The Jungle (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (2 page)

INTRODUCTION

—Malcolm Cowley on the Naturalist writers, in “Not Men: A Natural History of American Naturalism”

 

 

UPTON SINCLAIR described the site of Chicago’s meatpacking industry, Packingtown, as “the greatest aggregation of labor and capital ever gathered in one place.” The supreme achievement of American capitalism, Sinclair would undertake to reveal, was also its greatest disgrace. At the age of twenty-six, Sinclair set out to write
The Jungle
in the spirit of Saint George battling the dragon. His was an age of capitalist Titans, of magnates whose wealth, power, and hubris seemed unlimited: A single man owned a million acres of the Texas Panhandle, an American coal tycoon attempted to buy the Great Wall of China, and in the Midwest a combination known as the Beef Trust tightly controlled the production and sale of meat through pervasive wage and price fixing and the unrelenting exploitation of the stockyard workforce. Sinclair’s was also an age when writers, both journalists and novelists, were experiencing a thrilling sense of their own efficacy. The investigative exposé—what President Theodore Roosevelt would unflatteringly dub “muckraking,” after the character in John Bunyan’s
The Pilgrim’s Progress
(1678, 1684) who could “look no way but downward, with a muckrake in his hands”—had taken the magazine and publishing world by storm, had grabbed hold of the popular reader, and was shining a bright light on the ever-darkening realms of child labor, prisons, insurance companies, and, foremost, American enterprise and its role in the creation of a new American class of impoverished industrial wage slaves.

With their tremendous descriptive and explanatory power, books such as Henry Demarest Lloyd’s
Wealth against Commonwealth
(1894), a study of American business syndicates and trusts, Ida Tarbell’s
History of the Standard Oil Company
(1904), and Lincoln Steffens’s
The Shame of the Cities
(1904), an expose of municipal corruption and the ties between government and business in six American cities, had a significant impact on public debate, turning uncertainty into indignation and despair into outrage. Combining rigorous research and firsthand reporting with moralistic rhetoric, these works revealed how the contemporary world worked, how businesses were being transformed into empires, and how these empires were bleeding the public in an exploitative relationship starkly delineated by Lloyd on the first page of
Wealth against Commonwealth
(see “For Further Reading”): “Holding back the riches of earth, sea, and sky from their fellows who famish and freeze in the dark, they [the syndicates and trusts] ... assert the right, for their private profit, to regulate the consumption by the people of the necessaries of life, and to control production, not by the needs of humanity, but by the desires of few for dividends.”

Energized by their sense of mission, these journalists also understood that at that moment, when magazines and books were reaching wider audiences than ever before, there was no more powerful means at their disposal than the written word. They had a confidence in the power of their medium that writers seldom experience today. Not yet competing with motion pictures, either dramatic or documentary, these writers seemed to understand that, for the moment at least, the written word was
the
document of truth. Even photographs could not vie with narrative for getting at what was real. Consider, in this regard, the reader’s first exposure to the packing yards in
The Jungle,
when Jurgis and his family take a tour. As spectators, outsiders, what they see is an immensely impressive system; Jurgis himself is full of admiration; the family is “breathless with wonder” at the magnitude, the efficiency; “it seemed to them impossible of belief that anything so stupendous could have been devised by mortal man” (p. 45). This first impression, like a panoramic set of photographs, lacked narrative dimension. As the novel unfolds, we discover, along with Jurgis, that only through time and its unraveling—that is, through narrative—can the real meaning of these impressive images be disclosed and comprehended.

Given the great success of the muckraking journalists, and Sinclair’s admiration for them (including his friend Lincoln Steffens), it is worth examining why Sinclair did not choose to write his Packingtown book as a journalistic expose, especially considering that he had written a series of articles on the failed meatpackers’ strike of 1904. In choosing fiction over a journalistic account, Sinclair was responding to a moment when novelists were also taking on the real and exploring new techniques for storytelling, and as a consequence enjoying a heady period of reinvigoration and a renewed sense of their own persuasive power. Frank Norris, whose highly successful
The Octopus
(1901) was based on an actual clash in 1880 between farmers in California’s San Joaquin valley and the Southern Pacific Railroad, wrote in a 1902 essay:

Novelists had their own distinct aims and responsibilities, not only to represent “the true” but to give symbolic dimension to the new and strange. They sought to find language to describe the urban blight that was growing and spreading at frightening speed, drawing a vast population to toil and live in a new kind of poverty, to struggle against a new kind of filth and stench, to look upon a new kind of ugliness, and to endure new illnesses, injuries, and perils. The speed at which change was occurring intensified the sense that these transmutations were unstoppable. (In 1864 the Chicago meatpacking plants and stockyards were built, and were up and running within a matter of six months; within a short time every railroad that entered Chicago went to the yards, creating a ribbon of 100 miles of track surrounding the new plants that grew to 250 miles by 1905.) Such vastness and efficiency possessed the power to awe, and to overwhelm. Sinclair, and writers of his school, sought to represent the inhuman magnitude of industrial expansion, but also to give it symbolic shape—a human comprehensibility.

Although Sinclair portrays the crushing, machine-like force of a man-made hell, he turned for his title to an image from the natural world (as Frank Norris had done in choosing the octopus to describe the spread of the railway), to a place that, particularly in this period, evoked a sense of primal fear, a “heart of darkness.” The jungle represented a setting inhospitable to human life, where “civilized” man does not thrive, where life is an unrelenting and ultimately a dehumanizing battle. From our perspective, at the other end of the twentieth century, Sinclair’s world had yet to arrive at the shared symbolic reference points for man-made horror provided for us by systematic genocide, concentration camps, and industrial warfare.

