{"id":163476,"date":"2023-03-01T12:02:06","date_gmt":"2023-03-01T17:02:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=163476"},"modified":"2023-03-02T10:56:16","modified_gmt":"2023-03-02T15:56:16","slug":"oil-on-the-petro-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2023\/03\/01\/oil-on-the-petro-novel\/","title":{"rendered":"Oil!<\/em>: On the Petro-Novel"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Oil fields near San Ardo, California. Photograph by Eugene Zelenko, CC BY-SA 4.0<\/a>, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

In a letter dated June 1, 1925, Upton Sinclair announced a revolutionary experiment: the petro-novel, a new category of fiction inspired by modernity\u2019s most vexing paradoxes of fossil-fueled life. \u201cThis oil novel,\u201d Sinclair predicted, \u201cwill be the best thing I have ever done.\u201d Over the next ten months, that story poured out as a \u201cgusher of words\u201d to become the great American novel of petroleum power. By turns ardent family saga, scintillating potboiler, and anti-capitalist tirade, Sinclair\u2019s 1926\u201327 tale warrants its exclamation mark. Oil! <\/i>is an energetic tour de force whose plot goes everywhere. From ivory towers and gated estates to bleak frontiers of slow death, the book shows how a thirst for crude created new democratic dreams of freedom and their opposite. Through it all, the novel anticipates how the wreckage unleashed by big oil might lead to a greener, more inclusive world yet to come. It remains one of the most important critiques of fossil energy ever printed.<\/span>
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Today the earth is on fire, and fossil fuel corporations keep raising the heat. Recent years have been the warmest on record, sparking waves of mass migration and accelerating die-offs, with no real cooldown in sight. In a way, we\u2019re all to blame. Climate experts agree that the extreme weather of our time comes from human energy use. Northern countries like the U.S. have burned eons of accumulated hydrocarbons since the twentieth century\u2019s dawn\u2014too much and too fast for the planet to absorb them again, leading to a carbon cycle that\u2019s perilously out of whack. But vowing to scale back and buy less, to burn less, won\u2019t kill the flames. The truth is that twenty-five fossil fuel giants are responsible for more than half of all carbon emissions now, and a huge fraction of U.S. workers already live hand to mouth while energy earnings soar. Dismantling these institutions and their pyromaniacal profit-motives will require concerted action. It will require new intimacies across economic, racial, and gender lines. And it will require alternatives to very old habits of thinking that make it hard to conceive a world without oil. To avert a dead-end future for humans and our planetary kin, we must reimagine who we are, and in no time flat.<\/span>
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Oil! <\/span><\/i>is the novel that best illuminates how we got here and that leaves the blueprint for a more equitable future out of its ashes. At its core is the story of a whole new kind of society being born through the early twentieth century, when elites learned how to control a petroleum-powered system of production; that system allowed a few white men to get rich quick by exploiting everyone else below them. It\u2019s a system that has turned the world into the private landfill of oligarchs who have taken our land and labor and would now, in a final move, take a habitable future from us as well. But the novel shows that the story of oil isn\u2019t a tale for all time. We can contest an unsustainable system of energy and work that took hold not long ago, when deep-pocketed corporations combined to let the world burn. A hundred years after fossil capitalism kicked into high gear, the question at the heart of Sinclair\u2019s novel remains: How may we transition to a postcarbon democracy now? <\/span>Oil! <\/span><\/i>provides an outline for this urgent mission, the unmet demand on which all future life depends.<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/b><\/p>\n

