Analysis of Frank Norris's Octopus

Castronovo, Russ. "Geo-Aesthetics: Fascism, Globalism, and Frank Norris." Boundary 2, 30.3 (2003): 157-184.

Castronovo argues that before a land or region can be conquered it must be reduced to an intellectual concept. Political entities exploit formalist attributes such as unity, balance and symmetry (aesthetics) to create these concepts. In the early 19th century, Manifest Destiny gave Americans a philosophy that transformed the western frontier from unforgiving wilderness into something that could be tamed. The process can also be reversed: political pressure can influence an artist's aesthetic. Castronovo positions The Octopus in the center of these circular forces, showing that the novel reacts to critical issues of Norris's era, while also predicting the rise of a transnational future where market forces supersede national boundaries to create a unified, global community.

Castronovo concedes The Octopus is aesthetically flawed and buttresses his argument by "studying the work of the early historians of Manifest Destiny, philosophers of art such as Walter Benjamin and Friedrich Schiller, and contemporary theorists of the global" (158). Castronovo's wide-ranging argument is reined in with quotations from Frank Norris's essays "The Great American Novelist" and "The Frontier Gone at Last: How Our Race Pushed It Westward around the World and Now Moves Eastward Again."

Hochman, Barbara. "Reading Homer in the 1890s: Interpretive Conventions and Norris'

The Octopus." American Literary Realism 2003 Winter 35 (2): 120-131.

Frank Norris's debt to Homer in The Octopus is clear: Presley reads The Odyssey and dreams of writing an epic of the west. Hochman suggests that Norris's reading of Homer's work was impacted by late 19th century interpretations of the The Iliad and The Odyssey. Turn-of-the-century critics read Homer to appreciate his works' "aesthetic unity and moral content" (121). Scholars of The Iliad were especially interested in the attributes of the epic hero, and the way they were manifested by Achilles. Hochman draws an analogy between Book XXIV of The Iliad and Presley's visit with Hilma in the end of The Octopus. Hilma represents a recurring character in Norris's work--the mourning obsessed. Hochman suggests that Presley is able to overcome his grief, in a way that Hilma can't. Presley's victory in this regard is similar to Achilles' finally overcoming despair at the death of Patrocles. Citing Norris's essay "The Responsibilities of the Novelist," Hochman contends that Norris identified "Odysseus with the turn-of-the-century fiction writer" (126) in order to defend realist and naturalist writers from the harsh critique of classicists.

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