52 Weeks of Literature, Book Ten: “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair–Agitprop Trash

Talk about badly dated.

Earlier this year, I called Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn “poverty porn”. I had no idea what I was talking about. No character in esteemed literary fiction, to my knowledge, has been through more trauma than Jurgis Rudkus, the protagonist of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle—a novel which, in the hindsight of a century plus, seems more muck than muckraking. For Sinclair, it isn’t enough that Rudkus and his family emigrate from Lithuania to 1900s Chicago and sink into the inferno of the meatpacking factories. They also have to get robbed, starved, ostracized, sacked, blacklisted, jailed, prostituted, raped, drowned, diseased, backstabbed, subjected to deadly childbirth, conned out of every last penny, drenched in booze, stuck in blizzards, and killed (not in that order). I have nothing against narratives about despair; case in point, I’ll be reading The Painted Bird shortly. I do have plenty against narratives without nuance, in which one is either completely good or completely evil, either a total perpetrator or a total victim, with no ethical complications and no insight into the ways that iotas of humor, ritual and hope can assist people in surviving the direst holocausts. The characters of Sinclair’s Packingtown are zero-dimensional. Rudkus is Baltic muscle, and nothing else. These people have no agency; they are less people who do than people to whom shit is done. And Sinclair the novelist’s exclusive interest is assuring that as much shit is done to these poor suckers as possible. The Book of Job had a point to make about faith in God. Sinclair’s point is…what, exactly?

I was honored to see Slavoj Zizek speak at the Free Library of Philadelphia almost two years ago. He told an anecdote about a lecture he was giving to a group of ethnic Somalis in Minnesota (I believe), during which he stated that if someone came up to him and starting imploring him to help “the starving children in Somalia,” he’d reply—in his über-thick Slovenian accent—“Fuck off! I’m trying to write my book on Hegel!” How do you think the Somali audience reacted? Let me tell you: they applauded him, because they understood that talking about Somalia like that is manipulative and exploitative, and more often than not loaded with toxic careerist intentions. The belief that Somalia is only what the news shows us about it—depraved, backwards and miserable—is racist, and any charity that reverts to the old colonialist rhetoric about how these guys “need our help” deserves to see their condescension mocked with relish. This generation of Somalis have seen a share of trauma and uprooting and have been without stuff we in the West take for granted, true. But those who have survived and not fallen prey to ideological crap—and most of us do survive—have formed unseen social structures by which they care for themselves and each other, and it is their incremental changes to the Somali political infrastructure, not greater access to Western resources, that will change their circumstances in the long run. Of course, I could be discussing any Third World nation, failed or otherwise.

Sinclair was a Socialist. Zizek is a qualified Marxist. I proudly voted for Bernie Sanders. I cannot imagine Zizek or Sanders liking this book any more than I did. Its naked manipulation puts it right at home with today’s caged puppy infomercials and guilt-inducing doomsday clickbait. (Maybe this hasn’t dated so badly after all.) I can at least respect Sinclair’s effort to expose every back alley on the map of corruption in the Chicago of his time. As nonfiction, that might work; as literature, in execution, it’s preposterous. This author spends three hundred plus pages unloading every single catastrophe he can think of onto the Rudkus family, in ways increasingly contrived and implausible. Every time Jurgis’ prospects are raised, Sinclair crushes them by the beginning of the next chapter at the latest. The effect is repetitive and numbing. Not that said prospects matter. It isn’t so much that Jurgis’ happier moments weren’t a relief because I, the reader, figured out they’d be fleeting. It’s that when the novel is happy, it’s a fairy tale, and when it’s mired in its characteristic gloom, it’s maudlin, self-indulgent, self-serving, and totally ignorant of the complex personalities that created and sustained Gilded Age capitalism, so many of whom were shamed into philanthropy towards life’s end. (Assuming that exploitation of labor for profit is done for sadism is historically irresponsible.) Throughout, the initially promising view into Lithuanian culture turns glib quickly and remains so, and the only aesthetic concern evident in the prose is the infinity of ways in which agony can be detailed.

