Vice Provost for
Undergraduate Education Laura Brown:
The world presented to us in
Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath has an inexorable quality, in which, at
every turn, large and invisible forces seem to operate upon vulnerable human
beings. The tractors that level the
farms of Oklahoma, the bankers who evict the farmers from the land, the movement of the Joad family across the
country to California, the deaths that mark the family’s journey, and the
rising flood that surrounds the characters in the last chapters of the novel,
all make us feel the powerlessness of the individual in relation to the effects
nature and the economy. It is this
feeling, for me, that gives the novel its modern relevance, even if that
relevance has distinct limits.
As we read and discuss The
Grapes of Wrath, it’s easy to be struck by parallels with contemporary America, especially the America of the last twelve months. The dust bowl of the southwest becomes a
precursor of or analogue for global warming and environmental degradation more
generally–now, belatedly, on most people’s list of important issues. The rising flood at the end of Steinbeck’s
novel seems eerily to foretell the fate of New Orleans in the wake of hurricane Katrina. The hatred of “The Bank–or The Company” that
Steinbeck characterizes as a “monster”
does not require much in the way of translation into the present. If there is one group in American society that
is today almost universally reviled on main street, it is the Wall Street
financial elite. And, to continue the
analogy from the point of view of the ordinary American, it is a step, but not
a huge one, from the Okies desperately looking for work to the worst
unemployment and underemployment this country has seen since that period.
But the differences between
our time and Steinbeck’s, of course, are also obvious. For all the concern that one might have today
for the plight of the downtrodden and the victims of the economic crisis, the
possibility of renewed labor organizing has not seemed to many people to offer
an option. Our economic crisis has
created its own ordinary heroes, but they are not characters like Casy or Tom
Joad. Likewise, the hatred of the
tractor, which is so vividly represented in the novel’s early scenes, seems to
come closer to recalling the machine-smashing Luddites of nineteenth-century England than any sensibility that one can detect today.
At the level of individuals
and the family we see a similar complexity, which aligns with and differs from
the present day. The representation of
strong women keeping fragile families together resonates with the
on-again-off-again debates about single motherhood. But on the other hand, the multi-generational
family of the Joads, in which young adult men are part of a household that they
do not run seems clearly to belong to another era.
Steinbeck’s narrative
technique falls clearly into the mode of literary realism, a mode that by 1939
had long since ceased to be avant garde.
But the Depression inspired a return to a kind of gritty realism in many
areas where that mode might have seemed otherwise outmoded. In other words, an historical crisis produced
a return to an older literary technique.
This cyclical movement seems relevant to our understanding of the
novel’s historical currency. In the
resemblances between The Grapes of Wrath and our own moment, are we
seeing the continuity of certain problems over time, or are we witnessing a
cyclical pattern–the resurgence of key problems in times of economic crisis,
that are either non-issues or manageable difficulties in periods of
growth. And from another perspective, it
is hard not to feel that Steinbeck is describing an era that is gone once and
for all. The United States today is a much more urbanized society than
Steinbeck’s, much wealthier, and much more connected to the rest of the
world. All of those differences
obviously do not preclude social, economic, and environmental crises, but in
important ways they do mean that such crises will inevitably take new and
unforeseeable forms.
We will hear a range of
perspectives on The Grapes of Wrath from our four panelists, who will
speak at the Sunday, August 23, New Student Orientation event–Professors
Maureen O'Hara, Jeremy Braddock, Natalie Mahowald, and Jeff Cowie. Please join us at Barton Hall at 3:30 on Sunday for this campus-wide gathering. You will have a chance to follow up on the
ideas expressed in these talks, and to hear the views of your instructor and
your peers, in the small-group discussions on Monday, August 24, at 3:30.
[Images are from the current Penguin edition book cover and the dust jacket of the Viking Press first edition of The Grapes of Wrath from 1939. Cornell's copy of this first edition is currently on display in the Division of Rare & Manuscript Collections in Kroch Library.]
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