The Jungle (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free

The Jungle (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)
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becomes flesh for vermin. And we find the second in the narrator’s account of men who have fallen into the open vats in the tank rooms: “When they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,—sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard!” (p. 109). (This was the only assertion in the novel that could not be independently verified after the book’s publication. Sinclair responded that the employers made sure to send the widows of the men killed in such accidents back to their countries of origin in order to hide the atrocious manner of their deaths.)
    Our repulsion at the gruesomeness of the tasks the meatpacking workers are called upon to perform activates another level of meanings in the text. That is, not only is this work relegated to a vulnerable immigrant population, but, symbolically, capitalism hides its bloodied foundations; just as we’d rather not dwell upon where our meat really comes from, and how it reaches us, so capitalism disguises the sources of modern wealth, derived from the degradation of the laboring class. When Sinclair takes Jurgis into the grand mansion of one of the packing yard owners, we recoil at the recognition of what this lavish luxury is built upon—the gore of the slaughterhouse as well as the lives of tens of thousands of workers. In this act of separation of cause from effect, the reader is further called upon to consider our genteel treatment of the meat we consume. As Norbert Elias has noted in his majestic history of western manners, The Civilizing Process (1939; translated 1978), “Reminders that the meat dish has something to do with the killing of an animal are avoided to the utmost.” In contrast to the medieval practice of bringing the entire animal to the table, sometimes with hoofs or feathers still attached, in more recent times, “the animal form is so concealed and changed by the art of its preparation and carving that while eating one is scarcely reminded of its origins.” The iconoclasm of The Jungle is in part achieved in its relentless insistence that we dwell upon what we don’t wish to dwell upon, that we recognize that just as we have distanced ourselves from the slaughter of animals (once a quite ordinary part of life), so we have distanced ourselves from the hard lives of these workers. Indeed they are hidden from us by our own choice. Sinclair demands that we draw the connections, that we remember the origins of both meat and wealth.
    The first central slaughterhouse, built to cater to a population of millions, was La Villette, designed by George Eugene Haussmann, in 1867. (Haussmann himself compared this project with another engineering accomplishment of his, the great sewer system of Paris.) In this grand structure, located at the outskirts of Paris, gigantic halls of glass and iron dominated the long rows of low slaughterhouses. While La Villette provided enough meat for Parisian consumption over a period of days, each ox still had a separate stall in which it was felled: there were no cogwheels or conveyer belts. It was in the United States that the innovation of the assembly line was first introduced to the process of animal slaughter. The assembly line system, architectural historian Siegfried Giedion has argued in Mechanization Takes Command (1948), imparts a distinct neutrality to the act of killing. He argues that the broader influence of this neutrality “does not have to appear in the land that evolved mechanical killing, or even at the time the methods came about. This neutrality toward death may be lodged deep in the roots of our time.” But Giedion also observes that the killing of animals, unlike the production of cars, cannot be completely mechanized. “Only the knife, guided by the human hand, can perform the transition from life to death in the desired manner.” This tension, between mechanized process and the
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