1In the face of the sweeping changes that were tearing apart the fabric of American society in the 1890s, William Dean Howells knew that the linguistic premises underpinning his realism in the 1880s had become obsolete. A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), “the first novel to present a fully rendered portrait of [New York],”2 is nothing less than an author’s attempt to reinvent his craft. If books can be summed up by “pictorial images” or “geometrical similes,” as E.M. Forster has suggested (James’s The Ambassadors evokes an hour-glass, and Anatole France’s Thais a chain),3 the image that comes to mind in the case of A Hazard of New Fortunes is that of a circle whose outline has been erased, substituting tentative openness for prescriptive closure—which means that the portrait of the city is perhaps not so fully rendered after all. My contention is that in A Hazard of New Fortunes Howells attempts to suit the novel’s overall pattern to his mood (to paraphrase E.M. Forster), but also to the social climate of the time.

2Much has been written about Howells’s relocation from Boston to New York in 1888, a move which encapsulates a wider historical shift and, from a literary vantage point, a stylistic metamorphosis.4 The relocation to New York, however, does not herald a new form of stability for the novelist, but the beginning of a nomadic existence. His close friend, Henry James, describes him in 1894 as “the most addressless man I know.”5 Moreover, as the writer’s correspondence indicates, Howells has an ambivalent attitude towards the metropolis, presented sometimes as noisy and ugly, sometimes as exhilarating. His well-known remark, in a letter to James, that “At the bottom of our wicked hearts we all like New York,” summarizes this ambivalence. However fascinating, “Philistia” (as he called the city in December 1897 in a letter to Charles Eliot Norton) could never become the Altruria of his utopian novels.

3Interestingly, Howells decided to de-centre himself shortly before being made an institution, “the Dean of American letters,” thus pre-empting a canonization which he probably saw as ossifying. His decision to move to New York made him part of a wider “centrifugal” or “decentralized”6 tendency characteristic of American life, which can be seen as a first step towards solidarity with his fellow citizens. New York, therefore, should not be seen as a new centre but as the site of indeterminacy and interaction.

4Openness and uncertainty are at the core of Hazard. In the same way as the modern subject needs to give himself up to the vagaries of experience and accept its risks, the narrating subject must relinquish the smug certainties of his Bostonian period. Howells’s relocation is a matter of leaving not just one house for another, but more importantly one house of fiction, and language, for another. The new edifice, endowed with more doors and windows, must not become another “conceptual cage” (Ickstadt Faces of Fiction 96). While the characters seek their fortunes in the new capital of literature, the narrator embarks on an equally bold adventure, that of representing the metropolis. Howells’s 1890 novel deals with this twofold undertaking and should be read accordingly as the narrative of a double hazard,7 implying an ethical and aesthetic “uprooting and transplanting.” (Hazard 37)

5I would argue that, unlike the novels of the 1880s, both the narrative pattern and stylistic economy at work in Hazard are loose, repet-itive, based not on efficient production but on the dilapidation of energy. It is this evolution, touched upon by Edwin Cady,8 that we propose to analyze in detail. The squandering of textual energy is a far cry from Thorstein Veblen’s invidious conspicuous consumption, as it seeks to bring about a new social awareness or, in Howellsian terms, complicity. Complicit consumption, then, is the new paradigm. Howells’s description of his characters’ house-hunting, a time- and text-consuming activity, in the opening chapters of the novel, redefines literary practice and the relationship to others. These chapters enable him to transcend his own realism and replace the teleology of accretion of the 1880s by an aesthetic of “sliding,” to cite Bataille and Derrida.

