SOURCE: Rosendale, Steven. “In Search of Left Ecology's Usable Past: The Jungle, Social Change, and the Class Character of Environmental Impairment.” In The Greening of Literary Scholarship: Literature, Theory, and the Environment, edited by Steven Rosendale, pp. 59-76. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002.

[In the following essay, Rosendale explores Sinclair's use of landscape as symbolism of class status in The Jungle.]

When it comes to genius, to beauty, dignity, and true power of mind, I cannot see that there is any chance for them to survive in the insane hurly-burly of metropolitan life. If I wanted qualities such as these in human beings, I would surely transfer them to a different environment. And maybe that is what Providence was planning for me to understand and to do in the world. At any rate, it is what I am trying to do, and is my final reaction to the great metropolis of Mammon.

—Upton Sinclair, American Outpost

As the immigrant Jurgis Rudkus and his family peer out of their train windows on their journey to Chicago in the second chapter of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, the landscape undergoes a remarkable transformation. An hour before they reach the city, the Rudkuses get their first inkling of the possible nature of that change, becoming dimly aware of “perplexing changes in the atmosphere.” The air around them is increasingly polluted by an “elemental odor, raw and crude … rich, almost rancid, sensual, and strong” (20). Although they are divided in their feelings about this odor, other elements of the environment clearly dismay the immigrants as the train carries them nearer to Chicago. For mile after mile, they witness an increasingly dense “desolate procession” of “ugly and dirty little wooden buildings,” all the same, punctuated only by the occasional “filthy creek” or “great factory … darkening the air and making filthy the earth beneath.” Gradually, as Jurgis's group stares out at the view speeding by their train, its natural elements appear increasingly drained of vigor and beauty. Colors are bleached from the visible landscape. Everything in sight becomes “dingier”: the grass seems to “grow less green,” the fields become “parched and yellow,” the landscape progressively more “hideous and bare.”

When the group detrains at their new home, Packingtown, the transformation of the landscape is apparently complete. There remains, it seems, no vestige of real greenery, no trace of unaltered, nonhuman nature. In its place, industry has remade the entire environment in its own image. The “elemental” atmosphere that first signaled the approach to the stockyards, for example, turns out to be a product of the rendering-house smokestacks, which simulate a variety of other natural forces as well. They manufacture the region's weather signs—the “vast clouds” that dominate the sky. Alternatively, their smoke is described as an oily “river” and as a “self-impelled” geological force, since it appears to have come from “the center of the world … where the fires of the ages still smoulder.” Even the soil upon which the houses of the district sit is a by-product of manufacture: it is “made land,” the original soil having been excavated and turned to brick, and the hole from the excavation refilled “by using it as a dumping-ground for the city's garbage” (20). As evening falls on the immigrants' first day in Chicago, the only relic of the natural outside that is left is the remote sun, and it is ignored as the immigrant couple survey the horizon: “Jurgis and Ona were not thinking of the sunset … their backs were turned to it, and all their thoughts were on Packingtown, which they could see so plainly in the distance. The line of buildings stood clearcut 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” (24).

Metonymically extending “to the end of the world,” the Packingtown environment has supplanted not a few particular features of nature but nature itself. Throughout the novel, Jurgis, his wife, Ona, and the narrator will continue to refer to Packingtown as a “wilderness,” a “wild,” “unsettled country,” and the like. Soon after the immigrants' arrival in Chicago, a sound seeps into their frame of awareness, and the procession of similes the narrator provides for it suggests that the by-products of industry have encompassed the entire environment to the farthest horizon: “it was like the murmuring of bees in the spring, the whisperings of the forest … the rumblings of a world in motion.” The same point is driven home by the narrator's comment that the narrow roads between the houses “resembled streets less than they did a miniature topographical map of a continent,” with no pavements but rather miniature “mountains and valleys and rivers, gullies and ditches,” with oceanic “great hollows full of stinking green water” (21).

The Rudkus family has, of course, entered the jungle, an encompassing simulacrum of nature to which Sinclair referred in an early version of the novel as the “wilderness of civilization.”¹ Although Packingtown initially holds out the promise of a good life for the immigrants (on his first night in Packingtown the factories strike the optimistic Jurgis as a sublime “vision of power”), this hope is quickly gainsaid by the obviously noxious features of the industrial environment itself, a place that increasingly appears bewildering and uninhabitable to the immigrants. Some emphasis upon the crowding and monotony of the urban landscape might be expected in any tale of country folk moving to the city, but Sinclair devotes a full fifteen paragraphs to his initial description of the locale, commencing a critical view of the industrial simulation of nature that is sustained throughout the novel.

