The Octopus: A Story of California

“Then, faint and prolonged, across the levels of the ranch, he heard the engine whistling for Bonneville. Again and again, at rapid intervals in its flying course, it whistled for road crossings, for sharp curves, for trestles; ominous notes, hoarse, bellowing, ringing with the accents of menace and defiance; and abruptly Presley saw again, in his imagination, the galloping monster, the terror of steel and steam, with its single eye, cyclopean, red, shooting from horizon to horizon; but saw now as the symbol of a vast powers, huge, terrible, flinging the echo of its thunder over all the reaches of the valley, leaving blood and destruction in its path; the leviathan, with tentacles of steel clutching into the soil, the soulless Force, the iron-hearted Power, the monster, the Colossus, the Octopus.”

Norris, in his characteristically rolling language, unveils for the first time the scope of the novel’s central, monstrous symbol. Presley has just witnessed the obliteration of the sheep and lost the inspiration for his epic poem, and he suffers this harrowing vision, which looms over the rest of the novel. The chapter opens with Presley noticing the sound of the train and thinking little of it, and it closes upon this same sense, though Presley is now aware of the horror that grips the land.

“Annixter had no particular interest in the dog. For weeks at a time he ignored its existence. It was not his dog. But to-day it seemed as if he could not let the subject rest. For no reason that he could explain even to himself, he recurred to it continually. He questioned Hilma minutely all about the dog. Who owned him? How old did she think he was? Did she imagine the dog was sick?”

Naturalism focuses on the unknown motivations that direct people’s lives. Here, Annixter suffers an interior agitation at Hilma’s presence because he harbors deep feelings for her. However, Annixter, unconsciously avoiding his own inner depths, preoccupies himself with the superficial working of his mind: his fixation on the dog.

“But the moving train no longer carried with it that impression of terror and destruction that had so thrilled Presley’s imagination the night before. It passed slowly on its way with a mournful roll of wheels, like the passing of a cortege, like a file of artillery-caissons charioting dead bodies; the engine’s smoke enveloping it in a mournful veil, leaving a sense of melancholy in its wake […]”

The close of the second chapter echoes that of the first, in which the narrative rests upon a single character’s perception of the passing train. These two passages balance each other, suggesting a subjectivity to the Railroad. Rather than being a simple or objective evil, the mechanical entity’s import depends on the personal feelings of the character—horror in Presley’s sense, and sadness in Annixter’s.

“In that brief instant of silence following upon Magnus’s outburst, and while he held them subdued and over-mastered, the fabric of their scheme of corruption and dishonesty trembled to its base. It was the last protest of the Old School, rising up there in denunciation of the new order of things, the statesman opposed to the politician; honesty, rectitude, uncompromising integrity, prevailing for the last time against the devious maneuvering, the evil communications, the rotten expediency of a corrupted institution.”

Magnus’s character juxtaposes against the ethos of the new world represented by the younger ranchers who listen to him speak. As he rallies against the plan to form the League and commit bribery, he evinces a sense of honor that springs from old world values, and he articulates virtues that are inevitably slipping away in the face of modernity’s back-dealing politics.

“As Presley crossed the dining-room on the way to his own apartment in the second story of the house, he paused for a moment, looking about him. In the dull light of the lowered lamps, the redwood panelling of the room showed a dark crimson as though stained with blood.”

Presley has just observed the League’s plans to bribe officials and manipulate the Railroad commission. This excerpt situates him as an outsider, however, who will gain a privileged perspective on events without participating in them. This outside perspective seems to give him a sense of foreshadowing as well, for League’s scheming will lead directly to literal bloodshed. 

“It was the long stroking caress, vigorous, male, powerful, for which the Earth seemed panting. The heroic embrace of a multitude of iron hands, gripping deep into the brown, warm flesh of the land that quivered responsive and passionate under this rude advance, so robust as to be almost assault, so violent as to be veritably brutal. There, under the sun and under the speckless sheen of the sky, the wooing of the Titan began, the vast primal passion, the two world-forces, the elemental Male and Female, locked in a colossal embrace, at grapples in the throes of an infinite desire, at once terrible and divine, knowing no law, untamed, savage, natural, sublime.”

