The Tragedy of The Grapes of Wrath
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, first published in 1939, is certainly a book worth of note. It rightfully belongs in the category of “classics” because that status is obtained by virtue of the work being able to exert influence over its own generation and also generations to come. In other words, the classics were relevant then and continue to be relevant to us today.
The Grapes of Wrath is a book of many tragedies, including the tragedy of its poor quality. Indeed, the book is dense, profoundly unenjoyable, and littered with conversations in a barely intelligible accent. I am certainly very happy that the habit of mangling the English orthography has largely gone out of style since then.
The fact that it is not a pleasant read will probably be something you could say about a lot of classics. You could even object that the accent was intelligible to the readers there and then when those words were uttered. Nevertheless, that aspect of the work is probably best left to linguists to muse over. No. The greater tragedy of the book is that its style positions it as almost an eyewitness to the events of the early 20th century.
The Grapes are an excellent example of the vicious, self-reinforcing hermeneutic circle between history, literature, and our collective historical awareness. Steinbeck reported what he saw; we accept it as a version of reality, and eventually, it becomes a version of our collective historical reality. The question is, how long before Steinbeck’s view of that particular historical period becomes the version of events simply because we become too distant from the actual historical events and gradually rely on convincingly written pieces of historical fiction to inform our historical awareness?
Let’s look at particular examples. Having done nothing but light research into the causes of the westward migration in the 30s, we find that there were a bunch of factors. In short, the demand for agricultural production went up at the beginning of the century as a result of the war in Europe, and so did the prices. Therefore, people were encouraged to go farming and cultivate more land. The new farmers were not particularly experienced and the lands that were cultivated were not suited for the purpose. By the 1930s, a severe drought combined with plummeting prices created a very difficult situation. Crops were failing, prices were falling, and people began migrating. Unfortunate but hardly shocking.
However, Steinbeck portrays the situation very differently. In his view, people who had been ploughing the land diligently for generations were suddenly forced off the land by the ever-greedy banks, ugly capitalists, and the most hellish invention of all: the tractor. Setting aside the fact that the early tractors available at the time profoundly sucked and weren’t particularly practical for large-scale use, Steinbeck’s portrayal screams of class struggle. Especially since certain family members are shown as betraying their class by taking the coin of the evil capitalists and are even paid extra for destroying the houses of nice families to get them out. In the dog-eat-dog world, you have to be heartless.
Owners with rolled-up sleeves. Salesmen, neat, deadly, small intent eyes watching for weakness.
If you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But you cannot know. For the quality owning freezes you forever into “I” and cuts you off forever from the “we”.
A crop raised- why, that makes ownership.
Steinbeck doesn’t go to great lengths to hide the references. It’s all very clear. Business is ritualized thievery. At the same time, it’s all divorced from reality.
The Grapes of Wrath also undermine other classic ideas:
But you can’t start. Only a baby can start. You and me-why, we’re all that’s been. The anger of a moment, the thousand pictures, that’s us. This land, this red land, is us; and the flood years and the dust years and the drought years are us.
or
Don’t roust your faith bird-high an’ you won’t do no crawlin’ with the worms. I know that’s right. That’s Scripture, ain’t it?
Isn’t that blood and soil, anti-faith stuff quite un-American? I’m not saying that the opposite view is right and subverting it is necessarily wrong. Subverting the standards of the time is often the role literature plays so well, but just think of the times… 1930s… and who else was expounding these same ideas.
In the end, Steinbeck conjures a very humanist view of people. People naturally self-organize into governments of families and if conditions are good — like at the nice government camps for poor workers in California — multiple families can come together and create a wonderful society of mutually supportive family units.
All this is accompanied by truly bizarre images like that of the book’s ending where Rosasharn (one of the main female characters) goes on to breastfeed a man dying of hunger in some morally exalted act of solidarity. Or the completely random mention of what happens to you when you are left alone in the wilderness:
Ever since the pig got in over to Jacobs‘ an‘ et the baby, Milly Jacobs was jus‘ out in the barn. She come in while the pig was still eatin‘ it.
I did not know pigs were that dangerous… The Grapes of Wrath is a tragic book in all senses of the word. The greater tragedy yet would be to take it seriously. On the other hand, we should be grateful that the book exists and belongs in the canon of classics because it should forever remain a reminder that we shouldn’t confuse historical fiction and history.
