Chapter 8 - “A Story of Chicago”: The Future of Place in Frank Norris’s The Pit

Summary

Subtitled “A Story of Chicago,” Frank Norris’s The Pit chronicles a system of commodities exchange that made all localities, including Chicago, increasingly dissolve into globalized abstraction. Even though the novel is partly a realist account of the distinctive business practices of America’s fastest growing city, it is also a naturalist meditation on the abstracting effects of the futures market on place itself. Pioneered in Chicago, commodities futures trading usually amounted to competing bets on future prices, by which traders dealt in wheat that did not even exist. In such a market, place itself grew abstract too, given that traders no longer had to think about where grain came from, or how to ship it from one place to another. However, against the argument that The Pit punishes futures speculation by drowning it in a flood of real wheat, this chapter argues that the market corner at the novel’s heart is a desperate and finally failed attempt to re-establish traditional forms of materiality and locality from within the world of speculative finance.