I still consider myself an American, and a US American at that. And after reading through much of the text of The Jungle: The Uncensored Original Edition by Upton Sinclair I began to believe that what middle school history class had taught me of this novel was misdirected.
I found that beginning the book with a wedding scene reminds me of the beginning of another book, The Good Earth, which starts with a wedding as well. This type of introduction is an easy and useful device to kick off a story. It allows for many of the main characters to be introduced quickly. The reader can learn many things from a family’s matrimonial event; such as religion, class status, family size, and ethnic identity. Immediate character development is available to the reader due to the never-ending stream of stressful situations that a wedding provides. Marjia, Ona’s cousin, is devised as, “flying wildly hither and thither, bowling everyone out of the way, and scolding and exhorting all day with her tremendous voice …” (1). I felt like I have dealt with this person so many times, and I wasn’t even out of the first paragraph yet.
I came into the moment of reading this text expecting to find only stories of the manufacturing and food production industries; instead I found a novel that included looping around a dreary part of Chicago, the part of the past and the fictional historical silhouette of the Packingtown neighborhood. The family was the real portrait in the book, although the neighborhood seemed like a villain itself. For example,
The line of the buildings stood clear-cut and black against the sky;
here and there out of the mass rose the great chimneys, with the
river of smoke streaming away to the end of the world. (Sinclair 25)
Sinclair creates the dank neighborhood from our protagonist first view of their new setting. He uses the adjective “clear-cut” that my modern sensibilities require this phrase to describe a type of logging, an immediate cast of man versus nature. The color black is used to describe the buildings and tenements of the area, and a riparian pathway in the sky of the soot and grim pulls our narrator to the horizon. I was almost expecting Sinclair to write that Mount Morador was visible in the distance. All of these describe the effects of industrialized production on the environment and by extension its effects on the human population.
A few things struck me as the text became more of a blanket to my reading instead of an uncomfortable chair. Sinclair writes in sentences with many clauses. Although grammatically correct, his style is breathless and requires the reader to compel forward through more and more of the grit and inhumane treatment of our characters. This style mediated the relative ease of my existence to the harshness and unforgiving setting where the characters of the book are sequestered eternally.
Sinclair uses the personification of the machinery’s symbiotic relationship with its caretakers and owners. Once the young Stanislovas is recognized to offer the possibility of letting the family keep their house (house should be heavily air-quoted), his introduction to the task expresses this perfectly. The boss of the lard-canning factory, “showed the lad how to place a lard can every time the empty arm of the remorseless machinery came to him;” (Sinclair 63). Here Stanislovas becomes the automaton and the machine becomes the demanding creature that needs feeding, that demands its nutrients get handed directly to its arm and hand. This is the fate of a 13 year-old boy for repetitive hours day after day. And while the machines receive personification, the population of the workers had become more and more machinated. “All the year round they had been serving as cogs in the great packing-machine.”(Sinclair 70).
Sinclair also writes quite graphically of the results of setting young children to work in inhumane and thoughtless conditions. The young Stanislovas eventually has a breakdown every morning before leaving for work. Jurgis, the boy’s uncle by marriage, is fearful that the boy’s tearful fits are unassuageable. This caustic behavior of Stanislovas is in reaction to an event he witnessed, but there is more to his emasculated rage. Here this young creature has been chewed up through the gears of the factory. In a contemporary sense the affects of production-based institutionalization subsidized the boy’s mental health to serve the need of the factory, and Stanislovas became a bag of meat with anxiety as its primary motivation.
The book did not start as an easy read. However, Sinclair does write with descriptive prowess. He has a powerful sense of textual imagery, such as describing the onset of winter in Packingtown:
Four or five miles to the eastward lay the lake, and over this the bitter
winds came raging. Sometimes the thermometer would fall to ten or
twenty degrees below zero at night, and in the morning the streets
would be piled with snowdrifts up the first-floor windows.(Sinclair 71)
Sinclair sets the lake geographically and drags the winds across it for us. And the winds are bitter, an adjective usually reserved for the tongue or a sense of relentless spite ingested by the human condition. He talks of thermometer falling, which is synecdoche for the mercury and the temperature as a whole. And finally the snowdrifts have been “piled” to the windows from which I inferred a sense of a siege rather than just a change of season. With this quotation Sinclair also holds the reader’s “face under the putrescent waters of knowledge” (Croshaw) towards the structure of Sinclair’s circumlocutive style that I mentioned above.
The book surprised me. I was expecting the focus of the book to be about the conditions of the food production and the unsanitary nature of late 19th and early 20th century industrialized food-processing. This was the essential message of the book when mentioned in US History class during eighth grade. But socialism is poking out its head from time to time, and from the timbre of Sinclair’s thoughts I believe that The Jungle is another story completely. It seems that point that I have received from the novel thus far isn’t about the creation of the FDA or USDA as Mrs. Buttall had told me in room A122 at Haggard Middle School. It was about the quietly arising immigrant class of industrialized serfs and the pathway that socialism could cast in their future. Welcome to the setting for the Red Scare.
Sources:
Buck, Pearl S. The Good Earth. New York: Pocket Books, 2005.
Croshaw, Ben “Yahtzee”. “The Escapist : Video Galleries : Zero Punctuation : Peggle.” http://escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/7-Peggle. The Escapist. 16 Apr. 2009 .
Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle : The Uncensored Original Edition. London, UK: Createspace, 2008.