The narration paints an overtly sexual, procreative image of the soil’s plowing and seeding. The metaphor speaks to a worship of the earth as the source of all fecundity and presents the wheat farmers—the “multitude of iron hands”—as heroic agents in the crop’s cosmic drama. This is a vital moment in the novel, when the great life force of the universe, symbolized by the wheat, regains its regenerative upswing. However, the description makes plain the Naturalist notion of inborn baseness.

“Your grain of wheat is your symbol of immortality. You bury it in the earth. It dies, and rises again a thousand times more beautiful. Vanamee, your dear girl was only a grain of humanity that we have buried here, and the end is not yet.”

Father Sarria expands upon his earlier quotation of 1 Corinthians to help Vanamee work past his grief over Angéle, and he presents one of the novel’s larger symbols—wheat and immortality. Vanamee rejects this perspective, however, and must face his grief before he accepts the underlying truth, albeit in a more secular manner than Sarria intends.

“I hate a mystery. Maybe that’s why I am afraid of the dark—or was. I shouldn’t like to think that anything could happen around me that I couldn’t see or understand or explain.”

Hilma is one of the primary figures of innocence in the novel, and her statement is thickly ironic, particularly because, as she is speaking, Annixter is planning to kiss her without her consent. The instance is a portrait not only of Hilma’s naivety but of the Naturalist view of humanity in which motivations and desires remain hidden in the darkness of the unconscious.

“She recognized the colossal indifference of nature, not hostile, even kindly and friendly, so long as the human ant-swarm was submissive, working with it, hurrying along at its side in the mysterious march of the centuries. Let, however, the insect rebel, strive to make head against the power of this nature, and at once it became a vast power, huge, terrible; a leviathan with a heart of steel […]”

The women in the novel seem to better apprehend the conditions of the universe, but they are largely powerless to change the male-dominated world of Norris’s West (and this entrenched disempowerment may be what affords their insight). Annie Derrick, afraid her husband cannot see the folly of his path, articulates a perspective both enlightened and fatalistic; the words reflect a Naturalist notion of the universe as a sovereign indifference that turns hostile upon human efforts to transcend their “natural” limitations. Her thoughts inevitably tie the monstrousness of this condition to the monstrosity of the Railroad.

“Stories by the hundreds went the round of the company. The air was surcharged with blood, dying groans, the reek of powder and smoke, the crack of rifles. All the legends of ’49, the violent, wild life of the early days, were recalled to view, defiling before them there in an endless procession under the glare of paper lanterns and kerosene lamps.”

After the gunfight at Annixter’s barn dance, an air of relieved jocularity takes over as the ranchers share stories of the frontier past. The “stories by the hundreds” recall the old-world values that sustain the wheat farming community, but this sense of communal past is directly threatened by agents of the Railroad. Delaney will soon play a prominent role in that threat. This climax of Book 1 directly prefigures the fatal shootout at the end of the novel.

“I think there was a dance in Brussels the night before Waterloo.”

After the League forms, Vanamee references the Battle of Waterloo, the great defeat of Napoleon. The parallel is ironic as it ties the triviality of the barn dance to the dance in Brussels, but it foreshadows the ranchers’ ultimate defeat. This comparison adds a tone of inevitability and futility to the second book in the novel, which details the League’s successive failures.

“The map was white, and it seemed as if all the colour which should have gone to vivify the various counties, towns, and cities marked upon it had been absorbed by that huge, sprawling organism, with its ruddy arteries converging to a central point. It was as though the State had been sucked white and colourless, and against this pallid background the red arteries of the monster stood out, swollen with life-blood, reaching out to infinity, gorged to bursting; an excrescence, a gigantic parasite fattening upon the life-blood of an entire commonwealth.”

Norris presents one of his most direct images of the eponymous Octopus. Despite Lyman’s dispassionate relationship to both the League and the Railroad, his impression of the map takes on a metaphorical quality that is far from neutral in either diction or dynamic. The Railroad—the Octopus—is a “parasite,” a “monster,” and an “excrescence.” The image is both vampiristic and colonistic. Despite those sinister qualities, however, the vision appears to stir no passions for Lyman, as do the visions of Presley and Annixter at the beginning of the novel.