Sinclair\u2019s novel is not called <\/span>Oil<\/span><\/i>;<\/span> it\u2019s <\/span>Oil! <\/span><\/i>Between June 2, 1926, and March 7, 1927, Sinclair published the novel unadorned\u2014as just plain <\/span>Oil<\/span><\/i>\u2014for readers of the<\/span> Daily Worker<\/span><\/i>, the national newspaper by the Communist Party USA. Only afterward did he learn that Walter Gilkyson had scooped him by publishing <\/span>Oil <\/span><\/i>in 1924, a novel prophesizing that \u201cthe wars that were fought in the past \u2026 will be fought for oil in the future.\u201d Sinclair\u2019s gimmick\u2014the exclamation mark\u2014let him skirt copyright protections for the text while also expressing his novel\u2019s central narrative strategy. Instead of representing oil as a self-evident thing, Sinclair imbues it with a kaleidoscopic range of associations that reimagine it on visionary new terms: he suggests new language and material relations that readers might bring to life. The mark advertises oil\u2019s potential for sparking extreme emotions: the freedom of the road, the euphoria of flight, the vertigo of sudden social transformation. As if bypassing language itself, the titular black column looks like a graphic insignia of a blowout or an oil gusher.<\/span> Embossed on the first edition\u2019s cover, Sinclair\u2019s diacritical mark appears as a swollen line that echoes a derrick in the foreground. To read <\/span>Oil!<\/span><\/i>, it would seem, is to burn with the concentrated power of hydrocarbons themselves, as in chapter six\u2019s \u201camazing spectacle\u201d of overflowing oil. There, skyrocketing crude ignites into a \u201ctower of flame,\u201d the narrator writes: \u201cthe burning oil would hit the ground, and bounce up, and explode, and leap again and fall again.\u201d A veritable exclamation mapped on to the world, the spectacle of gushing crude hints at how oil could convert into language and vice versa, how a lexical mark might become charged with the incandescent radiance of things.<\/span><\/p>\n

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As the action unfolds, <\/span>Oil! <\/span><\/i>slams on the brakes and develops a more counterintuitive approach\u2014a poetics of the slow burn. Working to question the era\u2019s subjective speed thrills, Sinclair teaches us bit by bit to see oil capitalism\u2019s sheer scale and corruption, with attention to the gaping inequalities at its core. Early exuberance on the road shifts into uglier feelings of creeping dread, moral outrage, and anxious alarm as the novel follows oil\u2019s tentacular spread. The hero\u2019s gradual process of revelation is recapitulated by the reader as they go along and glean a more conscious understanding of oil\u2014an understanding that, Sinclair hoped, might lead to more militant opposition to the fossil-fuel industry once the covers close.<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

The years surrounding Sinclair\u2019s birth in 1878 represent one of the most decisive transitions in human history: it was the first decade fossil fuels provided more energy to societies than did traditional photosynthesis. Animating this transition was a shift from industrial economies of coal to the newly unlocked power of oil and natural gas. Countries like the U.S. were burning carbonized sunlight at an accelerating clip. In 1880, global oil production reached 4 megatons per year; by 1900, it had exploded to 22.5 megatons, and it quadrupled to nearly 100 megatons in 1920. This imbalance in the carbon cycle created the illusion that wealth could expand without limit\u2014without needing larger factories or labor forces, stockpiled gold reserves, or overseas territories. Sinclair\u2019s work brings attention to the toxic underside of these visions of prodigal growth: adulterated soil, smoldering skies, and dispossessive battles that erupted everywhere oil came to light.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sinclair\u2019s most influential bestsellers track a history of the planet\u2019s escalating energy burn, now measurable as parts per million of atmospheric carbon (ppm) that linger in the air at this very moment. <\/span>The Jungle <\/span><\/i>(published in 1906, when the level of carbon in the atmosphere was 298 ppm), <\/span>King Coal <\/span><\/i>(1917, 302 ppm), and <\/span>Oil! <\/span><\/i>(1926\u201327, 309 ppm)<\/span>, <\/span><\/i>constitute a loose trilogy of industrial energy novels, each examining an associated modern fuel system\u2014respectively, cheap food, cheap coal, and cheap petroleum. Moving in an arc through the years of exponentially concentrated carbon inputs, together the three books trace modernity\u2019s freedoms back to the violent capture of fuels, machines, and laboring bodies. The whole story of U.S. growth is recast as a tale of doubled exploitation: of caloric or mechanical fuel stocks, and of workforces battered in the era\u2019s developmental storm. We see something, here, of the rationale behind the first energy systems studies in the nineteenth century, when physicists reduced all things to their potential for work. But against a scientific desire to foster more productive, and thus profitable, relations of labor, Sinclair lays bare the strange and bitter fruits of industrialized life.<\/span><\/p>\n

In this suite of fictions, Sinclair gropes toward an account of how conflicts around energy created both civilization and its barbaric underbelly. Consider <\/span>The Jungle<\/span><\/i>, Sinclair\u2019s first success. Below its immediate concern with the meat industry\u2019s filth, <\/span>The Jungle <\/span><\/i>unfolds as a fable of energization. It reassembles the base material ties that bound cattle, chickens, and pigs with workers, who, like livestock defiled by food production, were degraded in the process of fueling modernity. On a surface level, The Jungle<\/i> identifies the exploitation of human bodies with that of animals on the killing floor. Both feature within a coordinated energy system that benefits a capitalist class of profiteers. King Coal <\/i>extended this approach by turning to America\u2019s fossil economy. Unnerved by the violent suppression of a 1914 coal miners\u2019 strike in Ludlow, Colorado, when a Rockefeller-owned coal company summoned state militia and paramilitary forces to their side, Sinclair represented miners\u2019 attempts to contest elites by banding together, blocking extraction sites, and disrupting energy profit flows.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

