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“The Black and Cruel Demon” and Its Transformations of Space:

2012; Penn State University Press; Volume: 14; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/intelitestud.14.1.0056

1524-8429

Michael K. Walonen,

Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature

No other commodity or natural resource has interlinked the disparate peoples of the world and altered the spatial conditions within which they carry out their lives to anywhere near the extent that oil has.The vast social changes wrought by oil's capacity to safely and efficiently power the internal combustion engine are immense taken by themselves. Reflecting toward the end of 1999 on the previous one hundred years of turmoil and sea change in world civilization, Tom Wolfe observed that the much-lauded digital revolution paled in comparison to the changes in warfare, sense of distance and space, religiosity, and sexual behavior brought on by the oil-fueled internal combustion engine: Without [the] engine, there would there would have been no world wars, no atomic bombings, no threat of worldwide nuclear destruction, no space exploration, nor, for that matter, any Vietnam War…. [Moreover,] it has … led to people discarding religion so casually and blithely you can't even give them any such somber, knit-brow name as “atheists” … [and] which did more to get the sexual carnival rolling, the pill or the drive-straight-to-the-room motel? (“The Party 2000”)Daniel Yergin voices much the same sentiment in his exhaustive history of the geopolitics of oil, The Prize: In the twentieth century, oil … became the basis of the great postwar suburbanization movement that transformed both the contemporary landscape and our modern way of life. Today, we are so dependent on oil, and oil is so embedded in our daily doings, that we hardly stop to comprehend its pervasive significance. It is oil that makes possible where we live, how we live, how we commute to work, how we travel—even where we conduct our courtships. It is the lifeblood of suburban communities. Oil (and natural gas) are the essential components in the fertilizer on which world agriculture depends; oil makes it possible to transport food to the totally non-self-sufficient megacities of the world. Oil also provides the plastics and chemicals that are the bricks and mortar of contemporary civilization, a civilization that would collapse if the world's oil wells suddenly went dry. (14)The dependence on oil of this modern industrial society, whose basic structure it made possible in the first place, has led over the years to recurrent anxieties (largely unfounded, as Leonardo Maugeri argues in his The Age of Oil) regarding the availability of a sufficient quantity of oil to meet consumption needs. These in turn have lead to neoimperialistic efforts by the major first world powers to secure access to oil reserves through direct military action, such as Britain's violent 1920 suppression of revolt in what is today Iraq, and by covertly fomenting the overthrow of governments by autocratic leaders, as in the case of the joint U.S. and Britain-backed 1953 coup d'état in Iran (Maugeri 27, 69–70). Thus oil has brought about the alteration of entire national political systems. Beyond this, at our current historical juncture it hardly needs to be pointed out that world dependence on oil has had profound environmental consequences, from global warming to water pollution to oil spills—seventy spills of varying sizes on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf between 1980 and 1999 (Juhasz 314), not to mention the more massive and notorious Exxon Valdez and current British Petroleum Gulf of Mexico oil spills. In all these ways and more oil has drastically affected the basic social and spatial conditions of people throughout the world, as well as their modes of relating to one another.This article traces the basic contours of the sizeable body of world literature concerned with the pursuit of oil and the riches derived therefrom, particularly the manner in which this pursuit drastically alters place—that is, the physical contours of a given area, but also the socially produced totality of the uses to which it is put, composed of the institutions, customs, functional divisions, aesthetic codes, and so forth that define it. In an era in which the discipline of literary studies finds itself seeking to go beyond nationally bounded canons and fields of concern, it is hoped that this approach might provide a productive way of discursively situating texts from disparate cultural and linguistic traditions in terms of their responses to a common global and globalizing situation, one whose ramifications, as the preceding has hopefully shown, are immense. Undertaking this task comprehensively would be a massive project, beyond the scope of this article; instead, I have selected an assortment of texts that offer particular insight into the nature of the oil business, as well as the transformations and