John Eperjesi has shown that this vision espoused by the character Cedarquist is largely based on two contemporary figures, Charles Conant and Albert Beveridge. Although Western writers had dreamed of making a fortune in the China market since the days of Marco Polo, it was Conant who popularized the idea that new overseas markets were the only solution to economic recessions at home. The late nineteenth century saw a fall in profits from manufacturing and a rise in financialization, not unlike the late twentieth century.Thus the closing of Cedarquist’s U.S. factories prompt him to look to China. Like Karl Marx, Conant argued against classical economists that supply and demand could not remain in balance, and that overproduction crises, or recessions, were not an aberration but a structural and repeating feature of capitalist markets. Conant proposed that what he called the problem of “oversaving” on the part of Americans could be counteracted by controlling foreign markets through Imperialism, which would not involve the political difficulties of direct rule as in “Colonialism.”Furthermore, while many celebrated the China market, the Senator Albert Beveridge did so with Cedarquist-like rhetorical flourish. In a speech in 1900, while Norris was writing The Octopus, Beveridge argued: “The Pacific is our Ocean. More and more Europe will manufacture the most it needs,black plastic nursery pots secure from its colonies the most it consumes. Where shall we turn for consumers of our surplus? Geography answers the question. China is our natural customer” . The China market has been called a myth not because there was no market, but because the idea of the market involved a complex narrative of world-historical developments in China and the West, and so structured plans in excess of actual conditions.
In Beveridge’s rhetoric, the myth emerges as a historical narrative grounding the United States’s destiny in the inevitable unfolding of natural processes. The problem of overproduction turns out not to be overproduction at all, but the lack of population increase. Food is not to be produced to feed the population, but ideally the population would be grown to meet the supply of food. As in many places in the text that enter into elevated language such as this, the word wheat is capitalized to indicate its divinity.Wheat is the “concrete example” that stands in for all American goods, due to its seemingly-natural production on the farm—growth—and consumption as food—digestion. Food is the key commodity of the coming twentieth-century where population must be made to depend on the global market. Whereas Cedarquist laments that the European population does not increase to meet U.S. supply, a suitable population does exist in China. Together with the standard Malthusian argument of an ever-expanding number of bodies who have overrun a limited food supply, there is also a decline in the quality of Chinese food, and so the danger is to each individual body. The supposed inability of the Chinese to feed themselves, and specifically the deficiency of their rice crops, is a boon to American agribusiness. Norris did not invent this idea, which reflects one competing view of Chinese agriculture among Americans at the time, which will be taken up in detail in the following chapter. Briefly, one common view of nineteenth-century Americans had been that China was the preeminent traditional agrarian society, but around the turn of the century, however, as China’s position in the world continued to decline and the U.S.’s continued to rise, the agrarian hierarchy was also reversed, and soon American agricultural experts such as Lossing Buck began traveling to China to teach. Indeed there was a crisis in Chinese rural economy at the time, though Norris does not find the cause in European or American interventions, nor even in domestic political failings.
He reverses the causality so that Empire will deliver food to Asia rather than famine, and moreover applies the naturalist trope of degeneracy to Chinese agricultural production. Chinese agriculture does not have an economic problem of production or circulation, the two great “watchwords” of American development, but instead a biological problem, the degeneration of the species itself. As we will see below, agriculture is understood in The Octopus to be propelled by a vital force, the nutritive quality perhaps, that is passing away in the Orient, replaced by the younger vigor of the wheat. The sublime hunger of the Chinese can never actually be relieved, so California wheat production can continue to expand indefinitely, without ever again saturating the market. Cedarquist predicts how such market “effects” will continue to help them in Europe, yet somehow not hurt them in China: “When in feeding China you have decreased the European shipments, the effect is instantaneous. Prices go up in Europe without having the least effect upon the prices in China” . China remains insulated, unaffected by changes in the rest of the world. It is simultaneously the key to international business success, and forever outside of the world market, playing a supplementary and ultimately mystical role. As the text continues, the mathematical sublime established in the Chinese population is transferred to American wheat, which itself becomes infinite: “We hold the key, we have the wheat,—infinitely more than we ourselves can eat” . The sublime quality of the wheat has actually begun with its infinite consumption in China, and then has been logically extended to an infinite production in the U.S. Here we see most clearly how the myth of the China market is the condition of possibility for imagining an infinitely expanding agricultural commodity production. This is how the qualities of the hungry Chinese body, discussed in more detail below, play into the transformation of the meaning of the land in the American West at the “close” of the frontier. The key to China’s role in the novel is that it is not simply a new market, but one where the “laws” of markets cease to apply; it is the limit point of capitalism beyond the horizon.
