Sympathy’s Sliding ScaleIndividuals and Large Forces in Frank Norris’s The Octopus Ashley Gangi (bio) Frank Norris’s 1901 novel, The Octopus, can certainly be a frustratingly contradictory read. How, for example, is it possible to reconcile Norris’s description of railroad president Shelgrim as a man of “vast sympathies” (404) with the understanding that he is ultimately responsible for the violent, untimely deaths of so many beloved characters? The novel defies expectations, refusing the simple condemnation of big business it seems to promise without erasing any of the horror that can result from the relentless pursuit of profit. True, this observation is nothing new, and a great many critics have struggled with the novel’s apparent inconsistencies. While some dismiss Norris as a sloppy or confused writer, others have tried to reconcile the striking contradictions of The Octopus in various ways.1 However, no critic has offered a systematic discussion of the way individual sympathy operates in the novel within its vast scope to suggest that moral answers to social questions are neither as simple as some sentimental novels imply, nor as impersonal as is typical for naturalism. At the very least, any moral argument involving ethical corporate behavior is necessarily complex and fraught with a host of legitimate alternative viewpoints. The novel suggests that moral calculations involving large numbers of people are questions of scale, which often struggle to retain the strength of sympathy’s affective potential between individuals in the face of its apparently dwindling powers when applied to a cohesive mass. Instead of rejecting sentiment as a vehicle for inspiring sympathy and focusing on social questions in the aggregate as is common in the genre of literary naturalism, and as Norris himself was, perhaps, intellectually inclined to do,2 The Octopus actually incorporates aspects of sentiment in order to tap into its power, although the moral inconsistencies of the novel also indicate that it cannot totally elide some of the problems associated with [End Page 130] using sympathy as a vehicle for social change. While the novel doesn’t offer any easy answers, it does intervene in some of the major conversations of its day. How, then, should its readers understand it? What does it ask of them? As explained above, one of the largest contradictions in The Octopus concerns Norris’s suggestion that the very same forces of nature and technology which have destroyed his well-loved, sympathetic characters by the end of the novel might also provide the only real source of global justice and hope as, in Norris’s formulation, the wheat progresses on its irrepressible journey eastward. This suggestion may very well be a result of Norris’s affinity for large forces, vistas, and concepts. As Charles Lewis humorously notes, one might describe this affinity as “‘agoraphilia’ (in the sense of his predilection for large open spaces and for macroeconomics)” (174). Lewis’s recognition that Norris’s so-called “love of the large” encompasses both physical space and the much more ephemeral realm of economics is quite astute and key to understanding the way that Norris’s vast descriptions of landscape complement his descriptions of economic and technological entities operating within that landscape. For Norris, the idea of “large forces” encompasses everything from enormous vistas and dramatic natural phenomena to the operations of big business, the march of technological progress, and the social movements that either snatch people up or leave them behind.3 The novel’s imagery reflects the plot’s narration, as both shift between large-scale descriptions of vast landscapes and economic forces and minute discussions of individual focal points and characters. True, these shifts can feel a bit like perceptual whiplash, which creates confusion about the novel’s moral stakes, but in another sense, they reveal the inadequacy of both the macro and micro viewpoint as each stands on its own. Lewis and Leigh Ann Littwiller Berte have already observed that the novel includes moments which feel quite vast in scale, both visually and philosophically, and that Norris’s technique of changing narrative scope by shifting from the macro to the micro is important, but no critic has offered a description of how Norris employs this...