Surely one of American literature's great treatments of the environmental consequences of industrial production, The Jungle has nevertheless never been taken seriously as a novel with important environmental implications, a failing that this essay seeks to correct. The lack of ecocritical attention to The Jungle (and indeed, to the larger Left literary tradition in the United States) can be traced to several sources, the most important of which is a mistaken tendency among ecocritics to confuse the complex and necessary project of developing eco-conscious critical values with a simplistic rejection of “interhuman” concerns like urban social life and class politics. For some ecocritics, the critical focus on such interhuman concerns has simply failed to provide an environmentally acceptable set of critical values, offering instead just another version of what Glen A. Love has called literary studies' “narrowly anthropocentric view of what is consequential in life” (229). “We must break through our preoccupation,” Love writes, “with mediating between only human issues, the belief that, as Warwick Fox puts it, ‘all will become ecologically well with the world if we just put this or that interhuman concern first’” (227).

The anthropocentrism-busting emphasis in ecocriticism has carried with it a corresponding rejection of traditional notions of politics, including the class critiques of capitalism that so interested the Left in the twentieth century. In the face of global environmental degradation, Theodore Roszak contends, both capitalist and socialist economies resolve into a global and univocally malignant economic “style” that renders even the most basic issues of social justice moot: “We have an economic style whose dynamism is too great, too fast, too reckless for the ecological systems that must absorb its impact. It makes no difference to those systems if the oil spills, the pesticides, the radioactive wastes, the industrial toxins they must cleanse are socialist or capitalist in origin; the ecological damage is not mitigated in the least if it is perpetrated by a ‘good society’ that shares its wealth fairly and provides the finest welfare programs for its citizens” (33).

Roszak's point is, of course, well taken. Both of the contemporary major modes of economic organization have produced environmental damage on a massive scale, and that damage carries no marker of its political origin. In theory and in history itself, both capitalism and socialism have been driven by a commitment to unlimited production, a similar faith in the power of technology to improve human life, and a virtually identical tendency to hide the environmental costs of production.

The prominence of such ideas in the emerging ecocritical canon explains ecocriticism's failure to examine the environmental implications of Left texts like The Jungle. For Sinclair's text is, of course, intensely focused upon interhuman concerns. In contradistinction to the wide array of wilderness-oriented texts already firmly ensconced in the ecocritical canon, The Jungle is set in landscapes entirely remade by human industry and agriculture. Despite the novel's extended ruminations on the victimage of stock animals (Sinclair was a vegetarian at the time of the novel's publication), this sympathy is ultimately an anthropomorphism meant to symbolize and accentuate the emphasis on human misery. Indeed, the major political effect of the novel—the passage of federal food purity laws—had nothing to do with the treatment of animals or any other part of nonhuman nature. In fact, the entire novel appears to be focused upon “narrowly anthropocentric” issues: class struggle, the possibility of individual and family success within a complex and predetermined economic structure, and the effect of ward corruption and national politics upon working-class life. Despite Sinclair's obvious interest in describing the environmental consequences of production, environmentally minded readers are likely to object even to Sinclair's central metaphor—the jungle—which often uncritically seems to reinforce an antipathy toward nature itself. The narrative, for instance, unquestioningly describes Jurgis's exploiting economic superiors as “wild-beast powers of nature” and “ravening wolves that tear and rend and destroy” (167, 301).

Nevertheless, there are compelling reasons for reexamining novels like The Jungle for their ecocritical potential. A growing body of ecocritical thought has begun to suggest that the simple dichotomy of “interhuman” and “environmental” concerns that has grounded ecocriticism's general failure to address literatures of class and of urban life may itself be part of our environmental problem. As Wendell Berry argued more than two decades ago in The Unsettling of America, even the central concept of “environment” suppresses the possibility of a mutualistic relation that might otherwise guide our lived relationship with nonhuman nature: “Once we see our place, our part of the world, as surrounding us, we have already made a profound division between it and ourselves. We have given up the understanding—dropped it out of our language and so out of our thought—that we and our country create one another, depend on one another, are literally part of one another … and so cannot possibly flourish alone; that, therefore, our culture must be our response to our place, our culture and our place are images of each other” (22).