This radical imaginary of fuel was shaped by powerful expos\u00e9s on corporate greed. Of particular influence was Ida M. Tarbell\u2019s The History of the Standard Oil Company <\/i>(1904, 297.5 ppm), which showed how the Standard syndicate rose to dominance through the \u201cruthlessness and persistency\u201d of its owner John D. Rockefeller. Tarbell\u2019s book made Standard a b\u00eate noire of the political left, and it animated Sinclair\u2019s thought. His energy fictions, however, are unique in two respects: their attention to the specific materiality of fuels like coal and oil, and how the production, consumption, and representation of those fuels shaped class conflicts around them. After a string of lukewarm successes in King Coal<\/i>\u2019s wake, Oil! <\/i>marked a return to form. Namely, it revived King Coal<\/i>\u2019s coming-of-age script, which followed a privileged youth, Hal Warner, from juvenile irresolution to a more mature understanding of coal capitalism\u2019s harms. Oil! <\/i>traces the maturation of James Ross Jr., aka Bunny, aka \u201cthe young oil prince,\u201d the sensitive heir to an energy fortune who grows to renounce his class commitments while meeting the era\u2019s have-nots. Oil!<\/i>\u2019s opening in 1912 also identifies it as a creative child of another work: Tarbell\u2019s History<\/i>. In 1911, the U.S. government ruled Standard Oil in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and broke it into thirty-four regional companies\u2014a liberal democratic victory that Tarbell\u2019s bombshell spurred. But retrenchment followed. Out of Standard\u2019s split was born a revenant era of collusion between a few oil oligopolies that swallowed or squeezed out the last independents. It was a stunning counterformation that, for Sinclair, raised a larger creative question: How might a work of fiction provide an alternative to oil capitalism that works like The History of Standard Oil <\/i>could not?<\/span><\/div>\n
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***<\/span><\/p>\n

To truly answer that question, it helps to understand how Sinclair recast conventions of fiction-making in general. Strictly speaking, all modern novels are oil novels. Choose your favorite story and you\u2019ll find petroleum powering plots and shaping subjectivities. F. Scott Fitzgerald\u2019s <\/span>The Great Gatsby <\/span><\/i>(1925, 305 ppm) casts its hero\u2019s gleaming car collection as a sign of nouveau riche aspirations, while Virginia Woolf\u2019s <\/span>Mrs. <\/span><\/i>Dalloway <\/span><\/i>(1927, 306 ppm) turns the meandering movements of aircraft and automobile into twin allegories for personhood as Clarissa Dalloway\u2019s stream of consciousness finds an echo in London\u2019s incessant hum. Gasoline and diesel, desire and subjecthood: once you pay attention, it\u2019s hard to miss how hydrocarbons beat beneath literature\u2019s rising pulse, covertly animating its fictions of being and belonging, personal development and social transformation.<\/span><\/p>\n

There are good reasons why oil poured into literature at this time. Between 1900 and 1930, global oil production surged some 300 percent amid a vogue for petroleum-powered motoring. Oil\u2019s inroads on the streets were flanked by its expanding embrace over the seas and skies. And these mechanical marvels were supplemented by an avalanche of cheap petro-goods, including fertilizers and pesticides, vinyl records, and a thousand plastic products that saturated middle-class households in northern nations like the U.S.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the catch: novels rarely represent oil as actual oil. When writers refine petroleum into art, it floats off into the realm of what is generally known without being thought about much, if at all. As capitalism\u2019s Ur-commodity, oil remains what Karl Marx called \u201ca thing which transcends sensuousness\u201d: something magically divorced from the sweat, grit, and blood that conjured it forth. Cooked over millennia from ancient algae, oil collects deep underground before faraway workers harvest it. The Anglo-American novel may be ill-suited to represent realities at this scale, as Amitav Ghosh suggested in an influential review of Abdelrahman Munif\u2019s <\/span>Cities of Salt <\/span><\/i>quintet (1984\u201389, 344\u2013353 ppm). What\u2019s clear is that the industry has worked to perfect its own disappearing act. Sites of petro-extraction are scrupulously screened from view, and recovered crude circulates without a trace through a grid of pipelines, terminals, refineries, and gas pumps. That grid reaches <\/span>collective consciousness only in instances of specularized disruption; for every oil rig explosion or pipeline protest that makes the news, 101 million barrels go without saying each day.<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s why <\/span>Oil! <\/span><\/i>is such an astonishing read. It\u2019s one of few fictions to thematize<\/span> oil culture and to lay bare what Marx called \u201cthe hidden abode of production,\u201d where workers transform crude into a refined resource for capitalists. Published in the exact window when little oil became big, it dramatizes how oil flooded U.S. society only to fade from view. Moving beyond the terrible deeds of one corporation or another, \u00e0 la Tarbell\u2019s <\/span>History<\/span><\/i>, Sinclair uncovers a massive web of social, cultural, and economic conditions that typified the oil era: not only new class relations but desires, routines, assumptions, and affects that made the industry difficult to reform, and that Sinclair sought ultimately to reinvent.<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/b><\/p>\n

