Sinclair Novel the Jungle

Jungle

Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle is perhaps best known for its historical and journalistic contributions, because the book opened the public's eyes to the horrors of the American meatpacking industry, and particularly its appalling health and safety standards. However, Sinclair's novel also represents an aesthetic and ideological advancement that is often overlooked in favor of the book's somewhat more dramatic accounts of life inside a slaughterhouse and meatpacking plant. In the novel, Jurgis Rudkus travels from naive belief in an American dream to jaded yet-hopeful acceptance of the possibility offered by socialist agitation, and his entire journey is relayed in a kind of naturalistic language that seeks to uncover the larger structures of power and oppression that instigate the specific injustices of the novel. By examining Rudkus' journey in the context of an aesthetic movement designed to capture, as clearly as possible, the objective, naturalistic reality behind experience, one can see how the same attention to detail that makes The Jungle such an important work of muckraking journalism also makes it an artistic and ideological advancement.

The first true hint that Jurgis' experience in America is not going to be what he expected comes near the end of the second chapter, when he and his wife are looking over their new home, and it is the novel's particular narrative style that makes these hints so effective. Sinclair's style is that particular kind of naturalism that arose at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, in that he focuses on describing the naturalistic details of the scene without going into such extreme detail that the narration strays into aestheticism. Instead, he connects these naturalistic details to larger cultural factors in order to make a particular ideological statement while couching it in terms of objective description. While Sinclair's goal is quite clearly agitation and "the crushing defeat of […] arrogant plutocrat[s] by the power of the common people," his case is particularly effective because he makes it by offering detailed, objective descriptions of what goes on in the packing district and the effect this has on the lives of its residents (Sinclair 263). As will be seen, Jurgis' ideological transformation is made possible by the combination of naturalistic description and ironic narration that defines Sinclair's style, and which makes the eventual ideological turn all the more believable.

For example, in the scene where Jurgis and his wife Ona survey Chicago's packing district, the narrator talks about "a great brickyard, with smoking chimneys," where "they took out the soil to make bricks, and then they filled it up again with garbage, which seemed to Jurgis and Ona a felicitous arrangement, characteristic of an enterprising country like America" (Sinclair 27). Jurgis and Ona do not see any irony in viewing the replacing of soil with garbage to be a process characteristic of America, and thus the chapter ends with an even more ironic description, this time regarding the way Jurgis and Ona actually view their dirty, dangerous surroundings. The narrator states that:

To the two who stood watching while the darkness swallowed it up, it seemed a dream of wonder, with its talc of human energy, of things being done, of employment for thousands upon thousands of men, of opportunity and freedom, of life and love and joy. When they came away, arm in arm, Jurgis was saying, "Tomorrow I shall go there and get a job!" (Sinclair 27)

From the beginning Sinclair's narration and description informs the audience of the trajectory Jurgis' life is going to take, but the novel includes a running irony because despite all of their hardships, the characters never doubt that they will fail until the moment they actually do. When Jurgis and Ona see the garbage and exploitation of the packing district for the first time, they do not recoil in horror, but rather excite themselves at the prospect of being part of this exploitation. Jurgis' perspective will change completely by the end of the novel, and it is a testament to Sinclair's particular style that this change appears believable and even natural.

In a sense, the initial description of bricks being made can be seen as a metaphor for the entire process of employment, unemployment, and tragedy that Jurgis experiences, because the exploitation of the worker is akin to the harvesting of the soil and replacing it with garbage. In the same way that the brick-makers take out the soil and replace it with garbage, so too does the capitalist system portrayed in The Jungle take the best parts out of human beings and replaces them with bitterness, failure, oppression, and death. Jurgis arrives in the United States with his family in tow, but by the end of the novel, he is entirely alone, as literally everyone else has been claimed by the myth of the American Dream, usually dying in pitiful, meaningless ways. Jurgis remains, but he is reduced to a shell of his former self, and it is not until he is floating free of any of his remaining family that he begins to gradually realize the truth of his situation. Even then, however, he cannot do anything about it, because he lacks the ideological tools to actually make sense of the scale of corruption and control that defines the political and economic structures which surround him.

Sinclair's focus on naturalistic description and the myth of the American Dream leads Jurgis quite naturally to the rise of socialism and the trade unions, because the novel presents the working conditions of 1906 America, both in terms of factory conditions and the power dynamic between management and labor, in such a way that a reasonable reader cannot help but identify with the socialist argument. Jurgis is reduced to nothing more than "an outcast and a tramp" by the circumstances of American capitalism, and it is only when he discovers socialism that he is finally able to become "sober and industrious" (Sinclair 281, 319). Sinclair's descriptions and narrations take the reader down an increasingly bleak hole, but by doing so, the novel is able to make the eventual discovery and celebration of socialism appear that much more naturalistic; because the utter destruction of any notion of American fairness or justice occurs over the majority of the novel, the proposition that socialism is the answer is far easier to palate by the end, because Sinclair has broken down any naive mental allegiance the reader might have to jingoistic concepts of freedom, liberty, or the American Dream.