The Octopus

The Octopus by Frank Norris.

There are a number of issues to deal with in the The Octopus, the first of which is briefly dealt with in my abstract on Pizer’s discussion of Frank Norris’s definition of naturalism. In short, is it naturalism? Many of the characters here seem to have free will, especially Annixter, who is transformed by love and is a classic “round” or “dynamic” characterin the tradition of realism (251). But Pizer skirts determinism in his discussion of Norris’s naturalism. But the vast majority of the characters here are also high class: they’re powerful and wealthy ranchers. Certainly, Norris would not have seen this figures as irrelevant in the way that he saw Hugo’s Renaissance power-brokers as irrelevant, but the fact remains that the milieu chosen here does not seem in any way to be lower-class, which Pizer suggests is one of the definitions of Norris’s naturalism. This is an avenue of inquiry which might be fruitful – but possibly not.

Strangely, The Octopus seems to suggest that some men have free will – all of the ranchers seem to make their own decisions – but that other men, caught up in the giant system that is the railroad, have no free will. First off, the railroad system is a deterministic, inhuman monster: “huge, terrible, flinging the echo of its thunder over all the reaches of the valley, leaving blood and destruction in its path, the leviathan, with tentacles of steel clutching into the soil, the soulless Force, the iron-hearted Power, the monster, the Colossus, the Octopus” (36). Strangely, Norris uses “Cyclopean” earlier, along with Colossus, all of which make the railroad a powerful organic monster, in direct contrast to terms like “iron-hearted Power” and “soulless Force” which renders the railroads in terms of physical mechanics, not biological drives.

When we finally meet the person driving the railroad, Shelgrim, the railroad’s determinism is hammered home. Presley wants to meet the man in charge, but Shelgrim tells him “that railroads build themselves” (395). This might make the novel into the great battle of free will and determinism. On the railroad, the men have no power, on the ranch they do, but the railroad and the ranch become intertwined, and Shelgrim and all others are powerless to stop the railroad from ensnaring the ranchers into the deterministic larger force.

Several other points bear noticing, before my conclusion. First, the figure Vanamee and his psychic powers which allow him to call others from a distance and conjure up an image of his lost love are strange and unsettling in a naturalistic novel (95). Secondly, we do get the most obligatory naturalistic of all plot points, eventually; after the loss of her father, Minna Hooven goes to San Fransisco and becomes a prostitute (404) – no fallen women, no naturalism.

Finally, the figure of Presley, who is our Norris stand-in, an author who tries on several different philosophical responses to the Octopus. Presley starts off trying to write an Epic of the West, then finally writes “The Toilers,” the much better poem in solidarity with the working man. He writes this after leaving behind his books of poetics and picking up Mill, Malthus, Young, Pushkin, Henry George, and Schopenhauer (210). He later declares his solidarity with Communism, declaring “I’m a Red” (368) but later views the anarchist/communist Caraher as a mere parasite (426). Finally, he decides, after his meeting with Shelgrimm, that there is nothing but a soulless force, overpowering everything, but Vanamee tells him that he’s mistaken – that history is the story of a soulless force, but it’s also the story of the life-force that inevitably overcomes that soulless force (436,437). The novel ultimately affirms this view: S. Behrmann, the great manipulator, who can be killed by neither pistol (332) nor dynamite (385) is killed by the wheat he has shanghaied from the ranchers (443). Behrmann seemed inevitable, the but the wheat was more inevitable – Norris even uses that word. The novel closes with Presley sailing off to the Orient, realizing in the final 4 paragraphs that Vanamee was right – the force kills people and ideas, but ultimately the wheat and life will always overcome – a strange optimism that I can’t reconcile with the rest of the book.