In a similar vein, Michael Pollan has persuasively argued in “The Idea of a Garden” that the notion of “wilderness” upon which much environmental activism is grounded must now be recognized as a concept with increasingly limited utility, precisely because it rigidly divides nature from human culture and economy: “Essentially, we have divided our country in two, between the kingdom of wilderness, which rules about 8 percent, and the kingdom of the market, which rules the rest. … Useful as [the wilderness idea] has been in helping us protect the sacred 8 percent, it nevertheless has failed to prevent us from doing a great deal of damage to the remaining 92 percent. The old idea may have taught us how to worship nature, but it didn't tell us how to live with her. It told us more than we needed to know about virginity and rape, and almost nothing about marriage” (425).

This kind of suspicion regarding environmentalism's reliance on the foundational dichotomy of nature and human culture suggests the need to return to Roszak's notion of the supersession of social justice issues by environmental ones (“ecological damage is not mitigated in the least if it is perpetrated by a ‘good society’”) with a new and more critical eye. We might, of course, reverse Roszak's formulation, observing that the traditional class-oriented, interhuman concerns that occupy Left novels like The Jungle are themselves not “mitigated in the least” if that oppression is perpetrated by a society that has redressed ecological disaster and developed sustainable modes of production. But the deeper point is the absurdity of conceptualizing “environmental” and “interhuman” concerns in isolation from each other, as Berry's proposition that our place and our culture mirror one another suggests.

A number of political theorists have begun an effort to frankly reassess the environmental legacy and potential of the Left in order to move beyond red-green dichotomies and style a politics that addresses human and environmental exploitation in the “kingdom of the market” that comprises the bulk of the American landscape. As Kate Soper has argued: “just as socialism can only hope to remain a radical and benign pressure for social change by assuming an ecological dimension, so the ecological concern will remain largely ineffective (and certainly incapable of reversing the current trends in the manner required) if it is not associated in a very integral way with many traditional socialist demands, such as assaulting the global stranglehold of multinational capital” (82). Integrating environmental concerns and Left-materialist political theory will surely entail a radical revision of some of the most basic assumptions that the Left has cherished. The Left, for example, will need to rethink its production-based notion of social “progress.” Whereas Marxism has traditionally regarded the technological basis of production (even under capitalism) as neutral, it must now revise its model of the transition to socialism to account for the necessity of transforming (rather than simply remanaging) the technological basis of production itself.

Concurrent with these efforts to rewrite Left politics in green is an effort to recover lost theoretical precedents for the necessary changes. The last few years have seen a burgeoning of scholarship reconsidering the underemphasized ecological potential of key concepts in Marxism: alienation, the critical theory of production, the notion of natural limits, and so on (see Ted Benton, The Greening of Marxism). This effort at theoretical recovery and revision strives to make areas of conceptual consonance between Left and green thought more visible. Both traditions might, for example, find common ground in their shared rejection of the preeminence of money profits over other values and in their common objection to the hiding of environmental and human costs that accompany the production of commodities.

Although “Left ecology” may be thought to have a recoverable theoretical past, there has been very little work done to discover whether a red-green synthesis might possess a cultural past that may prove valuable for contemporary environmentalism. William Empson linked the radical novels of proletarian experience and revolt produced in the first four decades of the twentieth century to the pastoral tradition, but his observation was never developed by subsequent critics. This critical lacuna is curious, for environment often emerges as a rather obvious controlling figure in a surprising number of American radical novels, which frequently compress their critiques of the social milieu into images of place: The Jungle, Industrial Valley, Daughter of Earth, Parched Earth, Land of Plenty, USA, From the Kingdom of Necessity, and so on. More than just an emphasis on “setting,” these titles point to the American literary Left's curiously strong interest in the idea of nature and in the environmental consequences of industrial production under capitalism.

The full potential of an ecocritical approach to the Left tradition in American literature is too large a subject for this essay, but an analysis of Sinclair's The Jungle might serve as a token of the contributions Left literatures can make to ecocriticism and vice versa. If The Jungle is narrowly anthropocentric, it is also a text profoundly concerned with the relation of nature and human life: how the immigrant experience in industrial cities recapitulated and gave the lie to dominant ideologies about American pioneering, how economic classes experience the environmental damages consequent to production, how natural forces express themselves in class society, and finally, how the notion of uncorrupted nature itself might be reclaimed as a liberatory idea in a class society.

