Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath is about a large Oklahoman family that, after being kicked off their farm, moves to California in search of jobs during the Great Depression. They are one of many. The journey is mildly perilous, and upon arrival they find that employers are hiring at not-even-subsistence wages.
It’s fantastically executed. I give it a 7/10. Two small essays came out of me while thinking about this.
Monomania
Steinbeck said he wanted to write a novel that would “rip a reader’s nerves to rags”. And so he did. I binged it in a sort of anxious-depressive flow state.
It’s hard for me to imagine a book succeeding more at being a moving anti-capitalist book. And yet, when the time came to fill out the ratings column of my book spreadsheet, I surprised myself by putting it down as a 7. I thought that the novel was hampered by exerting itself to maximize one emotional note. It wants its reader to be aghast at the plight of these migrant families, and angry at employers who offer sub-subsistence wages. I felt these things… and approximately only these things.
I almost think a story has to have some aesthetic, moral, or ideological discord with itself to be truly great, and Grapes of Wrath has almost none. If you squint you have it in the shitty behavior of the family’s children. (Particularly the female children.) The book would be much worse to me if, throughout all their suffering, the girls had been considerate, virtuous people. It would just be too much.
(Similarly, I don’t think I’d rate Ayn Rand’s ideological novels higher than a 7, despite having a lot of sympathy for her philosophy as I’ve heard it steelmanned.)
I found myself thinking, “This is why erotica can’t be really great, either.” I have read quite a lot of erotica in my life, and devoted myself to grading and analyzing excellence in erotica. Believe me when I say I appreciate it as an art form. But the same monomaniacal focus on one thing caps its potential greatness. As long as an author is constrained by trying to maximize one note, whether that is lust or ideology, they are limited in the story choices they can make, and their work will be, well, highly compressible.
Textuality
An interesting thing about this novel is that it made me realize contemporary novels don’t depict people who aren’t culturally textual.
By textual I mean not just literate, I mean people who largely engage with the world through text. Tumblr users are culturally textual, as are the ranty people on twitter who constantly misread people. It’s not reading comprehension that makes them textual – it’s that they’re using reading and writing as a major mode of interacting with the world!
Textuality obviously isn’t intelligence, but just as obviously, the two are correlated. With less justification I’d also argue that textuality changes your personality and communication style
- directly, because you have longer textual mental artifacts that are intermediate products of the decisionmaking, narrativizing, and emotion-making process
- and indirectly because textuality exposes you to a pretty different part of culture.
These days, people who are highly textual hang out with other textual people, write about other textual people, for textual people. This is evident even in mediocre fanfiction. Characters in that mediocre fanfiction talk and think in a much more textual way than Steinbeck’s characters, even girls who were raised by wolves and shit – because a highly textual psychology is so pervasive in the culture of people who read or write much at all.
People complain about how like medieval fantasy characters do therapy speak or use the traffic light system in BDSM, but after reading Steinbeck I was taken aback by how pervasive textuality is also. Steinbeck writes about a type of person who was absent in my reading before.
54% of Americans read at least one book in 2023. 18% read more than ten. It may be obvious to say that authors write books for people who read at least ten books a year. I think it’s less obvious that, as a result, the characters in fiction are “crunched down” psychologically. Many people don’t read much, and fictional depictions of their psychology have vanished, if it was ever there for long. For non-textual culture to be depicted in text,
- psychological realism had to be common in literature,
- people of varying class, textuality, and literacy had to commingle enough that they could depict each other accurately.
The former has only been around a few centuries, and the latter, I suppose, will tend to cease in meritocratic societies where people can (and prefer to) work and socialize exclusively with people of similar interests and capabilities.
Here’s a scene from Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, where Mack – a well meaning but irresponsible man – tries to do his friend a favor by throwing him a surprise party, and ends up trashing the friend’s house. I realized that this excerpt reminded me of some relatives of friends, or friends of friends of friends from very different drama bubbles… but that I don’t know anyone like that myself, nor do I ever read about them.
“I was glad when you hit me,” Mack went on. “I thought to myself—‘Maybe this will teach me. Maybe I’ll remember this.’ But, hell, I won’t remember nothin’. I won’t learn nothin’. Doc,” Mack cried, “the way I seen it, we was all happy and havin’ a good time. You was glad because we was givin’ you a party. And we was glad. The way I seen it, it was a good party.” He waved his hand at the wreckage on the floor. “Same thing when I was married. I’d think her out and then—but it never come off that way.”
“I know,” said Doc. He opened the second quart of beer and poured the glasses full.
“Doc,” said Mack, “I and the boys will clean up here—and we’ll pay for the stuff that’s broke. If it takes us five years we’ll pay for it.”
Doc shook his head slowly and wiped the beer foam from his mustache. “No,” he said, “I’ll clean it up. I know where everything goes.”
“We’ll pay for it, Doc.”
“No you won’t, Mack,” said Doc. “You’ll think about it and it’ll worry you for quite a long time, but you won’t pay for it. There’s maybe three hundred dollars in broken museum glass. Don’t say you’ll pay for it. That will just keep you uneasy. It might be two or three years before you forgot about it and felt entirely easy again. And you wouldn’t pay it anyway.”
“I guess you’re right,” said Mack. “God damn it, I know you’re right. What can we do?”
“I’m over it,” said Doc. “Those socks in the mouth got it out of my system. Let’s forget it.”