Much of this novel’s abject failure stems from Sinclair’s inability and unwillingness to decide just what he ought to write. Jurgis has no definition and no identity. Depending on the author’s whims, Jurgis is alternately a sweeper of cow entrails, an assembly line worker, an unemployed drunkard, a vigilante, an imprisoned victim of injustice, an orphan, a widower, a father to a dead child, a hobo, a witness to American ostentation, a petty burglar, a bellhop, a political activist…and so forth. The sense of genre thus becomes deeply muddled. The best counterexample I know is John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy, a socialistic account of America and Europe in the years before the Depression that achieves its panoramic scope by conglomerating a cross section of characters from different literary genres and regions. The hobo, the capitalist huckster, the war vet, the socialite, the Hollywood star, the aspiring artist—these and more are all well defined by the literary conventions they embody, and they play off each other as Dos Passos scathingly attacks those conventions as part and parcel of consumerist capitalism’s stultifying mode of production. Desperate to capture the zeitgeist of Chicago with similar ambition but less space, Sinclair crams all of his favorite archetypes into an everyman vessel, meant to represent a whole society while really being a cipher. Halfway through, I stopped keeping track of Jurgis’ shifts and gave up on trying to delineate the other characters. I didn’t care.

No ending could have saved this unfocused, pandering, steaming guano heap of a book, but I was at least hopeful that Sinclair would see his pessimistic vision through to its logical end and have Jurgis martyred, hackneyed as it would be. Not the case—the final chapters are a cop-out. Socialism saves and redeems Jurgis, nabbing him a stable job and income, and the last few paragraphs portend a Eugene Debs presidency. (Never mind that to get there, Jurgis has to abandon his family in an act of cowardice—a convenient means for Sinclair to dump characters that he was making up along the way and that thus weren’t working, where the mounting death toll simply won’t do. Man, this book.) It took me a while to finish reading this, and as a result, my yearlong project was nearly derailed. In that hiatus, I thought a lot about how some youths go into the arts to strike it rich, while others aim to create actual fucking Art and/or to make a difference in the world through their Art. And because the young are frequently demeaned as stupid and naïve, their urges for creativity and invention are cruelly labeled pretentious, their idealism interpreted as evidence of a political agenda, and their output dismissed—hence the market domination of genre fiction and vapid Alice Munro wannabes. This begs the question: how can literature change the world if experiment and agenda are frowned upon? Here’s what I’ve learned: you start with the story and characters, and let everything stem organically from there. Remember the immortal last lines of Middlemarch: excessive ambition breeds disappointment, best laid plans backfire, and the ones who leave a mark on history are the ones you least expect. The Jungle got us the FDA; its importance in letters stops there. As we trundle around in a new Gilded Age, gearing up for yet another lesser-evil-versus-greater-evil election year, we need authors who can wrestle with the dilemmas of capitalism and socialism more honestly than Upton Sinclair ever did.

Grade: F

31 Days of Cinema, Days Twenty-Nine, Thirty and Thirty-One: “Yi Yi” | “Pather Panchali” | “Winter Sleep”

The opening of Yi Yi—the three-hour swansong of the late Taiwanese New Wave master Edward Yang—had me worried: the character introductions are uneven, the musical theme is saccharine. But the film quickly recovered after that. It traces one year in which a well-off Taipei family faces crises of communication, trust, maturation, and the major transitions that we like to package into things called milestones. The father, NJ (Nien-Jen Wu), heads to Tokyo to cement two relationships: one with the Japanese software developer Ota (a tender yet serious Issei Ogata)—with whom he talks in halting English, since neither knows the other’s native tongue and English is a global force—and one with an old flame, Sherry (Su-Yun Ko). His daughter, Ting-Ting, has a crush on Fatty (Pang Chang Yu), the moody boyfriend of her best friend, Lili (Meng-Chin Lin). Her little brother, Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang)—no doubt named for the filmmaker—is precocious and wise for his age, a fact that the adults around him don’t appreciate as much as they should. NJ’s mother is comatose but back at home; doctor’s orders are to keep talking with her as if she were conscious to keep her uplifted in case she does wake up. The family can say anything they want to her yet can’t expect reward from it. She is a vessel for catharsis, and one of the film’s chief themes is whether environment, or at least an unconscious entity, can have a tone, an emotion.