Oil! <\/span><\/i>is about the rise of the Los Angeles area where Sinclair lived from 1915 on. Edward L. Doheny (the model for Bunny\u2019s father, James Ross Sr.) first discovered petroleum in LA in 1892. Thirty years after, the region exploded into a global petroleum center that gave the twenties their roar. In early 1920, oil operators opened a reservoir in Huntington Beach, and shortly after there was a world historical discovery in Long Beach, near Sinclair\u2019s home, that spawned a forest of derricks. Soon Southern California would vie with Texas and Tulsa as the nation\u2019s leading oil zone. The sorcery of petrodollars turned dry farmland into meccas for finance and banking, manufacture, real estate, and entertainment. In 1927, <\/span>The New Republic <\/span><\/i>observed that \u201cthis steady, speedy growth is the one most important thing to understand about L.A. \u2026 It creates an easy optimism, a lazy prosperity which dominates peoples\u2019 lives. Anything seems possible; the future is yours and the past?\u2014there isn\u2019t any.\u201d For many, oil marked a terminus to history\u2014it was a forever era of unlimited growth.<\/span><\/p>\n

But not for all. In <\/span>The<\/span><\/i> New Republic<\/span><\/i>\u2019s disavowal of the past, we see a negation of racial and economic populations that had historically enabled California\u2019s development, including Indigenous, Black, Asian, and Hispanic communities left out in the rush. Many felt the region\u2019s petro-development as a curse, as thousands of people found themselves displaced and penniless in speculative financial scrambles. While oil sparked collective hopes of transformed life, it deepened disparities between workers and owners on the ground. And while it inspired <\/span>omnipotent fantasies of annihilating space and time on the road, it made everywhere look the same. Sinclair shows how the region\u2019s neatly manicured suburbs, shopping centers, and picture palaces were enabled by wastescapes like nowhere on Earth\u2014and how oil optimism often proved to be cruel.<\/span><\/p>\n

Over the first half of <\/span>Oil!<\/span><\/i>, Ross Sr. (called Dad) acquires a slew of oil wells around LA (\u201cAngel City\u201d) and sells to opposed nations in World War I, thus catapulting his son into the good life. Bunny cavorts with the hoi polloi as big oil transforms the nation\u2019s every aspect. The tide of petro-influence flows from oil\u2019s hidden sacrifice zones to the loftiest civil institutions. Thus Bunny\u2019s education at Southern Pacific University (a thinly disguised University of Southern California) unfolds as an exercise in oil refinement, as Dad\u2019s fortune gets cleansed\u2014refined\u2014through Bunny\u2019s schooling. Over the second half of the novel, Bunny encounters more and more workers trampled by petro-culture\u2019s spread. Each fresh oil strike results in a more massive labor strike, just as petroleum \u201cstorage tanks\u201d expand alongside the jail \u201ctanks\u201d for insurgent workers. It\u2019s a brutally mounting class conflict, a dialectic of creative destruction that turns Bunny into a prodigal son. Though he\u2019s forced to become an adult petro-subject\u2014an individual defined by oil-based labor, leisure, and movement\u2014he renounces life as a commercial oilman like his father, and works to advance another world beyond oil capitalism\u2019s reach.<\/span><\/p>\n