For many writers of this new school of realism (or what some describe as Naturalism, which I discuss below), there was a sense of liberation from the requirement to tell a story; now the conditions of life were the story. (If for postmodernist writers, reality is no longer realistic, for writers of this period, reality was a new frontier, vivid and legible.) Exploring new narrative structures, novelists, following Émile Zola’s lead, were hanging their narratives on the framework not of an individual life, but of an industry or the history of a commodity. Zola had built his novels around coal mines, the emergence of the department store, stock market speculation, even a Parisian laundry. But when Sinclair determined to write a novel about the packing yards, he hit upon more than an apt framing device, more even than an industry that needed to be exposed for its heinous practices; consciously or not, he hit upon the subject that would give his novel its most enduring quality.
The Jungle
is, arguably, the only muckraking novel of its era that is still read for more than historical interest. In the slaughterhouse Sinclair found both the symbol and the objective correlative for the condition of the worker in that moment, as well as a trope for the entire twentieth century.

Sinclair famously quipped, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” His primary concern, what initially drew him to the subject of the packing yards, was the condition of labor following the failed meatpackers’ strike of 1904, and not the corruption of meat. The public reaction to the novel, including that of President Theodore Roosevelt, who called for an investigation into sanitary conditions after reading the pertinent parts of
The Jungle,
showed more concern for what affected them most directly—the horrible contamination of the meat they were eating and feeding their children—rather than for the horrible plight of the meatpacking worker. The Meat Inspection Act and the federal Food and Drug Act were both passed in 1906 as a direct consequence of Sinclair’s expose. No direct action, however, was taken by Congress against the Beef Trust until 1917, and, notably, the Humane Slaughter Act was passed only in 1960. Because the condition of labor and the conditions pertaining to food production became separated in the aftermath of the book’s publication, the intense relationship between the two within the novel has not received much attention. Not only did the working conditions of the meatpacking industry affect the hygiene of its products, as Sinclair painfully shows, but the relation between the two is absolutely integral to the power, analytical strategy, and impact of the novel.

Critics have noted that Sinclair draws analogies between the fate of the cattle and the fate of the meatpackers, how the worker, like the doomed animal, is slowly processed by the plant until there is nothing left of him (except, like the hog, his squeal). Now that we read this novel across the great span of the twentieth century, with our knowledge of the trench warfare of World War I and the even greater horrors of Stalin’s Gulag and Hitler’s death camps, Sinclair’s description of the systematic “using up” of human beings along a conveyer belt that step by step deprives them of their hope, dignity, and finally their humanity, takes on an even darker significance. The sign above the entrance to Auschwitz—
Arbeitmacht frei,
“work makes you free”—seems cruelly anticipated in
The Jungle,
where laborers arrive in a condition of health and strength, and we see them increasingly reduced in strength and spirit; once they have been depleted—in fact, “used up”—by the conditions in which they live and work, they are discarded. We watch the systematic dehumanization of the worker, like that of the concentration camp inmate. When Jurgis takes up work with the “fertilizer men,” his body becomes infused with a stench that cannot be washed away. He moves through the world as a pariah; he cannot separate himself from his degradation; he is marked. In the scene in the city jail, when Jurgis is forced, after his bath, to walk naked in front of the other prisoners, the link between shame and dehumanization is complete.

The analogy between the exploited worker and the animal brought to slaughter is most horribly drawn in two unspeakable images, presented in the text only secondhand, and mercifully not described in detail. The first is of the child, Stanislovas, being eaten by rats; the child laborer becomes flesh for vermin. And we find the second in the narrator’s account of men who have fallen into the open vats in the tank rooms: “When they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,—sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard!” (p. 109). (This was the only assertion in the novel that could not be independently verified after the book’s publication. Sinclair responded that the employers made sure to send the widows of the men killed in such accidents back to their countries of origin in order to hide the atrocious manner of their deaths.)

Our repulsion at the gruesomeness of the tasks the meatpacking workers are called upon to perform activates another level of meanings in the text. That is, not only is this work relegated to a vulnerable immigrant population, but, symbolically, capitalism hides its bloodied foundations; just as we’d rather not dwell upon where our meat really comes from, and how it reaches us, so capitalism disguises the sources of modern wealth, derived from the degradation of the laboring class. When Sinclair takes Jurgis into the grand mansion of one of the packing yard owners, we recoil at the recognition of what this lavish luxury is built upon—the gore of the slaughterhouse as well as the lives of tens of thousands of workers. In this act of separation of cause from effect, the reader is further called upon to consider our genteel treatment of the meat we consume. As Norbert Elias has noted in his majestic history of western manners,
The Civilizing Process
(1939; translated 1978), “Reminders that the meat dish has something to do with the killing of an animal are avoided to the utmost.” In contrast to the medieval practice of bringing the entire animal to the table, sometimes with hoofs or feathers still attached, in more recent times, “the animal form is so concealed and changed by the art of its preparation and carving that while eating one is scarcely reminded of its origins.” The iconoclasm of
The Jungle
is in part achieved in its relentless insistence that we dwell upon what we don’t wish to dwell upon, that we recognize that just as we have distanced ourselves from the slaughter of animals (once a quite ordinary part of life), so we have distanced ourselves from the hard lives of these workers. Indeed they are hidden from us by our own choice. Sinclair demands that we draw the connections, that we remember the origins of both meat and wealth.