threats posed by the quest after oil, and that represent a wide variety of eras and major oil-producing regions of the world. One might also have focused on such works as Antonina Koptiaeva's social realist Gift of Earth (1963), Romulo Gallegos's Sobre la misma tierra (1943), Ralph de Boissière's Crown Jewel (1952), Gregorio Lopez y Fuentes's Huasteca (1939), Ghassan Kanafani's “Men in the Sun” (1962), J. M. G. Le Clézio's Onitsha (1991), Laura Restrepo's The Dark Bride (1999), Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (1939, set against the backdrop of the moral corruption of the Southern California oil industry), and Gerald Haslam's writings about the oil-producing places of the Bakersfield area.In his essay “Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel” (1992) Amitav Ghosh, whose novel The Circle of Reason (1986) will appear later in this study, argues that “scarcely a single [literary] work of note” has been published on the subject of the encounter with oil—its extraction and trade and the social consequences thereof (138). According to Ghosh, no work outside of Abdelrahman Munif's Cities of Salt (1984) has come anywhere near capturing the transnational scope of the oil industry, the heterogeneous mixing of peoples in its workforce, and the forms of social organization it has fostered, because for Americans oil and oil dependence have a shameful aspect to them, because the literary epicenters of the Arab world are not found in oil-producing countries, and because of the tendency of contemporary fiction to occupy itself with the familiar and the geographically bounded rather than fluidly cross linguistic, cultural, and national boundaries (139–40). While there may not be a single crowning literary achievement that heteroglossically captures the flow of people, capital, and geopolitical control represented by the oil industry, this article will show that there is a well-established world literary tradition whose constituent texts may not be War and Peaces of what Ghosh calls “the Oil Encounter,” but nonetheless offer an incisive running commentary on oil's social and spatial impact—its destruction of traditional spatial orders; its creation of vast levels of material inequality, with the attendant risk of undermining democratic political systems; and its exercise of power, both diffuse and concentrated in the hands of legendary oilmen. Most of the texts examined here are canonical, though they occupy fairly marginal places within the literary canon; others, like Essad Bey's Blood and Oil in the Orient (1930) have been largely forgotten. But to properly begin this study with a consideration of the prehistory of the oil industry, the conditions that preceded and led to its ascendancy, we must turn first to one of the most canonical works of all, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851).It might at first blush seem like something of a stretch to trace the lineage of the literature of oil and place back to Moby-Dick, but Melville's novel remains not only the earliest but also one of the most powerful cautionary explorations of the greed and monomania that fuel the quest for oil wealth. The whaling business, carried out chiefly to obtain sperm whale oil for use as a source of illumination, was the direct predecessor, and one could even say antecedent, of the American oil industry. In her Forbes magazine article “Blubber Capitalism,” Laura Saunders notes that the New England whaling industry in many ways anticipated modern-day corporations, sharing such traits with them as risk distribution, international business scope, sophisticated forms of organization, capital accumulation, and technological innovation. By the 1850s the whaling industry was experiencing problems, particularly escalating costs due to the increasing scarcity of its product brought on by overfishing, and into this breach stepped petroleum, kerosene extraction having been patented in 1854 and what is generally credited as the first successful example of subsurface drilling for oil having taken place in western Pennsylvania in 1859 (Maugeri 3–4). For the first half century of its existence, kerosene, which provided a more affordable alternative to sperm whale oil, drove the petroleum industry—it was not until 1910 that gasoline, which had previously been considered “an almost useless by-product,” dumped into rivers at night on occasion, bypassed kerosene in sales thanks to demand occasioned by the spread of motor vehicles (Yergen 14, Maugeri 22).Moby-Dick is a tale about, among other things, heedless efforts to draw commodities—objects with use and exchange value, as well as a fetishized social aspect—from nature. As Robert D. Wagner remarks in his Moby-Dick and the Mythology of Oil, the Pequod is just the sort of protocorporation that Laura Saunders observed in the New England whaling industry: “a business enterprise, owned and managed for profit, with limited liability to its owners and potentially disastrous risks, physical and economic, to its workers,” with