Two books, The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and Fast Food Nation by E. Schlosser were written during different periods of time but portray similar problems and issues typical for two societies. In The Jungle, Upton Sinclair strives to produce a socialist critique of the horrific living and working conditions for turn-of-the-century immigrant laborers in the Chicago stockyards. This account of the brutal poverty that afflicts Jurgis Rudkus and his family, however, blends indistinguishably into an account of Jurgis’s subjective terrors of imprisoning familial relationships, terrors expressed in the novel as a fear of the maternal body. Fast Food Nation depicts fast food culture and its impact on the American population discusses the history and advantages of fast food. The Jungle was written in 1906 and Fast Food Nation in 2001 but both of them address the problem of capitalist exploitation and obesity problems.
In the Jungle, the vertiginous transport in Jurgis’s story between macropolitical critique and irrational dread results, Upton Sinclair The Jungle, its very pursuit of the truth of social and cultural relations, often in spheres and situations outside the reality of middle-class life and across lines of ethnicity, class, and personal experience, makes its fantasies powerfully projective and produces a continuing vulnerability to uncanny and psychoanalytically resonant disruptions. Similar ideas are expressed by Schlosser who claims that the image of fast-food culture is replaced by modern social culture. Thus, in contrast to Sinclair Schlosser sees fast food as both “a commodity and metaphor” which helps him to analyze and reveal the nature of this phenomenon and its consequences for the nation.
Both novels portray hatred of the capitalist burdens of social injustice, poverty, and suffering is increasingly indistinguishable from an aversion to the body and all of its fluids, smells, and processes. As a metaphor, fast food means the way of life followed by millions of Americans since the 1950s. Schlosser views McDonald’s as a prime example of suburbanization, Americanisation, and degradation and assumes that those who eat there are, by and large, dupes and victims. In the Jungle, the narrative’s fear of an entrapping world swarming with disreputable life blends into a fear of family life and, within the confines of the family, misogynistic fears of maternal women and their reproductive powers. Sinclair tells us that “she was a Dutch woman, enormously fat,” and that “[s]he wore a filthy blue wrapper, and her teeth were black” (177). After rubbing her hands with a saucer of “goose-grease” in her kitchen–good luck, Sinclair explains–Madame Haupt goes to minister to Ona (180). When she emerges, the blood displayed on her person, signifying the horror of childbirth and of the natural, allows Ona to be rescued from the body once more, for one last sentimental scene: when Jurgis finally sees his wife, “she was so shrunken he would scarcely have known her–she was all but a skeleton, and as white as a piece of chalk” (184).
The main difference is found in symbolic representations of capitalist society and expiation. Sinclair portrays it as a jungle while Schlosser sees it as like a “fast food nation”. Schlosser writes “Like Cheyenne Mountain, today’s fast food conceals remarkable technological advances behind an ordinary-looking façade” (Schlosser 5). The overdetermination of trouble in Sinclair’s narrative creates a jungle of disjunctions and contradictions, aptly represented by the novel’s repeated images of bodily disintegration–of the loss of fingers, the loss of feet, the loss of ears broken off in the cold, and even the loss of little Stanislovas. Bodily anxieties are coterminous in the novel with a metaphoric of entrapment as if a failure to rise from the body equals a life of imprisonment in an enveloping maternal womb that fundamentally undoes the illusion of autonomous masculine selfhood. As the novel progresses, it is increasingly dominated by images of enclosure in small dark spaces: in cellars and stairwells, prison cells and basement workrooms, pits and abysses. These fears, in turn, produce or are produced by a claustrophobic masculine inability to tolerate the emotions of women.
The other difference is the style of presentation and the style of fiction. Sinclair’s novel is a fiction work while Schlosser’s work is a nonfiction documentary. The Jungle is based on a political account of Jurgis’s problems under capitalism and an account of Jurgis’s woman trouble corresponds to the relation between Sinclair’s muckraking goals for his novel and the projective mix of literary ambitions, gender anxieties, and family troubles that work in and through his narrative. Sinclair had an enormous desire for literary success early in his career and faced enormous difficulties in its pursuit. In contrast, Schlosser concentrates on political and social aspects of culture and proliferation of capitalism: “The nations car culture reached its height in southern California. A new form of eating place emerged. People with cars are so lazy, they do not want to get out of them to eat” (Schlosser 11). The uncanniness of this progress in the context of the rest of the novel is hardly liberating. On the contrary, it contributes to the novel’s decentering of consciousness because the force that moves Jurgis, if it is his at all, is not subject to his control and has nothing to do with a logical mastery of events. Whatever progress Jurgis seems occasionally to make, as politician, worker, or criminal, sinks beneath his susceptibility to the uncanny repetitions that come to entrap him even in his moments of sleazy prosperity.
The other similarity is that fast food culture and sexual desires and relations are shared by members of a society and the behavioral traits of which it is comprised are manifested in a society’s institutions and artifacts. In both worlds, capitalism and social relations shape the behavior of people and their preferences, lifestyles, and desires. In one of the novel’s most remarkable passages, Jurgis sees the protean molten steel as a kind of life essence, which assumes first a masculine shape and then a determined and determining objective form. As he watches, the molten steel is a “pillar of white flame, dazzling as the sun… with a whiteness not of earth, scorching the eyeballs” (200). In another place, where the “crashing” and “groaning” of machines seem like “the center of the earth, where the machinery of time was revolving,” this cosmic plasma of molten steel becomes a phallic “great red snake escaped from purgatory,” which “writhed and squirmed… until it was cold and black–and then it needed only to be cut and straightened to be ready for a railroad” (2001). At this point in the novel, what was formerly protean about Jurgis is similarly “cut and straightened” and unalterable. Several pages later, he will hop a passing freight train and ride these iron rails into the novel’s curious rural idyll. First, however, young Antanas, the last obstacle to the desire of the text, must perish in a death that itself serves as an uncanny foreshadowing of his father’s flight.
In sum, both books vividly portray the weaknesses and limitations, threats and disadvantages of capitalism and its impact on society. In two centuries we see the same problems and troubles affected people’s lives and destinies. In both centuries, common citizens can do nothing to change their way of life and introduce new values and traditions. Schlosser portrays that for most modern citizens, fast food culture becomes a shared system of meanings: fast food culture is learned and experienced by millions of people around the workld. The swirl of emotions Jurgis cannot tolerate as signs of the “monstrous and unthinkable” suggests the difficulty the narrative has in generating a convincing and exhaustive account of his ills, the symptoms of which rapidly threaten to swamp the diagnosis. This rupture of conscious control, however, this abandonment of systematic analysis, generates a compensatory unconscious capacity in Jurgis magically to shape reality into the form of his urges. To understand capitalism modern citizens must understand its origins, history, structure, and functioning of production and exploitation. In the Jungle, this capacity, explicable only at the level of authorship, is incompatible with the naturalist reality of The Jungle and fails to lead to any supportable analysis of Jurgis’s difficulties. Rather, it further submerges him in a world of blind, mechanical repetitions. Ona’s death and his devotion to young Antanas, his Nietzschean super baby son, retain him in Chicago, but the narrative places Jurgis in an International Harvester factory, which once again sounds a proleptic note of rural life. When the Harvester factory closes, he gains employment in a steel mill and uncannily encounters still another. Both works vividly portray that nothing change in two centuries except the degree of exploitation and global proliferation of capitalism and consumerism. Both novels show that people are weak enough to resist capitalist traditions and principles, and create a new system of values and desires.
Works Cited
Schlosser, E. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Harper Perennial; Reprint edition, 2002.
Sinclair, U. The Jungle. See Sharp Press; New Sub edition, 2003.