The main contribution of Sinclair's novel—its articulation of class and environmental concerns—was strikingly manifest in his intellectual development, as it was in the careers of a number of writers on the American Left.² Most Sinclair biographies stress the alternation of Sinclair's childhood care between his impoverished parents and a set of wealthy relatives as a formative influence on his intense interest in social class (for example, Floyd Dell, Upton Sinclair, 16-32). Although it is less frequently noticed, Sinclair's class experience was also closely linked to a pattern of alternation between urban and relatively natural settings. Through his adolescence, Sinclair's family depended on the graciousness of a wealthy aunt who ensconced the family in a Virginia country retreat and in a rustic Adirondack camp; when his father could get a few months' work in New York, Sinclair would return to the bedbugs and economic uncertainty suffered by “the tribe of city nomads, a product of the new age” (Sinclair, American Outpost, 22). Thus alternation of geographical environments became associated with an acute awareness of class difference, with the country and mountain existence striking him mainly as an arena of fulfillment and leisure, while urban life figured as an arena of struggle and poverty. His account of city life is full of dangerous episodes (Sinclair reports, “I was able to reckon up fourteen times that I had missed death by a hair's breadth”) that obviously shaped the young boy. The city life presented a vision of harsh natural selection for Sinclair, turning out hundreds of thousands of children onto the street “to develop their bodies and their wits,” for “in a rough general way, those who get caught by street-cars and motor-cars and trucks are those who are not quite so quick in their escape-reactions” (24). Usually, such emphases on natural selection support a monistic materialism in which the city life is depicted as equally subject to natural law as the wild, but for Sinclair the class connotations of the urban and the wild preserve an inverted dualism: life in nature, for Sinclair, paradoxically seemed to escape the harshest applications of natural law that obtained in the city.

Later in his adolescence, this identification of poverty and the urban, privilege and the rural or wild, was incorporated into Sinclair's career as a writer as well. The despised work at which Sinclair began his career at the age of sixteen—cranking out potboilers and jokes for a meager living while at City College—was expressly an aspect of urban life for the young writer, while major turning points in his development of a more “serious” literary career were associated with nature, the rural, or the wild. One Christmas holiday at his rich uncle's home, Sinclair set out to read his uncle's entire library of unopened leatherbound “classics” in the frenzied course of two weeks. As would become typical of his thought in later years, Sinclair described his appropriation of the literary value of the books by recourse to the environmental metaphor: “Some poet said to a rich man,” Sinclair writes, “‘You own the land and I own the landscape.’ To my kind uncle I said: ‘You own the books and I own the literature’” (75).

The aesthetic claim to literature and landscape alike are merged in Sinclair's recollection of his conversion to the literary career. Following his reading frenzy, the young writer had a rapturous hallucination in an open park, wherein he received his literary calling. The sublime experience was repeated, Sinclair reports, many times, often “associated with music and poetry, but still more frequently with natural beauty”: winter nights in Central Park, a summer night in the Adirondacks, twilight in the “far wilds of Ontario.” The strangeness of the experience drove Sinclair, as it were, deeper into the woods, since, as he admits, “I wanted to be free to behave like a lunatic, and yet not have anybody think me one.” After an embarrassing episode when a young girl came upon him while in his rapture, he “became a haunter of mountain-tops and of deep forests, the only safe places” (78).

When he felt ready to forsake potboilers for his first “serious” novel, a romance called Springtime and Harvest, Sinclair found it necessary to wait until spring was “far enough advanced so [he] could go to the country.” “My one desire,” he writes, “was to be alone; far away, somewhere in a forest, where the winds of ecstasy might sweep through my spirit.” Building a rude cabin on the shore of an isolated lake, the author lived a summer in this “Fairy Glen” a life after the pattern of Thoreau at Walden, observing the “daily miracle” of sunrise and feeling a special kinship with “the great winds that lashed the forest trees” (91). The retreat would serve to solace him again in the throes of his first, unsuccessful marriage, but the more general association of urban environments with want (and hack writing), and of natural settings with material and spiritual fulfillment (as well as “literature”), persisted.³

For Sinclair, then, environment and class were inextricably linked, an association that continued to characterize his thought as he shifted from romantic idealist to “proletarian writer” during the writing of The Jungle.⁴ In an inversion of his usual practice, Sinclair suspended his dislike of city poverty and voluntarily immersed himself for seven weeks in the brutal world of Chicago's meatpacking district, taking meals at a nearby settlement house and moving about the harrowing slaughtering lines disguised in ragged clothes and carrying a lunch pail to gather his facts. The central metaphor Sinclair developed for the staggeringly horrific proletarian district he had observed—the jungle, or “wilderness of civilization”—represented both an outgrowth and a development of his experience with class difference and its correspondence with the contrast of natural and citified environments.

