Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: Frank Norris’s The Octopus ends with what a number of critics have described as an imperial gesture. Presley, the novel’s poet, boards a ship full of wheat and steams off towards India, completing what one character refers to as the “manifest destiny” of the Anglo-Saxon. Written only a few years after Norris covered the Spanish-American war as a correspondent, it is not surprising that Norris would associate Presley’s departure with tropes of expansion and spatial extension, and a common reading of this ending is that it ushers in a new age of U.S. westward expansion that replaces pioneering and settlement with markets and trade. In contrast to such readings, this paper argues that tropes of expansion do not adequately describe the spatial imaginary at work in the construction of U.S. imperial space. By connecting the novel’s explicit consideration of literary aesthetics to its equally explicit concern with space, I argue that The Octopus presents imperial space in the form of a failed formalism. Just as Presley’s fails to write a poem that encompasses both the (realist) minutia of farming in California and the more expansive (romantic) reach of California as a frontier for Anglo-Saxon expansion, descriptions of landscape in the novel repeatedly stage a disconnect between quotidian detail and tropes of expansiveness. Consequently, the novel repeatedly stages the failure of aesthetic experience to resolve a formal tension between detailed local spaces and the abstract spatial scale of a global totality.

Rather than read this aesthetic failure as the failure of U.S. empire, I use the 1902 Insular Cases to argue that this failed formalism is precisely the aesthetic form that U.S. imperial space takes. In the Insular Cases, the Supreme Court ambivalently defined imperial possessions like Puerto Rico and the Philippines as both a part of and apart from the U.S. body politic. These cases refigured national space in such a way that some spaces could be simultaneously included in and excluded from the body politic, thereby impeding a formal resolution to the relation between the constituent parts of a U.S. empire and its imaginary totality. This ambivalent definition of territorial sovereignty allowed colonial administrators to copy U.S. political forms while exempting colonial bureaucracies from constitutional oversight. Moving between legal cases and literary form, this paper argues that The Octopus registers the role that aesthetics played in making this spatial imaginary intelligible.

While this paper intervenes in recent discussions of the cultural politics of naturalism (eg Russ Castronovo “Geo-Aesthetics: Globalism Fascism and Frank Norris”), it also addresses more broadly based theories of American globalization, especially by scholars like Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Neil Smith, who have claimed that Progressive Era imperialism was a mode of territorial expansion while later instances of U.S. expansion have deployed a mode of “deterritorialization.” Keeping in mind the spatial ambivalence revealed through the relation between aesthetics and space, this paper ends by suggesting an alternative genealogy for U.S. globalization.