Ahab serving as the CEO and Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask as vice presidents (120). The ship is outfitted through the sale of shares to “a crowd of old annuitants; widows, fatherless children, and chancery wards; each owning about the value of a timber head, or a foot of plank, or a nail or two in the ship. People in Nantucket invest their money in whaling vessels, the same way that you do yours in approved state stocks bringing in good interest” (Melville 71). The crew, by turn, is paid by “certain shares of the profits called lays … proportioned to the degree of importance pertaining to the respective duties of the ship's company” (73), their economic gain thus being tied entirely to the ship's performance, in a manner redolent of logic of performance incentives and stock options. With the shareholders and the employees of the Pequod thus married to the bottom line, they place their faith and an unchecked level of control in the hands of Captain Ahab, a man with a reputation for skill and ferocity in his pursuit of whales, but also a man whose megalomania and hijacking of corporately owned resources in the service of his own personal vendetta lead to the destruction of the considerable amount of capital invested in the Pequod and the loss of the lives of all but one of its crew. Read in this manner, Moby-Dick is a text that voices strong anxieties regarding the evolving forms of capitalist business practices and wealth pursuit, a form of enterprise “apt to ‘invert’ and ‘deaden’ whoever takes too great a part in it” (Leroux 437). In addition to this, it is a text that voices early concerns about the overexploitation of limited natural resources in an era in which whalers were finding themselves forced to search out their once-abundant prey among the far corners of the earth: But still another inquiry remains; one often agitated by the more recondite Nantucketers. Whether owing to the almost omniscient lookouts at the mastheads of the whaleships, now penetrating even through Behring's straits, and into the remotest secret drawers and lockers of the world; and the thousand harpoons and lances darted along all the continental coasts; the moot point is, whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and then evaporate in the final puff. (Melville 352)As has often been remarked, every generation has its own Moby-Dick commensurate with the chief concerns and anxieties of its age; here in the early going of the twenty-first century, with our unabating dependence on a finite and dwindling supply of fossil fuels wreaking substantial havoc upon both global and local environments and the political, economic, and social ramifications of multinational corporations comporting themselves with Ahab-like impunity consistently mounting, Melville's insights into the dangers of proto-big oil ring sublimely prophetic.Starting in the 1920s, as oil came to exert an undeniable social influence upon the industrialized nations that were well on their way to becoming dependent on consuming it and on those locations throughout the world where it was being extracted, a literature exploring the operational dynamics of the companies that came to dominate the oil industry in the wake of the breakup of Standard Oil emerged. Among these works, Upton Sinclair's novel Oil! (1927) is probably the most widely known, thanks in part to the recent loose film adaptation, There Will Be Blood (2007).Oil! is set during the first two decades of the twentieth century amid the Southern California oil boom that—as it is easy to forget so many decades after that region's oil supply was exhausted—supplied 22 percent of the world's oil at the time, more than the production of any country outside the United States (Juhasz 64). It narrates the story of Bunny, the son of a successful independent oil magnate, and his father, J. Arnold Ross, or “Dad,” as he is more commonly referred to in the text. The two purchase a series of ranches in the fictional town of Paradise, where they make a big oil strike and come to know two brothers, Paul and Eli Watkins, who represent divergent approaches to social reform and existential vocation. Paul, introduced to radical thought by a freethinking lawyer who took him on as an apprentice in Paul's adolescence and increasingly galvanized his tendencies through the experience of his being forced to fight against the Soviet proletariat forces in Siberia at the end of World War I as part of the American expeditionary force, dedicates his life to communism and the labor struggle against big business. Eli, on the other hand, is an evangelical revivalist based upon Aimee Semple McPherson, one who becomes wealthy thanks to his “hellfire and damnation” ministry broadcast over the radio and from the pulpit of his multimillion-dollar tabernacle in the heart of Los Angeles. In the meantime, after a brief stint in the armed forces, Bunny takes up college life as a student at Southern Pacific University, an institution based on the University of Southern