1 A Diatribe Against Cultural Philistines

6A Hazard of New Fortunes has a strong autobiographical basis. The protagonists’ initial dislike of New York mirrors Howells’s own mixed feelings. However, both the author and the protagonists eventually comprehend the metropolis—though they do not assign any stable meaning to it, an instability reflected in the Marches’ choice to remain in rented accommodation rather than becoming house owners again. Paradoxically, the nickname “Philistia” seems more appropriate to describe the capital of New England than New York, and the term “cultural philistine” used by Nietzsche in Untimely Meditations would appear to fit the Boston-based protagonists, Basil and Isabel March, whose initial immobility is an index of their intellectual paralysis.9

7Basil and Isabel are cultural philistines insofar as they pride themselves on their aesthetic discernment and abhor stylistic cacophony. They “regar[d] as culture precisely that which negates culture” and “finally acquir[e] a coherent collection of such negations, a system of un-culture: ” (Nietzsche 8) a tastefully furnished townhouse, a few paintings and some cultural references (see Part Fourth, Chapter One). Basil defines as respectable “the ‘[American] culture’ he has patented.” He is “a negative being” lacking in “self-knowledge.” (Nietzsche 8) Finally, the thought of moving terrifies the couple, as is suggested by the recurrence of the terms “despair” and “anguish” in Chapter VI, which once again seems to illustrate Nietzsche’s remark: “For ‘All seeking must end’ is the motto of the philistines.”10

8The house hunting episode does not seem to bode well for the future: the search for a permanent dwelling within a perimeter of gentility delineated by Isabel indicates an attempt to shut out their unfamiliar surroundings. The obsession with real estate reflects the Marches’ urge to resume their sedentary existence as cultural philistines. Their search is devoid of any genuine “seeking” and amounts to a non-search, the very negation of a quest, which lessens the likelihood of their ever “widening” their “horizons” “indefinitely,” to paraphrase one of Howells’s oft-quoted letters.11 The line which Isabel is desperately seeking to draw between respectability and shabbiness12 suggests a narrow outlook, the very opposite of the concept of complicity, based on an indefinite broadening of the circle of sympathy, which Howells articulated after defending the so-called Chicago Anarchists; it is a search devoid of “seeking” and “feeling” alike. However, a close reading of the episode shows that things are not so simple, and that the utilitarian house-hunt becomes a genuine investigation.

9Although the lengthy opening chapters have often baffled critics, it is difficult to claim that they are “really just a house hunt,” (Trilling 215) for they also have symbolic and linguistic implications. Insofar as the Marches’s house hunt involves a whole cast of characters whose actions are necessarily inscribed in time and space, it can be regarded as a metaphor for the act of writing. One of the topics under discussion in these chapters is the jargon of estate agents and advertisements, a deceptive language which needs to be deciphered.

[The house agents are] a very illusory generation. There seems to be something in the human habitation that corrupts the natures who deal in it, to buy or sell it, to hire or let it. You go to an agent and tell him what kind of house you want. He has no such house, and he sends you to look at something altogether different [. . .].
(Hazard 51, emphasis added) Mrs. March [. . .] read the advertisements aloud with ardor, and with faith to believe that the apartments described in them were every one truthfully represented, and that any one of them was richly responsive to their needs. “Elegant, light, large, single, and outside flats” were offered with “all improvements – bath, ice-box, etc.”—for $25 and $ 35 a month. The cheapness was amazing. The Wagram, the Esmeralda, the Jacinth advertised them for $40 and $60, “with steam and elevator,” rent free till November. Others, attractive from their air of conscientious scruple, announced “first-class flats; good order; reasonable rents.” The Helena asked the reader if she had seen the “cabinet finish, hardwood floors, and frescoed ceilings” of its $ 50 flats [. . .]. There was a sameness in the jargon which tended to confusion.
(Hazard 53, emphasis added)

10The agents and their advertisements raise the question of representation, which in this case is a far cry from Howellsian orthodoxy defined as “truthful treatment of material.”13 Their distorting language is analogous to that of romantic literature, the arch-enemy of realism inveighed against in earlier novels. The advantage of Hazard, however, is that it avoids the ficelle of the literary discussion between the characters. Instead, the novelist uses the symbol of the Marches’ relocation to articulate his own literary quandaries. For that reason, Chapters III to XII are all but superfluous, and need to be read closely.

