders.

The intersections of capitalism and nationalism are multifarious, but there are incidents in history when the junction is particularly salient. One can imagine the excitement in 1860s California in the months when the completion of the Union Pacific Railroad, the final link in the transcontinental rail system connecting the East and West coasts, was imminent. The railroad, completed in May 1869, represented the strength and resources of the entire United States economy, including hundreds of thousands of overland immigrants, their labor and their capital. As the railroad approached, a group of literary entrepreneurs, including Bret Harte, founded the Overland Monthly in July 1868. The original title page asserted the mission of the new magazine, "Devoted to the Development of the Country." Although the magazine was modeled on the Atlantic Monthly, the founders rejected the title "Pacific Monthly" as too blatantly imitative of the Boston magazine: Harte's biographer, George Stewart, notes, "Overland had been chosen because it suggested the new railroad on the old overland trail which would be finished ... in less than a year" (Stewart 158). Harte's design of the magazine's logo, a bear straddling a railroad track, "intended to show how the `grizzly' ... so long the undisturbed monarch of the woods and canyons, was at last face to face with the ubiquitous engineer" (Pemberton 83).

The bear spoke in August 1868, when the second issue of the Overland Monthly published Harte's story, "The Luck of Roaring Camp." The issue traveled East by steamer and caused an immediate sensation. George Stewart claims that

   The sudden appearance of the Luck was about as close to a miracle as one
   finds in literary history, for its author's previous writings had shown
   almost no indication of what was coming.... Together with a wholly new
   subject-matter the story thus offered to the world in many respects a new
   form. (164)

The new form would come to be called "local color," an application of regional literature designed to inform and enlighten outsiders about the folkways and lifestyle of a particular locality and to solidify the sense among insiders that what comes naturally is culture. Like tourism, the form is thoroughly nationalistic.

"The Luck of Roaring Camp" was almost censored by the editorial staff of the Overland Monthly. Harte's own assistant, Noah Brooks, claimed that the story "might dissuade people from migrating to California" (O'Connor 101) and would thus work at odds with the mission of the magazine. In Harte's narrative description, the residents of California's Roaring Camp are "jealous of its privileges, and looked suspiciously on strangers." In fact, the story continues, "No encouragement was given to immigration" (8). But, like the bear on the tracks, it was the inhospitable nature of Roaring Camp that precisely defined California as elsewhere, making clear that this was not Boston or Memphis. Why would anyone wish to migrate to a place essentially the same as origins? Essentially the same as the place where the person was emigrating from? Far from discouraging immigration, Harte's story made the destination desirable for anyone wishing to start over or to escape a predicament. Furthermore, the fierce bear standing astride the railroad tracks made his passing inevitable, as the train would not stop for the grizzly. Reading about the demise of Roaring Camp due to the influence of the baby named "Luck" made immigration there more--not less--attractive, and anyone could try his or her own "luck" in California (the pun is Harte's not mine). Harte thus expanded the definition of the United States by linking an imagination of California to it. In "The Luck of Roaring Camp," California is a wild place populated by gamblers and fugitives who are nonetheless susceptible to the regenerative influence of childbirth. Ultimately, the renegades die for their child, "Luck," the baby born of a prostitute and raised by the camp. Harte thus conflates what gamblers live for ("gambler's luck") with what civilization values above all, life. The connection struck a national chord.