274 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900At the end of the novel, McTeague is an almost monstrous figure. When the reader
last sees him, he is alone in Death Valley, handcuffed to the corpse of the man he
has just killed.
Norris’s major project was what he called The Epic of the Wheat. “I’ve got an
idea as big as all outdoors,” he triumphantly announced, when he first thought
of it. “There’s the chance for the big, epic, dramatic thing in this.” It would, he
explained, be in the vein of “naturalism” but Naturalism as he understood it –
and so, “the most romantic thing I’ve ever done.” “The Wheat series” he planned
was to be a trilogy. There would be first a novel focused on the production of
the wheat, and the struggle between farming and railroad interests in California.
This was published in 1901 as The Octopus: it was, as it turned out, Norris’s
major novel. The second was to concentrate on the distribution of the wheat
and the manipulation of the wheat market in Chicago. That was published
posthumously as The Pit in 1903. But the third, dealing with consumption and
telling of a wheat famine in Europe, was never written: Norris came up with a
title for it, The Wolf, and little more than that. The epic scale of Norris’s^ ambition,
though, is clear from The Octopus. The octopus of the title is the railroad – also
called a “Titan” and a “colossus” – which is the most powerful vested interest in
California, and spreads its tentacles all over the state. It controls the movement
of prices and interest rates; it owns much of the land and dispossesses the
farmers of more; it manipulates the state government and, through its power
over the access to information, it ensures that, statewide, no story but its own
gets told. In the course of the narrative, the farming and laboring interests are
comprehensively defeated. A representative patrician figure, Magnus Derrick, is
ruined. A typical laborer and then farmer, Dyke, is forced into criminal activity
and imprisoned for life. A farmhand called Hoover, an embodiment of the
“People,” is killed in the often violent struggle against the railroad interests, his
wife dies and their orphaned daughter is forced into prostitution. On the
naturalistic surface, The Octopus is the bleakest of epics. What works against the
bleakness, however, and gives the novel a strangely affirmatory, even optimistic
tone is Norris’s belief in “force,” necessity – the sense that, as the final words of
this story put it, “all things, surely inevitably, resistlessly work together
for good.”
In effect, the social conflict of The Octopus is set in what Norris calls “a larger
view.” It is set in a frame within which, eventually, all human agents are seen as
subject to “primordial energy,” part of a “stupendous drama” of “creation” and
“re-creation,” “the eternal symphony of reproduction.” The narrative rhythm of
the book, moving from autumn to autumn, registers this; so do the visual
representations of characters, dwarfed by the vastness of the plains, and the
structure of individual scenes – which habitually move from close-up into
longshot, from “the minute swarming of the human insect” to “the great, majestic,
silent ocean of the wheat itself,” “wrapped in Nirvanic calm.” But Norris’s principal
means of creating this vaster perspective of endless, triumphant, primordial
struggle are four characters: a writer Presley, the “seeing eye” of the novel,GGray_c03.indd 274ray_c 03 .indd 274 8 8/1/2011 7:54:22 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 22 AM