SOURCE: Morris, Matthew J. “The Two Lives of Jurgis Rudkus.” American Literary Realism, 1870-1910 29, no. 2 (winter 1997): 50-67.

[In the following essay, Morris examines the character Jurgis's evolving representative function in The Jungle.]

William Dean Howells once warned that realism, like romance, would ultimately die as a truthful art form: “When realism becomes false to itself, when it heaps up facts merely, and maps life instead of picturing it, realism will perish too.”¹ He meant that realism must show some of the pattern of life, instead of merely accumulating description. That is a reasonable program, although Howells chose puzzling terms: one might just as easily have aligned “picturing” with formless description, and “mapping” with a realism that discloses the underlying structure of events. What does a map do if not subordinate surface appearances to a schema of spatial relations? But Howells was stressing precisely the schematic quality of a fiction congested with details. Such a fiction, having failed to identify the true source of formal coherence in art as in life, would still aspire to meaning, but this meaning could only be arbitrary, like that which is conventionally assigned to the configuration on a map. Curiously, Howells' division of the possible methods of realism here anticipates the analogous distinction signalled by the title of Georg Lukács's “Narrate or Describe?” For Lukács, classic realism surpasses naturalism in that realist novels take on a narrative form dictated by or expressive of historical necessity, while naturalist novels, choked with description, remain formless. The true realist must “go beyond crass accident and elevate chance to the inevitable,” which means dramatizing that epochal conflict in light of which every facet of the man-made world assumes significance.² If he cannot see that conflict, though he may have the best intentions to promote reform by describing, for example, slum life, the novelist inevitably assembles discrete data whose significance he can only will as symbolic.

Lukács could thus have adopted Howells' vocabulary and said that naturalists like Zola, for all their virtuosity in description, lack the pictorial sense, and thus can only map social relations. Of course, Howells actually liked Zola, and Lukács based his aesthetic judgments on a theory of reification alien to the American novelist. Their dismissals of formless fiction coincide only in part. But this coincidence brings into focus some of the assumptions about realism that have informed responses to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, a novel noted for its vivid descriptions and the ultimate formlessness of its plot, one which often seemingly “heaps up facts” in just the way that Howells (and, for different reasons and in different terms, Lukács) deplores. Sinclair must have been aware of the doctrines promulgated by Howells, and would later assent to censures of his novel which are at least consonant with these doctrines, if not derived from them. Yet The Jungle does not merely violate the canons of Howellsian realism, for it never quite embraces them. Rather, it remains, on the one hand, trapped within an ideal of factual accuracy which seemingly ignores Howells' call for formal harmony, while showing signs, on the other hand, of a more significant divergence from the realist program, a reclamation of romance as the indispensable dialectical counterpart of realism. In view of these signs, we must assume that the eccentricities of The Jungle have a constructive purpose, until they are proved to reflect poor judgment alone. The charge of “mapping” is unlikely to furnish such proof, for Sinclair arguably sets out to restore “mapping” to its literal sense: he uses spatial layouts as figures for complex social relations. When he describes how factories process meat, his description also functions as a diagram of how the ruling class corrupts democratic institutions.

This treatment of space is closely related to Sinclair's strategy of embodying capital, labor, and other abstractions in individual characters—another hallmark of what Howells calls “romance.” But these authorial choices need not render a work shapeless or schematic. Sinclair's use of maps and types opens, rather than closes, the question of whether he fashions a compelling plot, one which supports the argumentative burden he places upon it. As a socialist, Sinclair believed that the environment shapes human behavior, but also that human beings may reshape their destinies. Men may not make their history just as they please, yet they do make it. Sinclair's treatment of characters, their settings, and their actions follows from this concern with the making of human beings and, or more properly within, their surroundings. To formulate the problem of realism and romance in Sinclair most clearly, then, we begin with a closely related matter: the proper role of personal development in a leftist literature which, as such, is in some measure bound to emphasize the impersonal or suprapersonal conditions of collective action.

The most common plot in American radical fiction in the first half of the twentieth century, and particularly during the Progressive Era, depicted the conversion of a middle-class ingenue into an activist. Writers hoped, by showing such conversions, to induce similar changes in their audiences; they were also, understandably, writing about what they knew best, the processes of political discovery that had shaped their own vocations. They generally motivated these conversions by having characters observe, and if possible experience, the contrasts between rich and poor.³ The reader, following a fictive proxy through a series of telling juxtapositions, thus confronts the evidence that American society, rotten with class differences, can be saved only by socialism.

Although this strategy—portrayal of conversion, motivated by pointed comparisons—seems natural, indeed inevitable, the contradictions of novels like The Jungle call it into question. Everybody agrees that the first half of the novel, which shows the suffering of the Rudkus family under a system they can neither resist nor understand, is more compelling than the second half, in which Jurgis Rudkus comes to see and comprehend the class system that has destroyed everyone he cared about, and to join the fight to change that system.⁴ The concrete political effect of the novel followed from public furor over the quality of canned meat, so nauseatingly rendered in the novel's early going, and not from the later, programmatic introduction to socialist thought. Apparently Sinclair would have written a better novel in every way if he had forgotten about conversions and their motives.

Critics of Sinclair have often suggested the greatest danger of the conversion plot: if radical action is to come from the proletariat, fictions about the conversions of bourgeois protagonists, aimed at the conversion of bourgeois readers, are at best irrelevant, if not elitist. To be sure, The Jungle is one of the few Sinclair novels about the conversion of a worker, but critics have shown that even this story bears many traces of the detachment of its author and readers from the working class it purports to help. Michael Folsom argues that the tediously discursive ending of the novel reflects the lingering influence of its author's genteel background, which, at the crucial moment, got the better of his realist and socialist pretensions, and induced him to render Jurgis' conversion as “a psychic event, not a social or economic one.”⁵ This psychologization makes the newly-politicized Jurgis less threatening to the middle class reader, in that the socialism he will help bring, far from being worker-culture, will feel like an extension of “polite society”; Jurgis' silence during the novel's final theoretical exposition attests to Sinclair's continuing concern more for the “intelligentsia” than for “laboring people.”⁶ Thus the “tacked on,” preachy quality of the final chapters reflects not merely the author's impatience to point his moral, but also his deeper political ambivalence about this moral.

