an abrupt vision of chaos - more strange things I found in The Octopus

The strangeness of The Octopus is what makes it a great book, however great that might be.  Any hack can write a novel defending noble farmers against the greedy railroad.  But Norris, more than a bit of a hack himself, was artist enough to write a Frank Norris novel.

Here are more of the strange things he put in it:

1.  The jackrabbit massacre.  Everyone forms a long line in the field after the wheat harvest, compressing until the jackrabbits are corralled.  Don’t Google this unless you want to see the results:

Inside it was a living, moving, leaping, breathing, twisting mass.  The rabbits were packed two, three, and four feet deep.  They were in constant movement; those beneath struggling to the top, those on top sinking and disappearing below their fellows.  (II.6)

Norris squeezes plenty of irony out of this long, brutal scene.  As with McTeague, I recommend The Octopus to Cormac McCarthy fans.  No, actually, why haven’t McCarthy fans been recommending The Octopus to everyone else?  The scene is more like the slaughter of the passenger pigeons in Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823) than the industrial butchery of the whales in Moby-Dick (1851), but those two examples are sufficient to place Norris in a long, ongoing American fictional tradition.

2.  “Jack-rabbits were a pest that year” – so begins the previous chapter, which is mostly full of the long, complex pursuit of a fugitive train robber, driven to his crimes by the perfidy of the railroad, sure, but gone too far.  The train robbery scene is good, too, but the chase – at one point, there is a bit where two train engines are passing each other on parallel tracks, one going backwards, and there is a shootout between the engines as they pass each other.  Awesome.

…  confusion whirling in the scene like the whirl of a witch’s dance, the white clouds of steam, the black eddies from the smokestack, the blue wreaths from the hot mouths of the revolvers, swirling together in a blinding maze of vapor, spinning around them, dazing them, dizzying them, while the head rang with hideous clamor and the body twitched and trembled with the leap and jar of the tumult of machinery.

Roaring, clamoring, reeking with the smell of powder and hot oil, spitting death, resistless, huge, furious, an abrupt vision of chaos, faces, rage-distorted, peering through smoke, hands gripping outward from sudden darkness, prehensile, malevolent; terrible as thunder, swift as lightning, the two engines met and passed.

That passage is perfect, eminently Norris – his lists, his repetitions, his movement, his clichés.  “An abrupt vision of chaos” – yes, that’s The Octopus at its best.

3.  There is a character who has telepathy.  He can summon people to him – and the people he summons believe he has done it.  He wonders if he can summon his girlfriend from sixteen years ago, who was assaulted, and died.  She is associated with flowers:

Her hands disengaged the odor of the heliotropes.  The folds of her dress gave off the enervating scent of poppies.  Her feet were redolent of hyacinths.  (I.4)

Weird!  And it turns out he can summon her from the dead!  “Realism,” people call this.

Whole subplot should have been cut, honestly.

4.  The wheat farmers fight the railroad; the railroad wins; but the Wheat gets its murderous revenge.  It must be seen to be disbelieved – “… no sound but the rushing of the Wheat that continued to plunge incessantly from the iron chute in a prolonged roar, persistent, steady, inevitable” (II.9).

But that is not literature - No, thank God, it is not - the literature and art theme in The Octopus

The Octopus begins with a poet on a bicycle, but it is mostly about wheat framers fighting the railroad, fighting over freight rates and property.  Weapons include bribery and firearms.  The railroad through the Central Valley makes it profitable to plow up the ranchland for wheat – but profitable for whom?

The poet hopes to write an epic “Song of the West” in “hexameters,” Lord help us.  The other character here is a farmer’s wife who loves Pater and Ruskin and Italy:

His “Song of the West,” which only once, incoherent and fierce, he had tried to explain to her, its swift, tumultuous life, its truth, its nobility and savagery, its heroism and obscenity, had revolted her.

“But, Presley,” she had murmured, “that is not literature.”

“No,” he had cried between his teeth, “no, thank God, it is not.”  (I.2.)

At this point I feared Norris was describing his own novel, but Presley eventually has an epiphany leading him to drop his cornball Nietzsche act.  He “flung aside his books of poems” for “Mill, Malthus, Young, Pushkin, Henry George, Schopenhauer,” finding “not one sane suggestion as to remedy or redress.”  He becomes a proletarian poet, scoring big with something, not in hexameters, called “The Toilers.”