Oil! <\/span><\/i>begins with petroleum’s signature thrill ride. \u201cThe ground went in long waves,\u201d the narrator begins, \u201ca slow ascent and then a sudden dip; you climbed, and went swiftly over\u2014but you had no fear, for you knew the magic ribbon would be there, clear of obstructions, unmarred by bump or scar, waiting the passage of inflated rubber wheels revolving seven times a second.\u201d In this tableau of freedom, the two Rosses barrel down the highway along as if transcending time, space, and social attachments. Note the invisible infrastructure of Sinclair\u2019s prose: its syntactic cabling of semicolons, commas, and dashes mimics the feeling of the road itself.<\/span> Sinclair is coyly inviting readers to join in petroleum\u2019s pleasures, though the larger point seems clear: history and context seem to vanish in oil\u2019s thrall. \u201cThe past is past,\u201d Dad tells his son, \u201cor shall we say that the passed are passed?\u201d<\/span>
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Such speed won\u2019t last forever. After stopping for gas, the Rosses move though a newly manufactured landscape of roadside motels, diners, and shopping centers before reaching a political boss\u2019s back room. We come full circle here: when Dad greases the boss\u2019s palm to get a public road built up to his oil field, it\u2019s to show that sovereign petro-freedoms depend on crime and corruption. Oil kings make the law for others, not for themselves. It\u2019s the first of many escalating transgressions that Dad is forced to make. Though he\u2019s a benevolent man, he gets caught in the compulsory workings of an oil game that will seal his fate for the worse.<\/span><\/p>\n

All roads lead back to the oil field: petro-modernity\u2019s turbulent contact zone where human and nonhuman systems meet. Its most iconic image is the blowout, which Sinclair\u2019s contemporaries represented as a free gift of nature: an orgasmic flood that rises without human hardship and that promises freedom from work and want to all in its radius. That fantasy inspired Sinclair\u2019s working title, \u201cFlowing Gold,\u201d and it animates Paul Thomas Anderson\u2019s film adaptation of the novel <\/span>There Will Be Blood <\/span><\/i>(2007, 383 ppm), when Daniel Day-Lewis\u2019s character, Daniel Plainview, betrays a rare half smile when gushing crude comes into open sight. Yet the novel redescribes the blowout as a spectacle of ruin for the lower-class communities forced to sell their land and labor. Through a sequence of increasingly grim eruptions, it becomes clear that oil spells disaster for workers who \u201cstagger \u2026 to stop the flow\u201d in harm\u2019s way. So the novel gets \u201cgreasy\u201d as love of oil converts to creeping hate, and as Bunny\u2019s feelings of freedom and filial devotion become tainted by crude actualities at modernity\u2019s base.<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/b><\/p>\n

But aversion remains an attachment, and mixed feelings get us nowhere. In our warming world today, there\u2019s much to revile about the stuff: we know that burned carbon will soon slam the door on a habitable multispecies future. Yet the urgent need to transition from oil has been blocked not least because there remains much to love. Petroleum has supplied an aspirational middle-class dream of the good life that, however residual, lingers in the pursuit of spacious suburban homes, long summer road trips, and a towering mountain of plastic gadgets. Like a bad romance of catastrophic dimensions, it\u2019s a dream that persists even as the tides swell at our feet. We may know this in our bones, just as surely as petrochemical remnants build up in our bodies. But we\u2019ve yet to abandon the rituals and relations that oil has helped materialize.<\/span>
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This impasse suggests that oil is more than just a liquid compound or a set of commodity relations. It animates a broader cultural system: a grid of forms and feelings that makes oil seem desirable, indeed inevitable, even when we scorn its ills. This system has fostered a shared sense of helplessness as today\u2019s climate emergency mounts. Many understand that the time horizon for averting the worst outcomes means making big, systemic changes to how society is produced. But amid petro-culture\u2019s continued dominance, it\u2019s hard to imagine any action except shrinking one\u2019s own carbon footprint\u2014and fine-tuned consumption choices, we may feel, aren\u2019t enough to make corporations keep oil underground.<\/span><\/p>\n

Consider Sinclair himself. On June 23, 1921, the Shell cartel struck a 114-foot gusher not far from his Pasadena home. That discovery launched the entire California oil rush (represented in <\/span>Oil!<\/span><\/i>\u2019s \u201cProspect Hill\u201d chapters). In the throes of oil mania, Sinclair\u2019s wife, Mary Kimbrough, acquired two land lots and met with other landowners to fix a joint price. Yet these \u201ccommunal meetings\u201d disintegrated into heated arguments about who merited more of the takings. The episode sparked Sinclair\u2019s idea for an \u201coil novel\u201d about how petroleum corrodes democratic norms. But the irony remains: what inspired Sinclair\u2019s critique of oil capitalism was also an occasion for personal profiteering. The windfall became complete in November 1926, when Sinclair typed \u201cThe End\u201d just as Kimbrough cashed in her land.<\/span><\/p>\n