2 The Sea Serpent

11In order to find the ideal flat, Isabel March cuts out ads as she finds them and assembles them into a “nondescript vertebrate: ”

She took a long strip of paper out of her handbag with minute advertisements pinned transversely upon it, and forming the effect of some glittering nondescript vertebrate. “Looks something like the sea serpent,” said March, drying his hands on the towel, while he glanced up and down the list. (Hazard 42)

12The unpredictable pattern of the sea serpent symbolizes the novel’s haphazard aesthetic—it suits the author’s mood. It refers literally to the material object in Isabel’s hands and metaphorically to the textual object beheld by the reader. This “monstrous” object sets the tone for the whole novel, anticipating the modernist techniques of Dos Passos and of post-1913 painters, intent on expressing the epic scale of America. Howells is trying, rather like the American painter John Marin, “to express graphically what a great city is doing.”14 The teleological structure of his earlier novels is supplanted by a loose narrative economy suggested by the image of the sea serpent: the vertebrate can sustain indefinite growth but can also be amputated without any apparent damage to its integrity:

Mrs. March got several flats on her list which promised neither steam heat nor elevators; she forgot herself so far as to include two or three as remote from the down-town region of her choice as Harlem. But after she had rejected these the nondescript vertebrate was still voluminous enough to sustain her buoyant hopes. (Hazard 53)

13The absence of closure helps to understand the novel’s open end, and characterizes what Sämi Ludwig calls “pragmatist realism,” an awareness of one’s own “gaps and limitations,” the very opposite of “a totalizing view of things.” (Ludwig 111) Hazard’s accidental form is the only way of rendering the plurality of modern urban experience.

14Giving a stable meaning to existence is as impossible as finding a permanent or ideal dwelling in the metropolis. Estate agents can give no guarantee against the risks of modern life, nor is language a reliable guide. Isabel March’s assertion, after reading a few deceptive ads—“‘Well, I consider ourselves settled! ’” (Hazard 44)—is naïve, anti-modern and typical of a cultural philistine. By the same token, her unrealistic expectations about what the ideal New York apartment ought to be are amusing:

“The sine qua nons are an elevator and steam heat, not above the third floor, to begin with. Then we must each have a room, and you must have your study, and I must have my parlor; and the two girls must each have a room.” (Hazard 44)

15Isabel can also be narrow-minded and mean. She is panic-stricken when she thinks she has lost her purse with its tightly packed banknotes (“each note crushed into a round wad,” Hazard 368) a detail suggesting avarice. All these remarks point to a linkage between utilitarianism, predicated on the belief in absolute guarantees against the hazard of existence, and a restrictive conception of language regarded as a tool of semantic and social control. In the first part of the novel, Isabel still feels the need for reassurance and “insurance” (Basil’s former profession).

16Hazard comically deconstructs Bostonian expectations by showing that nothing is written in stone, and by erasing the “line” of respectability. The dichotomy between Isabel’s rigidity and the flexibility of the sea serpent creates a tension foreshadowing the protagonists’ metamorphosis, which is linked to a new economic paradigm. The yearning for a rational economy, based on control and possession, is replaced by lavish expenditure, to use Bataille’s terminology:15 the paradigm of production is superseded by the logic of consumption. This shift also accounts for a change in tone: one is struck by the contrast between the seriousness of the novels of the 1880s and Hazard, where the author amuses himself with language, as if to forget the loss of his beloved daughter Winifred. In the manuscript of his preface to the novel, he writes:

The stress of it [the death of Winifred] cannot be told; what may be told is that it had its effect in the formlessness of the passages following the opening [of the novel], or rather their disproportionate length. The story had to be placed, and it was not possible in the circumstances to give it the compression [. . .] which I aimed at everywhere. [T]here is nothing in this book with which I amused myself more than the flat-hunting of the Marches.
(Hazard, “Autobiographical” 509-10)

17This jocular tone, foregrounded by March’s seminal joke and Fulkerson’s constant puns, confirms the comic dimension of the novel. Thus, the relocation to New York clearly coincides with a stylistic renewal. The metropolis becomes a site of defamiliarization and enables March to break with the routine of habit.16

3 From Domestic inquest to Infinite Excursion

18If, as I have suggested, the protagonists’ house-hunt stands for the novelist’s stylistic quest, the modalities of this search are of paramount importance. One would expect a “normal” house-hunt to be methodical and time-efficient—a means to an end. In an earlier novel, The Lady of the Aroostook (1879), the male protagonist is extremely efficient, both from an erotic viewpoint (he goes east and gets married) and from an economic viewpoint (he goes west and starts earning money).

