The Grapes of Wrath(2)

Every strong novel redefines our conception of the genre’s dimensions and reorders our awareness of its possibilities. Like other products of rough-hewn American genius—Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (three other “flawed” novels that also humanize America’s downtrodden by exposing social ills)—The Grapes of Wrath has a home-grown quality: part naturalistic epic, part jeremiad, part captivity narrative, part road novel, part transcendental gospel.

Many American authors, often with little in the way of a shared novelistic tradition to emulate, or finding that established fictional models don’t suit their sensibilities, manage to forge their own way by synthesizing their personal vision and experience with a variety of cultural forms and literary styles. Steinbeck was no exception. To execute The Grapes of Wrath he drew on the jump-cut technique of John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy (1937), the narrative tempo of Pare Lorentz’s radio drama Ecce Homo! and the sequential quality of such Lorentz films as The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937), the stark visual effects of Dorothea Lange’s photographs of Dust Bowl Oklahoma and California migrant life, the timbre of the Greek epics, the rhythms of the King James Bible, the refrains of American folk music, and the biological impetus of his and Edward F. Ricketts’s ecological phalanx, or group-man, theory. Steinbeck’s imagination transformed these resources (especially biblical themes, parallels, analogies, and allusions) into his own holistic structure, his own individual signature. Malcolm Cowley’s claim that a “whole literature is summarized in this book and much of it is carried to a new level of excellence” is especially accurate.

In early July 1938, Steinbeck told literary critic Harry T. Moore that he was improvising what was for him a “new method” of fictional technique: one which combined a suitably elastic form and elevated style to express the far-reaching tragedy of the migrant drama. In The Grapes of Wrath he devised a contrapuntal structure, which alternates short lyrical chapters of exposition and background pertinent to the migrants as a group (Chapters 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 25, 27, 29) with the long narrative chapters of the Joad family’s dramatic exodus to California (Chapters 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 13, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28, 30). Just as in Moby-Dick Melville created intensity and prolonged suspense by alternating between the temporal chapters of Ahab’s driven quest for the white whale and Ishmael’s numinous chapters on cetology, so Steinbeck structured his novel by juxtaposition. His “particular” chapters are the slow-paced and lengthy narrative chapters that embody traditional characterization and advance the dramatic plot, while his jazzy, rapid-fire “interchapters” work at another level of recognition by expressing an atemporal, universal, synoptic view of the migrant condition. As he wrote Chapters 5 and 6, for instance, Steinbeck reminded himself that for maximum effect, “I want the reader to be able to keep [the general and particular chapters] separate in his mind.” In fact, his “general” or intercalary chapters (“pace changers,” Steinbeck called them) were expressly designed to “hit the reader below the belt. With the rhythms and symbols of poetry one can get into a reader—open him up and while he is open introduce things on a [sic] intellectual level which he would not or could not receive unless he were opened up,” Steinbeck revealed to Columbia undergraduate Herbert Sturz in 1953.

The Grapes of Wrath is an engaged novel with a partisan posture, many complex voices, and passionate prose styles. (“No other American novel has succeeded in forging and making instrumental so many prose styles,” Peter Lisca believes.) Except for its unflinching treatment of the Great Depression’s climatic, social, and economic conditions, and those interchapters that serve to halt the emotional slide toward sentimentality, there is nothing cynically distanced about it, nothing coolly modernist, in the way we have come to understand the elite literary implications of that term in the past seventy-five years. (The Grapes of Wrath is in some ways an old-fashioned novel, even down to its curious avoidance of human sexuality.) It is not narrated from the first-person point of view, yet the language has a consistently catchy eyewitness quality about it, and its vivid biblical, empirical, poetical, cinematic, and folk styles demonstrate the remarkable tonal and visual acuity of Steinbeck’s ear and eye.

Steinbeck told Merle Armitage on February 17, 1939, that in “composition, in movement, in tone and in scope,” The Grapes of Wrath was “symphonic.” Indeed, his fusion of intimate narrative and panoramic editorial chapters enforces this dialogic concert. Chapters, styles, voices all speak to each other, set up resonances, send echoes back and forth—point and counterpoint, strophe and antistrophe—as in a huge symphony whose total impression far surpasses the sum of its discrete and sometimes dissonant parts. Steinbeck’s novel belongs to that vital class of fictions whose shape issues not from an ideal blueprint of aesthetic propriety but from the generative urgency of its author’s experience. (“It had to be written,” Stanley Kunitz said in 1939.) Steinbeck’s direct involvement with the plight of America’s Dust Bowl migrants in the latter half of the 1930s created his obsessive urge to tell their story honestly but also movingly. “This must be a good book,” he wrote in Working Days on June 10, 1938. “It simply must. I haven’t any choice. It must be far and away the best thing I have ever attempted—slow but sure, piling detail on detail until a picture and an experience emerge. Until the whole throbbing thing emerges.”