Folsom's article defines a widely-shared view of the formal effects of ideology on “America's first proletarian novel.” Christopher Wilson, discussing Sinclair's achievement and limitations as functions of the economics of publishing in the Progressive Era, argues that Sinclair in The Jungle assumes the position of a “visitor,” a middle-class spectator whose detachment from the working-class tragedy he observes impairs his creative sympathy.⁷ Likewise, June Howard points out that Sinclair “plays the role of the reader's guide and interpreter in an alien land” so that “the worlds of the observer and the participant remain polarized, joined only by the narrator's pity and good intentions.”⁸ Finally, L. S. Dembo, while joining Walter Rideout in defending the plausibility of Jurgis' conversion, finds in the best of Sinclair's later novels the same faults of intrusive spectatorship and class-condescension that Folsom and others have found in The Jungle.⁹

The genteel protagonists of Sinclair's later novels, and the detached observer implicit even in The Jungle, all embody a wish: the wish that one could see the operations of class society from top to bottom, and choose the moral and rational response dictated by the plain facts.¹⁰ Above all, Sinclair wishes that the often invisible workings of class could become visible, indeed incarnate, and thus remediable; to show class struggle in the direct encounter of a rich man with a poor man, or in their close juxtaposition, is to show its solution, even if the encounter depicted remains one of violent injustice. The literary conventions which bring millionaires and proletarians face-to-face in this way are commonly described as “romantic” or “allegorical.”¹¹ As we have remarked, these terms generally carry a note of derogation, at least since Howells, who expressly links them.¹² Now, when critics disparage Sinclair's willful and hasty allegories, they at least implicitly endorse an opposite method, a patient technique proper to realism. The genuinely realistic narrative follows its protagonists through the great struggles of their lives and beyond, to the last consequences of these struggles, the ultimate social causes of which permeate every lived detail of the text, instead of being compressed into one or two symbols. By this measure, the most meticulously realistic part of Sinclair's oeuvre is the first twenty-one chapters of The Jungle, up until the death of little Antanas. To that point, every misfortune of the Rudkus family follows organically from the conditions of immigrant life in Packingtown. Their suffering, if exceptional, is not incredible; it unfolds gradually, amid other, comparable, cases, in small matters as well as great, and despite their stubborn struggle for happiness and dignity. June Howard has remarked that an “inexorable fatality seems to pursue Jurgis and his family, so that The Jungle at times seems to be following the logic of the plot of decline.”¹³ Sinclair might well have followed this trajectory to the bitter end by letting Jurgis die, Hurstwood-style, after descending each remaining rung of the social ladder. Instead, he gives Jurgis a second life, with adventures as a tramp, a prisoner, a strike-breaker, a robber, a machine politician, again a prisoner, and finally a convert to socialism. I would argue that this second life is really no more allegorical than the first; it merely shifts its scene and themes, in order to relate the first life to a broader political context and to Sinclair's own professional experience.¹⁴

Jurgis' first life, closely tied to the lives of his family, centers alternately on his workplace and his home, the house the family struggles to pay off and finally loses. As long as this poising of the Rudkus household against the stockyards predominates, the Rudkuses' ethnicity counts for something in the narrative; they struggle not only to survive, but also to preserve a certain community. By the time his father, wife, and son have died, however, Jurgis has lost this community, and the significance of ethnicity and of the first spatial system succumbs along with it. In Jurgis' second life, the narrator tries to show the causes of the earlier suffering in the workings of a political machine subservient to the great industrial machine he has already described. In this investigation a new spatial system prevails, now divided among various places where organized crime and political corruption block, deflect, or poison the flow of goods and information necessary to the well-being of society. This spatial coding of social forces, like the allegorical presentation of social types, makes explicit tendencies to romance which are implicit even in the first part of the novel. The two halves of Sinclair's plot thus reflect two aspects of a single problem. In turning to the first half of the plot, then, we also take up the mix of political, rhetorical, and aesthetic theories which Sinclair brings to his problem.

I. THE FIRST LIFE: DESCRIPTION AND THE MELTING POT

Sinclair's criticism affirms the veracity of his fiction, at the expense of its fictiveness. Thus in response to reviewers' often vehement disagreements about the accuracy of The Jungle, he announced his commitment to an ideal of unmediated description: “I intend The Jungle to be an exact and faithful picture of conditions as they exist in Packingtown, Chicago. I mean it to be true, not merely in substance, but in detail, and in the smallest detail. It is as true as it should be if it were not a work of fiction at all, but a study by a sociologist.”¹⁵ He reserves the right to “dramatize” and “interpret,” but makes no further concession here to the impact of authorial perspective on observation, for he believes the science of socialism preserves him from distorting the world he would describe. Marx and his expositors famously vacillate between using “ideology” as a pejorative epithet applicable to bourgeois philosophy and political economy, and using it to denote a universal and constructive component of the reproduction of society; for Sinclair only the former sense exists. He expresses this rudimentary notion of ideology most clearly in an essay that antedates The Jungle, “Our Bourgeois Literature—The Reason and the Remedy.”¹⁶