Several scenes occur in an empty room or in a room into which innocuous action is filtered, with the central narrative developing offstage in the actors’ urgent voices. There is a disconnect between sight and sound, yet also an esteem for and an effort to capture urban space unfettered by human presence or perception—an artifact and a memory that will withstand the most pressing concerns of the mortals on its periphery. We’re always on the periphery with these characters, not allowed to get too involved, because we’ve got three hours to hustle through, yet we grow quite attached to them. The standard rituals that form life’s milestones—the wedding, the firstborn birth, the anniversary—are all on display here, but Yang does not use them as clichés, rather as defense mechanisms by which people stave off the stress of transition, insomuch that by the time of the funeral that concludes the film, they’re exhausted and have no walls left to burn. There’s some commentary on globalization—McDonald’s, Coco-Cola, the English language—and we wonder why such staples in society have to promote themselves so aggressively when we all know what they are already (to foist their power, of course, in particular over youths), yet Yang’s view of this urban global culture is always impartial, leaving the people there to set the mood. Fatty does collapse into cliché—as he becomes the mortality-obsessed teen turned homicidal—and I was disappointed in his arc. But the film ends strong, and Yang-Yang’s climactic speech is undeniable.

Grade: A-

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As with most though not all debut films, Pather Panchali—the world’s introduction to West Bengali master Satyajit Ray—has its shortcomings, though it was and is quite an auspicious debut, especially considering the immense poverty and dearth of resources that it was made under and depicts. Based on a novel by B. Bandhopadhyay, and kicking off the filmmaker’s Apu trilogy, the film chronicles the efforts of Sarbajaya (Karuna Banerjee) to care for her two children, Apu (Subir Banerjee) and Durga (Runki Banerjee and Uma Dasgupta) and her aged cousin Indir—played by Chunibala Devi, in a performance so great, so minimalist and sexless and stoic, that I thought she was a man—in the absence of her husband Harihar (Kanu Banerjee), a poet who goes off to the city for work. Note that none of the Banerjees were related, yet their family unit is plausible throughout, so you could be forgiven for mistaking the coincidence. The story is built from vignettes that are connected perhaps a bit too loosely. There’s a contrast between the urban-industrial and the rural-pastoral that goes undeveloped; one scene set in a field of train tracks and power lines is supposed to suffice. I could have used more of that.

Granted, there is plenty of contrast between wealth and destitution, as is evidenced by Durga’s incessant impulse to steal fruits from the orchard of the family’s neighbor and (in a smattering of irony that I hope I am recalling correctly) once-landlord. And the vignettes host some truly beautiful moments: Apu’s introduction, which is constructed ominously enough to foretell a later death; the aforementioned train; an interaction with a candy vendor; a bathing scene; a play-within-the-play; a brutal monsoon; and an extended, impressionistic shot of a cow standing in the middle of ruins right after it. The photography is by Subrata Mitra, also debuting, and it is baffling that he had no experience with a camera before this. The film’s testament to innate talent over pedigree—to earning a living off artistic merit and not off playing to identifiable tropes, even while not everyone can succeed at that, much less use that to escape poverty—is thus very genuine. I hesitate to give away too much about the film, as it ends in tragedy (the monsoon is the least of it), and it is the sort of tragedy you must feel rather than be told about. Ray constructs this catastrophe with long takes, with set pieces of viscous silence and suspense, and the payoff is loud and vigorous. If there is one element that makes this film worth watching, however, it’s the music of Ravi Shankar. It doesn’t take long to see how he got famous. It’s stunning how broad an emotional range that man was able to create using just a handful of sitars and percussion. The soundtrack here is an aural feast.

