Moreover, what is interesting is how literary form follows, informs, or accompanies these forms of Social Darwinism. In the U.S., literary naturalism accompanies biological racial theory, and food secures a sense of nature that spans the range from agricultural production to physical consumption. In China, it is popular songs and literary representations of discussion, of liberal exchange of ideas, that attempt to call the new national community into being. Here artists demystify the commodification of food in order to map unequal trade relations and advocate for independence based on food sovereignty.Explaining why he wrote The Octopus, Frank Norris said that he believed the settling of the American West had been of such world-historical import that it deserved to be told in a great work of literature. His view of the West was heavily influenced by Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous thesis, in “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” , that the frontier had been the decisive factor in factor in shaping a distinctively American culture, and moreover that this period was now at an end. When the 1890 census found that nearly all “frontier” land had been occupied, this meant that the first chapter of American history was over, while the next chapter remained unclear. Thus Norris wanted to celebrate the frontier, but also to memorialize it, to monumentalize it in a loftier literary form than the popular western genre fiction. Having studied the form of the medieval romance at the University of California, he dreamed of seeing a Song of Roland for modern America, a song of the West. He planned a trilogy of novels, or following his interest in medieval literature,10 plastic plant pots what we might call a song cycle. The first novel, The Octopus, was based on a historical event, known as the Mussel Slough Incident, a deadly 1880 land dispute between the Southern Pacific Railroad and wheat growing ranchers in Tulare county, in California’s central valley.

Ostensibly weighing the conflicting interests of the ranchers and the railroad, The Octopus is ultimately more interested in placing the Mussel Slough incident within the larger geographical scale of the emergent global wheat trade and the larger temporal scale of the closing of the frontier. Following The Octopus’s description of wheat production on newly-industrialized California farms, the second book, The Pit , traces the wheat’s distribution through commodities markets in Chicago, and the never-completed third book was to cover consumption “in a famine-stricken Europe or Asia,” as he wrote in a synopsis . The song of the West turns out to be the story of the expanding global market for American agricultural commodities. Norris’s epic scope did not prevent him from conducting detailed historical research into the Mussel Slough Incident itself. The dispute centered on the price at which the Southern Pacific would sell the land abutting the railroad, which had been granted them by the federal government. The railroad circulated advertisements soliciting the public to lease the land from them temporarily, apparently with the option to purchase it for between $2.50 and $5 per acre. The ranchers who leased these large plots of land pooled their capital to build an irrigation system that transformed the arid region into productive farmland for wheat and hops. Once the crops were a success, however, the railroad declared that the land would be sold at market value between $17 and $40 per acre, and that the tenants would have to either pay or move out. In response, the ranchers organized a Settlers’ Land League and armed themselves to defend their claims. On May 11, 1880, a U.S. In the shoot-out that followed eight men were killed, most of them ranchers shot by one of the new owners. While many readers at the time of the book’s publication praised its attack on the railroad monopoly and support for the common farmer, later generations have emphasized that Norris portrays the ranchers as capitalists who care more about windfall profits than about hard work or the land, the traditional virtues of Jeffersonian agrarianism.

Indeed, the author emphasizes the ploy of the Settlers’ Land League to influence the election of a state commission that would favor their side in the legal case—when this corruption is exposed near the end of the novel the ranchers lose their popular support. Norris maintains a distance from the ranchers by telling much of the action from the perspective of an outsider, Presley, who is a San Francisco poet visiting his friend, Buck Annixter, one of the ranchers who will eventually be killed. Presley is hoping, like Jack London and Norris himself, to write the first great literary work expressing the essence of the American West. There is some disagreement among scholars over how the land is portrayed in the novel, and in this it is helpful to note that Presley tries out multiple writing styles as his view of area changes. In the first chapter Presley witnesses the beauty of the natural environment, and goes on to record it in a pastoral celebration of beauty and harmony. In a strange ending to the chapter, Presley repeats word-for-word in his writing long passages that had appeared as narrative description ten pages earlier, and in this way Norris self-referentially emphasizes both the centrality of Presley’s perspective and also that the novel itself is a work of descriptive writing. In the next chapter, however, the pastoral landscape is replaced by images of the massive new farm equipment used in planting the wheat, which Norris depicts this in graphic terms as the sexual union between the machine and the earth. At this point, Presley is forced to confront the land dispute and the competing economic interests that are driving the industrialization of agricultural commodities, and attempts to incorporate these into an enlarged view of the West. The industrialist Cedarquist assures Presley and the ranchers that the continued expansion of American agriculture depends on reaching the inexhaustible demand of the China market. A famine in India provides the opportunity for him to arrange a humanitarian shipment of grain, which serves as a test run ahead of increasing transpacific exports.