Sinclair opens his article by defining “bourgeois.” He believes civilization is approaching the close of a “long evolutionary process.”¹⁷ For two hundred years, Europeans have been wresting “political sovereignty” away from the aristocracy; now “industrial sovereignty” must likewise be won for the entire populace, and it must be won worldwide. The class that won the first stage of this struggle and must lose the second is the bourgeoisie, and the currently ascendant literature is “simply the index and mirror” of this ruling class, with all its familiar vices. In later years, Sinclair's most disciplined muckraking would come in his “Dead Hand” series (1918-1927), tracts exposing the venality and hypocrisy of organized religion, journalism, education, and art; here he anticipates this project in a couple of sentences: “The bourgeois civilization is, in one word, an organized system of repression. In the physical world it has the police and the militia, the bludgeon, the bullet, and the jail; in the world of ideas it has the political platform, the school, the college, the press, the church—and literature.”¹⁸ While this is hardly a nuanced view of the relationship between class interests and ostensibly disinterested public discourses, it sustained Sinclair for decades of work as a socialist writer. His task was to expose “repression” in its subtle forms as well as its overt ones, and so to contribute to the world's progress toward the utopia of reason.

At first glance, this program has little to say about the shaping function of the writerly imagination, just as it begs the question of how anyone can be sure of his or her own scientific impartiality. As Earl Norton Lockard points out in his dissertation on Sinclair, “technique” is “subordinate” here, serving “primarily to make the writing clear,” and this subordination is consistent with a theory which assumes propaganda on behalf of the working class to be the true end of art.¹⁹ This theory could logically compel the writer to abandon fiction altogether, if another medium offered better results. Yet both The Jungle and Sinclair's early aesthetic statements do imply that fiction achieves its rhetorical ends in ways different from other kinds of writing, that novelists present their truths with uniquely literary conventions. “Our Bourgeois Literature” is a good example of the ambivalence with which Sinclair makes this implication. He initially denigrates the role of literary conventions when he accuses writers constrained to please a middle-class public of turning “all history into a sugar-coated romance,” while socialist writers hew to the bitter unliterary truth.²⁰ But later in the essay he speaks of “the mighty revolution that is gathering its forces, far down in the underworld of the poor,” showing his attachment to a figurative system in which unveiling and eruption would remedy the burial and damnation of the poor under the existing regime.²¹ Such a system is more consistent with romance than with realism, to say nothing of the unmediated exposure of reality. Here, then, Sinclair makes his first dialectical leap from a program of description which merely ignores Howells, to a renewal of romance which potentially answers him.

Of course the “underworld” had long since become a dead metaphor, the isolated use of which means nothing, but we will see that this metaphor is hardly isolated in The Jungle. There the gustatory analogue for the writer's procedure will hardly be sugar-coating—one thinks rather of an emetic medicine—but the emphasis on a demonic world veiled by innocent surface appearances is fully consistent with a kind of romance. A further nonfictional clue to this (highly literary) imaginative system of disguises, burials, exposures, and eruptions comes in “Is The Jungle True?,” where Sinclair declares that “The Beef Trust is a thing which presents itself to my imagination as a huge castle, a fortress of knavery and fraud,” adding that he had to “descend into the social pit” to write about it.²² The figure of proletarian life as subterranean, and capital as a fortress, is an admission that literary conventions, and indeed conventions which antedate and survive any discussion of realism, animate Sinclair's “exact and faithful picture.”

Sinclair approaches a similar admission in The Jungle itself, and even at a moment when he intends to emphasize the opposite, simply factual, aspect of his work. In a passage from the original serialized version of the novel, which was cut in the Doubleday, Page edition, the narrator maintains that his task as the spokesman for wage slaves is harder than the task of his model, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her novel on the life of chattel slaves was dramatic and picturesque because the cruelty of masters and the flight of the runaway slave have great inherent literary interest, but “the lash which drives” the proletarian—economic need—“cannot either be seen or heard.”²³ This complaint, consistent with Sinclair's belief in unmediated reporting, hardly does justice to Stowe's inventiveness, and its excision improves the novel. But in elaborating this point, Sinclair reveals a curious ambivalence, notably when he asks “Who can make a romance out of the story of a man whose one life adventure is the scratching of a finger by an infected butcher knife, with a pine box and a pauper's grave as the denouement?”²⁴ On the one hand, this question implies that Sinclair's subject matter is unromantic—he might have said “naturalistic.” But the sentence also implies that Sinclair would be willing, like his precursor, to use “romance” for his propaganda—if it were available and effective. Indeed, he admits elsewhere that he tried in The Jungle “to put the content of Shelley into the form of Zola”—surely the ambition of a writer who had at least considered appropriating the form of Shelley as well.²⁵ Further, Sinclair's rhetorical question indicates that the raw materials of his novel come from life already incipiently formed as “stories” with “denouements,” and hence that the writer cannot present them without considering how they function as plots. Sinclair disavows such considerations when he pretends to practice direct description, but his fiction everywhere belies this pretense. When he describes people and places, he invariably shows how both are caught up in processes of change.

The most rich and sustained descriptions of The Jungle are those of the veselija or wedding feast of Jurgis and Ona, in Chapter One. Having attended such festivities during his seven weeks of research in Packingtown, Sinclair was able to show the customs of the Lithuanian immigrants in some detail.²⁶ In doing so, he introduces the family and establishes its utter difference from the American mainstream. But this chapter already hints that the immigrants' customs have begun to erode in America. For instance, Jurgis and Ona trust their wedding guests to contribute cash to offset the expense of the entertainment, but these contributions fall short of the expected amount. The sense of communal obligation which would have motivated the guests in Lithuania has already begun to wither under “some subtle poison in the air” of the new country.²⁷ The poison is the narrow understanding of self-interest, made ever narrower by the pressures of the free market. Thus the young couple starts its life together burdened with debts and baffled by social change; it is already engaged in the action which will transform it irrevocably. The same action continues through the second great descriptive set-piece of the novel, the factory tours of Chapter Three. For the family members, not privy to the commentary in which Sinclair debunks the packers' propaganda, leave the tours too awe-struck to suspect the deceit and violence they will soon find in this workplace. As a result, before they begin consciously to struggle, they slide even further from knowing and resisting their antagonists. After these tours and the family's purchase of a house in the next chapter, all of the decisive environmental factors are established, and the human experiment begins to unfold more rapidly and inexorably. The contradictions of the ensuing narrative follow from Sinclair's effort to balance the ethnic difference of the Rudkuses against the political imperative to make their metamorphosis typical for all American workers, and so to allegorize.

