Oil, p.3
Oil!, page 3
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Through the heat, Oil! offers hope for our troubled times. The culminating chapters trace the growth of visionary countercultures from below. In the Oil Workers’ Union, Young People’s Socialist League, and Industrial Workers of the World, we see Oil!’s 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’s front lines—manning oil wells, refineries, and transport hubs—they’re poised for strikes and disruptions able to thwart business as usual, thereby forcing owners and elected officials to accept democratic demands. This insight makes Sinclair into an aesthetic “organizer” like Bunny’s beloved friend, the political organizer Paul Watkins. It’s an undertaking that culminates in Bunny’s proposed labor college—an institution dedicated to teaching the lessons about oil that, in effect, the novel itself has provided for its Daily Worker readers. To be founded near “Mount Hope,” the college evokes a greener world beyond oil capitalism’s maw, a “valley of new dreams” where a revitalized labor movement might emerge after its 1920s defeats (516). In it, we’re invited to glimpse a future where energy could be owned and controlled publicly, by all, and asked to foster such a world after reaching the novel’s end.
The future is here. It’s not over the horizon, but immanent in the pulse of your blood and the pages you’re turning now. Entrenched systems of domination work by appearing permanent, unbending, but that is only oil capitalism’s illusion. Today’s extractive economy has left a few wealthy men at the top of the heap, dictating life and law for everyone else while weakening the ground beneath our feet. Yet our path isn’t inevitable. At a time when intervening in the climate emergency tends to stop at one’s personal carbon footprint, Oil! teaches us to think bigger about collective change. It invites us to see who profits and loses from our every act of combustion. And it reminds us that the system set up to benefit the profiteering class isn’t inexorable. It doesn’t follow from the chemistry of the earth. A small subset of humans shaped it not long ago. We can reshape it now. What life on earth will be like over the next millennia will be determined by our immediate words and actions. The brief, surreal epoch of fossil-fueled civilization will surely end; but a just and timely transition can’t unfold from above, and private market work-arounds won’t get us free. A truly mass movement is needed, as Sinclair rightly predicted. His Old Left commitments remind us that those who work to live aren’t just victims of oil but political subjects with a vested interest in its defeat. Consider what a resuscitated labor movement might mean in the electric utility sector. If workers organized for the wages and jobs to come from assembling a clean electric grid, then the transition to renewables could be vastly accelerated.[20] Other sectors and frontline communities might make similarly powerful demands for equity, economic justice, and the right to a livable future.
Ours is an unseasonable era of transition. We can’t know how a post-petroleum world will look or feel, but we know that we must build it now. Multiple actions are essential, both individual and institutional, while we adapt to life on a damaged planet. While working to demand coordinated state action, we must also scale back on driving and flying. We’ll need to make our homes and manufactories more energy efficient, reduce cattle farming and plastics production, and cultivate carbon-sinking green spaces. The transition to renewable power will be arduous, and may seem insurmountable, but we can’t simply learn how to die. There’s time to avert the worst-case scenarios here and now, in an era that rivals the Gilded Age disparities of Sinclair’s 1920s world. We inhabitants of fossil modernity’s twilight are acting on a planetary scale by what we do or fail to do at this moment. Our decisions matter. Our dreams, stories, and actions matter to the world we’re imparting. Will we do better than those who lived through the oil age’s dawn? 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 will shape the outlines of a world for which we have no name.
michael tondre
A Note on the Text
Sinclair began Oil! during the first months of 1924 in Pasadena, California, and recorded its completion on November 16, 1926. The novel was first published as Oil (without the exclamation point) in The Daily Worker, the national newspaper for the Communist Party of the United States of America, in 221 installments of about a thousand words each. The Daily Worker announced Oil’s serialization on May 20, 1926, with an initial installment advertised for June 15 under the coeditorship of John Engdahl and William Dunne. The novel in fact debuted on June 2 and ran through March 7, 1927. Two unattributed illustrations accompany this text: a large cartoon of Calvin Coolidge forced to drink from a bottle labeled “Uncle Sam’s Teapot Dome Oil Scandal” on June 4, 1926, and a smaller line drawing featuring three oil derricks and a refinery on September 14, 1926. The only other literary work in The Daily Worker during the novel’s installment run was a short play on industrial accidents by Michael Gold on July 3, 1926.
New York–based publisher Boni & Liveright acquired book rights to the novel in January 1927. Single-volume publication followed on March 25, 1927, with the revised title Oil! This edition had two initial impressions: a commercial text numbering 5,000 copies sold by Boni & Liveright, and a text under Sinclair’s self-published imprimatur numbering 3,000 copies. Both texts were produced by W. B. Conkey, a printer Sinclair had hired for self-published texts before Oil! The two impressions contain no major variants. One other version of Oil! appeared in 1927. In mid-May, the Boston police prohibited sales of Oil! due to nine pages that were deemed sexually explicit. Sinclair seized the chance for publicity by asking Conkey to produce 150 special paperback copies with the offending pages replaced by a fig leaf image. Sinclair sold this “fig leaf edition” in June with a frontispiece explaining that the “political and social information which is the real cause of the attack upon the book” remained unaltered. The stunt helped to boost Oil!’s initially lukewarm sales and made the novel a bestseller. In 1929, Sinclair created a dramatic adaptation titled Oil!: A Play in Four Acts that remains commercially unpublished. This Penguin Classics edition follows the Boni & Liveright text with silently corrected printer’s errors. Spellings for place-names and hyphenated words are also silently corrected and modernized (e.g., “Tibet” for “Thibet” and “wildcat” for “wild-cat”). Because no comprehensively edited edition of Oil! has appeared until now, the notes for this volume are unique.