Although nearly all the criticism of The Jungle understands its title metaphor as part of the novel's “naturalism,” it would be a mistake to assume that Sinclair's jungle metaphor describes a universally deterministic condition. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth, for the jungle, whether embodied in Packingtown itself or, later in the novel, in the agricultural countryside through which Jurgis tramps, is a specifically proletarian wilderness. Sinclair is at pains throughout the text to demonstrate that the industrial environment, which appears to Jurgis as a terrifying wilderness, is not experienced universally but only by members of a particular class under a particular economic regime. While begging for food during a period of unemployment, for example, Jurgis is befriended by the drunken son of a capitalist family. The young man, whom Jurgis learns to call “Master Freddie,” gives Jurgis ＄100, and Jurgis quickly finds himself invited to supper at the family mansion. The house, just a short distance from Packingtown, astounds Jurgis with its display of riches and presents a stunning contrast to the scenes of environmental degradation that surround the novel's laboring characters. While the Rudkuses live (and die) amid the filthy streams and “made land,” the wealth they create while laboring in the stockyards allows Master Freddie a private reserve on the lakefront. When he arrives at the address with his drunken host, Jurgis can only perceive the vast estate, which takes up a city block, as an element of nature itself—an “enormous granite pile.” Inside, the decor also recalls a privileged relation with nature, as Jurgis walks through gleaming stone halls. “From the walls strange shapes loomed out … wonderful and mysterious-looking in the half-light, purple and red and golden, like sunset glimmers in a shadowy forest,” Sinclair writes: apparently the “nature” in which Freddie lives has none of the threatening overtones of Jurgis's jungle (234-235).

Although this idea is hardly presented in sophisticated terms in The Jungle, the novel does provide a strong literary illustration of one of the Left's strongest critiques of environmentalism's claim to social neutrality. As Hans Enzensberger argues in “A Critique of Political Ecology,” environmental impairment has long had a class character. In a description that uncannily recalls Sinclair's portrait of Packingtown, he writes:

Industrialization made whole towns and areas of the countryside uninhabitable as long as 150 years ago. The environmental conditions at places of work, that is to say, in the English factories and pits, were—as innumerable documents demonstrate—dangerous to life. There was infernal noise. The air people breathed was polluted with explosive and poisonous gases, as well as with carcinogenic matter and particles that were highly contaminated with bacteria. The smell was unimaginable. In the labor process contagious poisons of all kinds were used. The workers' diet was bad. Food was adulterated. Safety measures were non-existent or were ignored. The overcrowding in the working-class quarters was notorious.

(24)

Despite the apparent nature of these environmental problems, Enzensberger notes, “it occurred to no one to draw pessimistic conclusions about the future of industrialization from these facts.” Not even the emergence of environmentalism in the twentieth century would adequately address this class experience of environmental damage. Environmentalism itself, he contends, is a class concern that emerged in part because of the rising cost of isolating oneself from increasingly universal environmental decline. “The ecological movement,” Enzensberger asserts, “has only come into being since the districts that the bourgeoisie inhabit have been exposed to those environmental burdens that industrialization brings with it” (25). If Enzensberger's assessment of environmentalism's unacknowledged class character is even partially right, as I think it is, attention to texts like The Jungle might begin to provide a necessary class dimension to the project of environmental criticism.

The failure to address the specifically class character of the jungle world has led to a second error in the critical consensus about the novel that an ecocritical perspective can correct—the astoundingly uniform disparagement of the novel as an aesthetic flop that fails to execute consistently the naturalistic implications of its environmental emphasis. For virtually all critics who have written about The Jungle, the novel's major structural flaw surfaces in its division into three fairly distinct sections marked off by changes in the story's settings: the initial naturalistic account of the Rudkus family's destruction by economic forces within Packingtown itself, an episode in which Jurgis leaves Packingtown for a summer on the tramp, and the final chapters, in which Jurgis returns to Packingtown, undergoes a sudden conversion to socialism, and is present during a number of lengthy declamations about the Cooperative Commonwealth. Although critics have uniformly praised the uncompromising depiction of the Rudkuses' grinding existence among the Packingtown proletariat, they have also with very few exceptions disparaged the supposed disruption of the story's organic development by the later sections. Walter Fuller Taylor's treatment of The Jungle in Literary History of the United States praises the “cumulative power” developed by Sinclair's lurid description of the jungle world, which “little in Zola or Dostoevski surpasses,” but also complains that the “fierce partisanship” of the novel's later chapters “estops it from being the fine naturalistic novel implied by some of its philosophical premises” (997). Harvey Swados asserts that “The Jungle must renew its hold on the imaginations of an entirely new generation of readers,” but nevertheless Swados concedes that “the more we examine a work like The Jungle, the more difficult it is to defend its specifically literary merits.” “No one could deny that structurally it is a broken-backed book,” he continues, “with most of the intensity concentrated in the first two-thirds, which are concerned with the struggle of the immigrants to sustain themselves in Packingtown, and most of the propaganda concentrated in the last third, after the dissolution of Jurgis Rudkus's family and during his conversion to socialism.” A critical perspective attuned to the ecological resonance of Sinclair's novel, however, can suggest a thoroughly different view, contesting the remarkably consistent critical consensus about the novel's structural flaws on three major points.