California during its days of affiliation with the Methodist Church, and begins a relationship with Hollywood starlet Vee Tracy. While he does this, Dad joins forces with fellow oilman Vernon Roscoe, who is based on real-life industry figure Edward Doheny (Juhasz 65), and together they help to buy Senator Warren Harding's way into the White House in the 1920 presidential election in exchange for the rights to drill on government oil reserves.1 Sinclair based this incident very closely on the Teapot Dome scandal, which had helped to inspire his writing of the novel in the first place (Bloodworth). When the machinations of Roscoe and Dad are discovered, a furor ensues; Dad flees to Europe, where, broken and growing sentimental with age, he becomes fascinated with spiritualism and dies shortly thereafter. The family fortune disappears with Dad, due likely to the manipulations of Roscoe, who does not want the money to fall into the hands of Bunny. This is because under Paul's influence Bunny has come to adopt an increasingly radical socialist position, one that he affirms when he marries Rachel, a woman from his university socialist group. The novel ends with the death of Paul, from a beating at the hands of an anticommunist mob breaking up a labor meeting, and of his devoted sister, Rachel, who throws herself down an oil well in grief.Oil! is a warning cry against the erosion of democracy that occurs when big business buys its way into government, a reflection on the corrupting face of greed, and a testament to the persecution of far leftist social reformers. Its position on oil itself is ambivalent, or rather, multifaceted. Dad, the novel's central oilman, is a sympathetic character, a rugged individualist who has made his own way, rising in affluence and social status not out of any inherent desire for power or luxury, but rather as a stoical concession to the necessities of modern life. He treats his workers well and employs strikebreakers only when he is forced to by the association of oil owners to which he belongs. In addition, the novel revels in times at the freedom of mobility and speed afforded by the oil-powered automobile, notably in its opening sequence and sections describing Bunny's high school days. However, this freedom of circulation, Bunny comes to conclude, is part of an ultimately fruitless, quixotic search for something better: “you looked at the world, and saw enormous crowds of people driving to places where they were no better off than at home” (284). Paul, who is favorably characterized as a selfless and enlightened figure, comes to see in the mad scramble of individuals and companies for control of resources endemic to the oil industry a metaphor for international relations within a capitalist system: As I go about Europe I say to myself that is world diplomacy. A wrangle over an oil lease! Every nation hating every other one, making combinations and promising to stick together—but they've sold each other out before night…. Each one racing to get the oil, and spending more than he makes—isn't that a picture of capitalism? And then the war! You remember how we heard the racket [of a group of neighbors fighting over the terms of an oil lease in their neighborhood of Prospect Hill]…. Son, that was a little oil war! And a year or two later the big one [World War I] broke out … and remember, they were fighting for a chance to exploit oil workers, to divide the wealth the oil workers were going to produce; in their crazy greed they killed or injured seventy-three per cent of all the men they put to work on Prospect Hill—that's government statistics also! And don't you see how that's the world war exactly? The workers doing the fighting, and the bankers getting the bonds! (468–69)So, for Sinclair, it is ultimately human acquisitiveness coupled with the scarcity of resources that lies behind the conflicts and exploitation of the oil business. The didactic final line of the novel emphasizes this—that properly harnessed under a different social system, oil will not cause the destruction and loss that occur in Oil!: “There will be other girls with bare brown legs running over those hills, and they may grow up to be happier women, if men can find some way to chain the black and cruel demon which killed Ruth Watkins and her brother—yes, and Dad also: an evil Power which roams the earth, crippling the bodies of men and women, and luring nations to destruction by visions of unearned wealth, and the opportunity to enslave and exploit labor” (527–27; italics mine).In the world of the novel this “black and cruel demon” transforms place by stirring the drive to dominate reserves and thus maximize profits, which in turn leads men to bring about great alterations to physical environments. The city of Paradise is transformed by the Ross's oil drilling, from a small pastoral—though more desiccated and rundown than its name implies—community to the site of a sprawling industrialized camp, with derricks, massive reservoirs, workers' barracks, and a state-of