Some classics are worthless: Grapes of Wrath
As the first episode of our journey to a greater spiritual understanding of the world through literature, we managed to pick a book about wrath. The wrath that you feel when Steinbeck pushes his political views in plain language as an interjection of a dubious storyline with orthographically conveyed accents. Nevertheless, I am happy this choice will lead us to settle our views on one of the most important discussions in literature right away:
- How does a bad book get on the list of the Great?
- What is Greatness, and is it the same as being admitted to the List?
The Grapes of Wrath earned its author a Nobel Prize and a place in the American high school curriculum while, at the same time, both critic’s and popular opinions of the book are not that different from our own evaluation. This isn’t a typical scenario where critics praise the work while the general public fails to understand it, nor the other way around. This is a much more interesting case when a bad book is a classic that is remembered and read just because it made it on the list of the Great.
Getting Grapes on the Great List
Steinbeck was given the Nobel Prize “for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception.” Which means nothing; a better explanation would be to say that 1962 was a weak year and other candidates were less fitting. Steinbeck was the only one who didn’t pass away suddenly, wasn’t French, or wasn’t opposed to receiving the award. Also, people on the Left at the time genuinely lacked literature that would be critical of the American context from the inside. I don’t think anyone is going to be surprised by the statement that the Nobel Prize is political.
To speculate, Steinbeck was added to the High school curriculum as an alternative view to more mainstream sentiments toward American society. The Grapes of Wrath is a unique combination: it is about the economic rather than moral problems of white Americans, and it puts them in the context of the Great Plains and physical labor rather than industrial novels of the East Coast. There is plenty of literature about the economic struggles of New York and Chicago, both black and white. There are a lot of words written about the legacy of slavery in the South and the complex racial issues and moral failures connected to it. But nobody cared to go and interview the poor farmers of the Great Plains, which gives The Grapes of Wrath its unique imagery. The stress on the physical labor of the characters and their connection to the land is something deeply symbolic to those ideologically adjacent to Steinbeck. This is the symbolism they would not find in the industrial novels, and which would be left undiscovered in black American literature until much later.
Greatness is a social construct
Maybe, but Grapes are not conventionally considered great, and the committee’s decision to award them the Nobel Prize was one of the most controversial they made. Further, I believe that we should be minimally pragmatic about our choice of words. If we say that greatness is a convention, our discussions will center around facts about the Nobel committee (metaphorically) rather than the object of art itself.
But there is something people see in this book, something that can explain why it made the list. Isn’t that enough to declare that it has made it justly? Well, I think people can be wrong about the value of art. Or we talk about two different things completely. So, let’s define what I am looking for in the great books we are reading and why Grapes are not that.
Tolstoy believed that through reading, individuals could transcend their personal experiences and connect with the universal human condition. He thought that literature had the power to convey the deepest truths of life, enabling readers to gain a greater spiritual understanding of the world around them. Which is what we are doing here. I am converting you to Russian mysticism about art.
I can’t say that Grapes of Wrath is taking us any closer to a spiritual understanding of the world. It is not a free exploration of foreign psychology, it is a study where the conclusion has been written before the methodology. Grapes doesn’t put up a mirror vibrant with meanings, it puts up a propaganda poster. This is detected by all the critics whose reviews appear in a Google search of the book.
We are going to read many bad great books on our journey
To conclude, if the quality “greatness” tracks in a work is different from what “goodness” is tracking, we are doomed to read a lot of bad books on our journey. Books that were written at the right time or with the right agenda. Or simply books that were the first at something we are completely used to.
