Study Guide to The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

INTRODUCTION TO JOHN STEINBECK

The fact that the works of John Steinbeck have sold enormously and continuously has harmed rather than helped his critical reputation. Steinbeck’s own avoidance of publicity and his refusal to play any sort of literary role has contributed to the notion that he is merely a popular writer and therefore unworthy of serious attention. John Steinbeck, however, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962 (long after many critics had decided that his productive career was finished), has never written for critical applause. Involving himself completely in the problems of his nation and his people, Steinbeck has always insisted that the first job of a man-with-a-typewriter is to get his work read. American readers (not to mention reading audiences throughout the world) have agreed with him.

This is not to say, however, that Steinbeck’s popularity (or the popularity of any great writer) is always a good thing. Neither audiences nor books can be judged by quantity alone; it is the quality of the audience and the quality of the books which determine the real communication between a writer and his public. And if the work of John Steinbeck has often been depreciated without justice, it has often been praised without perception.

Enthusiasm for Steinbeck as a social historian, for example, is very widespread and very superficial. Misled by the fact that Steinbeck has always been profoundly aware of the political, economic, and moral forces at work in the American culture; pointing to the fact that he has written many motion-picture scripts in addition to documentary films and articles for national magazines, reviewers have tended to promulgate the image of Steinbeck as a writer whose chief value is that of journalism: a social commentator who has, an occasion, presented his message in the form of fiction. Nothing could be more untrue to the facts of the writer’s life and the aesthetic complexity of his art.

Like two other great American writers who were Nobel Prize winners-William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway-Steinbeck is often read for the wrong reasons. Beneath the hardboiled and understated surface of Hemingway’s books, for example, there is a lyric statement of the universal human condition; over and above the hunting, fishing, and adventuring, there is a profound treatment of isolation and ultimate defeat. And within Faulkner’s sensationalism there is a morality-play of man’s destiny: his necessary Fall and his hope for redemption. By the same token, one cannot read the works of Steinbeck as though they were mere social histories (sometimes heavy and sometimes light); to do so would make no more sense than to read Hemingway as though he were offering nothing more than an outdoor guide, or to read Faulkner as though he were collecting case studies.

STEINBECK’S USE OF SYMBOLISM AND ALLEGORY

The major books of John Steinbeck, despite the easy surface of the narratives, cannot be read as though the surface itself were the total substance of the fiction. A book like Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, for example, is easy reading indeed, but the full richness of the book depends on the reader’s willingness and ability to work through, rather than on the most obvious level of narrative. This also is true of a larger effort such as Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Both books, to be sure, are about fishing on the one hand, and displaced farmers on the other, but neither book can be defined in any such way. For Steinbeck, like Hemingway, takes the particular action or actions of his story and so manipulates their elements that the result is a statement of human truth which goes far beyond the particular actions themselves. The method, as in all literary art, is essentially symbolic or analogic: that is, a method which uses the extremely limited story" to trigger a series of chain reactions pointing to universal truths.

In Cannery Row, for example, Steinbeck gives us a hint as to the manner in which he regards the language of literature: The Word is a symbol and a delight which sucks up men and scenes, trees, plants, factories, and Pekinese. Then the Thing becomes the Word and back to Thing again, but warped and woven into a fantastic pattern.

The pattern, it should be noted, is fantastic - that is, an imaginative perception, a re-creation; it is not simply an echo or photograph of any one level of reality. The artist must warp and weave reality itself, and in order to do this he will use a multiplicity of instruments. He may incorporate into his story allusions to religious or philosophical systems, ideas, characters; he may select actions which themselves hint of universal archetypes or dramas; he may use objects whose qualities will force a reader to make associations (either emotional or intellectual) that comment directly upon, or in some way help explain, the central action itself. He may even interrupt the central flow of his narrative with apparently unrelated digressions-digressions, however, unrelated only on the surface.