19By contrast, the Marches’ domestic expedition is never-ending. It takes up no less than seven chapters (VI to XII) and sixty-five pages. The list of the flats they visit is so long that at the end of the day Isabel exclaims: “‘Mrs Grosvenor Green! [. . .] Which of the ten thousand flats is it, Basil?’” (Hazard 72) Some of these places themselves are described in minute detail, like the Xenophon, belonging to a Mrs Grosvenor Green. In a deliberately rambling paragraph the narrator satirizes the pretentious style of the apartment, a caricature of the Victorian interior (see Miles Orvell.)17 The pomposity of the names and the references to Europe only reinforce the caricature. The Xenophon is “‘a junk-shop,’” an image of the incipient consumer culture. The novel reads:

Everything had been done by the architect to save space, and everything to waste it by Mrs. Grosvenor Green. She had conformed to a law for the necessity of turning round in each room, and had folding-beds in the chambers; but there her subordination had ended, and wherever you might have turned round she had put a gimcrack so that you would knock it over if you did turn. [. . .] March, when he had recovered his self-command a little in the presence of this agglomeration, comforted himself by calling the bric-à-brac Jamescracks, as if this was their proper name. (Hazard 49)

20For all its junk, Basil ignores his wife’s demands and rents the Xenophon. As it turns out, this choice constitutes an initiation into waste and excess—not in the competitive sense of conspicuous consumption, but in the sense of giving oneself up to “the general movement of exudation (of waste),” to “that glorious operation, [. . .] useless consumption” (Bataille 23). The new economic paradigm requires a non-productive expenditure: domestic space must be squandered lavishly. Which is why, besides the length of the house-hunt and the excess of bric-à-brac, the Marches’ domestic epic is structurally repetitive, as they unwittingly visit the same flats twice.

They went to several places twice without intending: once to that old-fashioned house with the pleasant colored janitor, and wandered all over the apartment again with a haunting sense of familiarity, and then recognized the janitor and laughed; and to that house with the pathetic widow and the pretty daughter who wished to take them to board. (Hazard 60-1)

21From the vantage point of the protestant ethic which informed the novels of the 1880s, such a waste of energy is scandalous. Why visit “ten thousand flats” in order finally to choose the second one? Measured against the yardstick of utilitarianism, Chapter VIII serves no use whatsoever: Isabel dismisses estate agents as unreliable, starts using ads instead, then goes back on her decision and works with agents again: “[T]hey varied their day by taking a coupé, by renouncing advertisements, and by reverting to agents.” (Hazard 64) Evidently, acquisitiveness has given way to a mode of existence based on risk and waste considered the sine qua nons of complicity.

22The novel deals with the launching of a new magazine (“a thing,” as Fulkerson calls it) and with the search for a new home. Yet, Hazard does not eulogize those “things” which, according to Emerson in “The American Scholar,” are the bane of America, or those appurtenances worshipped by Madame Merle in The Portrait of a Lady. It celebrates the “multitudinous and tangled world of experience to which the street belongs,”18 to quote William James in Pragmatism. The “heterogeneous” community involved in the magazine can be compared to a “menagerie.” (Hazard 195, 149) The shift from Silas Lapham’s paint factory to Hazard’s magazine, compared to a living organism, is that from the reign of techne to that of phusis, and Basil March succeeds gradually in distancing himself from the world of objects: “He experienced remorse in the presence of inanimate things he was going to leave as if they had sensibly reproached him.” (Hazard 37) If we remember the example of the Chicago anarchists, it was the process of trying to save them which widened Howells’s horizons, not the result, which, as we know, was tragic. Dewey’s remark seems applicable here:

For a man usually builds a house for the sake of comfort and security, the “control,” thereby afforded to future living rather just for the fun—or the trouble—of building. [. . .] We must not confuse the act of building with the house built. The latter is a means, not a fulfilment. [. . .] Activity should be productive. This is to say it should have a bearing on the future, should effect control of it. But so far as a productive action is intrinsically creative, it has its own intrinsic value. Reference to future products and future enjoyments is but a way of enhancing perception of an immanent meaning. A skilled artisan who enjoys his work is aware that what he is making is made for future use. Externally his action is one technically labeled “production.” It seems to illustrate the subjection of present activity to remote ends. But actually, morally, psychologically, the sense of the utility of the article produced is a factor in the present significance of action due to present utilization of abilities, giving play to taste and skill, accomplishing something now. The moment of production is severed from immediate satisfaction, it becomes “labor,” drudgery, a task reluctantly performed.19

23In Hazard, the act of launching the magazine is intrinsically creative, and the intrinsic value is complicity—the sense of belonging induced when one erases the line of respectability, when one jettisons the demands of utilitarianism. Once again, the novel seems to foreshadow pragmatism. The shift from the compulsive in-quest to erratic ex-cursions corresponds to Dewey’s notion that “[altruism] suggests a generosity of out-going action, a liberation of power as against the close, pent-in, protected atmosphere of a ready-made ego.” (Dewey 139) Basil March wakes up to sympathy by going out of his home and by exploring the city as far as the Elevated takes him.

24The narrative structure exchanges the middle-class logic of control, symbolized by Isabel’s line of respectability, for a more humane logic of sympathy symbolized by the tram line, which by carrying Basil from one end of Manhattan to another enables him to familiarize himself with the entire social spectrum. This spatial exploration goes hand in hand with a blurring of the line, since complicity implies an experience accessible to the “deeply underlying nobody.”20 Moreover, Basil’s forays into the great city are never put into words—his intended New York sketches remain virtual—, suggesting that urban experience is best left unwritten, open to infinite (re-) interpretations. Basil March simply will not commodify his experience by converting it into marketable articles as his wife and Fulkerson urge him to. The irony with which he ridicules their commercialism indicates his philosophical posture:

His wife brushed some crumbs from her lap before rising.
“Yes. You mustn’t waste any of these ideas now.”
“Oh no; it would be money out of Fulkerson’s pocket.”
(Hazard 40)

25New York eschews closure, cannot be written in stone. Somewhat like Melville’s Bartleby, Basil prefers not to comply with the law, especially the law of language.

4 The Language of Chance. From Meaning to Non-Meaning

26In Hazard, the shift from a constraining to an open paradigm is made tangible by the use of a different language. The magazine launched by Fulkerson and March is linked to the notion of plasticity. Just as they do not depend on an external publisher, the editors do not want Every Other Week to be subservient to the tyranny of words, which all too often reflects that of the market. Why would March trust the style of advertising, when his experience has taught him the pitfalls of meretricious language? The markers of subjectivity, such as adjectives when they misrepresent instead of describing, come under fire:

“Elegant, light, large, single, and outside flats” were offered with “all improvements—bath, ice-box, etc.”—for $25 and $35 a month. [Others, ] announced “first-class flats; good order; reasonable rents.”
(Hazard 53)

27After visiting the flats in question, March realizes the deceptive potential of language, as none of the lodgings tallies with their description. The semantics of estate agents is not objective, but purely evaluative. Their evaluative component, to cite research in sociolinguistics, increases “vis-à-vis their descriptive component, along a path of subjectification.” As a result, these evaluative items are “bleached of descriptive content, marking merely evaluation,” and playing an “ostentatious” function; they become “pure evaluatives.” (Zwicky)

28When language is not deceptive, it is deficient: what word(s) can describe Isabel’s monstrous collage? How is one to designate the new high-rise buildings, when the word sky-scraper still remains to be coined? Only a periphrasis or a generic term like “thing” can express the subject’s thoughts:

Now the paupers were gone, and where the old mansions that had fallen to their use once stood, there towered aloft and abroad those heights and masses of many-storied brickwork for which architecture has yet no proper form and aesthetics no name. (Hazard 302-3)

29This passage is reminiscent of another description of New York by an aspiring writer. Ray, the protagonist of A World of Chance, senses the great forces at work but is at a loss for words:

Ray looked at [the New York shore] too, with a sense of the beauty struggling through the grotesqueness of the huge panorama, and evoking itself somehow from the grossest details. The ferry-boats coming and going; the great barges with freight trains in sections on them; [. . .] the mean, ugly fronts and roofs of the buildings beyond, and hulking high overhead in the further distance in vast bulks and clumsy towers, the masses of those ten-storied edifices which are the necessity of commerce and the despair of art, all helped to compose the brutal and squalid body of the thing, whose soul was collectively expressed in an incredible picturesqueness. Ray saw nothing amiss in it. This agglomeration of warring forms, feebly typifying the ugliness of the warring interests within them, did not repulse him.
(The World of Chance 12-13)

30In order to palliate the deficiency of words one must devise new linguistic strategies. What makes them “realistic” is either their pluralistic dimension—their ability to envisage one aspect of reality (beauty) and the opposite (ugliness), or their semantic openness (“thing” denotes without connoting). Which is why the occurrences of “thing” in order to designate the new magazine are so numerous (at least sixteen in the first four chapters). As Basil points out, “Fulkerson always calls it ‘this thing [. . .]’” (Hazard 29) and the word gradually disseminates:

“But let’s examine this thing. (This thing! I believe Fulkerson is characterizing my whole parlance, as well as your morals.)”
(Hazard 479) “Mr. March, how would you like to take this thing off my hands? [. . .] If you want to take this thing off my hands, I reckon I can let you have it in ’most any shape you say. [. . .] I’ve been thinkin’ whether you wouldn’t like to take the thing.”
The word, which Dryfoos had now used three times, made March at last think of Fulkerson [. . .]. (Hazard 481)

31What exactly is Every Other Week, since it is neither a low-brow weekly nor a high-brow monthly like Atlantic Monthly, but a hybrid creature whose instability disturbs the very Bostonian Isabel March?

“[. . .] I wish Mr. Fulkerson hadn’t called it that! It always makes one think of ‘jam yesterday and jam tomorrow, but never jam to-day,’ in Through the Looking-Glass.” (Hazard 37)

32The magazine’s novelty is contained in its very title, chosen after much deliberation. Initially, Fulkerson wanted an attractive title, which might “pique curiosity” and be “a first-rate ad.” (Hazard 10) Thanks to the influence of March, who suggests extravagant titles (The Lone Hand, From Sea to Sea, The Fifth Wheel, etc.) precisely in order to undermine Fulkerson’s advertising rhetoric, the two men finally agree on Every Other Week. Compared to the other suggestions, this title strikes by its absence of connotations: unlike The Lone Hand, a melodramatic allusion to the solitude of frontier existence, or From Sea to Sea, a demagogic appeal to the American readership at large, it is purely denotative: Every Other Week is the name of a magazine published every other week, no more no less. Besides its comic and diegetic function, the naming of the magazine enables Howells to redefine his linguistic economy by neutralising excess and by positing literal or generic designation as his yardstick. The episode is also a lesson in democracy, as it suggests that realism is not a ready made theory but the expression of a dialogic, contractual process—the outcome of human interaction. Along the same lines, other terms suggesting shapelessness—“inchoately” (Hazard 11, 305), “shapeless” (Hazard 309), “formlessly” (Hazard 467), or “formlessness” and “disproportionate” (Hazard, “Autobiographical” 510)—are noteworthy, as is the substantive “line,” whose ambivalence symbolizes the novel’s general instability of meaning. A “line” can separate, like Isabel’s line distinguishing respectability from shabbiness; it can join together, as in the case of the tram line, and can even symbolize the writer’s craft. But among all these linguistic strategies, “thing” is probably the most iconic: on the one hand “thing” refers to what has not been named, to a real-in-progress, and on the other it posits a new conception of language as relative and provisional, a blurred line, unable—and reluctant—to contain the plurality of experience. “Thing,” the hyperonym21 par excellence, the word which contains multitudes and can be used by the multitude, is particularly fitting to express New York, the “city that belongs to the whole country,” where one “may do anything.” (Hazard 12, 494) Language must not seek to promote and/or to connote but merely to denote in order to foster social cohesion.