As the discussion above has indicated, Sinclair's fusion of class and environmental concerns ought to seriously challenge the assumptions about Sinclair's commitment to universal determinism that clearly underlie the critique of the novel's supposed structural flaws. Environmental ruin and bestial struggle are the rule in Packingtown, but there are those who live outside the determined landscape—a fact that logically allows the possibility of individual or class ascendance or escape from the jungle.

Moreover, although critics have seen Sinclair's intense interest in environmental description as simply an indication of determinism, the novel also quite evidently manifests a deep interest in the significance of the original nature that the industrial simulation has replaced. Although, as we have seen, the initial description of Packingtown suggests that the industrial perversion has entirely supplanted nature, in fact Sinclair peppers his narration with observations about recalcitrant scraps of nature that have resisted incorporation into the industrial simulation. For example, Sinclair's narrator pauses during the notorious hog-butchering passage long enough to note an exception to the dingy brown weeds (mixtures of pollution and organic life, Sinclair indicates) that otherwise appear to be the only plant life in the district (“of other verdure there is none,” he remarks in the serial version of the novel, “for nothing will grow in the smoke” [Sinclair, Lost Edition, 39]). “In front of Brown's General Office building,” Sinclair notes, “there grows a tiny plot of grass, and this, you may learn, is the only bit of green thing in Packingtown” (38). Comparing the little lawn to the anguished protests of the slaughtered hogs (and, by extension, to the protests of the exploited workers), Sinclair's narrator partially displaces the deterministic implications of his environment with what is essentially an issue of space: “in what can resistance be embodied?” or, in the environmental idiom of the novel, “what basis—literally, what ground—is there for opposition to destructive capitalism?” As Sinclair will eventually suggest, the answer to this question is that resistance—and renewal—must be embodied in a class-conscious proletariat but also in the environment itself. Redress for the proletariat and the environment go hand-in-hand, and the process of Jurgis's conscious move toward socialism begins, appropriately enough, away from Packingtown. While spending a season on the tramp, Jurgis begins to experience a less adulterated nature as a source of potential restoration. In an extended pastoral idyll that is usually understood as introducing the initial structural flaw in the novel, Jurgis enjoys the pleasures of summer as the land itself provides food, cleanliness, open space, rest, and even recreation. In a poignant episode, he bathes in a small spring, and as the accumulated grime of his industrial labors begins to wash away, he splashes about “like a very boy in his glee.” Nature itself, that is, affords Jurgis a material and an aesthetic experience that the industrial simulation of nature cannot. In addition to restoring Jurgis's humanity, the countryside affords him enough respite that he can evaluate his Packingtown experience with some clarity and begin to imagine a better life: as Jurgis argues with a farmer about hiring practices, the reader is aware that his experience of the countryside has begun his progress toward class consciousness. A positive “nature” and improvement of the lot of the proletariat are intimately linked in Sinclair's narrative.

This association between the restorative powers of nature and working-class ascendancy comes to fruition in the novel's closing chapters, a fact that should substantially alter the entrenched critique of the novel's supposed structural problems. Of course, the respite the countryside provides is seasonal, and Jurgis eventually is forced to return to Packingtown, where he is again subject to the degenerative forces of the industrial environment. After suffering a number of setbacks, Jurgis's body, once the guarantor of his employability, deteriorates. Just as all signs seem to point to his destruction, he happens upon an orator whose words effect Jurgis's conversion to socialism. The speaker's case against capitalism uses the customary environmental idiom of The Jungle, criticizing capitalism as a perverse simulation of nature. Of the capitalist class itself, he rages: “Their life is a contest among themselves for supremacy in ostentation and recklessness, the toil and anguish of the nations, the sweat and tears and blood of the human race! It is all theirs—it comes to them; just as all the springs pour into streamlets, and the streamlets into rivers, and the rivers into the ocean—so, automatically and inevitably, all the wealth of society comes to them. … The whole of society is in their grip, the whole labor of the world lies at their mercy—and like fierce wolves they rend and destroy, like ravening vultures they devour and tear!” (301).