the-art refinery. Dad distributes the necessary graft to local officials to have paved access roads built at taxpayers' expense. In general, the novel marvels at, while simultaneously cautioning against, this power of enterprise and capital to effect monumental change to the landscape, as in the case of a road constructed through the mountains: Men of money had said the word, and surveyors and engineers had come, and diggers by the thousand, swarming Mexicans and Indians, bronze of skin, armed with picks and shovels; and great steam shovels with long hanging lobster-claws of steel; derricks with wide swinging arms, scrapers and grading machines, steel drills and blasting men with dynamite, rock-crushers, and concrete mixers that ate sacks of cement by the thousand, and drank water from a flour-stained hose, and had round steel bellies that turned all day with a grinding noise. All these had come, and for a year or two they had toiled, and yard by yard they had unrolled the magic ribbon. (5)But while the enthusiasm in this passage over industrial might is palpable, the novel recognizes the necessity of spatial regulations in the form of zoning ordinances and restrictions on land exchange and exploitation. Southern California's first steps from relative obscurity in the late nineteenth century toward the sprawling urban and suburban population center that it is today resulted from the efforts of real estate boosters attracting people to the land of eternal sunshine. Before oil, before the entertainment and defense industries, this was the first big Southern California boom. Oil! represents these real estate men, one of whom aids Dad in acquiring the Paradise properties he later drills upon at rock-bottom rates, as rapacious roadside hucksters with no aesthetic sense. The real estate men's avaricious driving logic of usage is fundamentally the same as that of the oilmen, and Oil! posits that when there is no legal stewardship governing the usage of land or it is laxly applied, the kinds of capitalist economic exploitation carried out by the real estate men and Dad—and Roscoe to an even greater extent than Dad—take place unimpeded.A similar unease about the oil industry as the ultimate embodiment of capitalism, empowered to radically alter and even despoil whole landscapes and communities, is voiced in B. Traven's novel The White Rose (1929). Relating the story of the fictional Californian Condor Oil Company's repeated efforts to gain ownership of the oil-rich White Rose hacienda in the Veracruz region of Mexico, which succeed only after its Indian owner is murdered and his signature forged, The White Rose vacillates in narrative focus between the inhabitants of the hacienda, the governor of the region, and Mr. Collins, the president of the oil company.2 This allows the text to illustrate the multisided human dimension of the struggle for oil, riches, and land at the same time that it reveals the virtually limitless power that corporations of the era could wield as a result of their reserves of capital and influence. It notes that “large companies, especially steel and petroleum companies” such as Condor Oil, have the power to effect the rejection of foreign ambassadors; the changing of its own envoys; sickness and resignation of secretaries of state; armed intervention in the affairs of Bolshevik Russia; the abolition of freedom of speech for communists; the plotting of a new Mexican revolution; support for the Turks against England; twenty-two year minimum sentence for Wobblies; free trade for whiskey smugglers; … the encouragement of mobile prostitution to revive an auto industry struggling for its life; support for the installment plan and similar ideas for the enslavement of the people least able to pay; the denial of credit to cooperatives and unions that build houses to rent at cost; and a few other things. (56–57)Even this partial list illustrates that these corporate manipulations are generally carried out to alter foreign policy for the sake of profit or to attack organized labor. In the case of the White Rose hacienda and surrounding territory, the oil companies use their strength to acquire as much land as possible, even if this land is only likely to hold oil, because this “makes speculation possible and permits millions of dollars to be made without so much as a single barrel of oil having to be produced” (4). So a rather parasitic quality is imputed to these companies—they irrevocably alter landscapes and lives not solely to produce products that have a clear use value, but also to facilitate these sorts of speculative numbers games that do not create any social good, only shareholder profits. This point is made glaringly on at least two other occasion in the novel: when Mr. Collins, working at a previous job, instigates a conflict with the coal miner's union to drive competition out of business and reap a financial windfall, and later when he manipulates the price of stocks to make enough money to pay off the substantial bills he has accrued satisfying