Frank Norris - The Octopus

Frank Norris was an American journalist and novelist active in the last few decades of the 19th century. Today he is relatively unknown, though this novel, The Octopus, is an interesting read. I picked it up without knowing anything about the author, and Norris' more unpleasant ideas did not become immediately obvious.

The Octopus is a social realist novel set in rural California in the 19th century. It deals with the battle between wheat farmers and the railroad capitalists, whose interests are interdependent, but also clash. The book is populated by a number of fascinating characters and Norris tells the story by using varying viewpoints. While Norris is relatively progressive in his sympathies (I'll return to his ideas shortly) the book is not really a radical leftist novel. In fact most of the leading characters in the book are unsympathetic in the sense that they are wealthy landowners or capitalists competing for more money. As Norris describes the Californian farmer, "there's your Western farmer,... Get the guts out of your land; work it to death; never give it a rest. Never alternate your crop, and then when your soil is exhausted, sit down and roar about hard times."

The poor and downtrodden exist in this world - they work on the farms and on the railroad and they are frequently treated shoddily. The novel opens in the aftermath of a railroad strike, and one key small farmer is a character who scabbed on that strike, sets up a farm and is then ruined by the dynamics of the market. 

The context of the novel is the battle between agriculture and railroad - the rail capitalists wanted to fully control the land they lease to the farmers - but the main character is the land itself, or rather the wheat. This is grown in a "new order", on

a ranch bounded only by the horizons, where, as far as one could see, to the north, to the east, to the south and to the west, was all one holding a principality ruled with iron and steam, bullied into a yield of three hundred and fifty thousand bushels, where even when the land was resting, unploughed, unharrowed and unsown, the wheat came up.

This is far from the small producing, self sufficient farms of American folklore. In fact these massive agricultural pursuits are tied to an international market, with the big landowners desperate to use international politics to push their produce onto a hungry world. The limit to this are the costs paid to the middle-men, for transport, handling and processing. It is this that sets up the battle between the rail and land.

When I read The Octopus I did not really grasp the violence at the heart of US social relations. Reading Chad Pearson's recent book Capital's Terrorists, which deals with the battles between labour and bosses in a similar period at the same time, I got an appreciation for the centrality of violence. While this is not a conflict between boss and worker, the dispute easily explodes into murderous conflict. The aftermath allows Norris to briefly discuss more radical social change, though the speeches along these lines he places in the mouth of one of his main characters makes little impact. Presley, who plays the main role of observer in the book, a stand in for the reader to key events, fears that the Railroad (i.e. big Capital) will prevail everywhere, and all that can happen is that those opposing it, their struggles, are like a "fleck of grit in the wheels, perhaps a grain of sand in the cogs". 

He refers to alternative "schemes of society", but sees these as being impractical because of the all consuming power of capital to destroy ordinary people, and all obstacles in its way. Norris doesn't like the way the growth of capital smashes and destroys, but he sees it as an unfortunate necessity, in an economic Darwinian struggle for existence. 

The Octopus is thus a radical novel, but not one that is set among oppressed and exploited people. Nonetheless it sees the way that capitalism turns everything into a mirror of itself. In this sense it is probably reflective of a strand of US radicalism that celebrates the small producer, businessman and middle-class, over the proletarian and their struggles. Which brings me to Frank Norris himself. One of the problems with Norris, though not so much with this book, is his racist attitudes. Norris was very much influenced by 19th century Scientific Racism, and was an antisemite. It is notable that many scholars have seen Norris depiction of the main Railroad manager S. Behrman as an stereotypical Jewish figure, greedy for money.

This racism and antisemitism will put off many readers and helps explain how the author is relatively unknown today. Nonetheless the book is interesting, and has clearly influenced many writers such as Jack London, Upton Sinclair or John Steinbeck.