Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 275Shelgrim the railroad president and Behrman a railroad employee, and a strange
character called Vanamee. It is Shelgrim who tells Presley that the railroad
company is not in control, still less is he as president. As he explains, in that
speech quoted earlier, only “FORCE” is: on the social level, “conditions, laws of
supply and demand” and on the existential level, “Nature” in its “colossal
indifference,” “a gigantic engine,” “a vast Cyclopean power.” Behrman illustrates
the point in one way. Believing himself to be “the Master of the Wheat” when the
railroad company triumphs, he turns out to be its victim – he is crushed,
suffocated to death by “a sea” of wheat pouring down on him from a chute. And
Vanamee illustrates it in another. Losing his lover, Angèle, at harvest time, she
returns to him in the visionary shape of Angèle’s daughter, at the same time as the
recrudescence of the wheat. And her return is seen as a paradigm of the endless
cycle of existence, a process involving “life out of death, eternity rising out of
dissolution.” Above all, there is Presley. Modeled on the poet Edwin Markham,
Presley begins by searching for his subject in the romance of the Old West.
Becoming involved in the cause of the farmers, he then throws away his copies
of Milton, Tennyson, and Browning to read Mill, Malthus, and other social
philosophers. He writes a populist poem, “The Toilers,” engages in political debate
and violent political agitation. But neither his words nor his actions have much
effect. Gradually, he withdraws into the larger view that embraces necessity: the
inviolable indifference of nature, the “mighty world-force” of the wheat, the fact
that “the individual suffers, but the race goes on.” He still believes that, one day,
“the People” will triumph and “rend those who now preyed upon them.” To that
extent, he, and Norris, keep faith with their political commitments by placing
them within an evolutionary framework that sees the often violent processes of
evolution leading eventually to the “good.” But that belief involves a kind of
philosophical quietism – or, rather, a relentless, residual optimism that allows
Presley to retain hope even in the middle of disaster. The Octopus is a characteristic
work of American Naturalism in its potent mixture of populist political vision
and an evolutionary determinism that – in its celebration of force and talk of
“lower” and “higher” instincts, class, and races – teeters dangerously, sometimes,
on the borders of fascism. It is also a characteristic work of Norris in its heady
mix of fact and surreal fantasy, its seriousness and absurdity, and its extraordinarily
cheerful nihilism. This is a book in which nearly all the sympathetic characters
are defeated or destroyed, and yet still manages to end, quite convincingly, on a
note of affirmation – even joy.
There is little affirmation, or obvious joy, in the work of Stephen Crane. The tone
is more muted, more quietly bleak. In prose and poetry of crystalline clarity and
grimly pointed power, Crane pursues his fundamental perceptions that nature is
oblivious to human need, that human beings are often relentlessly selfish or blind to
circumstance, and that the two moral imperatives are humility and community. The
poetry has been sadly, and unjustly, neglected. Crane published two volumes of
poems during his lifetime: The Black Rider (1895) and War is Kind (1900). Stylistically,
they show the influence of Emily Dickinson, by whose work Crane was muchGGray_c03.indd 275ray_c 03 .indd 275 8 8/1/2011 7:54:22 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 22 AM