Sinclair made more than eighty significant adjustments, additions, and deletions as he prepared Oil! for single-volume publication. The most substantial was an entirely new three-page scene in the “new refinery” that Sinclair included in chapter 10, which describes the refinery as “a work of art” (256). A new paragraph also begins the single-volume edition’s final chapter to underscore the personal and political tragedy of Paul Watkins’s fate. One character named “Harry Dockweiler” in The Daily Worker edition is renamed “Barney Brockway,” with the effect of distancing the text from Sinclair’s model, Harry Daugherty, a U.S. attorney general embroiled in the 1921–1923 Teapot Dome scandal and indicted on unrelated corruption charges in 1926. Other changes add depth to the conflict between oil workers and paramilitary forces, extend ideological tensions between Bunny and Dad, and distinguish between petroleum products such as “gasoline” and “fuel oil.” See the notes for details about these and other interesting changes. A holograph notebook and incomplete manuscript for Oil! are housed at the Lilly Library’s Upton Sinclair Archive at Indiana University Bloomington (Sinclair mss., 1814–1968, box 19). The manuscript pages consist of typewritten sheets and autograph pencil revisions. A complete typewritten manuscript for Oil!: A Play in Four Acts is also held at the Lilly Library (box 33) with frequent autograph revisions in pencil.
Suggestions for Further Reading
Oil! is a foundational text in contemporary discussions of petroleum, literature, and climate change. Many of these discussions have unfolded within what scholars term the energy humanities, which examine the deep cultural underpinnings of fossil-fueled existence, and which show how works of fiction variously celebrate and critique modern oil use (often at the same time). Rather than viewing petroleum and other fossil fuels as self-evident resources waiting to be removed from the ground, this body of work accentuates the primacy of literature, film, and other media in imagining oil’s value; in illuminating oil’s taken-for-granted presence in our lives; in revealing oil’s long commodity chains and unevenly distributed impacts; and in imagining a just transition to alternative energy systems. Below I include earlier examinations of Sinclair and Oil! alongside more recent contributions in this vibrant field of inquiry.
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND BIOGRAPHY
Arthur, Anthony. Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair. New York: Random House, 2006.
Coodley, Lauren. Upton Sinclair: California Socialist, Celebrity Intellectual. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013.
Gottesman, Ronald, and Charles L. P. Silet. The Literary Manuscripts of Upton Sinclair. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1972.
Harris, Leon. Upton Sinclair: American Rebel. New York: Crowell, 1975.
Mattson, Kevin. Upton Sinclair and the Other American Century. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2006.
Sinclair, Mary Craig. Southern Belle: A Personal Story of a Crusader’s Wife. New York: Crown Publishers, 1957.
Sinclair, Upton. The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1962.
———. My Lifetime in Letters. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1960.
CRITICISM ON OIL!
Bloodworth Jr., William A. Upton Sinclair. Boston: Twayne, 1977.
Buell, Frederick. “A Short History of Oil Cultures; or, The Marriage of Catastrophe and Exuberance.” Journal of American Studies 46, no. 2 (2012): 273–93.
Dell, Floyd. Upton Sinclair: A Study in Social Protest. New York: AMS Press, 1927.
Hitchcock, Peter. “Oil in an American Imaginary.” New Formations 69 (2010): 81–97.
Johnson, Bob. Carbon Nation: Fossil Fuels in the Making of American Culture. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014.
Kashi, Ed. Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta. Ed. Michael Watts. New York: powerHouse Books, 2010.
LeMenager, Stephanie. “The Aesthetics of Petroleum, After Oil!” American Literary History 24, no. 1 (2012): 59–86.
Mackay, Ruth. Waiting for the Sky to Fall: The Age of Verticality in American Narrative. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2016.
Mookerjee, R. N. Art for Social Justice: The Major Novels of Upton Sinclair. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1988.
Nichols, Roberta. “Idyll at Station B: The Sinclairs in Long Beach.” Upton Sinclair Quarterly 4 (1980): 6–14.
Phipps, Gregory Alan. “Making the Milk into a Milkshake: Adapting Upton Sinclair’s Oil! into P. T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.” Literature-Film Quarterly 43, no. 1 (2015): 34–45.
Pinkus, Karen. Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
Rubenstein, Michael, and Justin Neuman. Modernism and Its Environments. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.
Schuster, Joshua. “Where Is the Oil in Modernism?” In Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture, edited by Sheena Wilson, Adam Carlson, and Imre Szeman, 197–213. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2017.
