Blog on the Lillypad
Saturday, July 10, 2004
 | John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath
I read The Red Pony and The Pearl in high school and came away from them with a distaste for John Steinbeck. Not that the stories were not enlightening. In some ways, they were. But his depiction of mankind as being the object of his own drives disturbed me then and annoys me now. However, in Grapes of Wrath, while Steinbeck still pays homage to his theory that people must act according to their drives without conscience taking a role, he does create a masterpiece of human dignity as well as a vivid snapshot of the hard lives of the "Okies" during the Dustbowl Era. |
Don't mistake my admiration for the literary grandeur of Grapes of Wrath for slavish devotion. Steinbeck does capture the culture, the language (and it is extremely blasphemous language), and the stoic quality of the dirt farmers who went bust. He provides an admirable analysis of the decline of a certain accepted "common decency" in society as men grew more and more remote from the land. Steinbeck combines moral analysis with a lyric prose that captures the reader.
And Steinbeck makes it clear that harming another human being, rich or poor, is wrong. Violence is a swipe at the dignity of mankind, which---in the perspective of the novel---is really the only valuable thing that mankind has.
However, Steinbeck fails to indict the main characters---the Joads---for their own incredible stupidity. Granted, they suffer more for their stupidity than most people do, but it doesn't diminish that the Joads are incredibly stupid.
The land they farmed has been dying for several years. The father of the family and the uncle acknowledge it. The passing apostate preacher also comments on it. Yet with a farm eroding and dying under his heels, Pa Joad goes to the bank to get a loan to preserve a farm that is producing disastrous failures instead of crops. He knows the cotton that was once planted here has sucked the life out of the land. Yet he keeps planting crops on exhausted acreage. He acknowledges that when the wild grass used to be permitted to grow among the furrows, that the soil stayed in place. Yet he burned out the grass anyway and never tried to replace it when erosion took place.
Steinbeck indicts the banks and the bankers for the plight of the farmers, but a hard and cold fact of life is that if you are stupid with your resources, you will starve. And the Joads have been stupid. They kept cutting into dying land, waiting for a "good year" when the soil would miraculously get them out of debt. One real truth of the novel (which Steinbeck ignores) is that the Joads would have suffered bankruptcy, poverty, and hunger even if they had stayed on their land, because they destroyed their land.
Once on the road in their worn and overloaded truck, the two Joad boys demonstrate astonishing skill in keeping the aged contraption alive. They bore out the engine themselves with makeshift tools. Yet Pa Joad, once again demonstrating his stupidity, declines every opportunity, right in the bustling dawn of the automotive age, to learn anything about car mechanics from his sons. He's looking for farm work.
The boys also assume (until the end) that they will look for farm work too. With cars zooming around them on Route 66, and mechanized tractors galore out on the huge farms in California, the two gifted mechanics of the Joad family keep trying to get work as pickers. It never occurs to them to walk up and down among the tents of the camps and ask people to trade food or pay cash to have their vehicles fixed. They knock on doors to look for work as pickers but never offer to look at engines or motors.
Steinbeck's handling of human dignity has a few caveats as well. The apostate preacher, Casey, is as bad at genuine faith as the Joads were at farming. He preached well but kept seducing young girls and then discarding them. This sin, in the eyes of the Joads, is pretty minor. Tom Joad, the eldest son, acknowledges that he raped a prostitute, and Casey finds such sexual violence completely permissible if a fellow has got it bad enough. The younger brother goes out in the camps and seduces young girls with promises of marriage. And then, similar to Casey the fallen former preacher, he discards them. Nobody ever reproaches or corrects him for this or points out the plight of the duped young women. When Rose of Sharon loses her baby to stillbirth, blame is laid at the door of the wretched Connie, who deserted her. The same blame is never laid at the door of the youngest Joad boy, who has deserted so many others to whom he promised marriage.
Crimes against the family as a whole, or crimes against humanity, are indicted in Steinbeck's book. But crimes against women---even young girls---are not. It's a relief, when the father threatens to beat the mother, that she threatens him right back. And he calms down. But the fact that the Joads cannot live up to their own creed of not harming their neighbors or each other is not belabored. Increasingly, the book makes clear (even though it is trying not to do so) that the Joads are just as corrupt, just as short-sighted in their morality, and just as quick to gain an advantage as the ruthless bankers that have driven them from their land and are keeping the wages so low that the family cannot live.
The bankers look down on people like the Joads, and the Joads look down on people not of their culture and mindset: prostitutes and girls from families who do not keep a careful watch over them, and anybody foolish enough to physically attack a Joad or their friends. The morality of the Joads, like everything else about them, is short sighted, focused only on the present moment, and stupid.
When the local Californians are incensed to hysterical and angry fear because one batch of pickers goes on strike over wages that are impossibly low and unjust, they strike out in their hysteria and kill Casey. Tom Joad's hysterical and frenzied response is to kill Casey's killer. For some reason, Casey's killer comes off as wrong, but Tom is not wrong. Yet both men were driven by a hysterical frenzy as they felt that their core way of life was endangered by strangers. This scene, to me, shows most vividly that the Joads are the same as their persecutors---driven by the moment and by the passion to hold on to what they possess. They recognize loyalty to family; they do not recognize loyalty to any idea of sanctity of life or self control for its own sake.
Nobody in Grapes of Wrath really rises to what I would call a heroic quality, or even an insightful quality of wisdom, from what they have suffered. The Joads learn that they must survive in a world that has changed forever. By the end of the book, they still have no idea of how to actually do that. And they realize that their values (those values that they possess) are what give them dignity. This is a moving and powerful truth. But many of the values of the Joads make many concessions to their weaknesses.
The other aspects of their ignorance and lack of ability to improvise, to rise above the moment, and find new resources within themselves make the Joads seem---to me---to be too incredibly passive before their fate. They let circumstances drive them, and they actually take on the roles that have been pushed upon them: underpaid pickers. Ma Joad predicts that they will survive because that is what they have always done. Perhaps, but it is almost certain that the Joads will never rise above being pushed around by circumstances. Their fortitude and stoic courage have made them like powerful oxen. They can endure a lot. But like oxen, they know only one skill---to walk slowly and steadily in a straight line, never lifting their heads nor considering a better way for themselves. The only things that give them any momentary power are overpowering lust and frenzied rage.
I came away from this book sobered by the fact that we all pay for our stupidity and rigidity of outlook: some more and some less. But there is no guarantee on how much a person might suffer from being stupid. So the best way to manage in life is to use foresight, remain flexible, and always keep a back door open.
