Stephen Amidon acclaims the mythic power of The Grapes Of Wrath
On The Shelf
The Sunday Times. April, 1993
When Americans pull up stakes and hit the road, it is usually with a sense of hope and renewal unique to that nation. With the exceptions of the African slave trade and the forced marches of Indians, great movements of people in America have usually been undertaken freely and, more often than not, resulted in better lives for the transplanted. Around this fact a myth of mobility has developed which endures to this day, encouraging, for instance, unemployed rust-belt factory workers to pile into their station wagons and head south or west with little hesitation. Norman Tebbit may have been pilloried for urging workers to get on their bikes, but when Ronald Reagan made a similar comment he was simply expressing a national creed.
Given this, the plight of the dirt farmers who were forced to abandon their 40 acres in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s was doubly tragic. For the first time in peacetime American history, the country's citizens had to migrate against their will, to a location that held nothing for them. And unlike Jews or Central European peasants, these poor Okies possessed no tradition of painful displacement, no folk culture to explain or absorb the unexpected catastrophe of having to travel to parts unknown.
It is in the depiction of this cultural deracination, and not its celebrated political radicalism, that the immense power of The Grapes Of Wrath lies. Although John Steinbeck's dewy-eyed pan-socialism may ring hollow to modern ears, his novel proves one of the most compelling examinations of dispossession ever written. Throughout the Joad family's numbing trek from Oklahoma to California, they futilely try to use their previously adequate folk ways to cope with displacement. Cut off from the land, the Joad men are rendered immediately helpless. They seem stunned, indecisive, almost childlike. Their gnarled hands are painfully empty of tools. Similarly, the comforts of old-time religion, exemplified now by the lapsed preacher, Casy, are no longer available to the Joads. Even the most basic of folk remedies violence is not a real option. ''Who can we shoot?'' one farmer asks after realising his evictor is as poor and desperate as he is. It is no accident that the only popular hero named in the book is Pretty Boy Floyd, the Okie farmboy turned bandit who was ignominiously killed by the FBI.
It is by carefully and precisely showing how the Joads' traditional culture lets them down that Steinbeck gives the novel its remarkable power. They are simple people who have been listening to the earth's rhythms their whole lives, but are now forced to follow other tunes. Through a careful accretion of imagery, Steinbeck shows how the family transforms from an earthbound to a more fluid existence, exemplified by water and blood, by urine and mother's milk. At its heart, this transition is from patriarchy to matriarchy, exemplified by Ma Joad, who claims that a woman is like a river who keeps on flowing through hard times. Indeed, Route 66, the avenue of their flight, is referred to as ''the mother road''. This transition is the novel's beauty and its triumph, capturing a family and a people at the moment when one system of beliefs is shed for a deeper, more enduring one.
What this focus also does is rescue the novel from the author's half-baked collectivism, expressed primarily in the ''big picture'' chapters that punctuate the Joads' story. It is easy to see how Steinbeck might initially have thought these sweeping verbal vistas gave his novel historical weight, but hard to imagine why he felt the need to keep them after the Joads came to life. In the end, all they do is raise sticky questions.
Does Steinbeck really expect us to believe that sustenance farming had any place in a nation undergoing rapid population growth and urbanisation? Ask any Russian standing on a food line what they think about collective farming to appreciate that Steinbeck's rage seems misdirected. And the notion that it is only in abject poverty that people become truly human seems to have implications that the virulently anti-Christian author might not care to stomach. In the end, Tom Joad's transition from ex-con to future labour agitator is far less compelling than his mother's from farm wife to family head.
It is a tribute to Steinbeck's raw power as a writer and his profound understanding of his characters that this fuzzy-headedness fails to detract from the novel's terrible strength. The last chapter, in which the depleted Joads huddle in a box-car, as the flood waters rise toward them, hits the sort of mythical tone rarely achieved in literature.
And the final image of Rose and Sharon, having recently delivered a child stillborn from malnutrition, breast-feeding a starving man they find by the side of the road, has to be one of the most enduring images of hope and renewal ever written.
It is this sort of moment, rather than any spluttering outrage, that ensures The Grapes Of Wrath's enduring greatness.