“Images of nature” ecocritics are likely to be offended by this characterization of wolves, but it would be well to remember that the image occurs in the context of a critique of the simulation of nature in Packingtown, in which “nature” is entirely reduced to the predatory behavior of the capitalist. Jurgis's conversion comes immediately, and following on the positive connotations of nature developed in the tramping episodes, his reaction to the speaker is described as an encounter with a wilderness more genuine than the jungle with which he is so familiar: it occurs to him that seeing the speaker is “like coming suddenly upon some wild sight of nature—a mountain forest lashed by a tempest, a ship tossed about upon a stormy sea” (296). The episode and the chapters that follow are a favorite target of naturalist critics, who charge that they introduce a radical disjunction from the stylistic and philosophical elements that comprise the early sections of the text. Granville Hicks placed The Jungle in the mainstream of his “great tradition” of democratic-spirited American literature but faulted Sinclair for committing a “sin against the art of the novel: failure to assimilate the material he so wisely accumulates” with the socialist message of the final section (Great Tradition 203). Walter Rideout also suggested that the powerful vision of the jungle world is wasted by this sudden turn, in the novel's final chapters, from naturalistic fiction to “another kind of statement altogether.” The naturalistic description of Jurgis's victimization is far more creatively realized than is his existence as a socialist: “the reader cannot exist imaginatively in Jurgis's converted state even if willing, for Jurgis hardly exists himself. What it means to be a Socialist is given, not through the rich disorder of felt experience, but in such arbitrarily codified forms as political speeches, an essay on Party personalities, or the long conversation in monologues about the Cooperative Commonwealth which comprises most of the book's final chapter.” “While the capitalist damnation, the destruction of the immigrants, has been proven almost upon the reader's pulses … the Socialist salvation, after its initial impact, is intellectualized” (34).

Even the most enthusiastic reader of The Jungle would recognize the accuracy of Rideout's description of the final chapters, which are indeed “another kind of statement altogether.” But while virtually all critics have heretofore understood this abrupt shift as an aesthetic failing, a critical perspective attuned to emerging Left ecology might find something altogether more admirable in it.

The political optimism of the novel's ending, in which a crowd of socialist workers roar in exultation over positive election results, “Chicago will be ours!” seems (as does most of the explicit political rhetoric in the novel's final chapters) to conceive of capitalism simply as a property relationship rather than as a mode of production: the solution to the workers' problems consists in a transfer of ownership, so to speak, of the city's industries. But as Rossana Rossanda notes, capitalism “cannot simply be done away with by dispossessing private capitalists, even when this expropriation makes it possible in practice to render that part of surplus value available for other purposes than accumulation. The socialist revolution cannot be understood as a transfer of ownership leading to a more just distribution of wealth while other relationships remain alienated and reified. On the contrary, it must lead to totally revolutionized relationships between men and between men and things—that is to say, it must revolutionize the whole social production of their lives” (36).

In fact, Sinclair's environmental focus in The Jungle tends to teach just such a lesson: throughout the text, Sinclair has been at pains to describe the environmental consequences of capitalist industry not simply as the result of bad management or accumulation but as an integral feature of the productive process itself. Although a socialist takeover might result in a redistribution of the wealth created by production, there is no provision in the socialist theory propounded in The Jungle's closing pages for a revision of the mode of production, which would ostensibly continue its devastation of the environment under new management. Thus the political optimism that follows Jurgis's conversion is more than a stylistic break in the novel: it is a conceptual contradiction of a more serious nature. If the mode of production is itself despoiling, as the bulk of the novel suggests, it is difficult to imagine how the situation of the workers will be improved through the kind of appropriation proposed by the novel's finale—without, that is, a substantial revision of the technical basis of production itself.

