Map My Read: Scaling Frank Norris’s The Octopus by Bicycle

“Not, of course, that the map is already an explanation; but at least it shows us that there is something that needs to be explained.”

(Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees 39)

I. A Bike and a Map

Readers of Frank Norris’s The Octopus: A Story of California (1901) have widely addressed his outsized ambition to write what he referred to in an 1899 letter to William Dean Howells as a “big Epic trilogy . . . that would be modern and distinctly American” (Letters 34). Critics as early as Howells himself addressed what he called Norris’s “vaster frame” (769), and readers since then have long remarked on what Alfred Kazin referred to as the “love of quantity” reflected in these “sprawling novels” (99). The Octopus, the first of the three planned novels, was the only one published before Norris died in 1902; The Pit: A Story of Chicago was published post-humously in 1903, and The Wolf: A Story of Empire was never written. What Norris envisioned as the story of “this huge Niagara of wheat rolling from West to East” was to be variously local, national, and international in scope and theme; while Norris confided to Howells that he thought the first novel was “a chance for somebody to do some great work with the West and California as a background,” it would “at the same time [be] thoroughly American” (Letters 34). Moreover, his epic constellation of deterministic forces would have global range and metaphysical consequence well beyond American shores or even strictly material concerns. The tentacles of this gluten-rich and leviathan-sized iron octopus were therefore to be more than rail lines or economic relations prefigured by wheat, linked as they were to forces and systems that, in turn, could be variously cast as supernatural phenomena, universal pattern, and philosophical abstraction. Critics have accordingly examined the tensions between the narrow scope of any particular realist grounding and the broader pull and range in the work.¹

Formations of this sense of scale are evident in a variety of the novel’s aspects: not only in the length and sprawl of the story itself, but also in the rhetoric about systems and forces, in the visual scope of the descriptions of the San Joaquin Valley’s landscape, and even in his expansive sentences, with their long riff s of stacked clauses, crowded appositives, and swollen adjectives—what John Berryman referred to as Norris’s “accumulative and ponderous” style (93). However, what one might describe as Norris’s “agoraphilia” (in the sense of his predilection for large open spaces and for macroeconomics) underscores how the depiction of scale is necessarily about the relative measurements of things like size, degree, and amount; any critical rendering of the presence or function of space, for example, arguably would need to address his representation of scale—or more precisely, spaces in relation to other spaces. Much as the surplus avalanche of wheat calls for expanding to new markets abroad toward the end of the novel, Norris’s handling of scale involves navigating an extensive and diverse range of physical places and spaces, social systems and abstract concepts, and formal novelistic techniques such as multiple points of view. Readers of Norris who address his sense of scale often note his related preoccupation with systems, and we can see how paying closer attention to movement between different scales and systems underscores how Norris’s project addresses novelistic realism not only as itself a system of representation but also as a mode for the representation of other systems (such as the marketplace, mass transportation, and state government) in view at the end of the nineteenth century.

Walter Benn Michaels, for example, addresses Norris’s commodification of wheat in Naturalism and the Logic of the Gold Standard, whereby corporate capitalism and literary naturalism inhabit the same space and logic in which scale is of central significance. Michaels’ work speaks to the importance of giving more attention to Norris’s scaling logic—not necessarily to locate it within an economic framework so much as to broaden our understanding of how scale works...