The Sunday Times. April, 1993
When Americans pull up stakes and hit the road, it is usually with a sense of hope and renewal unique to that nation. With the exceptions of the African slave trade and the forced marches of Indians, great movements of people in America have usually been undertaken freely and, more often than not, resulted in better lives for the transplanted. Around this fact a myth of mobility has developed which endures to this day, encouraging, for instance, unemployed rust-belt factory workers to pile into their station wagons and head south or west with little hesitation. Norman Tebbit may have been pilloried for urging workers to get on their bikes, but when Ronald Reagan made a similar comment he was simply expressing a national creed.
Given this, the plight of the dirt farmers who were forced to abandon their 40 acres in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s was doubly tragic. For the first time in peacetime American history, the country's citizens had to migrate against their will, to a location that held nothing for them. And unlike Jews or Central European peasants, these poor Okies possessed no tradition of painful displacement, no folk culture to explain or absorb the unexpected catastrophe of having to travel to parts unknown.
It is in the depiction of this cultural deracination, and not its celebrated political radicalism, that the immense power of The Grapes Of Wrath lies. Although John Steinbeck's dewy-eyed pan-socialism may ring hollow to modern ears, his novel proves one of the most compelling examinations of dispossession ever written. Throughout the Joad family's numbing trek from Oklahoma to California, they futilely try to use their previously adequate folk ways to cope with displacement. Cut off from the land, the Joad men are rendered immediately helpless. They seem stunned, indecisive, almost childlike. Their gnarled hands are painfully empty of tools. Similarly, the comforts of old-time religion, exemplified now by the lapsed preacher, Casy, are no longer available to the Joads. Even the most basic of folk remedies violence is not a real option. ''Who can we shoot?'' one farmer asks after realising his evictor is as poor and desperate as he is. It is no accident that the only popular hero named in the book is Pretty Boy Floyd, the Okie farmboy turned bandit who was ignominiously killed by the FBI.
It is by carefully and precisely showing how the Joads' traditional culture lets them down that Steinbeck gives the novel its remarkable power. They are simple people who have been listening to the earth's rhythms their whole lives, but are now forced to follow other tunes. Through a careful accretion of imagery, Steinbeck shows how the family transforms from an earthbound to a more fluid existence, exemplified by water and blood, by urine and mother's milk. At its heart, this transition is from patriarchy to matriarchy, exemplified by Ma Joad, who claims that a woman is like a river who keeps on flowing through hard times. Indeed, Route 66, the avenue of their flight, is referred to as ''the mother road''. This transition is the novel's beauty and its triumph, capturing a family and a people at the moment when one system of beliefs is shed for a deeper, more enduring one.
What this focus also does is rescue the novel from the author's half-baked collectivism, expressed primarily in the ''big picture'' chapters that punctuate the Joads' story. It is easy to see how Steinbeck might initially have thought these sweeping verbal vistas gave his novel historical weight, but hard to imagine why he felt the need to keep them after the Joads came to life. In the end, all they do is raise sticky questions.
Does Steinbeck really expect us to believe that sustenance farming had any place in a nation undergoing rapid population growth and urbanisation? Ask any Russian standing on a food line what they think about collective farming to appreciate that Steinbeck's rage seems misdirected. And the notion that it is only in abject poverty that people become truly human seems to have implications that the virulently anti-Christian author might not care to stomach. In the end, Tom Joad's transition from ex-con to future labour agitator is far less compelling than his mother's from farm wife to family head.
It is a tribute to Steinbeck's raw power as a writer and his profound understanding of his characters that this fuzzy-headedness fails to detract from the novel's terrible strength. The last chapter, in which the depleted Joads huddle in a box-car, as the flood waters rise toward them, hits the sort of mythical tone rarely achieved in literature.
And the final image of Rose and Sharon, having recently delivered a child stillborn from malnutrition, breast-feeding a starving man they find by the side of the road, has to be one of the most enduring images of hope and renewal ever written.
It is this sort of moment, rather than any spluttering outrage, that ensures The Grapes Of Wrath's enduring greatness.