Telling Truth Through Fiction, Part 2
The world is filled with tragedies, some far away, some right next door or even in our own homes.
This week, we continue looking at the way that novelist Upton Sinclair sought to report the truth through fiction. We are skipping the podcast version this week because we are on location in Italy, where we are shooting the video for our first Moving Experience, a virtual tour of the Appian Way. Look for it next month here on Mind Inclined.
The world is filled with tragedies, some far away, some right next door or even in our own homes.
You surely have noticed a difference in the ways you have experienced the tragedies in your own life. The closer they come, the harder they feel.
A Novel Approach to Exposé
This direct relationship between proximity and pain helps to explain why some writers have chosen to "cover" tragedies in the form of novels instead of journalism. After all, the "hard news" of conventional journalism typically focuses on events, not people, and news articles are shorter than novels, so there's little opportunity to personalize the coverage, to make the tragedy hit home, so to speak.
In 1904, the writer Upton Sinclair received a commission to write a novel exposing the "wage slavery" then common in Chicago, home of the Union Stockyards, the center of the meatpacking industry. The novel form allowed him to tell a story that would resonate with readers, ultimately, he hoped, moving them to action.
Consider, for example, the first chapter of the resulting novel, The Jungle. The content of this chapter would seem to have nothing to do with the economic exploitation and political corruption that Sinclair seems determined to expose throughout the rest of the novel. The scene is of a wedding reception for two Lithuanian immigrants: a young man named Jurgis, the novel's protagonist, and his beloved Ona. Along way, we meet family members such as Ona's cousin Marija and Jurgis's father, Antanas. Sinclair takes pains to personalize these characters, at times even playing to our emotions, as when he refers to "the supreme hour of ecstasy in the life of one of God's gentlest creatures, the scene of the wedding feast and the joy-transfiguration of little Ona Lukoszaite!" He continues:
“She stood in the doorway . . .and in her happiness painful to look upon. There was a light of wonder in her eyes and her lids trembled, and her otherwise wan little face was flushed. . . .She was so young—not quite sixteen—and small for her age, a mere child; and she had just been married--and married to Jurgis.”
While this passage does nothing to advance the plot, it helps us to get to know the characters so that we can empathize with them.
There will be plenty of opportunities for us to empathize over the course of the ensuing chapters. Jurgis, Ona, Marija, Antanas, and other characters confront a barrage of trials, tribulations, and outright disasters, generally the results of the economic and political systems in which they strive to survive.
When they suffer, we suffer with them—to a lesser degree than real people in such circumstances would, of course, but to a far greater degree than we would if we were reading a news article filled with statistics and perhaps a few brief references to individual persons. That's the power of literature: it encourages, even compels empathy. Sinclair's account of Jurgis and Ona's marriage, for example, helps us to feel the impact of their trials:
“She had to be away from him all the time, and bear her own troubles while he was bearing his; and then, when she came home, she was so worn out, and whenever they talked they had only their worries to talk of—truly it was hard, in such a life, to keep any sentiment alive.”
Here we can appreciate the value of the opening scene of the wedding reception: what had started as something so promising and lovely has begun to dry up in this world of poverty and overwork—and we feel the impact because we know these characters.
A Warped World
Sinclair goes beyond personalizing the impact of exploitation and corruption, however. Like Frederick Douglass, when he exposed the evils of slavery in an 1845 autobiographical narrative, the author of The Jungle appeals to our moral sensibilities when he exposes the warped system in which these characters are trapped.
Early in the novel, Jurgis repeatedly offers the same solution to problems that he and his family face, saying simply, "I will work harder." This simple sentence is a brilliant touch on Sinclair's part, since it succinctly captures a deeply held American value: hard work leads to success. Benjamin Franklin had made the case more than a century earlier in his autobiography and aphorisms, and the lack of a formal class system had made it possible for some Americans, in theory if not always in practice, to work their way up the economic and social ladders.
Hard work, however, is not enough in the system in which Jurgis finds himself. Indeed, it's not even part of the calculus, as Sinclair sees it. He explains:
“Jurgis had come there, and thought he was going to make himself useful, and rise and become a skilled man; but he would soon find out his error—for nobody rose in Packingtown by doing good work.”
Sinclair later explains that "the man who told tales and spied upon his fellows would rise; but the man who minded his own business and did his work—why, they would ‘speed him up’ till they had worn him out and then they would throw him out into the gutter.”
With these passages, Sinclair takes the bold step of giving the lie to the American dream. In a polemical novel, it's an ingenious move because the corruption of this dream is as intellectually offensive as the passages about the characters' suffering is emotionally potent. This system, Sinclair argues, is not merely oppressive and destructive; it's also warped, wrong, anti-American.
The Power of the Personal
In The Jungle, Upton Sinclair depicted the tragedies that were taking place in real places: the Union Stockyards and the nearby Back of the Yards on the south side of Chicago. What's more, he brought these tragedies close to home and increased their impact by writing a novel in which he could elicit both our empathy and our intellectual outrage.
As I explained in an earlier post, the most obvious result of the novel was the passage of legislation regulating the food industry, not a widespread triumph of Socialism, as Sinclair apparently had hoped, or even immediate, dramatic reforms to end "wage slavery." He wrote, "I aimed at the public's heart, and I accidentally hit it in the stomach."
Still, the personalization that the novel form allowed made for a powerful exposé, a form of investigative fiction with both emotional and intellectual resonance.