“the terror of sheer bigness”: microplotting immensity in Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901)

This article traces the stylistic consequences of the attempt to map seemingly infinitely
expanding networks of trade and value in Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901). It focuses on
the rehearsal at the level of the sentence of characters’ grappling with the ‘terror of sheer
bigness’, and the complex interrelation of public and private, political and personal, local and
global inaugurated by the railroad’s management of the distribution of wheat. The textures of
Norris’s style—his grammar, syntax, and diction—are implicated in the novel’s interrogation
and negotiation of these dislocations. From the failures of mimetic phrasing spiralling across
lengthy cumulative sentences to patterns of phrasal repetition, the various microplots at work
within the novel’s verbal landscapes represent an essential and often overlooked facet of the
force of The Octopus.