The Jungle (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (3 page)

The first central slaughterhouse, built to cater to a population of millions, was La Villette, designed by George Eugene Haussmann, in 1867. (Haussmann himself compared this project with another engineering accomplishment of his, the great sewer system of Paris.) In this grand structure, located at the outskirts of Paris, gigantic halls of glass and iron dominated the long rows of low slaughterhouses. While La Villette provided enough meat for Parisian consumption over a period of days, each ox still had a separate stall in which it was felled: there were no cogwheels or conveyer belts. It was in the United States that the innovation of the assembly line was first introduced to the process of animal slaughter. The assembly line system, architectural historian Siegfried Giedion has argued in
Mechanization Takes Command
(1948), imparts a distinct neutrality to the act of killing. He argues that the broader influence of this neutrality “does not have to appear in the land that evolved mechanical killing, or even at the time the methods came about. This neutrality toward death may be lodged deep in the roots of our time.” But Giedion also observes that the killing of animals, unlike the production of cars, cannot be completely mechanized. “Only the knife, guided by the human hand, can perform the transition from life to death in the desired manner.” This tension, between mechanized process and the demands of the variable organic being at the center of the process, is also poignantly explored in
The Jungle.
In the scene in chapter eleven where the steer breaks loose and has to be shot we see the slippage that occurs between living creature and machine. With the men dodging for cover (this is when Jurgis sprains his ankle), we are also reminded of how far this mechanized killing is from the killing done by the hunter who pits his wits against those of his prey.

Today the Chicago meatpacking plants are all but deserted. The industry has relocated, mostly to small towns in nonunion states. In the 1980s large multinational corporations came to dominate the industry, as Eric Schlosser reveals in his muckraking bestseller
Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal.
These corporations, catering to the fast food chains and their demand for a uniform product, have overseen fundamental changes in how animals are raised, slaughtered, and processed. In one vivid example, Schlosser recounts the story of how one day in 1979, Fred Turner, the chairman of McDonald‘s, had an idea for a finger food made from chicken meat without bones. (Until then McDonald’s had sold only hamburgers.) Once their supplier’s technicians had come up with the “technology of manufacture” (what we once called a recipe) of small pieces of reconstituted white meat held together by stabilizers, which are then breaded, fried, frozen, and reheated, the chicken suppliers got to work on a new breed of chicken. They dubbed this new bird “Mr. McDonald”; its innovative feature was that it had an unusually large breast. One month after McNuggets were launched, Schlosser informs us, McDonald’s became the second-largest chicken purchaser in the United States, right behind Kentucky Fried Chicken.

As Schlosser’s book makes eminently clear, consumer anxieties that in Sinclair’s day were focused on the killing and processing of the animal now extend well beyond that to the production (through genetic engineering, feeding, and injecting of hormones, etc.) and preparation of the meat. Schlosser also informs us that, as in Sinclair’s day, the current meatpacking workforce is made up largely of immigrants, many illegal, many illiterate, from Mexico, Central America, and Southeast Asia. They are a short-term, often migrant workforce (the average worker quits or is fired after three months), and they are performing the most dangerous job in the United States, with a rate of injury and job-related illness three times greater than that of the average factory.

And again, as in Sinclair’s day, most public concern with regard to the meat industry remains focused on the condition of the meat, now with regard to hormones and other additives. In recent years, the public has expressed a growing concern for the experience of the animal, its quality of life, how much room it is given on a daily basis, and how it is fed. With all this newfound concern, however, someone, as in Sinclair’s day, is being left out—the human worker.

In one of the great critical understatements, Edward Clark Marsh wrote in his review of
The Jungle,
“It is not a pretty story”
(The Bookman,
April 1906, pp. 195-197; in
Critics on Upton Sinclair,
edited by Abraham Blinderman). Marsh went on to recommend that the book be experienced firsthand “if you can stomach [it].” Indeed,
The Jungle
aims to shock middle-class readers out of their complacent sense that their lives need not be touched (or contaminated) by remote social ills. But Sinclair did not have only his middle-class readership in mind as he wrote the novel—far from it.
The Jungle,
first published in installments in the journal
Appeal to Reason,
had a socialist readership and was addressed to a working-class audience. He was highly conscious of this readership. (Sinclair had been introduced to socialism in 1902, and by 1904 was becoming an active socialist.) After spending seven weeks in Packingtown and to some extent sharing the life of the meatpacker, he wanted, among other ambitions, not only to do justice to the suffering he had seen and heard about, but to render it in a fashion that was neither condescending nor falsified by either middle-class gentility or restrained literary convention. Sinclair makes explicit his aim to elevate the hardships of the common workingman, a subject generally outside the purview of literature, to dignify it with the seriousness that had generally been reserved for the suffering of the great and mighty. Describing the feelings of defeat experienced by Jurgis’s family, Sinclair writes:

Sinclair also eschewed the sentimentality that often shaped novelistic representations of the poor. In order to arouse compassion and encourage social reform, writers such as Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among many others, portrayed the poor as excessively virtuous. These novelists seemed convinced that their middle-class readers would be moved to sympathize with the plight of the poor only if they approved of their moral character. In stark contrast, Sinclair wanted to arouse not sympathy, and certainly not pity, but indignation and outrage. He refuses to sentimentalize his characters; indeed, he sometimes goes to the opposite extreme, as when Jurgis takes work as a scab. The suffering of Sinclair’s characters is not unjust because they are virtuous; it is unjust because it serves a system that exploits the many for the profit of the few.

