The Octopus and the Other: Capitalocene Contradictions in the Symbolic Order

Kelly Gray
Additional contact information
Kelly Gray: Boston College, United States

Journal of Ecohumanism, 2022, vol. 1, issue 2, 95-197

Abstract: This article exercises a Lacanian psychoanalytic intervention into ecocriticism through examining the contradictions of the Capitalocene within Frank Norris’s 1901 novel, The Octopus. Drawing upon Jason Moore’s dialectical framework in the Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History and the Crisis of Capitalism (2016) and Philip R. Polefrone’s “The Stock Ticker in the Garden: Frank Norris, American Literary Naturalism, and Capitalocene Aesthetics” (2020), this article examines the contradictory naturalization of capitalism in nature within the novel’s depiction of the wheat and railroad industries in California through the ideology of the Capitalocene. This article then analyzes the novel’s pairing of Angéle’s sexual assault with the industrial assault of the land. Read through a psychoanalytic framework, the assaults in the novel together illuminate how the search for the other in the novel effectively obscures the psychoanalytic understanding that “there is no big Other,”or the understanding that the Capitalist symbolic order is inherently contradictory.

Keywords: Ecocriticism; Capitalocene; Ideology; Psychoanalysis; Lacan (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.tplondon.com/ecohumanism/article/view/2262/1955 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mig:ecohjl:v:2:y:2022:i:1:p:95-197

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://ecohumanism. ... ormation/librarians/

DOI: 10.33182/joe.v1i2.2262

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Ecohumanism is currently edited by Peggy Karpouzou and Nikoleta Zampaki

More articles in Journal of Ecohumanism from Transnational Press London, UK
Bibliographic data for series maintained by TPLondon ().