East of Eden: New and Recent Essays
2015; Penn State University Press; Volume: 12; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/steinbeckreview.12.2.0206
ISSN1754-6087
Autores ResumoFrom the publication of East of Eden in 1952 to the present, there has been much critical controversy about this novel's autobiographical digressions, its narrative interweaving of two families, and the enigmatic Cathy/Kate Trask. While Steinbeck eschewed critics as a general rule, he may have been pleased that these discussions center around his story-crafting innovations, and he may have been amused by the longevity of the controversy. Old issues and new views are engaged in the 2013 collection titled East of Eden: New and Recent Essays, a project that Michael J. Meyer initiated and Henry Veggian completed after Meyer's death. While most of the pieces acknowledge early criticisms, they challenge them from the vantage points of newer theoretical frameworks. The resulting volume makes for fascinating reading and brings convincing new insights to this novel.Borrowing from Meyer's seminal essay “Steinbeck's Adaptation and Implementation of Musical Techniques,” Veggian's introduction invokes music as an explanation for this collection. For the musical metaphor illuminates what Meyer and Veggian aim to achieve: a choral work of criticism that counters the current state of East of Eden studies. Veggian writes, “It is a novel whose early critical history often assembled a chorus; yet it has more recently attracted the solitary critic” (xi). Indeed, many of the essays can stand alone as a solo, or an aria. Some essayists harmonize with others as a duet or trio. And readers are invited to add their own voices: “Like the solitary critic, the reader always rejoins the chorus” (xii). Overall, Veggian hopes the collection will amplify or augment the notes Steinbeck so expertly plays for his readers. Included also is Veggian's restrained, affectionate memorial for Meyer, a beloved teacher and scholar. In accord with Meyer's wishes, Veggian provides helpful critical history and arranges the essays in such a way as to maximize the conversation, disagreement, and synthesis. In praise of his colleague, Veggian writes, “To that end, he worked to encourage a literary criticism that would listen as well as speak. The collection that follows does not now appear in Professor Meyer's memory but with it, a living tribute to his work as a critic, editor and teacher” (xviii). Most of the essays, therefore, come together primarily around three common lines of inquiry concerning East of Eden: Steinbeck's narrative technique and idiosyncrasies, Cathy Trask, and free will.Florian Schwieger and Jeremy S. Leatham address the view that East of Eden relies too much on allegorical underpinnings. Schwieger's “‘Mapping the Land of Nod’: The Spatial Imagination of John Steinbeck's East of Eden” looks at the meaningful spatial and temporal geography of locations and events in the novel, placing Steinbeck's story against the backdrop of the narrative of American history, which he believes is a close parallel to the Cain and Abel story. He concludes that the biblical tale parallels the American Ur-narrative. Segmented by location, Schwieger's essay visits key places in the novel, including the Trask house, Dessie's shop, the whorehouses, and the schoolhouse, showing how each place becomes an important factor in Steinbeck's Edenic myth-making process. Leatham's “Out of Eden: Dualism, Conformity, and Inheritance in Steinbeck's ‘Big Book’” also maintains that “the novel has roots in Genesis, but its allegory is organic and adaptable” (124).In “Bio-Politics and the Institution of Literature: An Essay on East of Eden, Its Critics and Its Time,” Henry Veggian offers a moderated view between the formalists, who decry Steinbeck's narrative idiosyncrasies, and the post-modernists, who cast it as a novel out of time or a harbinger of narrative techniques to come. Instead, Veggian states that the book ought to be read as an aesthetic product of its own times. Considering “biomorphic forms” in the architecture of the 1950s, Veggian correlates the popular aesthetic shape with the rhetorical shape of “modulation and repetition” in East of Eden (92). This essay connects fruitfully with other essays, especially that of Leatham, who, like Veggian, sees narrative idiosyncrasies as entwined with “form and purpose” (123). These essays find the fluidity of the allegory/narrative to be purposefully unstable, designed to interrogate the political, cultural, and economic status quo of the conformist 1950s. This position finds rich concordances in essays to follow.The second thrust of the collection centers around Cathy Trask. Elisabeth Bayley's “Mimesis, Desire and Lack in John Steinbeck's East of Eden” draws on René Girard's theory of mimetic rivalry to illuminate Cathy's motivation, resulting in a more understanding—if not more sympathetic—view of this character. Similarly, in “East of Eden County: John Steinbeck, Joyce Carol Oates and the Afterlife of Cathy Trask,” Gavin Cologne-Brookes finds Steinbeckian influences in the work of Joyce Carol Oates and makes a compelling case that Cathy is the victim of sexual abuse and that this abuse colors her speech and actions throughout the narrative.Questions of morality and free will still interest contemporary critics, and Yuji Kami's “A Paradoxical World in East of Eden: The Theory of Free Will and the Heritage of Puritanism” convincingly breaks down the good/evil binary, resulting in a paradox: one must first acknowledge evil in order to overcome it. Countering early critics who decried the novel's simplistic, conventional, or inconsistent morality, Bruce Ouderkirk's “The Unconventional Morality of East of Eden” contends that the novel's “moral philosophy is much more complex than has been generally recognized” (233). Drawing on Steinbeck's disparate allusions to the Bible, Stoicism, and Erich Fromm, Ouderkirk maintains that the author has created a morality as varied as the people who occupy Salinas and its environs. And like several other essays in the collection, Alec Gilmore's “A Steinbeck Midrash on Genesis 4:7” states that the blended personas of Cain and Abel in the novel show echoes of good and evil in all of the characters.Other essays complement these three themes and also speak to the “reality” underlying East of Eden. In “Steinbeck Knew Dad Better Than I Did,” Tom Gage offers compelling, though admittedly circumstantial, evidence that the Trasks were based on the author's own ancestors, including the colorful steel magnate Capt. Bill Jones. David A. Law's visual presentation, “‘Literary Landmarks’ of East of Eden,” provides contemporary vistas of Salinas Valley. Scott Dill's “An Image of Social Character: Elia Kazan's East of Eden” highlights the key differences between Cal Trask in the novel and James Dean's depiction of Cal in the 1955 film. In “The Status of East of Eden in Slovenia and the Former Yugoslavia,” Danica Čerče asserts that this novel still enjoys surprising popularity in Slovenia, despite a communist bias still systemic in Slovene letters.The collection succeeds in its presentation of critical works that harmonize. All of the essays celebrate the complexity of this novel, which in all likelihood is Steinbeck's most ambitious. It deserves a place on the bookshelf of Steinbeck scholars, teachers, and admirers.
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