Frank Norris’s Fidelity to Realism in The Octopus: A Story of California

Abstract

Since the critical writings of Frank Norris span many years, starting with his reporter days at the San Francisco Wave in 1896 and reaching full momentum with freelance work for various newspapers and magazines in 1901-1902. Most of his writings pivot on the distinction between “life” and “literature” that many scholars have read as either problematic or untenable. Yet a closer look at Norris’s definitions of what he refers to as “genres” reveals that not only was he aware of this problematic distinction but he also turned it into the ground for a temporal negotiation that would mediate the “accuracy” of realism against the “truth” of romance. This negotiation gives rise to a correspondence between the aesthetic and the political dimensions of literature, and sustains Norris’s increasing emphasis on naturalism as the most just of what he terms “literary genres.”