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Reclaiming John Steinbeck: Writing for the Future of Humanity

2023; Penn State University Press; Volume: 20; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/steinbeckreview.20.1.0128

1754-6087

Cecilia Donohue,

Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature

In Reclaiming John Steinbeck: Writing for the Future of Humanity, Gavin Jones aptly describes Steinbeck’s status in today’s world of literary study: “most read,” “least studied,” “oddly canonical,” “neglected” (17). His observation is right on the mark, for many people’s experience with Steinbeck’s writing begins and ends with The Grapes of Wrath (1939) as required classroom reading. Jones believes that Steinbeck’s body of work merits additional attention today, and his book provides convincing and ample evidence in support of his claim. Jones analyzes a diverse, multi-genre selection of Steinbeck’s oeuvre, ranging chronologically from The Pastures of Heaven (1932) to Cannery Row (1945), the last novel Steinbeck penned as a Californian. In his search for a critical language for approaching Steinbeck, he identifies timely and relevant perspectives by which contemporary readers and scholars can appreciate and interpret his work. And he reassesses Steinbeck by interweaving the lenses of traditional literary theory, ecocriticism, animal/humane studies, disability studies, and media criticism. The result is a persuasive argument with updated options for reading—and reclaiming—Steinbeck.In his exploration of Steinbeck’s work, Jones leaves no stone unturned. As he looks to Steinbeck’s relevance for today and tomorrow, his critical framework ignores neither the established assessments of Steinbeck’s writings nor the backstories. He shares with readers what Steinbeck was doing, feeling, reading, and communicating as the works under discussion were in progress. For example, Jones recalls Steinbeck’s English professors at Stanford alongside the claim that he believed in leprechauns and had “a strong interest in magic,” which inspired the characterization of Tularecito and the plot developments of the segment of The Pastures of Heaven in which this character appears (24, 25). Thus, Jones concludes that “so balanced were . . . aspects of realism and the magical in Steinbeck’s mind that we can consider him, without much of a stretch, a homegrown magical realist” (25). Because of its “cyclical rather than linear sense of time, and its questioning of the distinction between people and things,” Jones also suggests magical realism as a lens for reading To a God Unknown (1933) (53). Yet, for Jones, To a God Unknown holds greater contemporary significance “for its pioneering treatment of a timely subject in California: drought” (37). And a drought-based reading is not limited to the issue of climate. Jones connects the lack of water to issues of race and ethnicity in To a God Unknown as he points out its “impact . . . on the psychological well-being of its Anglo characters” (46).Further, Jones effectively argues alternative socioeconomic interpretations of two stories from The Long Valley (1938). Readers are informed of major revisions to “The Vigilante” before its final published version. Based on the true story of the lynching of two white men in San José, California, Steinbeck reduces the number of victims to one Black male. In so doing, Steinbeck “underscores lynching as a national . . . outrage, one that targeted African Americans disproportionately . . . that continued to receive national attention in the 1930s” (60). And Jones calls “Johnny Bear” “a classic study in unreliable narration” (69), a flaw attributable to the “suppression of interracial and cross-class” sexual relationships “to protect the sanctity of a white culture” (70). In addition, he points out the “Capitalist exploitation” in this short story, manifested by the rental of land to Chinese sharecroppers and the mistreatment of the dredging crew.Midway through Reclaiming John Steinbeck, Jones shifts the discussion to works by Steinbeck that lend themselves to reassessment against the backdrop of a relatively new critical field: animal studies. He observes that “the rise . . . of critical animal studies (CAS) is the culmination of critical efforts to focus on excluded others . . . and to deconstruct hegemonic categories—the rational; the logocentric; and, indeed, ‘the human’ itself’” (74). His discussion of The Red Pony (1933) (which includes informative content about Steinbeck’s writing process) raises this novella within The Long Valley above its traditional status as middle-school literature. “The Red Pony deserves attention,” Jones writes, “for the ways it challenges hierarchical status divides (particularly between humans and animals) and the problems inherent in that destabilization. . . . The figure of the child becomes a means to contemplate . . . intractable social and political questions . . . regarding the status of the human” (75). Jones also pays attention to the human-horticulture connection, viewing “The Chrysanthemums” and “The White Quail” as short stories that “explore the possibilities and the limits of transformations in human consciousness, ones that lie along the human-plant connection” (91). For Jones, plant life is empowered to an even greater extent in The Grapes of Wrath, as inedible crops “become the tools of social power” (107).Significantly, early in his book, Jones declares that “we can reclaim Steinbeck as twentieth-century American literature’s most experimental writer—and not the least for his engagement with