A Fable of the Anthropocene: The Disturbing Naturalist Humanity in Frank Norris’s The Octopus

Abstract

A Fable of the AnthropoceneThe Disturbing Naturalist Humanity in Frank Norris’s The Octopus Daichi Sugai (bio) A key trope in literary naturalism is that natural force over-weighs individual power. In The Octopus (1901) Presley, a poet, narrates one of the characteristics of American naturalism that subsumes individual human affairs into an environmentally deterministic whole: “men were naught, death was naught, life was naught; FORCE only existed” (1084). The concept of force beyond personal power and intention bolsters Frank Norris’s first volume of the would-be Wheat trilogy. However, Norris’s use of force was influenced by nineteenth-century thermodynamics, and its sociological adaptations diverge into representations of several laws, such as the law of biological reproduction, heterosexual love, and the marketplace.1 For instance, Presley contemplates, “FORCE that brought men into the world, FORCE that crowded them out of it to make way for the succeeding generation, FORCE that made the wheat grow” (1084). Norris uses erotic and heterosexual metaphors to describe the cultivation of land and regards plowing as a heterosexual love affair of the “two world-forces, the elemental Male and Female” (680). Shelgrim, the president of the railroad, says in a conversation with Presley, “The Wheat is one force, the Railroad, another, and there is the law that governs them—supply and demand” (1037). Although Norris’s employment of force ramifies into several leitmotifs, they share the same basis that individual power cannot resist a current of environmental or “natural” forces beyond human agency. This naturalist concept—the “discourse of force” in Mark Seltzer’s terms (29)—deprives humans of their free will and reduces them to a part of an indifferent system of force. No wonder Walter Benn Michaels dismisses the relationship between the naturalist [End Page 143] force and individual power in The Octopus as follows: “The point is not simply that human agents are less powerful than nature but that, reduced to the ‘forces’ they really are, human agents are not agents at all” (201).2 I argue, however, that—considering the Anthropocene debate in recent years—force in literary naturalism is not a natural occur-rence independent of human activities; instead, individual power fortifies the naturalist force. Although June Howard points out that naturalist novels dramatize the “antinomy between fate and hope, between determinism and human will” (39), I believe Norris’s naturalist idea of force exhibits not so much antinomy as a conspiracy between deterministic environmental force and individual power. The term “Anthropocene” designates a period in geological time in which humans have come to play a definitive and crucial role in the planet’s ecology. Although there are arguments regarding its time frame, this time frame can be compellingly situated as the beginning of the industrial revolution, when the human impact on Earth reached unprecedented intensity (Bonneuil and Fressoz 50; Clark 1–2; Glaser et al. 6; Morton 4–5).3 Given that the Anthropocene undermines the difference between the geological time scale and human history, natural force and human agency are inseparable. According to Dipesh Chakrabarty, the Anthropocene “requires us to translate ideas that have deeply to do with Earth history, geology, and geological time into the language of world history,” and this necessitates the displacement of the category “force” into the “human-existential category of power” (9). Eva Horn and Hannes Bergthaller also suggest that seemingly natural forces such as climate change over the long term are not so much external forces as they are humans’ “cumulative, collective and highly consequential behavior” (74). However, Giovanna Di Chiro astutely observes that the concept of the Anthropocene conceals the “gendered, racialized, and exploitative global capitalist system” and criticizes its irresponsibility: The pan-humanism of the concept of Anthropocene reflects and shores up neoliberal, individualist, entrepreneurial forms of “resilience,” which trade on the notion that if “we” (humans) are [End Page 144] all to blame for the climate crisis, then no one is to blame and, therefore, no one is responsible, so we’re all left to our own devices to become more resilient. (489; emphasis original) This individual diminishing structure hides the responsibility of some of those who enjoy the benefits of Western capitalism, who bear a...