In this anecdote we see the strange double binds at the petro-era\u2019s core. Given its importance as modernity\u2019s lifeblood, how could one not want what oil has enabled, even when lamenting its dire effects? As you read, watch for <\/span>Oil!<\/span><\/i>\u2019s celebration of the open road and its delight at goods like \u201clovely tar,\u201d which sometimes eclipse Sinclair\u2019s critical aims. It\u2019s a procedural problem that <\/span>Oil! <\/span><\/i>never resolves, but rather that converts into a source of ongoing fictional intrigue. How to more properly hate oil, in other words, becomes both an ideological impasse and a literary plot. The central chapters trace a hulking oil \u201cmachinery\u201d that turns crude into a foundation for life as usual. Its gears go from the nation\u2019s homes, offices, and universities to its citadels of governance and far-flung locations of culture.<\/span><\/p>\n

The work of this machine can be distilled down to a word: <\/span>refinement<\/span><\/i>. Literally, refinement names crude\u2019s conversion into a suite of fractionated goods, as illustrated when Bunny visits his father\u2019s refinery to see <\/span>how \u201cblack and greasy\u201d crude transforms into innumerable colors and consistencies. The scene, Sinclair\u2019s largest addition to <\/span>Oil!<\/span><\/i>\u2019s single-volume edition, underscores the novel\u2019s abiding fascination with refinement. From a single cache of hydrocarbons, the narrator explains, \u201cyou got gasoline of several qualities, and kerosene and benzene and naphtha.\u201d But refinement begins only in the processing plant. It continues when oil becomes culture\u2014a suite of fractionated feelings, desires, experiences, and attachments rooted in hydrocarbons. The relentless nature of this process extends the technique of continuous distillation, which eliminated time between refinement cycles and revved up petroleum production to new economies of scale.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of special significance are emergent mass media forms that \u201cmanufacture culture wholesale\u201d: nationally distributed newspapers, magazines, films, and radio broadcasts. It\u2019s a biting critique of the petro-culture industry, and above all of the Hollywood studio system. Historically, Hollywood\u2019s development coincided with the California oil trade. Beginning as a minor shooting location in 1910, Hollywood was synonymous with commercial filmmaking by 1930. Production crews came for the region\u2019s ample sunshine and shooting locations and grew thanks to the virulently anti-union conditions fostered by the oil lobby. And vice versa: major motion picture studios were vital to petro-capitalism\u2019s growth. As cinema became big business, narratives and newsreels about class conflict vanished, and representations of oil worker strikes declined in favor of big, splashy melodramas that celebrated the nation\u2019s high-energy existence. In an era when many people went to the movies weekly, this transition represented a cultural sea change.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the novel, Sinclair shows how film and oil came of age together. Just as a few studios start to dominate film development, publicity, and ticket sales, a few oil oligopolies push the last independents aside. Dad is forced to partner with the aptly named Vernon Roscoe (modeled on Harry F. Sinclair of Sinclair Oil) to create a consolidated chain of oil fields, refineries, and gas stations. The alliance is embodied by Roscoe\u2019s affair with the starlet Annabelle Ames. But the ties that bound oil and cinema find fullest illustration in Bunny\u2019s romance with Viola Tracy. As Bunny\u2019s petro-fortune grows, Vee\u2019s fame mounts through a wave of pro-oil films, the last of which features an autocrat who gives \u201cone of the biggest of Roumanian [sic] oil fields \u2026 to an American syndicate.\u201d<\/span>
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There\u2019s a clear parable of power here: modern media emerged as a vital handmaiden to oil\u2019s legitimation. When we go to the movies or pick up a magazine, we unconsciously consume oil\u2014once a resource for film stock\u2014as refined art and culture. Within this parable, however, the novel embeds another allegory of love\u2014for Bunny cannot help but pine after Vee even long after he understands that she\u2019s in cahoots with big oil. She remains a charismatic presence to the end\u2014a object of ruinous devotion he\u2019s learned to disclaim but can\u2019t quite let go of. The attachment shadows his later feelings for Rachel Menzies and Ruth Watkins, and it uncannily connects him with Roscoe. It\u2019s possible to love what hurts us long into adulthood, Sinclair shows, and abhorring oil\u2019s harms doesn\u2019t necessarily issue in new conditions of living.<\/span><\/p>\n