Grade: A-

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The last three days of my July challenge saw me going west across Asia, from the Taiwan of Yi Yi to Ray’s India, finally ending with Winter Sleep in Turkey, on the cusp of Europe inasmuch as I was on the edge of the month, looking into an August in which I would not be burdened with thirty-one films. There is something sacred about an ending, something furtive and ethereal about having gone through a film—or a group of films—as a rite of passage, and emerging with the awareness of how it culminates. Spoilers cannot suffice for this feeling. Much of these emotions in fact were conjured by the Cappadocia depicted in this film, a borderland of modern buildings and houses carved into jagged, imbalanced, unstable towers of rock, a clash between nature and man, old and new, tradition and liberty. The most ostentatious of these constructions is an inn, the Hotel Othello, run by Aydin (the superb Haluk Bilginer), a retired actor who spends his days writing hot air for the local news (on his rare Mac laptop, no less), extracting rent from the villagers, and insisting to himself that he will start writing his history of the Turkish theatre very soon. Towards the beginning, he’s riding shotgun in a truck when an indignant kid chucks a stone at his window. The entire plot emanates from that single moment.

Adapted by Nuri Bilge Ceylan (who won the Palme d’Or for this, after several attempts) from some Chekhov stories, Sleep runs at over three hours and has been accused of wheel spinning. I disagree with that sentiment. The story uses as an axle two confrontations in its middle act—one between Aydin and his blasé sister Necla (Demet Akbag), the other between Aydin and his younger, more humane and simmering ex-wife Nihal (Melisa Sözen)—that are almost twenty minutes apiece. These scenes and others felt much more to me like real life than contrived cinema. People on different sides of a coin try to get their points across, things boil, they reach a détente and fall silent, then one of them can’t resist muttering a riposte, and the other’s passions grow inflamed, and it all starts up again and repeats itself…and so on. Tensions play out in the void between words, when words are calculated, as much as when they are spoken, and when they are, they aren’t always clear or accurately chosen or what ought to be said. Writing and acting scenes like that is a hundred times easier said than done, and Ceylan and his ensemble pull it off time and again. The effect is more hooking and exhilarating than one might think a three-hour gabfest should be. Throughout, the film shows awareness of time as a straggling process, but not without a pitch-black sense of humor. At one point, Aydin is told that his train is delayed by an hour, and that’s about how much of the film is left. Characters invoke Shakespeare and the tenets of Islam, with as much pretension as one may expect from artists and wordsmiths, yet the film is far from pretentious, as it exploits these references for irony and meta-commentary, which it earns. There is banal hunting scene, a use of English as a universal tongue similar to that in Yi Yi, and a climactic act of pure spite that nearly had me jumping from my seat. I’m with the Cannes jury here; this was a tremendous closer to the month.

Grade: A

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Well, folks, I’ve done it. Yes, it took me longer than I’d hoped to get the reviews finished, and yes, I abandoned my original schedule completely in the final days. Never mind. I watched all thirty-one films I said I’d watch, all within the month of July, and though the execution wasn’t perfect, the challenge was a success. There were a few duds and disappointments, but gratefully, there were no outright bad films in the bunch (except for maybe La Ciénaga), and I discovered five masterpieces (Eternity and a Day; Lore; In Vanda’s Room; Je, Tu, Il, Elle; and Open Your Eyes), several films that were close to, and several films that may grow on me in the coming weeks–which is more or less what I set out to do. Thanks to everyone who watched and read along, or who will watch and read along in the future. This challenge nabbed this blog its greatest number of readers yet (special thanks to the Robert Pattinson fans who recognized my approval of The Rover), and I will definitely do it again in the future (next January, perhaps) and am even contemplating making it an annual or twice-yearly tradition. I already have another list of films to get through. Furthermore, taking the effectiveness of this effort into account, I’m thinking of doing a similar challenge for literature, as God knows there are too many books that I need to read, so giving myself a concrete schedule of books just might do the trick. That’d have to be a yearlong endeavor, though, and the reading of each book would have to be drawn out to a week–two weeks, if it’s long. It’ll be more complicated. But it might be worth it, so don’t be surprised if you see a “52 Weeks of Literature” challenge springing up next year. In the meantime, I’m more satisfied than I’ve ever been to take a break from viewing films, and I’ll be glad to turn my focus back onto my Great Films reviews and other projects. Once again: thanks for reading!