The passage describing Jurgis's conversion consistently mediates this tension through environmental metaphor. As Jurgis responds to the orator's vision, it seems as if his socialist life cannot occur upon the same solid ground as his wage-slavery. The narration depicts his transformation into a socialist as a series of catastrophic events that alter the landscape itself, an “unfolding of vistas before him, a breaking of the ground beneath him.” The sky, too, “seemed to split” above Jurgis, as the words of the speaker impress Jurgis as a “crashing of thunder in his soul,” the emotions stirred within him, as a “flood.” “It was,” the narrator explains, “a most wonderful experience to him—an almost supernatural experience.” Like the “wild sight of nature” that the speaker recalls, the setting of Jurgis's new life must be imagined as a nature no longer devastated by production. From the natural wilderness setting of an imaginary mountaintop, Jurgis at last gains a useful perspective on the jungle in which he has been immersed: “It was like encountering an inhabitant of the fourth dimension of space, a being who was free from all one's own limitations. For four years, now, Jurgis had been wandering and blundering in the depths of a wilderness; and here, suddenly, a hand reached down and seized him, and lifted him out of it, and set him upon a mountain top, from which he could survey it all—could see the paths from which he had wandered, the morasses into which he had stumbled, the hiding places from which the beasts of prey had fallen upon him” (311).

Although the passage is meant to convey optimism about Jurgis's new condition, it also tends to undermine the note of the here-and-now effectivity of socialism upon which the text ends. To say that Sinclair must imagine Jurgis's socialism as occurring in nature is also to recognize Sinclair's inability to imagine a fulfilling life for his protagonist within the industrial landscape that the socialists propose to expropriate. The novel has so successfully given the picture of the city wilderness that the transition to socialism can't be imagined convincingly except in figural terms that apocalyptically erase the environmental consequences of the productive mode the socialists are about to seize.

Thus while Rideout and others have belittled the abstract, imaginative, and intellectualized nature of Sinclair's attempt to represent Jurgis's converted life, critics with an interest in the environmental implications of literary texts might usefully understand the novel's close as a logical continuation of Sinclair's interest in the connections between environmental and class politics. If, as I suggested earlier, a text like The Jungle can furnish ecocriticism with a much-needed class emphasis, an ecocritical perspective can itself offer much to Left theory and criticism by discerning the way in which Sinclair's novel embeds within an apparent formal flaw the need for the left to recognize the non-neutrality of the technological basis of production.

While it is doubtful that Sinclair had anything so sophisticated in mind as the creation of a literary form uniquely capable of articulating this simple political ecology, in fact that is just what he created. While the structural “break” in his novel may not satisfy the accustomed aesthetic standards of literary criticism, it does a fine job of highlighting a basic contradiction between the technological progressivism of socialist thought and the environmental evidence about industrial production. Despite nearly a century of criticism to the contrary, neither the picture of the social world nor the form of The Jungle itself is incoherent, flawed, or outworn. Rather, the novel is ambivalent—intently focused upon both the hope of social change and the necessity of revising production's environmental consequences. In a time when the split between environmentalism and anthropocentric social concerns is so easily accepted as an apriority of critical thought, even Sinclair's relatively simplistic attempt to maintain a connection between the two provides a relevant literary model, a usable cultural past upon which Left ecological criticism may be built.

Notes

1. This was Sinclair's original title for the pivotal eighteenth chapter of the serial novel published in the Appeal to Reason, which is conveniently available in The Lost First Edition of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, ed. Gene DeGruson (Atlanta: St. Luke's, 1988). Unless noted, all references to The Jungle are from the standard Doubleday edition of 1906.

2. In addition to Sinclair, an unusual proportion of writers on the American Left pursued their political-literary agendas while maintaining an interest in nature writing and the outdoors. Robert Cantwell wrote the 1934 strike novel The Land of Plenty—one of the central texts of the American proletarian tradition—while also writing feature stories for outdoors magazines. Cantwell went on to write a fine biography of naturalist Alexander Wilson. Noted Marxist critic Granville Hicks, who edited the Communist journal New Masses from 1934 to 1938, was also interested in the political possibilities of rural, regional life and economy, subjects he explored in Small Town. Hicks later wrote a utopian novel, The First to Awaken, which featured productively restrained, regionally planned, environmentally sustainable economies. The figure with whom most environmental thinkers are likely to be familiar is Left sociologist Scott Nearing, who wrote a number of radical novels and socialist treatises but who is primarily known for his long-term sustainable living experiment, detailed in the back-to-nature bible The Good Life.

3. Sinclair's The Journal of Arthur Stirling, a fictional suicide diary of a misunderstood and neglected literary genius, was written on the Raquette River in the Adirondacks. Another work, Prince Hagan, explored the wilderness-literature association more directly, casting the poet-protagonist as a Thoreauvian hero who retreats to the rustic discomforts of life in the woods for spiritual and artistic rejuvenation.

4. Although this term is usually associated with the Communist and fellow-traveling writers of the 1930s, it was a term Sinclair used to refer to himself.