By the end of the novel, Sinclair ceases to pay attention to the specifically Lithuanian qualities of the Rudkus family. Their fate becomes nothing more or less than representatively proletarian. But it would not be fair to say that Sinclair's interest in their ethnic peculiarities was factitious, an opportunistic injection of color into the beginning of the story. Rather, Sinclair meant to show how industrial capitalism, among its other effects, could strip away the uniqueness of folkways as it transformed immigrant farmers into industrial workers. The house the Rudkuses buy, to their ultimate grief, is where this process of stripping-away emerges as representative. As their neighbor, Grandma Majauszkiene, relates in Chapter Six, four earlier families—German, Irish, Bohemian, and Polish—have successively bought and lost the same house.²⁸ Her urban archeology is highly conscious of differences among these ethnic groups; she notes, for instance, that the Irish family used political clout to stave off its doom for a while. And yet these differences cannot measure up to the regularity with which the house, and by extension the economic world it represents, works the same fateful transformations on the families. Sinclair exaggerates when he implies, by the example of this house, that every new family was destroyed by Packingtown. In reality, each wave of immigrants found a place, however slowly and painfully, in American society. Thus James R. Barrett points out that the German and Irish workers who first came to the stockyards had become “the most ‘American’” and the best adjusted by 1909, while the Bohemians were on their way toward Americanization.²⁹ In this perspective, the outright annihilation of the Rudkus family is a figure for the cultural bleaching it would undergo if, like most families, it survived.³⁰

By using this house to concentrate the social forces that corrode ethnic identity, Sinclair reminds us that naturalism is often defined as a kind of fiction which uses heavy description to promote a genetically or environmentally deterministic theory. But even the crudest materialism understands the environment to encompass more than the local physical surroundings, and certainly Sinclair's socialism is refined enough to recognize that the Rudkus house is more suggestive as a symbol than as a direct source of unexpected bills, unsafe sidewalks, and unclean water. Bad as these conditions are, they are secondary to the house's status as the intended reward for the family's labors, and its haven from a hostile world. When the family loses the house, a series of non-homes (brothels, prisons, thieves' dens, streets) takes its place, until Jurgis finds a new, indestructible family in socialism, and a correspondingly collectivized home in the hotel of Comrade Tommy Hinds. The novel's scenes of degradation thus appear as stages in Jurgis' progress from traditional to revolutionary community, which means that the setting has an allegorical function, in the novel's vision of human renewal, from the first. It also means that this allegory, far from being the negation of purposeful plotting, always emerges through an action, a process of change.

Although the Rudkus house and neighborhood are important scenes of transformation in their own right, the greatest changes unfold when the narrative moves out into the workplace. What happens there, in turn, both influences public life and is affected by it. This interplay of economy and polity emerges as the explicit topic of the novel's later chapters, but it is already implicit in the first life of Jurgis Rudkus. As early as the ninth chapter, for example, Sinclair suggests that political disfranchisement is systematically united with the family's other woes. The chapter opens with a report on how venal Democratic Party operatives induce the immigrant workers to sell their votes, and then describes how the officials thus elected allow the packers to pollute the environment and adulterate meat. But this outline of systemic corruption must remain imperfect until reader and protagonist have both felt the full subjective horror of the results. Jurgis, in particular, must experience effects before he can understand causes. And so Sinclair goes on to catalogue the special debilities incidental to each job in the packinghouses: workers in the pickle rooms contract infections, and have their fingers eaten away by acids; butchers and can-makers cut their hands up, while stampers' hands simply get chopped off. Finally, in a painful literalization of the metaphor of the American city as cultural melting-pot, workers in the cooking rooms fall into huge cooking vats, perhaps only to be fished out after “all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard!” (120).³¹ This most extreme variant of the immigrants' forcible assimilation exemplifies how all the descriptive passages in the first life of Jurgis Rudkus are indeed allegorical, even fabulous, but hardly formless. The injuries and adulterations they detail contribute to a larger narrative: of the destruction of a family, and the poisoning of a commonwealth. We cannot understand the completion of this narrative, the tale of redemption, merely by labelling it as a failure in Sinclair's skill and patience as a writer, his rigor as a socialist, or his purity as a realist. We may, though, be able to show how his vocational trials affected the kind of allegory he wrote as he moved his protagonist out of the stockyards.

II. THE SECOND LIFE: MAPPING THE JUNGLE

In the second life of Jurgis Rudkus, Sinclair offers a more complete systemic view and causal analysis of the evils of the modern industrial city. This change of focus, from the experience of injury to the elucidation of causes and remedies, brings with it an increasingly deliberate reflection on the nature of political knowledge. Although Sinclair believes in the ultimate rationality of history, and hence in the worldly efficacy of writing exposés, he is wary of piecemeal political interventions, like the arrest of individual crooked aldermen and corporate malefactors. Such interventions constitute a reformist counter-narrative which steals and blunts the truths of the socialist movement, leaving the profound structural evils of capitalism intact.³² This co-optation may be the least brutal weapon of a ruling class which, as we have seen Sinclair saying in “Our Bourgeois Literature,” still has its police, bullets, and bludgeons as well. But for Sinclair as a writer, the subtler intellectual weapons of the bourgeoisie pose a profoundly personal threat. I suggest that he became increasingly conscious of this threat as he turned to the second life of Jurgis Rudkus. This tale of proletarian education is thus also a report on historical and journalistic revisionism, and the predicament of the writer who would combat these evils. Sinclair's later chapters make most sense when seen in the light of this predicament. He is now writing about transformations of literary meaning, as well as economic and political life. Critics have had trouble seeing this widening of the novel's vision of change, because Sinclair himself, discussing the composition of the later parts of The Jungle, emphasized the loss of meaning, rather than its displacement. Reading the later chapters of the novel thus entails reconsidering Sinclair's discussion of what went wrong while he wrote it.