Norris uses the adjective “vague” throughout the novel to indicate a character’s intentions when his or her reason and common sense are overwhelmed by emotional excitation. This can happen either in business dreams, as here, or also in feelings of romantic love. The novel continuously oscillates between the precise calculation of grain rates, land values, and train schedules, and the “vague” stirrings of personal ambition, revenge, and love. This language encapsulates the tension between the realistic and the romantic that we saw earlier. In this passage, we see that the same word sums up the Orient, another object of ambition and love. Whereas Cedarquist has just given a pseudo-scientific account of nutrition and population figures to argue for the China trade, it is the fact that he cannot prove any of it that makes it so desirable; it must remain mysterious. By flowing over the water to China,greenhouse pot the wheat itself becomes water. By evading the Trust, they become a trust. As many commentators have noted, The Octopus constantly invokes the popular hostility for the middleman in late-nineteenth century American agrarianism while ultimately suggesting that all capitalist enterprise, even farming, operates on the same principles. This sense of geography as destiny follows from Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis on the historical end of the frontier in the American West, widely influential from Norris’s time well into the twentieth century. In “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” a paper delivered to the American Historical Association in 1893, Turner argued that the frontier had been the decisive factor in shaping the course of U.S. history, and that the end of the frontier meant the closing of the first period of that history. The Octopus is addressed to Turner’s thesis in a double sense: the advent of industrial agriculture proves that California is no longer a frontier, while the interest in China expands the westward push beyond the continent. As Turner put it, “Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development” . Here colonization is understood as overtaking and ruling “free” land. Many commentators at the time and since have seen the frontier thesis as underlining the importance of expansion across the Pacific. What separates the actions around the Spanish American War, the era that U.S. politicians openly debated imperialism as a policy, from the earlier settler colonial policies on the continent and Hawaii is first that these areas of Asia are not imagined as empty “free land,” and second that they are occupied for their strategic geographical positions, specifically for access to the China market.
For Frank Norris, moreover, the end of the frontier can be pinpointed to the specific moment of U.S. military action in China, when U.S. troops joined with an international force to put down the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. In a significant essay that has received little attention from critics, “The Frontier Gone at Last,” he wrote that “[u]ntil the day when the first United States marine landed in China we had always imagined that out yonder somewhere in the West was the borderland where civilization disintegrated and merged into the untamed” . Once the marines have landed, that is, Americans can no longer imagine that there is a frontier to the west. The frontier is by definition untamed, uncivilized, whereas China is understood to be a civilization of ancient provenance—in The Octopus, as we have seen, it is in fact the first empire, ancestor of the present U.S. Thus moving into this area is no longer frontier expansion, but meeting, in Turner’s words, “other growing peoples [to be] conquered” . Finally, “the day” when the marines landed and the frontier vanished took place while Norris was writing the novel, which perhaps partly accounts for Cedarquist’s oracular style. Norris’s conception of the U.S. encounter with China as the historical as well as geographical end to the frontier is what links the land dispute plot to the dream of the China market. When the ranchers read the circulars advertising land that is virtually free, they are still operating with a frontier mentality. Their leader, Magnus Derrick, in particular is presented as a veteran of the gold rush, a 49’er, who has shifted to ranching as a new form of prospecting. When the railroad comes to charge the current market value, however, the frontier has been closed. Although commentators on the novel have tended to analyze either the environmental meaning of new agriculture, or the representation of China and the Chinese, but not both, the structural connection between these two foci needs to be emphasized. As Cedarquist explains to the group, there can be no going back to the economics of the frontier, but they must compete in an industrial capitalist market. The only way profits can be guaranteed in this new world is through the China market, and in order to secure this ideologically, Asia must be seen as having been America’s destiny all along. Thus, I follow William Conlogue’s argument that The Octopus should not be understood as pastoral, the term that is most often used to describe the representation of the land in American literature. In the U.S. context, the pastoral is used slightly differently than its classical meaning in the Western tradition, in which is the countryside is imagined by urban cultural elites. Instead, Leo Marx famously argued that Americans’ attitudes toward rural space betrayed a contradiction, both idealizing the scene of natural purity and simultaneously displaying enthusiasm for industrialization. Literary writers displayed this tension by producing a compromise formation captured in Marx’s paradoxical term “complex pastoral,” which is somewhat analogous to the classical pastoral’s position as the cultivated middle space between the city and the wasteland. The Octopus is one of his key examples, not only because the railroad is the paradigmatic “machine in the garden” but more specifically because of the novel’s vivid depictions of industrial agriculture as the sexual union of machines and the soil. Whereas Marx establishes the complex pastoral as a trope that repeats across the full range of fiction and nonfiction genres, for Walter Benn Michaels The Octopus represents something more specific,which is the “central problem for naturalism, the irruption in nature of the powerfully unnatural” .