The Octopus and the Other: Capitalocene Contradictions in the Symbolic Order

Abstract

This article exercises a Lacanian psychoanalytic intervention into ecocriticism through examining the contradictions of the Capitalocene within Frank Norris’s 1901 novel, The Octopus. Drawing upon Jason Moore’s dialectical framework in the Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History and the Crisis of Capitalism (2016) and Philip R. Polefrone’s “The Stock Ticker in the Garden: Frank Norris, American Literary Naturalism, and Capitalocene Aesthetics†(2020), this article examines the contradictory naturalization of capitalism in nature within the novel’s depiction of the wheat and railroad industries in California through the ideology of the Capitalocene. This article then analyzes the novel’s pairing of Angéle’s sexual assault with the industrial assault of the land. Read through a psychoanalytic framework, the assaults in the novel together illuminate how the search for the other in the novel effectively obscures the psychoanalytic understanding that “there is no big Other,†or the understanding that the Capitalist symbolic order is inherently contradictory.