I’m writing today about a book that left my mind wrestling with two puzzles when I first read it, in college in the late 1970s. My second reading of Frank Norris’s The Octopus brought a partial solution for one of the puzzles, but I’m still mystified by the second.
I first heard about Frank Norris in an American lit class. He was presented to me as the epitome of the naturalist movement. According to what I was told, in naturalist writing, as exemplified by Norris, descriptions are factual, not interpretive, not emotional. Details that a reader would see as symbolically significant in earlier fiction represent nothing in naturalist fiction. It sounded unlikely to me that an author of any era would want to tell a story without meaning anything by it: surely an author at least means to say, “I like this story” or “I believe the people and events in this piece of narrative worth your time and contemplation.” But my professor said this was the way it was, and I know that humans go for all sorts of fashions now and then, so I accepted the lesson.
Then in an American history class in a later semester, the professor assigned The Octopus by Frank Norris. “Oh, great,” I thought, “400 pages of dry depiction of events that didn’t actually happen told with details about which I’m not supposed to think.” (Hey, I was young. It was hard for me to imagine why anyone would want to do anything in a way that I didn’t understand and approve of.) But, as wrong as my take on naturalism may have been, I can say even now that I was quite justified in being surprised at what the Master of Naturalism in Fiction brought to the table in The Octopus. Biblical symbolism of death and resurrection in the life cycle of wheat? Emotional, referential descriptions of nature? A man calling to people telepathically? (I’m obviously not really clear on my literary-criticism terminology, but if it were up to me, I’d call telepathy supernatural.) Did I remember the lesson correctly? Was this a different Frank Norris? My lit professor got her line about Norris and naturalism right from the author himself, so you can’t much blame her, I guess. But whatever Norris meant by calling himself a literary naturalist, either he didn’t mean that he would never use symbolism, metaphor, and evocative images, or else he simply didn’t end up writing the way he set out to write.
I remembered liking the book a lot, confused as I might have been about what label I was supposed to attach to it. So this time around, forty-some years after my first reading, I was less concerned about whether some label was correct or not and more interested in just experiencing and absorbing the novel for whatever it was. It was every bit as interesting and exciting as I had remembered. Sure, it’s not naturalist the way that word is defined in literature. So Norris changed his mind – or didn’t know his own style. So what? Whatever the style, this book is great! Wheat farmers in southern California in the late nineteenth century contemplate the meaning of life and death. Family businesses struggle with the inexorable forces of the American corporation. Victims of the railroad’s repression debate political solutions: Socialism? Anarchism? Democracy? Democracy with bribes? A poet struggles to write the great American novel. A girl gets called from the dead. There’s a barn dance. There are lots of shootouts. There’s a train hijacking. There’s a rich, respected family who think of themselves as lords of the land until they find out that the railroad company didn’t really mean what they thought it said when it leased them the acreage. And there’s a beautiful love story involving a crusty farmer who falls in love with and is softened by the daughter of his farmhand, a girl who rolls up her sleeves every morning to dip her beautiful arms into milk without realizing what effect the sight might have on her boss.
And all of that brings me to the second, still unresolved, mystery. Why hasn’t this wonderful story of love, drama, action, intrigue, faith, and politics been filmed? When I read it in the 70s, it seemed absolutely perfect for a miniseries. It’s forty years later, and a ten-part Netflix series would be even better. Come on producers! Somebody please rediscover this intelligent, exciting book!
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