Citing passages where one of the characters compares planting and harvesting to death and rebirth, he concludes that “Norris’s utterly idealized account of the production of wheat as the emergence of a spiritual body out of a natural one can coexist peacefully with an utterly materialist account of the growing wheat as a mechanical force” . Thus the more important binary in the novel for Michaels is not between nature and machine but between the ideal and the material. Conlogue helpfully cuts through the binaries that accompany the idea of the pastoral, whether they are conceived of as country and city, nature and machine, or ideal and material. He focuses instead on labor and management, arguing that the novel is part of a minor tradition of “American georgic” concerned with historical shifts in agricultural practice. In support of this he advances a more robust definition of industrialization as a confluence of technologies: not only machines, the focus of so much criticism on The Octopus, but also management technologies such as record-keeping, mapping, and other quantifications together make up what he calls “the new agriculture.” In redirecting the discussion to industrialization as a whole, Conlogue emphasizes that what Norris is describing is itself an emergent phenomenon. Many critics treat the mechanical and managerial technologies depicted in the novel as typical of the time period— indeed taking them as the hallmarks of this era—reserving their detailed analysis for how Norris, as a naturalist writer, makes sense of them.
Conlogue, on the other hand,30 plant pot gives significant attention to the history of farming practices to argue that these technologies of industrial agriculture were largely unknown to the American public at the time. Thus the book should be read as playing a role in reporting, popularizing, and celebrating them. The novel is not a reflection of historical changes in agricultural labor practices, but can be seen as itself a part of that history. It promotes new forms of labor organization by, among other things, celebrating new farm equipment in ecstatic sexual terms. In this way, The Octopus advocates for the future development of both the China trade and agricultural industrialization, suggesting that neither can exist without the other. Norris pays special attention to the record-keeping and communications technologies as new forms of writing necessary for the new agriculture, and we can add these to the several modes of representing the land that saw Presley and the narrator experiment with. We have already quoted some of the description of the Los Muertos ranch office whose, “appearance and furnishings were not in the least suggestive of a farm” but rather of the headquarters of an international farm . In this book about the mechanization of agriculture, moreover, the first machine we encounter on the ranch is the “typewriting machine,” and the most significant object, again, is the stock-ticker, which makes the farmers feel themselves part of a global whole as they watch updates being printed before their eyes . Writing as record-keeping does not passively reflect an external reality but by identifying imbalances and inefficiencies will spur on new enterprises. Between the scales of the typewriter to keep accounts and the stock-ticker to know the world, the text features a map as a medium-scale technology of representing the farm as a whole. Because the ranch is a business enterprise, every feature of the landscape needs to be measured and recorded, accessible at any time.
But the reader, like the farmer, can also refer to this information at any time: at Norris’s request, the first printed edition contained a “map of the locality” in the “frontmatter,” and this map has generally been read as part of the overall reality effect of the book.And just as the printed novel incorporates the map, so this textual description of a map is curiously suggestive of narrative: “A great map of Los Muertos with every watercourse, depression, and elevation, together with indications of the varying depths of the clays and loams in the soil, accurately plotted, hung against the wall between the windows” . Here, plotting is the process of spatially representing the exact conditions of the soil so that it can be best utilized. But surprisingly, every description of a map in the novel contains this same phrase; later, in the local railroad office we see “a vast map of the railroad holdings… the alternate sections belonging to the Corporation accurately plotted,” and in the San Francisco office of Lyman Derrick, again on the wall “the different railways of the State were accurately plotted in various colours, blue, green, yellow” . Here we can note that the word “plot” condenses three central elements of The Octopus: the graded plots of land under dispute, the conspiracy plot to gain their ownership, and the narrative plot which decides the outcome. A final form of writing that The Octopus highlights as playing a decisive role in the development of the West is advertising, and this is in fact the most central to the plot. Conlogue has shown that The Octopus reproduces almost verbatim many sentences from the actual pamphlets that the Southern Pacific Railroad circulated to encourage ranchers to begin leasing the land. He interprets these circulars within a contrast between the “paper value” of abstract legal content, on the side of the railroad, and the “work values” of those actually improving the land, on the side of the ranchers.