Thus <\/span>Oil!<\/span><\/i>\u2019s refinement plot moves beyond the initial commodity chain linking Dad\u2019s oil fields to gas stations, factories, and homes. We cannot understand oil\u2019s taken-for-granted nature, Sinclair suggests, without understanding how it gets further diffused into so much modern art, entertainment, and news. That\u2019s why the novel never defines what oil <\/span>is<\/span><\/i>, much less depicts it as an inherently evil thing. Far from an essential substance, oil names something like a process: a web of material and cultural relations that unfold in time. There\u2019s solace in this view. By writing a novel that assembles myriad genres bound up in oil\u2019s construction, and by representing those constructions <\/span>as <\/span><\/i>constructions, Sinclair makes a claim for fiction as a master genre to contain them all. <\/span>Oil! <\/span><\/i>tells a more \u201cwholesale\u201d story of how culture gets manufactured from oil\u2014and, in the process, it gets us outside the machine.<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/b><\/p>\n

At times, <\/span>Oil! <\/span><\/i>is haunted by significant silences and distortions of its own. In conceiving a \u201cgreat\u201d and \u201cAmerican\u201d petro-novel, Sinclair struggled to represent realities of race and empire that his subject forced him to confront. Explicitly, oil workers appear as \u201call white Americans,\u201d while Sinclair ignores antiblack hiring practices that produced an exclusionary workforce. Throughout the novel, non-white people remain on the symbolic side of the road and outside the fold of U.S. petro-culture. The same goes for the wider world. While charting the global drama of petro-violence in World War I, when oil became a prime resource for fueling ships, airplanes, land craft, and munitions, the text leaves out a significant slice of the planet. <\/span>Oil! <\/span><\/i>details Romanian and <\/span>Russian petro-conflicts while remaining mostly mute on of black and brown struggles in Mexico, Trinidad, and Venezuela. Mosul, in modern-day Iraq, appears as depopulated land. Sinclair\u2019s myth of white oil blunts his attention to petro-modernity\u2019s wellsprings throughout the Global South, and it blinds him to racial struggles at home.<\/span><\/p>\n

What <\/span>Oil! <\/span><\/i>rightly intuits, in the end, is that oil capitalism is an unsustainable juggernaut: a system designed to feed on stolen labor, life, and land until everything burns. It\u2019s a system in which new middle-class dreams of the good life go hand in hand with increased lower-class suffering and levels of ruling-class excess. It demands collective change. Sinclair never actively advocates a transition from oil per se. Yet the entire narrative bends in that direction. One way forward involves the path of reform. Having wandered across modernity\u2019s mineral landscapes, Bunny commits to \u201coverthrow capitalism by the ballot,\u201d believing that democracy can be wrested from corporate oil owners and their shills. Only should this mission fail, Bunny says, will \u201cdirect action\u201d follow. The pronouncement threads the needle between Sinclair\u2019s socialism and the more revolutionary ideals of the<\/span> Daily Worker<\/span><\/i>. \u201cBoring from within,\u201d and delaying full-bore insurrection, becomes the novel\u2019s theoretical creed.<\/span><\/p>\n

In practice, however, everything leads to more radical conclusions. Take the Teapot Dome affair in which Dad gets snared. Between 1921 and 1923, Edward L. Doheny became embroiled in one of the nation\u2019s most sensational scandals before the Watergate affair: he was charged with presenting a $100,000 bribe to President Warren G. Harding\u2019s Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall, in exchange for rights to Navy oil lands in Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and Elk Hills and Buena Vista in California. <\/span>Oil! <\/span><\/i>hews closely to these details. Dad\/Doheny\u2019s reputation gets tarnished while the worst get off unscathed. For Sinclair, the episode illustrates the petro-era\u2019s accelerating death spiral, as the criminally rich shove their last well-meaning associates aside to take what\u2019s left from the rest. Like Joe Gundha, the roughneck who falls into one of Dad\u2019s oil shafts, the nation seems poised to drown.<\/span><\/p>\n