scientific experiments” (3). Preceding the chapter on Sea of Cortez (1941), Reclaiming John Steinbeck discusses Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath as literary laboratory projects that yielded mixed results. Acknowledging Of Mice and Men’s status in disability studies, Jones argues that the narrative’s focus on “the recursive need to care for Lennie . . . disables the narrative of awakening class consciousness . . . which remains only weakly formulated” (113). Steinbeck’s experiment in translating the novella into a Broadway production that ran for 207 performances in 1937–38, while fleshing out some of the characters (notably Curley’s Wife, who remains nameless nonetheless), arguably suffered the same flaws as its source material. Jones describes the effort as “a failure of plot and character . . . that makes disability not a trope for investigation but a weakness at the level of form, as if we are witnessing a wounded creature that . . . can only behave in limited ways” (127–28).One can argue that Jones categorizes The Grapes of Wrath as an experiment as well—creating a narrative of social-political-economic movement while the movement remains a work in process. Jones cites a communiqué Steinbeck sent to Elizabeth Otis during The Grapes of Wrath’s fledgling stages, in which he reveals his stress when “trying to write history while it is happening and I don’t want to be wrong” (143). Writing under these conditions lends credibility to Jones’s describing The Grapes of Wrath as a novel of “emergence” (130). The sense of flow and change suggested by this word is manifested by the “serial movement” of the novel’s “road narrative” (130); the gradual revelation of knowledge to the reader about protagonist Tom Joad and other characters; and its fluctuating commentary on human development: “Chapter fourteen, the philosophical heart of the book, actually restarts halfway through when its initial attempt to describe man emerging and growing beyond ‘himself’ becomes a recognition of human stumbling into violent slaughter” (136).The final two chapters of Reclaiming Steinbeck address the writer’s shift in interest “beyond the political and sociological” (148), a move that in its focus on the “Global South” brings geography, biology, and culture to the forefront. Drawing on the writings of Gloria Anzaldúa, particularly Borderlands / La Frontera (1987), Jones argues that Steinbeck made a prescient attempt to heed Anzaldúa’s future advice to “admit that Mexico is your double” (148). This gesture is manifested and chronicled in the Sea of Cortez (1941), coauthored by Steinbeck and marine biologist Ed Ricketts. The Gulf of California exemplifies “Anzaldúa’s predominant image for . . . pluralistic, borderless thinking” (151), while its “peculiar optical effect of mirage” lends itself to Steinbeck’s revisitation of magical realism (153). The research of marine invertebrates described in the text lends itself to expansion of Steinbeck’s egalitarian interest in animal-human studies: “Sea of Cortez is an exercise in creating a species sensibility, one that recognizes humanity as a species among other species, . . . and . . . create[s] a response to a question that every species must face, . . . the question of extinction” (156). The vulnerability of the human species proved a major theme in Steinbeck’s next creative endeavors—filmmaking in Mexico. With the production of The Forgotten Village (1941), Steinbeck was likely defining film as Jones does here—“both medium and agent of change” (174); this documentary on water pollution, filmed with an indigenous cast, likely satisfied “Steinbeck the solitary writer . . . seeking emergence into both artistic and social collaboration” (175). The Pearl (1947), also filmed in Mexico, was a hybrid creation not unlike Of Mice and Men, but this time the dual media—novella and movie—shared a cultural partnership; the native music researched by Steinbeck and his then-wife Gwyn was incorporated into the film as well and referred to as various “Songs” in the print version. Both cinematic productions featured a theme of social justice that resonated throughout Steinbeck’s work (186).The epilogue of Reclaiming John Steinbeck combines its overarching conclusions with an analysis of Cannery Row. Labeling Steinbeck’s final California-based work as “this most fragmented of novels,” Jones identifies its place in Steinbeck’s oeuvre as the book “written for the troops” whom the writer encountered as a World War II correspondent (193). Cannery Row is also recognized for the character of Lee Chong, reportedly the first Asian American character to play a salient role in a work by a major American author. And the difficulty in classifying Cannery Row (“a realist novel? a symbolist fantasy? a metafictional experiment?”) ties in with Jones’s overall evaluation of Steinbeck’s work as reliably protean and emergent (195).Reclaiming John Steinbeck is a valuable text for a number of audiences. Upper-division undergraduate and graduate students in literature will acquire much knowledge about John Steinbeck’s early career and why he still matters. Secondary school instructors and university faculty will no doubt come away from this reading with enlightening perspectives on Steinbeck and his continued relevance. Book group discussion leaders with a solid grounding in theory will appreciate this refreshing take on Steinbeck—an inspiration for new, innovative questions. And Steinbeck scholars may complete the reading with an intriguing question—can similar or related arguments be made about Steinbeck’s later works?