Brief Note In Midst Of Reading Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle

‪The wedding scene is an amazing cross section of that swathe of immiserated, exploited, grimly existing immigrants carving out a tragedy-enhancing moment of pleasure in the midst of their terrible social affliction. Here, in this scene, the showing and telling seem to be in accord. From then on, The Jungle devolves to tract-like telling under the veneer of fiction, whatever Sinclair thought he was achieving. And yet, as I say, what he describes, and it gets gloomier and darker as it proceeds, is powerfully resonant. So, maybe there’s another way of seeing what he does, that the thin simulacrum of people living their lives all so externally presented, almost fable like, is enough humanity as to make resonantly work the endless description of the conditions creating their deepening misery.‬