The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck [6]
No matter what aural or visual analogy we apply, the fact remains that The Grapes of Wrath is not a closed system of historical periodicity, but a relational field, a web of connections between text and context, nature and culture, physical earth and human inhabitants. His “general” or intercalary chapters (“pace changers,” Steinbeck called them) were expressly designed to “hit the reader below the belt. With the rhythms and symbols of poetry one can get into a reader—open him up and while he is open introduce things on a [sic] intellectual level which he would not or could not receive unless he were opened up,” Steinbeck revealed to Columbia University undergraduate Herbert Sturz in 1953. Throughout his career, Steinbeck was always a relational thinker, and in Grapes, the intercalary chapters provide a kind of anthropological “thick description” of the American migrant plight. Moreover, Steinbeck historicizes the Joad narrative by embedding his fiction in its contemporary milieu; conversely, he demonstrates the fluidity of history by re-creating it in fiction. History surrounds fiction; fiction embeds history. Text and context are integrally related to each other in a kind of necessary complementarity, “a unique ecological rhetoric,” according to Peter Valenti, whose totality cannot be separated, subdivided, or segregated without risking distortion of its many layers of meaning.
The Grapes of Wrath is an unapologetically engaged novel with a partisan posture, many complex voices, and passionate prose styles. Except for its unflinching treatment of the Depression’s climatic, social, and economic conditions, there is nothing cynically distanced about it, nothing coolly modernist in the way we have come to understand the elite literary implications of that term in the past ninety years. It is not narrated from the first person point of view, yet the language has a salty, catchy eyewitness quality about it, and its vivid biblical, empirical, poetical, cinematic, and folk styles demonstrate the tonal and visual acuity of Steinbeck’s ear and eye, the melding of experience and rhetoric, oral and literary forms.
Steinbeck told Merle Armitage on February 17, 1939, that in “composition, in movement, in tone and in scope,” The Grapes of Wrath was “symphonic.” His fusion of intimate narrative and panoramic editorial chapters enforces this dialogic concert. Chapters, styles, voices all speak to each other, set up resonances, send echoes back and forth—point and counterpoint, strophe and antistrophe—as in a symphony whose total impression surpasses the sum of its discrete and sometimes dissonant parts. Steinbeck’s novel belongs to that class of fictions whose shape issues not from an ideal blueprint of aesthetic propriety but from the generative urgency of its subject matter and its author’s experience. (“It had to be written,” Stanley Kunitz said in 1939.) Steinbeck’s direct involvement with the plight of America’s Dust Bowl migrants in the latter half of the 1930s created his obsessive urge to tell their story honestly but also movingly. “This must be a good book,” he wrote in Working Days on June 10, 1938. “It simply must. I haven’t any choice. It must be far and away the best thing I have ever attempted—slow but sure, piling detail on detail until a picture and an experience emerge. Until