After the victory of the railroad, Presley tries his hand at politically committed poetry, publishing a successful georgic poem titled “The Toilers.” Local attempts at political mobilization fall apart, however, after the Settlers’ League’s conspiratorial plot to influence the commission is exposed. Resigned to the power of industrial progress, Presley decides to accompany Cedarquist’s famine relief voyage. The novel ends with him looking out to sea,plastic pots large as he decides that his friends’ deaths do not mean much in the grand scheme of things. All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, for toilers may come and go, “But the WHEAT remained” . Because it is ultimately the story of large-scale natural and historical forces that dwarf the characters’ moral choices, The Octopus is classed as work of literary naturalism. Florian Frietag points out that while all farm novels must feature natural forces to some extent, it is the total failure of the characters’ attempts to influence the social world around them that gives The Octopus a specifically naturalist form as compared to most American farm novels. At the same time, I believe it is also worth keeping in mind Norris’s own preferred formal terms from ancient and medieval poetry rather than modern prose, the epic and the romance. It is an epic because it is intended as telling the heroic story of a whole people. And yet it is a “naturalist epic” in that, however improbably, humans ultimately give way to the wheat as true hero of the West, uncontainable as both a commodity and a natural force. All previous work on The Octopus addresses political economy is some way, and just as Norris intended to write one novel each on production, circulation, and consumption of wheat, commentators have tended to focus on one of these moments in the economic sphere as it was organized at the turn of the twentieth century. Environmental critics from Leo Marx to William Conlogue have focused on the rural scene of production and shifting generic conventions for representing it.

Critics primarily interested in naturalist form, such as Walter Benn Michaels and Mark Seltzer, have focused on circulation during the late-nineteenth-century financialization of the economy. Finally, critics focused on race and imperialism, such as John Eperjesi and Colleen Lye, have focused on the export to China and the Chinese cooks on the ranch. What reappears across much of this criticism that focuses on the new economy, however, is a tendency to downplay the land dispute at the center of the plot, since the ranchers are themselves capitalists engaged industrial agriculture. The land dispute plot, however, is crucial to Norris’s goal of writing the true history of the West, especially the transition from the frontier period into a new age. By organizing the first book of the “epic of the wheat” trilogy around a real event, Norris’s overall strategy is to record historical reality and celebrate it within a larger, reassuring narrative of enlarged of production and circulation. The reason that there is so much focus on writing and recording in the novel, I argue, is that Norris sees writing itself as crucial to the history of the west, and hopes, through his own writing, to participate in it. What we see throughout the book is a consistent reversal of commonsense causality: production depends on consumption, the stability of the continent depends on overseas empire, and physical production depends on writing and information management. This is how we should understand the relationship between writing and the land in The Octopus: writing is practical, supporting the development of industrial farming to the point of export to China in a new food empire. As portrayed in the novel, the Mussel Slough incident is a symptom of the lack of access to sufficient demand for industrializing U.S. agriculture. For as the ranches become connected to a global food market, they are exposed both to greater opportunities and increasingly volatile risks. Before the production process is even introduced in the novel, Norris highlights the communications technologies that make “the office […] the nerve-centre of the entire ten thousand acres of Los Muertos” . Magnus and his son Harran would sit up half the night watching “the most significant object in the office,” the stock ticker. The occasions for these transcendent feelings of connection are foreign crises that affect the price of their own wheat. Yet because circulation is limited by the railroad—its physical and geographical capacity as well as its monopolistic organization—there is an equally limited amount of profit that the railroad operators and the ranchers must fight over. This is the central contradiction of the novel, as Norris relates the railroad both to a system of veins that facilitates circulation and also an octopus that strangles the full vital force of production. While the ranchers are awaiting the results of their legal case, the character of Cedarquist gives a long speech proposing the China market as the only long-term solution for American production. A former industrialist transitioning into shipbuilding, he addresses the opportunities made possible by the Spanish-American War, speaking as an oracle from the past to the “youngsters” reading the novel at the turn of the century: “Our century is about done. The great word of this nineteenth century has been Production. The great word of the twentieth century will be—listen to me, you youngsters—Markets” . Cedarquist goes on to explain the fundamental problem of the business cycle, that production must expand to stay competitive, but the saturation of the market leads to bankruptcy for most producers and consolidation of industry into fewer large corporations. Faced with certain degeneracy and death, a staple of the naturalist decline narrative, the booster provides a solution that will save the country: “We must march with the course of empire, not against it. I mean, we must look to China” . Empire—like the wheat or the railroad—is propelled by quasi-natural forces that individuals can neither help nor hinder. This speech takes place at the midpoint of the novel, and the development of the plot ultimately vindicates Cedarquist’s logic, ending with the wheat harvest shipping out for famine relief in India, understood as the transpacific test run for the ships that will export future harvests to China.