Sinclair believed that his “last chapters were not up to standard” because he had lost “both my health and my money” over the course of 1905.³³ His account of how he wrote the novel does not specify when this decline set in, or which chapters first bear witness to it, but other sources lend some substance to his claim. Sinclair reports that he began writing on Christmas Day, 1904, and worked steadily for three months. By the end of this time (25 March 1905), four chapters of the serial had run in as many weekly issues of the socialist journal The Appeal to Reason, whose managing editor, Fred Warren, had the first nine chapters two weeks before running the first installment on February 25.³⁴ Thus Sinclair composed at least half of the first life in six weeks, and several more chapters before taking his family on a spring vacation in Florida. Beginning in May with the tenth chapter, the weekly installments consist of half-chapters, until the death of Ona in Chapter Nineteen, which ran on August 26. This change may reflect a slackening of Sinclair's pace of production, a decline which would be consistent with more concrete evidence that he was becoming distracted or discouraged by late summer. Sinclair reports that he went to work founding the Intercollegiate Socialist Society “shortly before the completion of the book.”³⁵ Since the I.S.S. had its inaugural meeting on 12 September 1905, it seems likely that Sinclair finished the novel in late September or early October. By then he had ascertained that Macmillan would not grant the request he had made in a letter on September 13 for a second five hundred dollar advance with which to rework the later chapters as the sequel to a first novel consisting essentially of the first life.³⁶ The last serial installment appeared in the Appeal on 4 November 1905, while the quarterly One Hoss Philosophy had carried a somewhat different conclusion to its concurrent run of the novel in October. The following January, Sinclair, having had further differences with Macmillan and four other publishers, signed a new contract with Doubleday, Page, which published the revised novel in February.³⁷

Thus by the end of the serial run, Sinclair, experiencing friction with both socialist and commercial editors, was looking for ways to reconceive his task. The conditions under which the very last chapters appeared imply that they were especially damaged by this stress, as their plodding quality would seem to suggest. Warren ran the last eight chapters (including the ones that consist almost exclusively of doctrinal exposition, and are equivalent to the last four chapters in the Doubleday, Page edition) in a separate package which readers had to request by postcard, a sign that popular interest in the serial had waned.³⁸ It is even possible that Sinclair had seen some of the negative reader reports which were circulating at Macmillan, a factor which could have demoralized him as he wrote his didactic peroration.³⁹ Yet the author's merely privative view of how the novel's second half differs from its first is insufficient. Even if such a view held for the very last, homiletic, chapters, it would remain inadequate for Chapters Twenty through Twenty-Seven, the bulk of the second life. Though we may never know enough about the quotidian details of the composition of The Jungle, I suggest that as Sinclair experienced personal reverses in the summer of 1905, he became increasingly conscious of parallels between himself and his protagonist. But even if these reverses came too late to affect the content of the second life, Sinclair's earlier travails as a writer had predisposed him to identify with industrial workers, and this predisposition is the key to his emerging emphasis on textual as well as industrial and cultural retooling.

Sinclair was the first to discuss this identification, presenting it as a source of strength which had benefitted The Jungle: “I wrote with tears and anguish, pouring into the pages all the pain which life had meant to me. Externally, the story had to do with a family of stockyards workers, but internally it was the story of my own family.”⁴⁰ He adds that Ona and her infant parallel his first wife Meta and their son David, both of whom were sickly, and he relates how the entire family, like the fictional immigrants, faced the budgetary constraints which come with an ambitious mortgage. So while it is always dangerous to equate writer and protagonist, the author here offers a warrant for seeing some such identification imparting vividness to the novel's early narrative of economic struggle. Leon Harris has pursued this connection into the second life, comparing Jurgis' stint as a migrant agricultural worker and tramp to Sinclair's attempt to write while living in the country.⁴¹ Of course, observing such parallels does not, in itself, address the problem of how Sinclair's narrative generates meaning after it abandons its first spatial system. The same writer who draws inspiration from a little bit of adversity could, after all, be ruined by a lot of it; such a view of Sinclair's case would be compatible with his autobiographical assertions, but it would bring us no closer to understanding what the later chapters actually do. To gain that understanding, and finally read the maps rather than simply dismiss them, we need to consider a topos in Sinclair's confessional writings which has a sustained and thematic relationship with the topography of his novel: the use of prison to symbolize ideological error.

Sinclair describes his conversion to socialism as “the falling down of prison walls about my mind.”⁴² This sentence comes from an autobiography he wrote in 1932, but coincides with images which appear in his nonfiction at least as early as “Is The Jungle True?,” with its capitalist “fortress of knavery and fraud.” Prison is a conventional, even trite, figure for illusion or ignorance, but for that very reason we may assume a certain constancy of meaning among Sinclair's uses of it. Such constancy, within a given text, is one of the distinguishing features of allegory; I am suggesting that references to prison in The Jungle have this allegorical consistency, but also that later works by Sinclair enable us to see these references as something more than the feverish effusions of a hurried and impoverished writer.

