“Vast, Vague and Impersonal”: Statistics, Ecology, and the Aesthetics of Scale in Frank Norris’s The Octopus

Abstract

“Vast, Vague and Impersonal”Statistics, Ecology, and the Aesthetics of Scale in Frank Norris’s The Octopus Andrew Hebard (bio) Near the end of Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901), Presley, the poet-protagonist, is finally able to confront the man he holds responsible for the tragic events of the novel: Mr. Shelgrim, the owner of the Pacific, Southern, and Western Railroad, whom Presley blames for the financial, moral, and physical ruin of the wheat farmers he counts among his friends. Although Presley imagines Shelgrim to be “the master . . . the man whose power was so vast, whose will was so resistless, whose potency for evil so limitless,” anyone familiar with the genre of naturalism would likely predict that Presley will be disappointed in his desire to assign blame (570). As Lee Clark Mitchell has noted, “realism assumes that individuals are responsible for their lives, while naturalism offers up characters who are no more than events in the world” (2). Shelgrim puts it succinctly to Presley when he dismisses rather than defends his own role in the destruction of the farmers: “If you want to fasten the blame of the affair at Los Muertos on any one person, you will make a mistake. Blame conditions, not men” (576). In many ways, this scene is typical of naturalist fiction, for the call to consider the agency of “conditions” appears in similarly direct forms in the fiction of Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Stephen Crane, Edith Wharton, and a number of other writers who have been associated with American naturalism. Like other naturalists, Norris links these conditions to a conception of nature, implying an amoral, Darwinian world in which there is “no malevolence” and only “colossal indifference” (577). And yet, beyond this conception, there is also something particular to the brutal determinism of this scene, what one might characterize as its scale. The “colossal indifference” is the indifference of a nature that is “vast,” “gigantic,” and “huge” (577). Environments can come in many sizes, [End Page 1] and the environment in this novel is decidedly large. Often read as a novel about the globalization of markets as well as the scaled-up ambitions of American imperial expansion, the scale of the “conditions” responsible for the events in the novel dwarf the possibilities of individual responsibility. They also obscure the apprehension of agency and causality. Presley’s inability to assign blame is because his “standards of measurement” are “lamentably deficient in size” (574–75). In fact, much of this novel seems to confront the problem of scale, and synonyms of the word “vast,” which appear close to 400 times, are used to describe the landscape, nature, the “forces” driving events, the railroad, global trade, and even Presley’s attempted poem, “The Song of the West.” The novel itself is also large in conception, 650 pages and only the first volume in a planned trilogy. In fact, while drafting the novel, Norris wrote to William Dean Howells and remarked upon the unprecedented scale of the project: “My idea is to write three novels around one subject of Wheat . . . and in each to keep this idea of this huge Niagara of wheat rolling from West to East. I think a big Epic trilogy could be made of the subject that would at the same time be modern and distinctly American. The idea is so big that it frightens me at times” (Berte 204–05). But even if Presley’s “standards of measurement” are not up to the task, the novel itself is committed to the problem of how to apprehend and narrate the forces exerted by large-scale environments. As a recent special issue of Studies in American Naturalism has argued, naturalism is a literary form that is particularly invested in the aesthetics and logics of “big data” with its promise of making sense of large-scale and complex phenomena.1 Indeed, as James Dorson and Regina Schober note in their Introduction to the issue, there are “striking similarities between the organizing natural metaphors of big data discourse . . . and Frank Norris’s representations of wheat as a natural force in The Octopus (1901) and The Pit (1903)” (1–2). Big data might seem like an...