The Grapes of Wrath, for example, undoubtedly Steinbeck’s most important work, and indeed one of the most important works in American literature, is far too often read simply as a social documentary dealing with a regional problem: the Dust-Bowl of the 1930s, the displacement of tenant farmers by a totally indifferent (rather than cruel) economic machine, and the subsequent trek of the Oakies to California, where they were victimized by unscrupulous agricultural interests. But the narrative itself cannot be read apart from the biblical allusions permeating it. It is the great mythic structure of the Judeo-Christian tradition (the story of Israel, bondage in Egypt, journey to the Promised Land, Redemption through Suffering), and the moral code intrinsic to this tradition, which lies at the very center of the narrative itself.

Within this allegorical structure, furthermore, there are other levels of reference: to the transcendentalist ethic of American moralists such as Emerson; to the naturalist assumptions of race power-and-instinct which developed from Darwinism (and the social application of these assumptions to patterns of economic failure or survival). There is, in short, an entire complex of references to religion, to non-teleological naturalist philosophy, to myth and symbol which begin with, but go far beyond, the problems of the Oakies themselves.

STEINBECK’S TECHNIQUES OF FICTION

Even the narrative progression may be broken when it suits the artist’s purpose to do so: hence the land turtle chapters in The Grapes of Wrath and the lyrical interchapters as well might seem to have nothing to do with the main story, but actually they serve as a sort of metaphorical reinforcement of those qualities driving the Joad family onward despite all adversity, ultimately providing at least the hope for eventual triumph. Steinbeck, in short, so often dismissed (or praised) as a social historian, actually uses a wide variety of symbolic and linguistic instruments to get at the full reality he wishes to communicate. Far from employing documentary prose, he utilizes a whole spectrum of techniques: allegorical counterpoint, poetic prose, cinematic description (the use of prose as a camera), dramatic dialog, and symbolic reference.

The result of these various methods must be considered an orchestration rather than a simple recording. Steinbeck, again, begins with a regional problem-but renders it universal; he examines partisan conflicts from the standpoint of their human, rather than partisan, elements. To cite another parallel: Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls is not really about the Spanish Civil War; it uses the war - and all its political and ideological ambiguities-to dramatize a reality that is far more real than the particular actions and individuals involved. So too does The Grapes of Wrath dramatize those elements, in a particular situation, which themselves are universal; elements which, as Warren French points out, are typical of recurrent patterns of human behavior.

Reality itself, furthermore, is complex rather than simple; American writers, especially since the turn of the century, have come to distrust the mere surface of life, no matter how accurately described. It is what lies beneath (or above) the surface that fascinates the literary artist. And in order to pierce through mere surface, a writer may use one or more basic techniques: he may concentrate on psychological analysis (the method of Henry James); he may examine the stream of consciousness itself (as Faulkner did in The Sound and the Fury); he may concentrate on those areas where action itself creates emotion, without the need for rhetoric (the essential preoccupation of Ernest Hemingway). And he may choose to deal with human beings who are either involved in some vital struggle, or who are alienated from that level of material prosperity which often obscures rather than reveals spiritual reality. Such is the essential method of John Steinbeck.

ALIENATION AND STRUGGLE

The alienated individuals, in short, have less surface to distract them (and us, as readers), while the struggle itself reveals human motivations and drives too often hidden beneath the polite verbalisms of polite society. If Steinbeck often chooses to write of alienation and struggle, he does so not because he is preoccupied with politics but because he is preoccupied with human dignity and human reality. It is for this reason that he deals with alienation (the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath, the boys of the Palace Flop-house in Cannery Row); with struggle (the labor conflict of In Dubious Battle, the tragic loneliness and violence in Of Mice and Men); or the attempt of the individual human being to resist an environment which threatens to destroy human ethics, pride, and dignity (the essential conflict of The Winter of Our Discontent). And one of his most recent books (Travels with Charlie) represents an attempt to rediscover the meaning of humanity, of selfhood, and of the American Dream.

Like Huckleberry Finn, Steinbeck often refuses to be sivilized and takes to traveling; and like Huckleberry Finn, this most sensitive and morally aware of writers is too often criticized for what he resists rather than loved for what he affirms. It is important to remember that Steinbeck cannot be defined as a social critic; nor can he be defined as a documentary or political writer. One might almost say, indeed, that for John Steinbeck, the only true politics are the politics of the