I would argue, however, that such a contrast does not hold in the novel, as the ranchers both approach farming as an industry like any other and also make their case in terms of this “paper value” of the written text. Instead, we should see the competing interpretations of the advertisements as different ways of valuing the land before and after the close of the frontier. The exaggerated and even confusing syntax in which these “circulars” are introduced in the novel foreshadows their grand role at the center of the legal case: “Long before this the railroad had thrown open these lands, and, by means of circulars, distributed broadcast throughout the State,grow raspberries in a pot had expressly invited settlement thereon” . Like the newspaper and the stock ticker, this early broadcasting medium disseminates business information throughout the country. The term circular links writing to the theme of circulation epitomized by the railroad itself, and to empire circling back to China where it began, by way of America. The legal question of ownership, and so the outcome of the plot, hangs on the interpretation of these texts. It is the newspaperman Genslinger—his Wild West name juxtaposed to his profession as a writer—who first suggests that the railroad will sell at a higher price than the ranchers anticipated. To this, the rancher Annixter responds that their writing is their bond: “Haven’t we got their terms printed in black and white in their circulars? There’s their pledge” . But a closer reading of the black text on the white sheet reveals an ambiguity: “‘When you come to read that carefully,’ hazarded old Broderson, ‘it—it’s not so very reassuring. ‘Most is for sale at two-fifty an acre,’ it says. That don’t mean ‘all,’ that only means some’” . Here the entire Mussell Slough incident, indeed the entire plot of the novel and the future of California wheat farming, comes down to textual interpretation. The importance of reading for this narrative arc is brought home when the ranchers learn the outcome of their court case, the authoritative interpretation of the circular’s text. Tellingly, this comes at the conclusion of Cedarquist’s speech, when Magnus in the midst of imagining his son in Hong Kong, having marched with the course of empire full circle back to its origin in China. At this point he overhears a stranger reading aloud the afternoon newspaper: “It was in the course of this reading that Magnus caught the sound of his name,” . Called by name by the text, he listens on to the full reading of the verdict: the League’s plot has failed to secure the plots of land, and his ultimate fate will be to lose the ranch. By quoting these circulars verbatim, then, Norris enfolds authentic material from the historical incident into the text of the novel, to tell the true story of the West. Furthermore, by announcing the verdict at the moment that Magnus is listening to Cedarquist’s speech, Norris suggests the link between the land dispute and the China market, which is the close of the frontier.
As we saw above, in “The Frontier Gone at Last” Norris dated the decisive end of the frontier to the arrival of U.S. marines in China in 1900, the year before The Octopus was published. This was the moment America finally reached and bordered on another civilization to the west, with no wilderness separating them. The railroad’s case in the novel is not the victory of paper values over work values, but rather the historical transformation of the land from an open space of prospecting into a closed loop of industrial production. Indeed, Magnus and the others are already operating their farms as businesses, and Norris portrays this economic contradiction as moral hypocrisy, which weakens Presley’s identification with them. In understanding The Octopus’s representation of the new agriculture, then, Conlogue corrects earlier scholars’ focus on the machines themselves and redirects attention to changes in the organization of agricultural labor. Namely, he points to the technical management of large scale wage labor. Still we can connect this insight to larger economic changes by employing the more precise vocabulary of Marxist analysis, as well as examining the role of racialization in U.S. labor history. Palumbo-Liu, for example, has argued that Americans have long understood their own modernization through reference to Asia. In the case of The Octopus, Lye has given perhaps the fullest account of the importance of racialization for the novel, in which all of the cooks working on the ranch appear to be Chinese. These men are represented as docile workers, feminized by their labor in food production. Chinese prepare the food for both the owners of the ranch, these minor capitalists, and also for the workers planting in the fields. Their presence working at the Derricks’ ranch underscores the modernity of industrial production, its post frontier character. While Norris is notorious as one of the most unrelentingly racist “major” writers in the history of American literature, Lye’s work illuminates the importance of food in anti-Chinese racism of the time and how Norris engages with it. In particular she points to the American Federation of Labor pamphlet Meat vs. Rice, Anglo-Saxon Manhood Against Asiatic Coolieism, authored chiefly by Samuel Gompers, which explicitly links Chinese labor to modernization and industrialization. It does so, moreover, by asserting a biological connection between body and food. The original Exclusion Act, issued in 1882, prohibited immigration for ten years, and was renewed in 1892 for another ten. During this period anti-immigrant writers presented the “Asiatic” and the “Anglo-Saxon” as separate biological types. In fact one of the words that Turner himself used when speaking of the frontier was the Anglo-Saxon “organism.” Turner’s form of white supremacy was slightly different, however, as he used this term metaphorically, with Anglo-Saxon cultural spirit moving through history as an organism. The anti-immigrant writers, on the other hand, use organism in a direct physical sense: the Anglo-Saxon and the Chinese are separate biological entities in Darwinist competition for resources. The root of the problem was that Chinese supposedly ate less food, which indicated a superior, more efficient body. This is not yet a quantitative discourse of calories, but the qualitative differences among foods are seen to give different levels of sustenance.It is not just that there is no question of labor solidarity, but this lack of solidarity is blamed on the Chinese themselves. The rice standard is a kind of bare human subsistence, on which “the beef-and-bread man” cannot survive, an instance of what Eric Hayot has identified as a tradition of Western views of the Chinese as the limit case of humanity.