“For all his public spirit, for all his championship of justice and truth, his respect for law, Magnus remained the gambler, willing to play for colossal stakes, to hazard a fortune on the chance of winning a million. It was the true California spirit that found expression through him, the spirit of the West, unwilling to occupy itself with details, refusing to wait, to be patient, to achieve by legitimate plodding; the miner‘s instinct of wealth acquired in a single night prevailed, in spite of all. It was in this frame of mind that Magnus and the multitude of other ranchers of whom he was a type, farmed their ranches. They had no love for their land. They were not attached to the soil. They worked their ranches as a quarter of a century before they had worked their mines.”

Norris complicates his moral portrait of the wheat farmers by plainly stating their pasts, which were more involved in the extraction of resources than of tending the land. If, before, the wheat farmers juxtaposed with the Railroad’s ruthless greed, the distinction between the two is now suspect. Curiously, this revelation occurs when Magnus is in San Francisco, a city associated in the novel with triviality and greed.

“The whole world had been struck with horror at the reports of suffering and mortality in the affected districts, and had hastened to send aid. Certain women of San Francisco, with Mrs. Cedarquist at their head, had organised a number of committees, but the manufacturer‘s wife turned the meetings of these committees into social affairs—luncheons, teas, where one discussed the ways and means of assisting the starving Asiatics over teacups and plates of salad.”

This passage lampoons the triviality of San Franciscan society, and the chapter highlights the contradictory nature of attempts to help minorities and foster marginalized peoples by turning them into “causes.” The criticism’s irony, however, is revealed at the end of the novel, when the Cedarquists facilitate help to the famine in India.

“Wait till you see—at the same time that your family is dying for lack of bread—a hundred thousand acres of wheat—millions of bushels of food—grabbed and gobbled by the Railroad Trust, and then talk of moderation. That talk is just what the Trust wants to hear. It ain‘t frightened of that. There‘s one thing only it does listen to, one thing it is frightened of—the people with dynamite in their hands—six inches of plugged gaspipe. That talks.”

Caraher’s inculcation of Dyke reflects the rhetoric typical of the historical anti-Railroad sentiment. The phrase “six inches of plugged gaspipe” occurs four times in the novel and stands for Caraher’s spreading influence. It also describes the bomb Presley throws into S. Behrman’s home.

“The winter brownness of the ground was overlaid with a little shimmer of green. The promise of the sowing was being fulfilled. The earth, the loyal mother, who never failed, who never disappointed, was keeping her faith again. Once more the strength of nations was renewed. Once more the force of the world was revivified. Once more the Titan, benignant, calm, stirred and woke, and the morning abruptly blazed into glory upon the spectacle of a man whose heart leaped exuberant with the love of a woman, and an exulting earth gleaming transcendent with the radiant magnificence of an inviolable pledge.”

Upon realizing his love for Hilma and his willingness to open his heart to others, Annixter notices that the seeded wheat has breached the soil for the first time. The narration’s image of a mother and a Titan—an image of primeval Greek gods—characterizes the earth as a primal force. Annixter will later similarly characterize Hilma.

“He saw why he had never grasped the inspiration for his vast, vague, impersonal Song of the West. At the time when he sought for it, his convictions had not been aroused; he had not then cared for the People. His sympathies had not been touched. Small wonder that he had missed it. Now he was of the People; he had been stirred to his lowest depths. His earnestness was almost a frenzy. He believed, and so to him all things were possible at once.”

The same evening that Annixter realizes his love and the wheat emerges, Presley writes “The Toilers.” He discovers that his subject is not the idealized past but the suffering present. Like Annixter, his revelation comes with an opening of his heart to the experiences of others. Unlike the confines of his own mind, this new focus on others gives him a concrete, understandable subject; Presley finds his place as a chronicler of the oppressed.

“Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die. So the seed had died. So died Angéle. And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain. It may chance of wheat, or of some other grain. The wheat called forth from out the darkness, from out the grip of the earth, of the grave, from out corruption, rose triumphant into light and life. So Angéle, so life, so also the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption. It is raised in incorruption. It is sown in dishonour. It is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness. It is raised in power. Death was swallowed up in Victory.”