33This semantics serves no ostentatious purpose, does not embellish reality, but strives to articulate and communicate a complex experience. It is marked internally by a see-saw movement (the oscillation between the positive and the negative) and externally by a conative function (the wish to get through to somebody). It resists semantic fixity—what Marie-Laurence Desclos calls definitional closure.22 Meaning is not contained within the perimeter of a word, but is disseminated thanks to an open, tentative designation—a figurative expression (“sea serpent”), a periphrasis, or a generic term (“thing,” “line”). After widening the moral and intellectual horizons of the subject, Hazard erases the circle of the word, thus transcending the “line” which circumscribes language.

34Ultimately, if Hazard is Howells’s “most vital” work, it is because it redefines realism as what Ludwig calls an experiential mode of representation. Basil March explores the great city aimlessly, without seeking to appropriate it—to use it as material—which is precisely what the unscrupulous journalist in The Rise of Silas Lapham, Bartley Hubbard, could not refrain from doing. “[Lapham assented] to Bartley’s use of him as material.” (Novels 1875-1886 876) March does not transmute the modern city, an “agglomeration of warring forms [. . .] and warring interests” (The World of Chance 13), into a literary object—a written text. He does not write his New York sketches.23 Howells’s new approach to language contrasts with that of his earlier novels. In The Lady of the Aroostook and The Rise of Silas Lapham, teleology reigned supreme—nothing was left to chance; in A Modern Instance, the inability to interpret the world, to put things into words, filled the protagonist with dismay: “Atherton flung the letter upon the table, and drew a troubled sigh. ‘Ah, I don’t know, I don’t know! ’” (Novels 1875-1886 589) By contrast, the ending of Hazard is left deliberately open. Will Every Other Week be a successful magazine on the long term? What is the meaning of the smile of Margaret Vance, which concludes the novel? There only answer is “‘Well, we must trust that look of hers.’” (Hazard 496) A few lines before, March said to his wife: “‘I don’t know. I don’t care. In any event, it would be right.’”

35This stylistic shift calls to mind the “two forms of writing” defined by Derrida, which correspond to two opposed economic paradigms. According to Derrida, there is a restrictive form of writing—one which seeks to conserve meaning, and which is a slave to meaning, for “The servant is the man who does not put his life at stake, the man who wants to conserve his life, wants to be conserved”—, and a sovereign one which is willing “to risk the absolute loss of meaning.” (Derrida, Writing and Difference 254-5) This type of writing “exceeds the logos” and is based on a loose linguistic economy in which words “make us slide” or consume meaning. (Derrida, Writing and Difference 261- 7) Put differently, the stable meaning of definite intention (l’intenté, in Ricoeur’s words) gives way to what Derrida calls un-knowledge or non-meaning, i.e. l’insensé.24 Which brings us back to A Hazard of New Fortunes. Having left their Bostonian dwelling the Marches must accept that language is not a reliable epistemological tool but is itself a fiction, a site of indeterminacy. Their spatial and verbal condition, like everybody else’s, is necessarily nomadic. This blurring process, in the last analysis, summarizes the trajectory of Howellsian realism from a rational economy of language to an extravagant economy that consumes words meaninglessly. The raw materials of reality and language are not converted into signifying products but deliberately squandered and left to chance. Howells’s fiction is characterized by this fundamental duality between a productive, utilitarian semantics and an unproductive, open-ended style.