the lavish tastes of his high-priced mistress.Beyond this, like Moby-Dick, The White Rose is a work that illustrates the environmental dangers of the single-minded corporate profit-drive. As Richard E. Mezo argues, the text purveys a view “that people should live in an intimate and balanced relationship with the natural world” (95). This clearly does not occur when the White Rose is taken over by the oil company and transformed into a “monotonously” noisy place that is “smeared over, oiled up, smoke-filled, filthy,” where “drillers were killed by swinging pipes, tooldressers were crushed by collapsing jacks, part-time workers were struck down by heavy steel cables and wound up piecemeal in the winches” (206). In addition to this loss of life and environmental devastation, the social impact of this transformation is registered: these inroads of the industrial onto the agrarian are represented as destroying an ancient communitarian existential wholeness that cannot be recuperated. The inhabitants of the hacienda find their gemeinschaft society ruptured as they are forced to relocate by the oil company, losing in the process “much of what had once made them rich in their feelings, in their quiet natural happiness” (195). However, The White Rose is not an uncomplicated text of romantic longing for a lost folk existence of simplicity and strong interpersonal bonds. It sees the life changes experienced by the people of the hacienda as essentially bittersweet—for all they have lost being brusquely and precipitously forced into the industrial, anomie-ridden twentieth century, they have gained in not inconsequential material comfort and in a sense of being part of a larger, more globally encompassing world. Those who come to work in the oil fields saw that other men were not so very different from themselves. And this strengthened the fraternal bond to other men and other peoples. They listened to the radios brought into the camps by the American engineers and oil people. They heard music and words from other lands, heard the speeches of the President of the Republic, heard the lectures of doctors, teachers, instructors, artists, health inspectors—all of those people who were bearers of culture, knowledge, and advice, into the most remote regions of the nation. They met other workers…. And a day was coming when everyone could rightly say: We have become richer than we were; we have become greater than our fathers were. Today we are citizens of the world. What is more, we are conscious citizens of the world, because we understand the earth and the other people in it, and we understand more and more. And because we understand more, our love has become greater. (194–96)So, at the same time that The White Rose sees American oil companies operating abroad as antagonistic to workers, economically exploitative, and destructive of the environment and traditional societies, it also shows them unwittingly creating a way out of the parochialism of the traditional and local by producing new social spaces that allow for new possibilities of human solidarity, awareness, and interconnection.Although published, in Germany, in the same year as Traven's The White Rose, Essad Bey's Blood and Oil in the Orient stands worlds apart from Traven's work in its ideology and its valuation of oil.3 Part romance of Orientalist violence and grandeur, part anti-Soviet diatribe, Blood and Oil in the Orient is set amid the massive early twentieth-century oil boom in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. The Baku region's oil saturatedness has been known since ancient times—flammable oil and natural gas seeping to the surface drew the Zoroastrians to Baku, which became the geographic center of their religion—and Marco Polo commented on the oil of Baku centuries later in his travel writings (Reiss 10). Starting in the late nineteenth century, the demand for oil to produce kerosene drew a bevy of individuals from the Caucus region and abroad to seek their fortunes in Baku, which by 1901 was producing half the world's oil (11).Blood and Oil in the Orient is the ostensibly autobiographical story of its narrator's early life as the son of a powerful Baku “oil lord,” his journey through Turkistan to Samarkand with his father in flight from the Communist/Armenian takeover of Azerbaijan, their return to Baku following the Turkish/German occupation of the country, and finally their escape into Georgia when the Soviets reestablish their control in 1920. Throughout, oil takes on a fairly idiosyncratic character. The text begins by equating oil with barbarism, the unimpeded drive to control and thrive (3–4), yet a natural aspect is attributed to it as well. Oil is a basic, constituent part of the Baku landscape as described in Blood and Oil in the Orient, saturating the earth and even the waters of the Caspian Sea, into which the city juts (18). The narrator describes oil vapors as refreshing and notes that locals believe they help to fight lung disease (20).4 At times oil is valued even furt