The Jungle

 For those who believe that literature can have a powerful, positive, effect on society, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) is both a heartening and a disheartening example. Sinclair's portrait of the horrific living conditions of recent immigrants to the United States, and his specific portrait of the horrors of employment in the meat-packing industry, had a powerful effect beyond the one it had on its immediate readers. It led, dramatically and directly, to the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906, which greatly improved conditions at these plants -- for the meat, at any rate. The situation of the workers, and of immigrant families generally, did not improve, leading Sinclair to comment, with some bitterness, that he had "aimed at the public's heart, and by accident hit it in the stomach." Sinclair's embrace of the worker's cause, and of the promise of organizing trade unions, was prescient -- but in his day, he was more often hated than praised for it, and it's quite possible that, were a similar such story to appear today, it might re-ignite some of these same debates, which perhaps have never really gone away -- for some, "socialist" is still as dirty a word as it was in 1906.

The Jungle has been adapted in many forms, the first being a silent film made in 1914. Sinclair admired the film so much that he appeared in person in it as a sort of prologue and epilogue; once its first commercial run was completed, he bought the rights to the original negative with the hope of having it screened to wider audience. Unfortunately, as with many films of this era, no print of this version survives, though one can get something of a sense of it from the movie posters and publicity materials. A new film version was planned in 2011 by David Schwimmer (There Will Be Blood), but it was never made. And, a few years earlier. Peter Kuper also did a version for the re-booted "Classics Illustrated" series; Kuper's adaptation drew from the visual vocabulary of modernist art, making it in some ways feel closer to the period, though some readers found his version a bit too grotesque for their tastes.

Kristina Gehrmann is a graphic novelist and artist from Germany with quite a few major works to her credit, although her version of The Jungle is the first to appear in print in English. In 2015, her most substantial work -- Im Eisland ("In the Land of Ice") was published in Germany; it has since appeared in English as a webcomic, which you can read here. Filling three volumes, it undertakes to retell the story of the ill-fated Franklin expedition to the Arctic, a voyage that began with optimism and cheers and ended with cannibalism and despair. As she did with Im Eisland, Gehrmann combines meticulously researched and detailed backgrounds, clothing, and historical perspective with a facial style that is somewhat more like that of Japanese manga than of strict realism. Within that style, though, Gehrmann conveys emotion with masterful simplicity, leading a reviewer for the New York Journal of Books to remark that “In many ways, Gehrmann achieves what Upton Sinclair never quite did: She makes the characters real and complex, and she makes the political story a movingly human one.” As with Kuper's Heart of Darkness, Gehrmann's Jungle is mainly monochrome -- except for the visitations of red -- as meat, as blood, as human blushes and fury -- which haunts these pages to wonderful effect.

So read the first half of The Jungle -- and post your thoughts about it here. And, if you like, you can phrase your comment as a question for the author; with her permission, I'll be passing along some of these questions to her, and we can have the rare experience of getting answers directly from the artist/adapter herself!

Oranges are Not the Only Fruit

In the realm of semi-autobiographical first novels, stands out from the crowd -- its story might seem implausible in any other guise, and indeed when in 2013 Winterson published a nonfiction account of her childhood and youth -- Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? -- it almost paled by comparison. In both books, not unexpectedly, it's the main character's mother who stands out, not simply for her inflexible views on every detail of the proper conduct of life, but for the wry and often quite funny ways her daughter finds to resist them.

The setting is England, but not the Mary Poppins version that many Americans have in their minds -- rather, it's the dreary, drafty, drab working-class town of Accrington, whose principal claim to fame is the loss of a great swathe of its young men -- known as the Accrington Pals -- in World War I. In this world drained of color, the initially dutiful daughter Jeanette eventually grows in directions that place her increasingly at odds with her mother, and eventually, as she begins to identify as a lesbian, into outright violation of the core tenets of her mother's religious faith. The efforts that her mother and her fellow Pentacostals make to exorcise Jeanette's sexuality are disturbing and strange, but as readers we also sense from the start that they're likely to be futile.

Ultimately, it's a coming-of-age tale, and also a tale of a young woman coming into further self-awareness as a literary creator, an artist. You can read about Winterson's actual life on her website -- but don't read it until you're well along in the novel -- in her case, it's a bit difficult to say which is stranger, the 'truth' or the fiction. Winterson is also adamant that she does not want the book to be seen as a "lesbian novel" -- any more than a book about anyone should be limited in its audience to those who share the identity of its main character -- and its enduring popularity is testimony to the wide range of readers it has found.

