“the terror of sheer bigness”: Microplotting Immensity in Frank Norris’s The Octopus

abstract:This article traces the stylistic consequences of the attempt to map seemingly infinitely expanding networks of trade and value in Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901). It focuses on the rehearsal at the level of the sentence of characters’ grappling with the “terror of sheer bigness,” and the complex interrelation of public and private, political and personal, local and global inaugurated by the railroad’s management of the distribution of wheat. The textures of Norris’s style—his grammar, syntax, and diction—are implicated in the novel’s interrogation and negotiation of these dislocations. From the failures of mimetic phrasing spiralling across lengthy cumulative sentences to patterns of phrasal repetition, the various microplots at work within the novel’s verbal landscapes represent an essential and often overlooked facet of the force of The Octopus.