John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath （思政融入点：阶级斗争）

A similar vein of prophecy is at work in the fiction of John Steinbeck (1902–1968), although, in this case, prophecy is more closely wedded to political vision. Born in California, Steinbeck studied marine biology at university: a subject that may have later helped shape his interest in humanity as a collective biological organism, and the mass movement of that mass humanity as the fundamental condition of life. It was Tortilla Flat(1935), a vivid portrait of life among the poor in Monterey, that brought Steinbeck to prominence. And it was In Dubious Battle (1936), the story of a strike among migratory workers in the California fruit orchards, that brought a new political edge to his work. With Of Mice and Men (1937) Steinbeck firmly established himself as the novelist of the rural poor. It is the tale of two itinerant farm workers, drawn into a brotherhood of suffering with each other, who yearn to find a home. With the Depression wreaking economic havoc and drought turning vast swathes of agricultural land into a Dust Bowl, farmers and their families were reduced to absolute poverty, forced out of their homes and buildings. As they traveled across America in search of work, they needed to find a voice, someone to make the nation aware of their suffering. And they found it in Steinbeck, particularly with the publication of his most famous novel, The Grapes of Wrath, in 1939. The origins of The Grapes of Wrath lie, typically for the time, in a series of newspaper articles Steinbeck wrote about migratory laborers. Published in 1936, they were reprinted as a pamphlet, Their Blood is Strong, with an epilogue added, in 1938. It was then that Steinbeck decided to turn fact into fiction to gain maximum impact: to tell a story that would enable his readers to experience the suffering he had seen. So he invented the Joad family, Oklahoma farmers who are driven off their land by soil erosion, and who drive to California hoping to take advantage of what they imagine to be a land of plenty. The migration of the Joad family is punctuated by interchapters, written in lyrical prose, that generalize the experience of the family, and force us to see what happens to them as representative of what was happening to all the rural poor of the time. Steinbeck plays cunningly with different mythical structures, too, to add resonance and representativeness to his story. The journey of the Joads recalls many other earlier, epic migrations: notably, the biblical journey to the Promised Land and the westward movement that helped shape the history of the American nation. What the Joad family find when they reach California, however, is no land of promise. For these Western adventurers, there is no realization of a dream of freedom. There is only more poverty and pain. Tom Joad, the older son in the Joad family and the epic hero, joins with Jim Casy, a minister turned labor organizer, to try to build resistance to the exploitation of the “Okies,” as they are dismissively called, and other migrant laborers. Casy is killed; Tom kills to avenge his death; those few members of the Joad family who have survived try to hide Tom. But then Tom leaves, telling his mother, “I’ll be Making It New: 1900–1945 225 ever’where – wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there.” Casy has died but the spirit of Casy, his belief in collective identity and action, lives on in Tom. Not only that, the intimation is, it will soon be “ever’where,” just as the spirit of Jesus Christ (whose initials are recalled in Casy’s) spread everywhere after his death. That spirit is evidently at work in the last, symbolic moment of The Grapes of Wrath when Rose of Sharon, Tom’s sister, who has just given birth to a stillborn child, nurses an anonymous starving man with the milk meant for her baby. She has recognized, as Tom has, her involvement in a communal identity larger than her own immediate family; and she has realized that her giving of herself to that communality is the source of renewal. As its title indicates, as well as its narrative drive, The Grapes of Wrath is an angry but also an optimistic book. Recalling “The Battle-Hymn of the Republic” with its prophecy of truth marching to victory, and recollecting an earlier triumph over another kind of oppression, that title announces what the book will say: that the oppressors will be conquered, with a crusade to end poverty succeeding in the twentieth century, just as the crusade to end slavery triumphed in the nineteenth. Steinbeck acknowledges the power of the oppressors and catalogues the destitution and defeats of their victims, but he also anticipates the trampling under of that power. Weaving together the literal and the legendary, he outlines not only what America is but what it might be. And what it might be is registered, not just in conversion of people like Casy, Tom, and Rose of Sharon, or in the comments of other characters, as they grope towards political consciousness, or in the transformation of the religion of Christ on the cross into one of man on the move. It is there, also, in the sheer sweep of Steinbeck’s prose as he describes the vastness of the American continent. In terms of narrative fact, the westward movement of The Grapes of Wrath may meet with closure. But, as far as narrative feeling is concerned, there remains something else: the conviction that there is still space, and time, to find a true West. The betrayal of the American dream may be what gives the novel its quality of barely controlled rage. But the belief in the continuing presence of that dream, as a source of renewal, is what gives it also a prophetic fervor. Steinbeck was never to write anything as powerful as his story of the Joads, although there were to be many further novels about the poor (Cannery Row (1945)), family troubles and tensions (East of Eden (1952)), and a book about Steinbeck’s own journeying across America (Travels with Charley (1962)). The Grapes of Wrath stands, though, as a worthy equivalent in the twentieth century of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the nineteenth: a work founded on the conviction that things should and could change which, thanks to its author’s mixing of the documentary and the visionary, managed to ensure that many others were equally convinced.

Preview questions:

1. Why does the author entitle the novel The Grapes of Wrath?

2. The Grapes of Wrath vividly depicted the sufferings of the working people during the Great Depression years, but Chapter 19 is telling the history of California. Does it have anything to do with the theme of the novel?

3. What are the major themes of the novel?