Scott, Heidi C. M. Fuel: An Ecocritical History. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.
Valiunas, Algis. “The Blood of Upton Sinclair.” Commentary 125 (2008): 45–49.
Van Wienen, Mark W. American Socialist Triptych: The Literary-Political Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Upton Sinclair, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011.
Vredenburg, Jason. “The Californian Problem: Upton Sinclair’s Oil! and the Mexican Revolution.” American Literary Realism 48, no. 3 (2016): 251–69.
Worden, Daniel. “Fossil-Fuel Futurity: Oil in Giant.” Journal of American Studies 46, no. 2 (2012): 441–60.
Wyatt, David. “L.A. Fiction through Mid-Century.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Los Angeles, edited by Kevin McNamara, 35–48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Yaeger, Patricia, Laurie Shannon, Vin Nardizzi, Ken Hiltner, Saree Makdisi, Michael Ziser, and Imre Szeman. “Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources.” PMLA 126, no. 2 (2011): 305–26.
Yoder, Jon A. Upton Sinclair. New York: Ungar, 1975.
OF MORE GENERAL INTEREST
Appel, Hannah, Arthur Mason, and Michael Watts, eds. Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015.
Balkan, Stacey, and Swaralipi Nandi, eds. Oil Fictions: World Literature and Our Contemporary Petrosphere. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2021.
Barrett, Ross, and Daniel Worden, eds. Oil Culture. Foreword by Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Bellamy, Brent Ryan, Michael O’Driscoll, and Mark Simpson. “Introduction: Toward a Theory of Resource Aesthetics.” Postmodern Culture 26, no. 2 (2016).
Boyer, Dominic. “Energopower: An Introduction.” Anthropological Quarterly 87, no. 2 (2014): 309–33.
Burtynsky, Edward. Burtynsky: Oil. Edited by Paul Roth and Marcus Schubert. Göttingen: Steidl, 2009.
Coronil, Fernando. The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Dahlquist, Marina, and Patrick Vonderau, eds. Petrocinema: Sponsored Film and the Oil Industry. London: Bloomsbury, 2021.
Diamanti, Jeff. Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum: Locating Terminal Landscapes. London: Bloomsbury, 2021.
Ghosh, Amitav. “Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel,” New Republic 206 (March 2, 1992): 29–34.
Huber, Matthew T. Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Johnson, Bob. Mineral Rites: An Archeology of the Fossil Economy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.
Jones, Jamie L. “Beyond Oil: The Emergence of the Energy Humanities.” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 6, nos. 2–3 (2019): 155–63.
Kapuscinski, Ryszard. Shah of Shahs. Translated by William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand. New York: Vintage, 1985.
LeMenager, Stephanie. Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Macdonald, Graeme. “Improbability Drives: The Energy of SF.” Paradoxa 26 (2014): 111–44.
———. “Oil and World Literature.” American Book Review 33, no. 3 (2012): 7–31.
———. “The Resources of Fiction.” Reviews in Cultural Theory 4, no. 2 (2013): 1–24.
Malm, Andreas. How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire. London: Verso, 2021.
Malm, Andreas, and the Zetkin Collective. White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism. London: Verso, 2021.
Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso, 2011.
Orpana, Simon. Gasoline Dreams: Waking Up from Petroculture. Foreword by Imre Szeman. Afterword by Mark Simpson. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021.
Simpson, Mark, and Imre Szeman. “Impasse Time.” South Atlantic Quarterly 120, no. 1 (2021): 77–89.
Smil, Vaclav. Oil: A Beginner’s Guide. London: Oneworld, 2008.
Szeman, Imre. On Petrocultures: Globalization, Culture, and Energy. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2019.
Szeman, Imre, and Dominic Boyer, eds. Energy Humanities: An Anthology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017.
Szeman, Imre, and Petrocultures Research Group. After Oil. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2016.
Szeman, Imre, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger, eds. Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017.
Tondre, Michael. Oil. London: Bloomsbury, 2024.
Wenzel, Jennifer. The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019.
Wilson, Sheena, Adam Carlson, and Imre Szeman, eds. Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017.
Yergin, Daniel. The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power. New York: Free Press, 1991.
Shuffle the cards, and deal a new round of poker hands: they differ in every way from the previous round, and yet it is the same pack of cards, and the same game, with the same spirit, the players grim-faced and silent, surrounded by a haze of tobacco smoke.
So with this novel, a picture of civilization in Southern California, as the writer has observed it during eleven years’ residence. The picture is the truth, and the great mass of detail actually exists. But the cards have been shuffled; names, places, dates, details of character, episodes—everything has been dealt over again. The only personalities to be recognized in this book are three presidents of the United States who have held office during the past fifteen years. Manifestly, one could not “shuffle” these, without destroying all sense of reality. But the reader who spends his time seeking to identify oil magnates and moving picture stars will be wasting time, and perhaps doing injustice to some individual, who may happen to have shot off his toe to collect accident insurance, but may not happen to be keeping a mistress or to have bribed a cabinet official.
