Promise and Precarity: Moving Through Eden in Upton Sinclair’s Oil!

Abstract Critical analysis of landscape in Upton Sinclair’s OIL! often engages with the precarity of California’s natural geography and interprets that precarity as a comment on the instability of the extractive capitalism that drives the novel’s plot. However, these analyses often ignore or understate the promise presented by the novel’s more Edenic tropes. To highlight and recover these tropes and present a nuanced understanding of the role that California’s landscape plays in OIL!, this article reads the novel’s depictions of geography through Michel de Certeau’s distinction between “place” and “space.” “Places” in the novel function as static examples of landscape that can be mapped, controlled, and sold as real estate and sites of (oil) extraction. In contrast, OIL’s depictions of “space,” characterized by complexity and movement, are facilitated by the perspective of the novel’s protagonist and his automobile, which invites a comparison of maps and mapped spaces. A close reading of this comparison reveals and challenges the degree to which the Californian landscape can be defined solely by capitalism and the oil industry. Instead, it posits an altered, hopeful perspective through which readers can view the state.