In The Brass Check (1920), his exposé of the kept press, Sinclair relates an episode which preceded, and may well have influenced, his work on The Jungle. In 1904 Sinclair, newly converted to socialism, wrote “An Open Letter to Lincoln Steffens,” asking the author of The Shame of the Cities what practical remedies he proposed for the abuses he had documented. Steffens liked the letter and tried to get McClure's to publish it; refused, it found its way to Collier's, where the young editor Robbie Collier accepted it until his father, the publisher, compelled him to reverse the decision and keep the magazine free of subversive messages.⁴³ Sinclair renders this reversal dramatically, as a personal affront he endured while dining with the Colliers. He then describes their refusal to publish his letter as a cause of the 1919 Red Scare: if Collier's had “taken up the truth which I put before them, they would have conducted a campaign to make the American people see it—and to-day we should not be trying to solve the social problem by putting the leaders of the people's protest into jail.”⁴⁴ Sinclair could hardly have sustained the grandiose historical claim which, taken literally, he makes here, but what matters is that he ties censorship to incarceration, and does so in connection with his vocational development. This development is a vital context for his great novel. In The Jungle as in The Brass Check, Sinclair uses the physical and ideological apparatuses of law to represent the forces that restrict radical literary expression, forces correlated in turn to the more subtle and constructive agencies that shape and distort public opinion. The series of confinements and escapes experienced by Jurgis Rudkus, however plausible in their own right, thus refer also to their author's struggle to convey through them the knowledge he had acquired about life in the stockyards, a struggle at once with a hostile publishing climate and a broader ideological environment resistant to the truths of socialism.

The episode with the Colliers in The Brass Check supports the view that this struggle was still on Sinclair's mind in 1920. It was presumably a fresher wound when he wrote The Jungle, where it enters into a scene from Chapter Twenty-Four, familiar to viewers of Charlie Chaplin's City Lights. The drunken son of one of the great meat-packing tycoons picks up Jurgis, takes him home, feeds him sumptuously, and gives him a hundred-dollar bill. After the young man passes out, the butler throws Jurgis back on the street; Jurgis is robbed of his hundred dollars by a bartender, whom he assaults, only to be arrested. The episode stresses human connectedness by the irony that the young man whose fortune depends on the daily exploitation of people like, and at times including, Jurgis, can casually and meaninglessly give him such a sum; it is in part a parody of private charity. It is also unapologetically allegorical, both because its characters are all types, and more narrowly because it presents Jurgis' arrest as the mere external realization of a spiritual shackling which antedates the encounter with the bartender: “all outdoors, all life, was to him one colossal prison, which he paced like a pent-up tiger, trying one bar after another” (278). This sentence, so redolent of Sinclair's apprenticeship as a hack writer, anticipates Sinclair's introduction to the chapter of The Brass Check about his famous interview with President Theodore Roosevelt. In the middle of a series of chapters on the publication and reception of The Jungle, and its deflection from its real goals, Sinclair pauses to recall his resolution and the adversity that tested it: “I was determined to get something done about the Condemned Meat Industry. I was determined to get something done about the atrocious conditions under which men, women, and children were working in the Chicago stockyards. In my efforts to get something done I was like an animal in a cage. The bars of this cage were newspapers, which stood between me and the public; and inside the cage I roamed up and down, testing one bar after another, and finding them impossible to break.”⁴⁵ Sinclair's representation of the writer as a caged animal fits neatly with his admission that he identified with his protagonist. The same metaphor applies to Jurgis' unfreedom wherever he goes, and Sinclair's incapacity to help, however he writes. Jurgis' adventures reflect his creator's career: as surely as Jurgis is thrown out of the packer's mansion by the butler, Sinclair finds himself turned out of the house of Collier.

Just as Sinclair figures himself as a struggling worker, Jurgis emerges as a prototype of the proletarian writer. This emergence lends plausibility to his conversion, as it shows him assembling a narrative picture of the world he has experienced. He does so, appropriately, by moving between the extreme immurement of the convict, and the total exposure of the homeless beggar. First he becomes “free to roam the shopping district,” observing its contrasts; this freedom comes after his first imprisonment, but before the encounter with the millionaire, and the confinement that follows it.⁴⁶ His compensation for this enforced, and in many ways degrading, sojourn in the wide world of contrasts is not merely an increase in street-wisdom ultimately redeemable as socialist doctrine, but also, more proximately and specifically, the acquisition of the ability to narrate. When, after further adventures, he becomes a successful beggar, he does so by constructing a “hard-luck story,” of which “not a word … was true,” but which he can deliver “scientifically.”⁴⁷ He has become a romancer, in short—and one who, like a good naturalist, brings science to his narration. In the penultimate chapter of the serial, Jurgis, now a socialist, even finds his voice as an orator, joining his comrades in debate with a reactionary politician.⁴⁸ By making himself conspicuous in this way, he exposes himself to a final arrest for an assault committed in his old life, but this time the walls and bars around him will be purely physical. Meanwhile, by making his surrogate a skilled purveyor of rogue stories, Sinclair virtually admits that his own development as a writer and a socialist, and his decision to turn Jurgis' life into a picaresque tale, were positively shaped by his engagement with the great resources of romance writing.

With this engagement in mind, we are better equipped to understand the rhetorical strategy of the second life of Jurgis Rudkus. The novel certainly shifts mode and mood between the first twenty-one painful chapters, in which the Rudkus family is ground into sausage, and the next six chapters, in which Jurgis wanders about, mixing with rich and poor, and learning the ways of tramping, corrupt city politics, and organized crime. The man who can move among these different worlds is a definitive mediator among types, and in playing this role Jurgis loses all personal specificity (i.e., as a stockyards worker, as a Lithuanian). But the claim that this change of narrative method represents a loss of realism is hard to sustain, or even define; we have seen that the first half already contains a strong tendency to romance. With the close of this half, the novel shifts its focus from the family's struggle to preserve a certain community to the causes and consequences of its failure in this struggle. In the second half Jurgis has no home, but the factory remains, now part of a series of equivalent infernos, jungles, and jails, each of which symbolizes the repression of writing and memory. In this world Jurgis the adventurer is as free of social bonds as Sinclair the observer, for whom he becomes a surrogate. Before, Sinclair contrasted industrial efficiency with personal and ecological chaos; now the scenes of blockage and pollution also refer, however obliquely, to a damming-up of information, a poisoning of public opinion.

