What is unique about Norris, however, is that he ultimately transcended the iconoclastic attitudes popular among the turn-of-the-century avant-garde—as sardonically expressed by Stephen Crane and Ambrose Bierce when they ruminated over how little their unsophisticated contemporaries understood life's complexities. After some similar flourishes of rebellion against his parent culture, he went on to anticipate, in his own fashion, T. S. Eliot's manner of dealing with the "modern predicament" by synthesizing what seemed to remain valid in the old thought and artistic methods and what seemed important in the new. The blending of the modern and the Victorian in his works once caused some confusion among literary historians: Norris's fiction was identified as a puzzling mixture of pessimism and optimism, realism and romanticism, progressive philosophy and regressive thought. The apparently paradoxical yoking of Charles Darwin and St. Paul and the blending of Emile Zola and William Dean Howells, however, was purposeful. Whether Norris always succeeded is debatable, but his intention was clearly that of a synthesizer attempting to wed the traditional and the modern in distinctive novelistic statements on the nature of life.
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