At the same time, Sinclair is interested in showing that virtue is a luxury that the poor can’t afford. While striving to dignify their suffering, he wants also to explore the ways in which poverty robs individuals of the life of the mind, of spiritual comfort, and of the consolations of intimacy and emotional bonds. In the course of the first half of the novel, Jurgis becomes increasingly despondent; he is unable, for example, to respond to or even think about what might be the cause of Ona’s anguish and her frantic weeping. (It is provoked, we discover with Jurgis, by her sexual exploitation at work.) The narrator observes, “It was only because he was so numb and beaten himself that Jurgis did not worry more about this. But he never thought of it, except when he was dragged to it—he lived like a dumb beast of burden, knowing only the moment in which he was” (p. 147).

Indeed, not only thought but also, it seems, feeling or any semblance of interior life seem to be denied the protagonist. When Jurgis does experience moments of interior awareness, as when the sound of church bells—heard from his jail cell—brings back to him memories of Christmas in Lithuania, his recollections and feelings become instruments of torture. Thinking does not alleviate his torment, but intensifies it. It is better, the text suggests, not to think; better to acclimate to the insensate state that a grueling life demands.

Some readers have taken the view that if Sinclair had given Jurgis more of an interior life by way of richer, fuller responses to his experiences, he would have aroused greater empathy and made us more interested in his fate. Perhaps Sinclair felt that there was more truth and force in showing how the combination of brutal labor and crushing poverty stultifies the mind. But it could be that Sinclair was also attempting to keep the reader mindful that Jurgis’s is not a unique story, that he is a representative figure, standing in for thousands like him. And perhaps Sinclair did not want to individualize Jurgis, to allow his story to fall into the category of the bourgeois novel or the
bildungsroman
(novel of education), in which a man’s fate is mostly in his own hands, a matter of character and self-knowledge, rather than determined by economic and institutional forces. In this regard Sinclair’s socialist perspective intersects with that of Naturalist writers such as Emile Zola, George Gissing, Theodore Dreiser, and Stephen Crane. Focusing on the effects of environment and heredity on behavior, as distinct from personal history or psychological characterization, the Naturalists held to a pessimistic materialist determinism. Naturalism, according to Malcolm Cowley in an essay entitled, “Not Men: A Natural History of American Naturalism,” is “not what we have learned to call literature ‘in depth’ ”; it concerns itself with what can be observed rather than what takes place unseen, internally. After fifty years of American novels of interior life, the limited interiority of Sinclair’s novel may be what is most foreign to contemporary readers.

One last turn of the screw: Perhaps the reason we get relatively little exposure to Jurgis’s thoughts and feelings beyond “Dieve, I’m glad I’m not a hog,” is that Sinclair believes that it is only after Jurgis discovers socialism, after his conversion experience, that he finds the key to understanding his life, the ability to reflect on what he sees, to put two and two together, to recognize feelings as his own. In this interpretation, socialism not only removes the scales from his eyes but finally enables him to attach meaning to the world.

The Jungle
now holds a secure place in the American literary canon. It has never gone out of print since its original publication; it is taught regularly in high schools and colleges; and it generates its share of scholarly and critical study. Its stature is attributed by some to the remarkable documentary value of the text, its painstaking accuracy. For others, the book’s importance will forever be justified by its social impact, particularly its role in the establishment of the federal Food and Drug Administration. For some literary critics, the book’s primary significance is as a representative of the socialist novel or the muckraking novel or the American version of the Naturalist school of writing.
The Jungle
has not, however, generally been given credit as a great work of literature; it is often chided by critics for the propagandistic tone of its second half. It is interesting to note Sinclair’s own reaction to this charge, which was leveled against many of his novels. He has no interest in refuting it, or in pointing out the literary merits of his prose; rather, he embraces the charge, asking, in so many words, “What’s wrong with propaganda?” He writes:

Upton Sinclair—with his ninety published books, his countless articles and causes, his tireless activism, his unsuccessful run for governor of California, his contribution to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal economic policies, and what critic Walter Rideout called his “curiously impersonal egoism”—had far less interest in influencing literary history than in influencing the history of the world. And he did.

 

 

 

Maura Spiegel
teaches literature and film at Columbia University and Barnard College. She is the coeditor of
The Grim Reader: Writings on Death, Dying, and Living On
(1997) and the coauthor of
The Breast Book: An Intimate and Curious History (2002), and she
coedits the journal
Literature and Medicine.
She has written on popular culture for the
New York Times,
and she also writes on film, fashion, and the history of the emotions.

TO THE WORKINGMEN OF AMERICA

IT WAS four o‘clock when the ceremony was over and the carriages began to arrive. There had been a crowd following all the way, owing to the exuberance of Marija Berczynskas. The occasion rested heavily upon Marija’s broad shoulders—it was her task to see that all things went in due form, and after the best home traditions; and, flying wildly hither and thither, bowling every one out of the way, and scolding and exhorting all day with her tremendous voice, Marija was too eager to see that others conformed to the proprieties to consider them herself. She had left the church last of all, and, desiring to arrive first at the hall, had issued orders to the coachman to drive faster. When that personage had developed a will of his own in the matter, Marija had flung up the window of the carriage, and, leaning out, proceeded to tell him her opinion of him, first in Lithuanian, which he did not understand, and then in Polish, which he did. Having the advantage of her in altitude, the driver had stood his ground and even ventured to attempt to speak; and the result had been a furious altercation, which, continuing all the way down Ashland Avenue, had added a new swarm of urchins to the cortege at each side street for half a mile.