California and the Fictions of Capital

294 Pages·1998·20.55 MB·English

by  George L. Henderson

CALIFORNIA & THE
FICTIONS OF CAPITAL
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CALIFORNIA & THE
FICTIONS OF CAPITAL
George L Henderson
New York Oxford
Oxford University Press
1999
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York
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Copyright © 1999 by George L. Henderson
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Henderson, George L., 1958—
California and the fictions of capital / George L. Henderson.
p, cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-510890-6
1. American literature—California—History and criticism.
2. Capitalism and literature—California. 3. California—Historical
geography. 4. California—Economic conditions. 5. Capital—
California—History. L Title.
PS283.C2H46 1999
8I0.9'32794—dc21 97-52308
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 42
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Contents
Introduction: The Alchemy of Capital and Nature ix
Why the Late Nineteenth-Century Countryside? xii
The Discourse of Rural Realism xiii
Why Rural Realism, Why the Novel? xv
Stalking the Interdisciplinary Wilds xvii
Reference Maps xxi
PART I Making Geographies
1 Rural Commodity Regimes: A Primer 3
The Logics and Illogics of Production: The Shift to and
out of Grain 4
The Regime of Specialty Crops 7
A Wider Division of Labor: The Country in the City 18
2 Nature and Fictitious Capital: The Circulation of Money Capital 28
Capitalism and Nature: The Agrarian Nexus 28
Axis One: The Mann-Dickinson Thesis, Nature as Obstacle 30
Axis Two: Exploiting the Natural Obstacle 32
Keeping Capitalism Out or Letting Capital In?
Marx on Circulation 34
Blurred Boundaries and Fugitive Bodies 38
Nature and Circulation 42
Capital, Nature, and the Space-Time of Agro-Credits
in the United States 44
Capital, Nature, and the Space-Time of Agro-Credits
in California 52
Conclusion: Reading the Landscape of Fictitious Capital 77
vi CONTENTS
3 Toward Rural Realism: Variable Capital, Variable Capitalists, 81
and the Fictions of Capital
The Way to Get Farm Labor? 81
The Ever-New, Ever-Same, 1: Continuity of Wage Labor and
Changes in the Wage Labor Market 83
The Ever-New, Ever Same, 2: Resistance and Reaction 87
Racializing the Working Body and Multicultural Racism 90
Toward Rural Realism: An Agrarianism without Illusions? 96
Variable Capitalists All: Capitalist Laborers and
the Fictions of Capital in Country and City 104
Coda: The Labor of Fiction 112
PART II Excavating Geographical Imaginations
Introduction 115
Many Countrysides 115
The Trials of Capital and Narratives of Social Space 118
The Narrative of Social Space in Rural Realism 121
4 Mussel Slough and the Contradictions of Squatter Capitalism 123
The Commodification of Mussel Slough: Railroad, Speculators,
and Squatters Converge in the Tulare Basin 125
Blood-Money and the Anatomy of Development 130
The Country and the City: From Transgression
to Similitude 137
The Octopus and the Bourgeois Sublime 139
Bourgeois Discourse and the Uses of Nature 148
5 Realty Redux: Landscapes of Boom and Bust 150
in Southern California
Where Is Southern California? 150
From Ranchos to Real Estate 152
The Boom of the 1880s 154
The Southern California Boom Novel 160
Conclusion: Production, a Necessary Evil 173
6 Romancing the Sand: Earth-Capital and Desire 175
in the Imperial Valley
The Problem 175
Engineers and Entrepreneurs 176
Producing the Imperial Valley 178
What a Difference a Flood Makes 179
Imperial Valley Representations, 1: Promotion and
Its (Dis)Contents 181
Imperial Valley Representations, 2: The Winning
of Barbara Worth and the Erotics of Western Conquest 182
Conclusion: Engineering Rural Realism 193
CONTENTS vii
7 Take Me to the River: Water, Metropolitan Growth, 196
and the Countryside
Designer Ducts 196
Los Angeles and the Owens Valley 198
San Francisco and Hetch Hetchy Valley 200
Rural Eclipse: The Water-Bearer and The Ford 204
Wither Rural Realism? 213
Conclusion 215
Notes 219
References 235
Index 251
D. W. Griffith, "A Corner in Wheat" (1909). (Courtesy of Kino Film International
Corporation.)
Introduction
The Alchemy of Capital and Nature
Though he was already dead, Frank Norris had a good year in 1909. His epic novel
The Octopus (1901) was brought to the screen by visionary film artist D. W.
Griffith—no other filmmaker has touched it since. Titled "A Corner in Wheat,"
the film is a confident, bare-bones distillation of the novel's hundreds of pages
into fewer than fifteen minutes of viewing time. It is of course no substitute for
the original, a point compounded by the fact that Griffith drew on a second Norris
novel, The Pit (1903), also a rather long book. Griffith's work is such a treat for
Norris's readers because it superbly confirms that Norris was an expert craftsmen
of signature tableaux, devices that regularly punctuated his narratives and that
allowed him to tie together the worlds of meaning he had been summoning up.
Of several exemplary scenes that structure the two novels, one from The Octopus
was perhaps guaranteed to be filmed. This was an especially macabre sequence
involving a conniving grain speculator, who is destined for live burial under the
tons of wheat he has amassed. Thrashing about in a pelting rain of wheat, chok-
ing on grain dust, and trying desperately to stay alive, he inevitably succumbs.
The wheat continues to pile up around him, until only one hand is able to poke
through in a final, gruesome salute. In Norris's hands, the speculator, also an urban
sophisticate, has tumbled into the hull of a ship while the wheat was being loaded.
In the film, he happened to have plummeted to the bottom of a grain silo. But no
matter the difference in detail, the scene is a brilliant summation of the novel's
back and forth movements between San Francisco and its startlingly productive
hinterland, the San Joaquin Valley. As such, it establishes a host of disquieting
themes and questions.
For one thing, here is a man who has been profiting without producing: What
sort of economy could properly allow that? Who could call watching the ticker
tape "work," and why, up to the point of the speculator's demise, should it have
brought such riches? But assuming this man is actually a legitimate creation of
ix