This subtext of censorship and revision enters into almost all of the novel's later maps, however schematic they appear, and however far they depart from the setting of the early chapters. For example, one of the temporary jobs Jurgis finds after his family breaks up involves helping to build a freight subway, “a perfect spider-web beneath the city” (268). Although the city council has only authorized “the construction of telephone conduits under the streets,” a group of capitalists is using the contract to set up a freight monopoly; they intend “to have the teamsters' union by the throat.”⁴⁹ The episode thus contributes both to the novel's titular conceit (metropolis as wilderness, complete with throat-ripping predators) and to its allied project of using the city's geography and architecture to give physical substance to the intangible evils of capitalism. For this project, the unauthorized digging is more suggestive than the Yerkes traction scandals which Dreiser was to fictionalize in The Titan, though these latter were more notorious, and Sinclair does mention them, too. The street railways Yerkes sought to corner were mainly elevated, and thus less infernally resonant than the tunnels into which Jurgis descends. But Sinclair has a second reason for displacing affect from the traction scandals to the buried “spider-web.” For this scheme does not merely menace labor, but also perverts the city council's well-meaning effort to facilitate communication. The contractors promise to enhance the flow of information by deploying telephone lines, and deliver instead a system for transporting freight, one which will ultimately, upon the death of the union and the consolidation of the monopoly, impede the free circulation of goods and ideas alike. Sinclair regularly links these two forms of circulation and the blockages which threaten them, and this linking complements his identification of the writer and the worker. Characteristically, he dismisses the official investigation of the telephone scheme by highlighting its literary character: the malefactors may get into “gaol,” but only “figuratively speaking” (268).

Prison and its equivalents are thus scenes of literary contention, scenes that the enemies of reform deny, rewrite, or at least misname. Where Sinclair the socialist sees a jungle, bourgeois political economists see Nature; where he sees an inferno, they see an efficient machine; where he sees jail and silence, they see law and necessity, the triumph of fact. Each of these re-visions leads directly to the next. For example, when Jurgis is first incarcerated, Sinclair speaks of his jail as a “Noah's ark” of crime and a “wild beast tangle” (198-9), equating prison with a jungle.⁵⁰ Later, when Jurgis is a beggar, Sinclair calls the Detention Hospital into which beggars are herded “a miniature inferno,” but also, in effect, a jungle, whose residents can be seen “barking like dogs [and] gibbering like apes” (277). Hell, jail, and jungle are thus interchangeable terms, and all three are scenes of blockage, the squandering of human capital. But Sinclair's deepest insight is that mere waste is impossible: the capitalists have, rather, created vast laboratories, places of mutation, ideological as well as physical. They preside over something far more terrible, and far more wonderful, than any ordinary abattoir, just as Sinclair writes something far more complex than a botched naturalist novel.

A muckraker must show industrial conditions in their full hideousness, as the reality underlying the utopias of the political economists, and yet he must also show the efficiency of the system that exploits these conditions and extends them even to the writer's cell. In other words, his task of making the terrible transformative powers of capitalism visible is inseparable from his discovery that anything he says must take its place among existing representations—that his observation of reality is intertextually mediated. Sinclair never formed an adequate theory of the relationship between inherited literary form and realistic depiction, but the growing explicitness within his novel of the romantic animation of the landscape, and the change in Jurgis' representative function, attest to his struggle with this relationship. This struggle has been seen only in negative terms, as the reason the novel unravels. Now we can understand it as a positive adaptation of the novel's code.

Notes

1. William Dean Howells, “Editor's Study,” Harper's Monthly (May, 1886), 973; rpt. in Edwin H. Cady, ed., W. D. Howells as Critic (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 83. Cited in Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 46.

2. Georg Lukács, “Narrate or Describe?,” Writer and Critic, trans. A. D. Kahn (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1970), p. 112.

3. Walter B. Rideout's The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900-1954 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1956), summarizes several works which share this plan.

4. See Abraham Blinderman, ed., Critics on Upton Sinclair (Coral Gables: Univ. of Miami Press, 1975), for a selection of critiques forming this consensus.

5. Michael Folsom, “Upton Sinclair's Escape from The Jungle: The Narrative Strategy and Suppressed Conclusion of America's First Proletarian Novel,” Prospects 4 (1979), 251.

6. Folsom, pp. 259, 261.

7. Christopher Wilson, The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1985), pp. 133-6.

8. June Howard, Form and History in American Literary Naturalism (Chapel Hill and London: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1985), p. 159.

9. L. S. Dembo, Detotalized Totalities: Synthesis and Disintegration in Naturalist, Existential, and Socialist Fiction (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 169.

10. Dembo remarks that Sinclair's characters lack psychological depth because of his “view of the world, which to its core is rationalistic and moralistic” (Detotalized, 186). In such a world characters should look around them and decide to be good. The same insight prompted Lincoln Steffens to compare Sinclair to George Bernard Shaw, concluding that both represented “the economic reformers, the Socialists, who really believe in morality” (The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens [New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958], II, 605).

11. For example, Wilson argues (p. 131) that “Sinclair's sublimation of personal and poetic desire” in his realist fiction represents the lingering effects of his training as a hack writer and then as a producer of narcissistic Künstlerromane: “Even as he laid claim to realistic subject matter, his prose retained the heightened tones of his earlier allegories.”

