You may notice that the appearance of the blog has changed somewhat. The oh-so-cool-urban-intellectual just wasn’t presenting the material appropriately. More changes are certainly to follow as I tinker with designs but the focus of the blog will remain the same. Six superfluous dimensions will continue to look for the revelatory and fabulous even with eyes trained close to the soil. Just look at that tomato!
I’ve been thinking about what and how I would write about my recent experience reading Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle. I did not read The Jungle in high school or college as many others did. If I had I might have been most powerfully moved by the disgusting descriptions of moldy meat and the spectacle of unsanitary conditions in the meat-packing industry of the early Twentieth Century. This seems to be the legacy of novel; it led to investigations and public outcry, and, according to the introduction in my copy, the passage of two food safety laws. Yet little came of the novel’s condemnation of the way workers are used by industry, especially immigrant workers. At every turn these workers and their families are swindled, robbed, poisoned and killed in the service of a great machine. In the style of early industrialization, the metaphor of the machine is used often in the novel, to describe the mechanisms of the stockyard (both in the processing of meat and the overall system) and also the machines of politics and power in the United States. Much of the novel is devoted to the awesome exploitative power of these machines. Some debate or another led my partner and I to look up the origin of the word ‘machine,’ as if our popular usage had staled the word’s imaginative power. In every definition we found the same descriptor came up: contrivance. The word ‘machine’ is interesting in that contained in its definition is its origin as something created; there is no natural or inherent machine. However, when we think about omnipresent machines, like those describing the workings of economics, we lose sight of the machine as something that was designed and created. We are disempowered by a belief that the machine is out of our hands. Obviously, it is in the interest of groups who benefit from the workings of the machine to emphasize the machine’s natural and ‘right’ existence. Even once the immigrants in The Jungle have realized that the machine (either that of the stockyards or larger United States) is exploiting them they feel they are powerless to stop it, must even take part in its exploitation of others.
I am reminded of the danger of become too amazed with our imaginative contrivances. When first reaching the stockyards of Chicago, new immigrants Jurgis and his family tour the hog-processing plant in amazement. The reader cringes while Jurgis sees it all as “a wonderful poem” of efficiency. Sinclair is careful to construct for us the mentality of the newly arrived worker, a person who views the animals without “metaphors of human destiny” and whose mind is still somewhat baffled by the experience of the foreign. What is large, what is noisy, what has been set up to involve many pieces, requiring the organization and manpower that can only come from having a great number of people gathered together in one place. These are the things that still have the power to inspire awe (military operations are often impressive in this way, also cities). So why does the reader cringe, what is there to temper our own self-congratulating pride? There can be no space to doubt that the machines of The Jungle abuse every bit of life they touch. The stockyards of The Jungle are marked not only for the intensity and danger of the work performed but also the downright illegality of the work. The workers have no protection from theft, of their work or their money, nor do they have any authority to appeal to for crimes such as injury, murder or rape. They are expendable because there are hundreds of other workers outside the gates of the factories. And indeed, it is in the best interest of the factories to work a person as hard as they can, for when they die, there will be a new worker to replace them. They are a piece of the machine, and, like a metal part, they will be replaced when they wear out.
The Jungle has a place in contemporary times to be reread. Perhaps there will be many who say that a novel from a hundred years ago could say little about the modern treatment of workers, that conditions have improved so much in the United States as to render the novel irrelevant. Maybe in a world of globalization we bear a responsibility for conditions beyond our political borders. We certainly benefit from the exploitation of millions around the globe. But even within our country we cannot ignore the legacy of how this country’s economic power was created. The (semi-)fair wages, work hours, ‘safe’ working conditions were not born out of the machine but from the protest of workers who had to demand them. The political and legal recourse of workers, that is, the very right of workers to receive a paycheck when it was due and to have a way to demand it when it was withheld, is something that had to be fought for. For those willing to think more abstractly, the novel has much to say about the ‘naturalization’ of power and rights disparities. Even with my interest in food systems, it is a shame to read the novel merely for the meat.
I have always loved this ending to Calvino’s Invisible Cities:
The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live everyday, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.
In the past I have interpreted this in the most abstract sense; applied to everything from the Great Khan’s fear of future infernal cities to the struggles of living in this world. But I returned to this passage after finishing The Jungle and, primed as I was with the rhetoric of righteous struggle which concludes that text, I was struck by Calvino’s call to arms against the forces of inferno. The words became an indictment of the colonialism that is at the foundation of the novel; the Great Khan and his empire. We can accept the forces of the inferno or we can seek out its antagonists, like the energized Socialists whose words fill up the last thirty pages of Upton Sinclair’s novel. On the inside cover of The Jungle is a short biography of Upton Sinclair which ends with this quote:
My efforts are to find out what is righteousness in the world, to live it, and try to help others to live it.
Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1974. 165
Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York: Bantam Books, 1981. Originally publ. 1906.
