How to Kill a Corporation: Frank Norris’s The Octopus and the Embodiment of American Business

Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.

—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

In a pivotal scene from John Steinbeck’s 1939 Depression-era classic, The Grapes of Wrath, a farmer dispossessed of his land threatens to shoot a corporate agent astride a monstrous tractor who is about to plow over his house. When the farmer is told that the bank would just send a replacement, he threatens to shoot the bank president; when he’s told that the president takes his orders from a board of directors, and then that the board of directors get their orders from some vague source “back East,” the man asks a staggering and impotent question that haunts not just this novel but a large swath of American literary fiction in the early twentieth century. When Steinbeck’s farmer finally asks, “Who can we shoot?” he articulates a desire for an imaginative embodiment of the corporation that might be as weak and vulnerable as his starving family (52).

Steinbeck’s absent corporate villain can be juxtaposed with earlier versions of the same economic conflict in which a clear and embodied antagonist appears main stage. In Hamlin Garland’s 1891 short story, “Under the Lion’s Paw,” a man attempting to buy his farm for its original asking price finds that he must pay twice that amount because of years of improvements he performed himself. Only the sound of his child’s voice saves the farmer from murdering the encroaching landlord with a pitchfork (144). The question of ownership is answered with relative simplicity in Garland’s story: the parasitic speculator physically appears in the text, is threatened with violent extinction, and then is exorcised in the return to dignified, sacrificial work. In 1891, Garland’s nemesis could appear in person, but Steinbeck’s farmer in 1939 confronts a chain of representation that, by definition, can only appear by proxy. The fundamental change in their respective representations of ownership suggests a deep revision to the historical structure of systems of business, as well as the kinds of stories a writer might be able to accurately tell about those structures.

With the elimination of restrictive charters and the adoption of general incorporation rights in the late nineteenth century, the modern American corporation enjoyed legal immortality and illimitable expansion without the restrictions of a physical form. People were powerfully aware that incorporeal corporations made concrete actions happen, such as moving mountains or building railroads, but when the same entity required punishment or condemnation or even question, the absence of a material body to which to pose these queries was troubling. To understand the problems of representation surrounding the corporate form in the early twentieth century as an active yet elusive presence in fictional narratives and business practices in the United States is to ask the same question as Steinbeck’s farmer: who could we shoot?

Frank Norris’s 1901 masterpiece, The Octopus: A Story of California, exemplifies the ways in which writers attempted to describe the corporate person as it was—paradoxical, ruthless, and seemingly untouchable—and the corporate person as it should be—coherent, fragile, and responsible. Prior to the nearly total legitimacy of the corporate form in American culture, The Octopus offers a dramatic answer to the question of who we can shoot in its final pages. The corporation as represented by the fictional Pacific & Southwestern Railroad, Inc., is an immaterial and invincible presence, and Norris’s representational strategies indicate the profound difficulties of accurately sizing up a network of property relationships now empowered as a social agent. Norris traces the shape of this abstract corporate character through an attention to both the voices and bodies of its human avatars and to the impotence of violence aimed at silencing and destroying those same proxies. Absent and indestructible even in the climactic confrontation between poet and president, the corporate person only finds vulnerable symbolic form in the closing moments of the novel, as Norris builds towards the death of the railroad agent S. Behrman as a fantastic solution...