“A Little Turn Through the Country”: Presley's Bicycle Ride in Frank Norris's The Octopus

Long before the Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head scene in the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid associated the bicycle with the evolving modern west, the "wheel" had made a comparable appearance in Frank Norris' 1901 The Octopus. The first chapter of the novel is structured on the framework of a bicycle ride taken by the would-be poet Presley around the vicinity of Magnus Derrick's sprawling Los Muertos Rancho. Taking what he calls a "little turn through the country," Presley introduces readers to the novel's principal characters and the landscape in which they act. Presley's bicycle riding, however, is more than simply a convenient structural device for establishing information. Framed at beginning and end by significant references to the railroad, Presley's bicycle excursion echoes the intrusion of newness, specifically technological newness, into late 19th-century rural life and suggests in summary the poet's (perhaps temporary) transition from detached observer of events to engaged participant.The first novel of Norris's planned "epic of wheat" trilogy, The Octopus tells the story of economic conflict between the Pacific and Southwestern Railroad and the ranchers of the San Joaquin Valley, many of whom occupy improved checkerboard railroad land adjacent to the tracks. The conflict comes a head when the ranchers learn that they face eviction unless they pay exorbitant prices for the land they have improved, and the crisis ends in a bloody shoot-out based on the historical "Mussell Slough" incident of 1880. On a higher level of abstraction, the novel elaborates these events as a problematic theodicy of blind, determined "Forces" operating far beyond the limited personal range of human events. Presley, whose experiences in the Valley shape the narrative, arrives in the midst of all this by bike.The novel's bicycle reference is confined to the opening chapter. Before we know him as a would-be poet, ranchhouse courtier, political dilettante or any of the other roles he assumes during the narrative, we know Presley first as a bicyclist. At the novel's opening he announces his plan to take "a long excursion through the neighboring country, partly on foot and partly on his bicycle" (9), a "little turn through the country to get the kinks out of the muscles" (23); he explains that that he will ride from the town of Bonneville, drop off the mail at Los Muertos, have dinner in Guadalajara, leave his bicycle at Annixter's Quien Sabe Rancho and walk up to the small spring above the San Juan Mission. From its opening there is a process or movement orientation to the novel. The narrative begins in medias ride, so to speak, with Presley already keeping a firm hold on the cork grips of his handlebars "just after passing Caraher's saloon, on the County Road"(9). In the course of his ride we learn that Presley is a somewhat dreamy 30-year-old who had "graduated and postgraduated...from an eastern college where he had devoted himself to a passionate study of literature" (13). Riding by on his wheel, Presley longs f the inspiration and idiom to write an epic poem about the American west, a "Song of the West" that would shape the region as a "huge romantic West," a construct bathed in "rose colored mist that dulled all harsh outlines" (15). Presley has the opportunity to think about this sort of matter--we learn that he is on an extended vacation in the country, recovering his threatened health, "taking advantage of a standing invitation on the part of Magnus Derrick" (13), the largest land owner in the distinct. In its entirety, The Octopus is to an important degree an exercise in the point of view established by the introduction of Presley in this first chapter. Whatever else the novel might be, it is plainly an account of what this bicycle-riding poet found when he came to convalesce in the dry air of the San Joaquin.IIWhile in the largest sense Norris's fiction embodies his attempt to, in Carl Van Doren's phrase, "continentalize" American literature with the dark palate of Zolaesque naturalism (266), when it comes to Presley's bicycle, we see perhaps a local reversal of that process, a small Americanization of Zola. …