On this same evening that the wheat surfaces and Annixter discovers his love, and Presley finds his creative inspiration, Vanamee has an epiphany of the wheat as a symbol of eternal life. Norris employs biblical language to emphasize the wheat’s transcendent power to conquer death and vanquish famine. This narrative elevates Angéle to almost a pure symbol, or, as Vanamee asserts, “proof of immortality” (393).

“The Governor had aged suddenly. His former erectness was gone, the broad shoulders stooped a little, the strong lines of his thin-lipped mouth were relaxed, and his hand, as it clasped over the yellowed ivory knob of his cane, had an unwonted tremulousness not hitherto noticeable. But the change in Magnus was more than physical. At last, in the full tide of power, President of the League, known and talked of in every county of the State, leader in a great struggle, consulted, deferred to as the ‘Prominent Man,‘ at length attaining that position, so long and vainly sought for, he yet found no pleasure in his triumph, and little but bitterness in life. His success had come by devious methods, had been reached by obscure means.”

Norris charts the moral degradation of Magnus through physical characteristics, indicating that Magnus, once so in control of his image, is beginning to rot inside. Having achieved the public person to match his self-conception, Magnus finds that his secret moral compromise and inner conflict are beginning to pull him apart. Paradoxically, his position of power has only disempowered him.

“Ah, yes, the Wheat—it was over this that the Railroad, the ranchers, the traitor false to his trust, all the members of an obscure conspiracy, were wrangling. As if human agency could affect this colossal power! What were these heated, tiny squabbles, this feverish, small bustle of mankind, this minute swarming of the human insect, to the great, majestic, silent ocean of the Wheat itself! Indifferent, gigantic, resistless, it moved in its appointed grooves. Men, Lilliputians, gnats in the sunshine, buzzed impudently in their tiny battles, were born, lived through their little day, died, and were forgotten; while the Wheat, wrapped in Nirvanic calm, grew steadily under the night, alone with the stars and with God.”

Presley now has enough insight to separate himself from his egotistical need to compose a grand epic or become the “poet of the People.” He can thus approach the wheat for the “colossal” and indifferent power that it is. Though he just witnessed Lyman’s traitorousness, Presley finds calm in the wheat’s cosmic grandeur. The notion of humans’ relative insignificance typifies the philosophy of Naturalist novels.

“I’ve got a whole lot of ideas since I began to love Hilma, and just as soon as I can, I’m going to get in and help people, and I’m going to keep to that idea for the rest of my natural life. That ain’t much of a religion, but it’s the best I’ve got […]”

Annixter’s willingness to help the community is completely contrary to the Annixter at the beginning of the novel. His new self-awareness completes the cycle of his character, growing from a woman-hating bachelor to a married man awash in domestic bliss. This development diverges from typical Naturalist character arcs, though Norris utilizes this upwards momentum to emphasize the tragedy of Annixter’s death.

“Presley, for all his love of the people, saw clearly for one moment that he was an outsider in their minds. He had not helped them nor their cause in the least; he never would.”

Failing to help during the shootout, and failing to stir Bonneville into anarchism, Presley realizes his position of ineffectual action. This idea—of idealistic altruism’s ultimate inefficaciousness—isn’t original to Norris. Dostoevsky famously termed such idealism “love in dreams,” though Presley is a unique expression of the idea. However, this is a transitory moment for Presley and for the narrative, as he must still seek his place and recognize his part in the wider process of life. 

“You are dealing with forces, young man, when you speak of Wheat and the Railroads, not with men. There is the Wheat, the supply. It must be carried to feed the People. There is the demand. The Wheat is one force, the Railroad, another, and there is the law that governs them—supply and demand. Men have only little to do in the whole business […] Blame conditions, not men.”

Shelgrim, the president of the Railroad, complicates the moral reasoning of the novel and introduces a new force in the universe. He is a surprise to Presley, compassionate to his employees, and demonstrates knowledge of art. Presley must come to terms with Shelgrim’s reasoning before he can reconcile the mechanics of his own universe.