So how does the story speak to you? Are there elements of the world it discloses, the characters, the situations, that evoke aspects of your own life? And what about the role of religion which, as we've discussed in class, seems just as often to stir rebellion as it is to reproduce faith? Your thoughts below.

Eggshells

When she heard that her first novel, Eggshells, had won the prestigious 2018 Rooney Prize, bestowed by Ireland's Trinity College, she might be forgiven her initial shock -- since, at that very moment, she was still employed by that same Trinity College -- as a janitor.

She was also a graduate of the college, and like many in her situation, needed a "day job" to pay the bills while she labored on her book. At the time she won the Rooney prize, she'd moved on to her second novel, but was beginning to despair of ever having a literary career. For, it must be admitted, it's no easy path becoming a writer -- if by "writer" you mean being able to earn a living at it. As of this writing, she still works at Trinity.

Central Dublin (click to enlarge)

The story of Eggshells is a strange one -- in some ways paralleling the Palm-Wine Drinkard. Where the drinkard explored "bushes," the narrator of Eggshells explores Dublin, not in the usual way of someone needing to get to work or run errands, but with a kind of deliberate randomness, designed to eventually cover the city mile by crooked mile. She's fortunate in that she has a home and money, but otherwise is quite alone in the world, at least until "Penelope" answers her advertisement for a friend. She, like the Drinkard, also has extraordinary powers, and is able to read the tea leaves of city streets and sights as well as any fortune teller. And yet, at the same time, she seems not to have a very good grasp of how to behave in a conventional manner -- perhaps just what one would expect were one a changeling, a child from the fairy land of Tir naNóg substituted in the cradle for a human infant. But how to get "back"?

I've provided a map of central Dublin that you can refer to as you read of her peregrinations; you should also feel very free to Google any unfamiliar landmarks or features that you hear about. I've often wondered whether, in reading this novel, it's better to know Dublin a bit -- but I think that, either way, the landscape here is not so much the "dear dirty Dublin" of everyday reality, but more like one of the Drinkard's "bushes" -- a jigsaw puzzle of fantastical pieces, a canvas for the imagination, a great wandering -- one in which the imagination is needed even if reality is at hand. So read -- and choose an episode, a sight, a moment that stirred your imagination -- and post about it below:

The Palm-Wine Drinkard

This week, we move to consider Amos Tutuola's weird yet groundbreaking novel, The Palm-Wine Drinkard and his Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads' Town. When it first appeared in 1952, the reviews were a mixture of astonishment and admiration; Dylan Thomas famously proclaimed it a "brief, thronged, grisly and bewitching story," and other reviews were also quite positive; others called it a "strange, eerie, poetic novel" and praised it as the embodiment of an African perspective of Africa. And yet, today, modern African writers such as Wole Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thiong'o have tended to disparage Tutuola, accusing him of being too eager -- even if unconsciously -- ready to write just the sort of exotic, juju-filled story that Western readers expected from a "dark continent."

Forty years after its publication, in 1992, I was fortunate to have a brief correspondence with Mr. Tutuola, and to receive a contribution from him for a book I had proposed at the time: Without Any Rules: The Politics and Poetics of the Vernacular. Unfortunately, as fate would have it, the book proposal never found a home, and when Mr. Tutuola passed on in 1997, I found myself with his contribution still unpublished. I had asked contributors to reflect on what they considered their "vernacular":

Although I wrote (and still do) in English, my writings, looking back now, are still in Yoruba, my mother tongue ... The medium in which my ideas are expressed is English, but when I write, the ideas I express, the atmosphere I create, and as reviewers of my works (perhaps rightly) maintain, the gestures readers encounter on the pages of the books I write are Yorubaish. Thus I think it can be said that beyond being a Yoruba writing in English, my works are African in conception.

The full essay has since been published in the journal Transition. I think that Mr. Tutuola's comments here give us a remarkable account of the unexpected combinations, conflicts, and sometimes fortuitous collisions of language and consciousness that are a powerful feature of postcolonial writings. Should a writer seeking to resist colonization be obliged to write in the colonizer's tongue? And if she or he chooses it despite its histories, can it be shaped, as Tutuola suggests, back into a "native" language?

Two years after The Palm-Wine Drinkard, he published My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which was later the inspiration for a groundbreaking electronic album by Robert Fripp and Brian Eno, which is widely regarded as one of the most powerful, pioneering recordings of its kind. I urge everyone to read -- and listen to -- all of these remarkable works.