Or erupt into flames. While abroad in chapter twenty, Bunny learns of Paradise\u2019s incineration in \u201cthe worst oil fire in California history.\u201d The episode recalls the first blowout\u2019s \u201cmasses of flame\u201d in a catastrophic mode. <\/span>\u201cEnormous oceans of flame\u201d pour out of Paradise, flowing \u201cover the earth, turning night into day with the glare, turning day into night with thunder clouds of smoke; rivers of blazing oil rushing down the valleys.\u201d In this scene of roiling oceans and earth, underground crude consumes the world that it\u2019s spawned, converting into climate and weird weather. Sinclair alludes here to the 1926 California Union Oil fires, then the industry\u2019s worst ecocatastrophe. In <\/span>Oil!<\/span><\/i>, that fire signals an eviction from Paradise and a portent of civilizational doom. Everything calls for more urgent action. Each detail serves as an indictment of Dad\u2019s mantra that \u201cthe world has got to have oil.\u201d Having oil might mark the end of all things, and a society conjured by gushing crude may leave a blown-out world in its wake.<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/b><\/p>\n

Through the heat, <\/span>Oil! <\/span><\/i>offers hope for our troubled times. The final chapters trace the growth of visionary counter-publics from below. In the Oil Workers\u2019 Union, the Young Peoples\u2019 Socialist League, and the Industrial Workers of the World, we see <\/span>Oil!<\/span><\/i>\u2019s outcast dreamers, drifters, and rebels coalesce into a more powerful whole. Their attempts at organization show that the workers most oppressed by big oil have an untapped power to block its survival. By virtue of their location at the industry\u2019s front lines\u2014manning oil wells, refineries, and transport nodes\u2014they\u2019re poised for strikes and disruptions that can thwart business as usual, thereby forcing owners and elected officials to accept democratic demands. This insight makes Sinclair into an aesthetic \u201corganizer\u201d like Bunny\u2019s beloved friend, the political organizer Paul Watkins. It\u2019s an undertaking that culminates in Bunny\u2019s proposed labor college\u2014an institution dedicated to teaching the lessons about oil that, in effect, the novel itself has provided for its <\/span>Daily Worker <\/span><\/i>readers. To be founded near \u201cMount Hope,\u201d the college evokes a greener world beyond oil capitalism\u2019s maw, a \u201cvalley of new dreams\u201d where a revitalized labor movement might emerge after its defeats in the twenties. In it, we\u2019re invited to glimpse a future where energy could be owned and controlled publicly, by all, and we\u2019re asked to foster such a world after reaching the novel\u2019s end.<\/span><\/p>\n

The future is here. It\u2019s not over the horizon, but imminent in the pulse of your blood and the words you\u2019re using now. Entrenched systems of domination work by appearing permanent, unbending, but that is only oil capitalism\u2019s illusion. Today\u2019s extractive economy has left a few wealthy men at top of the heap, <\/span>dictating life and law for everyone else while weakening the ground beneath our feet. At a time when intervening in the climate emergency tends to stop at adjusting one\u2019s personal carbon footprint, <\/span>Oil! <\/span><\/i>teaches us to think bigger about collective change. It invites us to see who profits from our every act of combustion, and who loses. And it reminds us that the system set up to benefit the profiteering class doesn\u2019t follow from the chemistry of the earth. A small subset of humans shaped it not long ago. We can reshape it now. The brief, surreal epoch of fossil-fueled civilization will surely end, but a just and timely transition can\u2019t unfold from above, and private market work-arounds won\u2019t get us free. A truly mass movement is needed, as Sinclair predicted. His Old Left commitments remind us that those who work to live aren\u2019t just victims of oil but political subjects with vested interest in its defeat.<\/span><\/p>\n

We can\u2019t know how a post-petroleum world will look or feel, but we know that we must build it now. There\u2019s time to avert the worst-case scenarios here and now, in an era that rivals the gilded-age disparities of Sinclair\u2019s world of the twenties. We inhabitants of fossil modernity\u2019s twilight are acting on a planetary scale by what we do\u2014or fail to do\u2014at this moment. Our decisions matter. Our dreams, stories, and actions matter to the world we\u2019re imparting. Will we do better than those that lived through the dawn of the oil age? Can we embrace the possibilities for transformation that an earlier era left unfulfilled? The answers will determine how all future generations tell our story, and shape the outlines of a world for which we have no name.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Adapted from the introduction to a new edition of<\/em>\u00a0Oil!<\/a> by Upton Sinclair, to be published in April by Penguin Classics.\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Michael Tondre<\/span> is an associate professor at Stony Brook University and the author of<\/em> The Physics of Possibility: Victorian Fiction, Science, and Gender.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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