- Sinclair, Upton.
The Jungle.
Tucson, AZ: See Sharp Press, [1905] 2003.
ISBN 1-884365-30-2.
-
A century ago, in 1905, the socialist weekly The Appeal to
Reason began to run Upton Sinclair's novel The
Jungle in serial form. The editors of the paper had
commissioned the work, giving the author $500 to investigate the
Chicago meat packing industry and conditions of its immigrant
workers. After lengthy negotiations, Macmillan rejected the novel,
and Sinclair took the book to Doubleday, which published it in 1906.
The book became an immediate bestseller, has remained in print ever
since, spurred the passage of the federal Pure Food and Drug Act in
the very year of its publication, and launched Sinclair's career as
the foremost American muckraker. The book edition published in 1906
was cut substantially from the original serial in The Appeal to
Reason, which remained out of print until 1988 and the
2003 publication of this slightly different version based upon a
subsequent serialisation in another socialist periodical.
Five chapters and about one third of the text of the original edition
presented here were cut in the 1906 Doubleday version, which is
considered the canonical text.
This volume contains an introduction
written by a professor of American Literature at that august
institution of higher learning, the Pittsburg State University of
Pittsburg, Kansas, which inarticulately thrashes about trying to gin
up a conspiracy theory behind the elisions and changes in the book
edition. The only problem with this theory is, as is so often the
case with postmodern analyses by Literature professors (even those who
are not “anti-corporate, feminist” novelists), the facts.
It's hard to make a case for “censorship”, when the changes to the
text were made by the author himself, who insisted over the rest of
his long and hugely successful career that the changes were not
significant to the message of the book. Given that The Appeal
to Reason, which had funded the project, stopped running the
novel two thirds of the way through due to reader complaints demanding news
instead of fiction, one could argue persuasively that cutting
one third was responding to reader feedback from an audience highly
receptive to the subject matter. Besides, what does it mean to
“censor” a work of fiction, anyway?
One often encounters mentions of The Jungle which
suggest those making them aren't aware it's a novel as opposed to
factual reportage, which probably indicates the writer hasn't
read the book, or only encountered excerpts years ago in some
college course. While there's no doubt the horrors Sinclair
describes are genuine, he uses the story of the protagonist, Jurgis
Rudkos, as a
Pilgrim's Progress to illustrate
them, often with implausible coincidences and other story
devices to tell the tale. Chapters 32 through the conclusion are
rather jarring. What was up until that point a gritty tale of
life on the streets and in the stockyards of Chicago suddenly
mutates into a thinly disguised socialist polemic written in
highfalutin English which would almost certainly go right past
an uneducated immigrant just a few years off the boat; it
reminded me of nothing so much as John Galt's speech near
the end of Atlas Shrugged.
It does, however, provide insight into the utopian socialism
of the early 1900s which, notwithstanding many present-day
treatments, was directed as much against government corruption as
the depredations of big business.
April 2005 