The Angle(s) of Truth: Perspectives for an American Democratic Fiction in William Dean Howells’s Critical Writing

William Dean Howells was well acquainted with his nation’s distrust of fiction. Intent on cleansing literature from the alleged sins of deceit, he launched the promotion of truth as the standard of American fiction. Truth, as it were, would save fiction from itself. American literature would proudly stick to the matter-of-fact, down-to-earth “American” reality. Howells however did not ask for a bird’s-eye view of the nation-continent. An influential sponsor of local color literature and unrelenting critic of the “great American novel,” he believed that the truth of a variegated, decentralized nation could only be represented from a particular angle, or rather, from the angle of the particular. But once acknowledged that one’s field of vision was the measure of one’s access to truth, the question remained: How shall the nation become one out of these local, idiosyncratic truths? For Howells as for Emerson, the condition of revealing truth was “the circle of the eye,” the span of the arm, but whereas Emerson’s solution to the bias born of circumscription was the ceaseless eccentric movement of the eye/I, its constant expansion, the bias, for Howells, was no cause for lament. The relative purchase was the condition of true vision and Howells’s answer to parallax lay in the multiplicity of focuses, the circulation of viewpoints that built the in common of a democratic nation. At the end of the century, no voice, however self-reliant, could represent America. The making of America was a “making up.” For Howells as for the local color writers he promoted, building an “in common” as the foundation of a true representation of America demanded a multiplicity of truths understood as “truths to”. As such, they could be performed through an American fiction. This American fiction, this paper argues, is what William Dean Howells put forward as the horizon of literature: to relate an America that would constitute the nation as more than the sum of its relations, the ongoing miracle of an acquaintance between “truths to”. By turning the most particular into the “common ground,” by favoring the angle of the particular as the main focus for building the democratic nation, Howells’s vision defied the logics of parallax and located the “un-place-able common” in the “relation to” that is the privilege of a true fiction.