Norris at times regards his poet not as a stand-in but as a warning, something close to a con man.  The visual arts are treated more brutally, though, with artists treated as courtiers, servants to railroad money.  A railroad executive’s San Francisco mansion features stained glass windows with Wagnerian themes and a series of painted panels representing “the personages in the Romaunt de la Rose, and was conceived in an atmosphere of the most delicate, most ephemeral allegory.”  The poet dines at this house near the end of the novel, in the extraordinary II.8., with the courses of the dinner alternating with scenes of another character, a widow of the fight with the railroad, literally starving to death on the San Francisco streets:

A grateful numbness had begun to creep over her, a pleasing semi-insensibility.  She no longer felt the pain and cramps of her stomach, even the hunger was ceasing to bite.
                                                                 ------------
“These stuffed artichokes are delicious, Mrs. Gerard,” murmured young Lambert, wiping his lips with a corner of his napkin”…  [discussion of the “special train” that brings the fresh asparagus]

“Fancy eating ordinary market asparagus,” said Mrs. Gerard, “that has been fingered by Heaven knows how many hands.”

Then back to the dying woman.  This is blunt, but as gripping as earlier scenes with gunplay.  That Julian Lambert fellow, who appears only in this scene, is openly mocked by the narrator – he “posed as an epicure” – and I wonder if he is meant to parody someone.  But otherwise, I wonder if Norris’s use of this incongruous poet character is meant to show a movement towards an authentic art, away from Romanticism and idea-driven works towards journalistic, Zolaesque fiction like The Octopus.  Like the novel contains its own apology, for some reason.

There is another character, one of the farmers, an odd bird, who spends his leisure time reading David Copperfield and eating prunes, “methodically swallowing one prune every time he reached the bottom of the page” (I.5).  That sounds almost allegorical, too.  Literature as health food.  This character begins as a fool and greatly improves, for all the good it does him.  I don’t know.  I’m just trying to puzzle out why this poet is even in this wheat and railroad novel.

But the WHEAT remained - Frank Norris's wheat epic, The Octopus

There it was, the Wheat, the Wheat!  (Book II, Ch. 2)

The Octopus (1901) is a novel based on a questionable idea.  It is the first volume in the “Trilogy of the Epic of the Wheat,” three novels that while “forming a series, will be in no way connected with each other save only in their relation to (1) the production, (2) the distribution, (3) the consumption of American wheat.”  That is from Frank Norris’s note that heads the novel, itself another questionable idea, numbered lists about theoretical novels.  Unless that is what the novel is about.  But this novel is about wheat.

But the WHEAT remained.  Untouched, unassailable, undefiled, that mighty world-force, that nourisher of nations, wrapped in Nirvanic calm, indifferent to the human swarm, gigantic, resistless, moved onward in its appointed grooves.  (last page)

Imagine a novel mostly written like that!  It’s not this book, which is a mix of functional best-seller writing of the kind I associate with much later writers of big epics (James Michener, say) punctuated by passages of California lyricism that are inspired by Zola but at this point do not really sound like him, with a number of chapters, long scenes – a big barn-warming party, the pursuit of a dangerous fugitive, a jackrabbit hunt – that are terrific, fast-moving, meaningful, exciting, etc., etc.

Unfortunately, I have not read the two most relevant Zola novels, La Terre (1887), about farming, and La Bête humaine (1890), about railroads – the “octopus” of the title is the railroad – so I do not know to what extent Norris has pilfered them for metaphorical material.  His plot seems unrelated.

This sounds kinda like Zola:

One could not take a dozen steps upon the ranches without the brusque sensation that underfoot the land was alive; roused at last from its sleep, palpitating with the desire for reproduction.  Deep down there in the recesses of the soil, the great heart throbbed once more, thrilling with passion, vibrating with desire, offering itself to the caress of the plow, insistent, eager, imperious.  (I.4.)

Plenty more like that.

The Octopus is one of many novels about the Mussel Slough Tragedy, a property dispute between pioneer wheat farmers in the San Joaquin Valley and railroad representatives that turned violent.  The novel is resolutely on the side of the farmers, who are themselves quite wealthy.  The conflict is mostly between the rich and the super-rich, which dampened the stakes, although there are some side plots that allow a little more ordinary sympathy.

Norris is well aware of the issue.  The railroad is the more or less distant villain, but the novel spends time critiquing the farmers.  This is their leader, “Governor” Magnus:

It was the new era.  He had lived to see the death of the old and the birth of the new; first the mine, now the ranch; first gold, now wheat.  Once again he became the pioneer, hardy, brilliant, taking colossal chances, blazing the way, grasping a fortune – a million in a single day.  All the bigness of his nature leaped up again within him.

He is less a farmer than a hands-on commodity speculator, a gambler.

Lots of other things in this novel.  A day or two more.

“I’m no critic, I only know what I like.” - emptying my bag of McTeague notes

“Of course,” she told the dentist, “I’m no critic, I only know what I like.”  She knew that she liked the “Ideal Heads,” lovely girls with flowing straw-colored hair and immense, upturned eyes.  These always had for title, “Reverie,” or “An Idyll,” or “Dreams of Love.”  (Ch. 10)

Frank Norris absorbed French fiction pretty thoroughly.  He mocks the bad taste of his characters.  He’s as bad as Flaubert.  Trina – that’s Trina, who marries McTeague, speaking – decorates their apartment with magazine illustrations that “inevitably” included “very alert fox terriers and very pretty moon-faced little girls” (Ch. 9).  Norris is so mean.