12. For example, he declares that “the romance … deals with life allegorically and not representatively; it employs types rather than characters” (Howells, “Novel-Writing and Novel-Reading,” The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 3rd ed., ed. Nina Baym et al. [New York: Norton, 1989], p. 269). Compare a very similar formulation in the “Editor's Study” cited above (Cady, p. 81). Though “romance” and “allegory” are not identical, we may treat them as such while considering the critical discussions which shaped Sinclair's reception and, in some measure, his praxis.

13. Howard, p. 158.

14. Among commentators on The Jungle, Eric Homberger has taken the most understanding attitude toward what he calls the novel's shift from “naturalism” to the “picaresque.” This shift, he argues, is motivated by Sinclair's “belief in the capacity for change” (Homberger, American Writers and Radical Politics, 1900-39 [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986], p. 43). Sinclair can hold such a belief because he belongs to a generation of leftist writers not yet alienated from society at large, as well as being temperamentally resistant to the “dehumanizing” aspects of “Darwinian naturalism” (p. 4). Although I, too, find the term “naturalism” occasionally unavoidable, my point is partly to show how it and the allied term “realism” prove insufficient as norms for Sinclair's work, insofar as they are defined in opposition to “romance,” “allegory,” or “the picaresque.” We cannot ignore these binarisms, for Sinclair does not, but we can analyze how he creates his realism by casting out and recovering its opposites.

15. Sinclair, “Is The Jungle True?,” Independent, 17 May 1906, p. 1129.

16. See Utz Riese, “Upton Sinclair's Contribution to a Proletarian Aesthetic,” in Dieter Herms, ed., Upton Sinclair: Literature and Social Reform (Frankfurt, Bern, New York, and Paris: Peter Lang, 1990), pp. 11-23, for a discussion of how this essay fits into Sinclair's evolving “self-authorization” as a radical writer.

17. Sinclair, “Our Bourgeois Literature—The Reason and the Remedy,” Collier's, 8 October 1904, p. 22.

18. Sinclair, “Bourgeois,” p. 23.

19. Lockard, “Technique in the Novels of Upton Sinclair,” diss. University of Chicago, 1947, p. 17.

20. Sinclair, “Bourgeois,” p. 22.

21. Sinclair, “Bourgeois,” p. 23.

22. Sinclair, “Is The Jungle True?,” pp. 1132, 1133.

23. Sinclair, The Lost First Edition of Upton Sinclair's “The Jungle,” ed. Gene DeGruson (Atlanta: St. Luke's Press, 1988), p. 65. Hereafter cited as LFE.

24. Sinclair, LFE, p. 65.

25. Sinclair, “What Life Means to Me,” Cosmopolitan, 41 (October 1906), 594, cited in Ronald Gottesman, “Introduction,” Sinclair, The Jungle (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985), p. xx.

26. Sinclair, American Outpost: A Book of Reminiscenes (Port Washington and London: Kennikat Press, 1969), p. 156.

27. Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985), p. 20; hereafter cited parenthetically.

28. See James R. Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago's Packinghouse Workers, 1894-1922 (Urbana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1987), pp. 36-51, for a helpful discussion of this passage and the demographic realities it represents.

29. Barrett, pp. 38-9.

30. “The Life Story of a Lithuanian,” narrated to Sinclair's friend Ernest Poole for Hamilton Holt's The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans as Told by Themselves (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 6-20, is thus far less gruesome than The Jungle, although it confirms many of the novel's details, and gives a sense of the cultural sacrifice involved in successful immigration.

31. Elaine Scarry discusses Marx's similar linking of jobs and products to the injuries they cause in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), p. 267; Sinclair had probably read Capital, and certainly claimed to know Marx thoroughly (Leon Harris, Upton Sinclair: American Rebel [New York: Crowell, 1975], p. 330). Compare the discussion of “dangerous trades” in Jack London's People of the Abyss (Westport: Lawrence Hill & Co., 1977), pp. 103-5.

32. Hence Sinclair's famous remark on the pure food laws which followed his call for more militant action: “I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach” (Sinclair, American Outpost, p. 175).

33. Sinclair, American Outpost, p. 161.

34. De Gruson, “Introduction,” LFE, p. xv; the bibliography to this edition gives the publication dates of the chapters (319-333).

35. Sinclair, American Outpost, p. 159.

36. De Gruson, “Introduction,” LFE, xix-xx.

37. Gottesman, “Introduction,” The Jungle, pp. xxi-xxii.

38. De Gruson, “Introduction,” LFE, p. xix.

39. See Suk Bong Suh, Literature, Society, and Culture: Upton Sinclair and The Jungle, diss. Univ. of Iowa, 1986, p. 122, for more on the dates and contents of these reports.

40. Sinclair, American Outpost, p. 156. Compare (to name only one example) his earlier description of the “harrowing, fourteen-hour-a-day labor” which went into The Journal of Arthur Stirling, causing his stomach to go on “strike” (p. 123).

41. Harris, p. 75.

42. Sinclair, American Outpost, p. 143.

43. Sinclair, The Brass Check: A Study in American Journalism (Pasadena: privately printed, 1920), p. 24. This book also confirms, incidentally, that Sinclair counted Howells as an important leftist literary forerunner (pp. 260-261).

44. Sinclair, Brass, p. 26.

45. Sinclair, Brass, p. 39.

46. Sinclair, LFE, p. 202.

47. LFE, p. 253, ellipsis added.

48. LFE, pp. 312-315.

49. See Ray Ginger, Altgeld's America: The Lincoln Ideal versus Changing Realities (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1958), p. 100, for the historical background to this episode.

50. The serialized version of the novel contains many more uses of the word “jungle” than the revised text, as editor DeGruson remarks (LFE, pp. xxv-xxvi), but even the later version often evokes the jungle indirectly, with the help of wild beasts and the like.