He also turns Trina into a cruel miser, borrowing now from Balzac, from Lost Illusions and Eugénie Grandet:

“Ah, the dear money, the dear money,” she would whisper, “I love you so!  All mine, every penny of it.” (Ch. 16)

“She even put the smaller gold pieces in her mouth, and jingled them there” – fantastic.  Norris understood Zola the way I do, that his fiction is a kind of baroque Romanticism disguised in drab.  Norris does not share Zola’s baroque descriptive tendencies, but his imagery is pretty good when he wants.  This is across the bay in Oakland:

At the station these [poles] were headed by an iron electric-light pole that, with its supports and outriggers, looked for all the world like a grasshopper on its hind legs…  Clouds of sea-gulls were forever rising and settling upon this mud bank; a wrecked and abandoned wharf crawled over it on tottering legs…  (Ch. 5)

As far as I know, these animated ruins do not have a strong thematic connection to anything else, but I may have missed something.  They do dimly link to a long theater scene that features the Kinetoscope, the earliest reference to motion pictures that I have seen in an American novel:

McTeague was awe-struck.

“Look at that horse move his head,” he cried excitedly, quite carried away.  “Look at that cable-car coming – and the man going across the street.  See, here comes a truck.”  (Ch. 6)

His future mother-in-law is on to the seductive deception of movies, though: “’I ain’t no fool; dot’s nuthun but a drick.’”  This terrific chapter, which is packed with theatrical entertainment, also includes a little boy who desperately needs to pee, something else I had not seen in earlier fiction.

“Owgooste, what is ut?” cried his mother, eyeing him with dawning suspicion; then suddenly, “What haf you done?  You haf ruin your new Vauntleroy gostume!”

Poor little August, constantly humiliated by Norris, stuffed into that Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, “very much too small for him.”

What else?  Ah, Frank Norris gives himself a cameo in his own novel, near the end (Ch. 20).  I needed the help of a footnote to know that.  Pretty funny.

I would not call McTeague a great novel, but it is full of amusing things.

something else in life besides concertinas and steam beer - McTeague, Frank Norris's novel of Zola in San Francisco

Speaking of miserable, how about some time with Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899).  For once, the “Naturalism” label does me some good, since this novel is Zola in San Francisco.  It is mostly like L’Assommoir (1877), but there is a scene near the end where McTeague works in a mine, the noise of “which is like the breathing of an infinitely great monster, alive, palpitating” (Ch. 20), a description directly thieved from Germinal (1885).  A tip of the hat, there.  But there is a wedding feast so close to the one in L’Assommoir that the Norton Critical Edition includes the Zola scene for comparison.

It makes sense.  American readers without French could not read Zola’s most famous books, since they were considered obscene, so there was an opportunity for an American novelist to do his own version sans the smut but avec the violence, worse violence, even – this would become the standard American method of adapting French art.

Seriously, this thing turns into a Cormac McCarthy novel towards the end.  Or a Coen brothers movie.  To my memory, I had never read much about the novel itself, but I had read plenty about Erich von Stroheim’s Greed, the 1924 film adaptation, so there were several points where I thought “Uh oh, here it comes.”  And then, mostly, it didn’t.  But eventually it did.

McTeague is an unlicensed San Francisco dentist.  He is huge, able to pull teeth with his bare hands, and unintelligent, a “draught horse, immensely strong, stupid, docile, obedient” (Ch. 1).  His stupidity is a genuinely interesting part of the story.  There are a number of scenes which begin as comedy but turn into something more pathetic as McTeague proves unable to handle ordinary activities.  The scene in Chapter 6, for example, where he is almost too stupid to buy theater tickets in advance.  Or see Chapter 4, where the poor brute almost chokes to death on a billiard ball.

He learns there is “something else in life besides concertinas and steam beer” when he begins fixing the teeth of petite Trina.  “The male virile desire in him tardily awakened, aroused itself, strong and brutal” (Ch. 2).  Meanwhile, Trina is in some ways repulsed by McTeague but also turned on by his strength.  “McTeague had awakened the Woman” (Ch. 6), etc. – Norris has to resort to abstractions at points like this.

Reading these scenes soon after reading The Awakening, published the same year, was amusing?  Everyone is awakening!  Was the word showing up in magazines a lot or something?

The San Francisco setting is terrific, and strangely intact and recognizable.  Characters walk to the Cliff House or the Presidio; the cable car is in the same place; even McTeague’s dentist parlor, with its big gold tooth for a sign, is in more or less the right place, except now it is a saloon.