Exploring the “monster” in The Grapes of Wrath
Literature throughout history has been a medium to express the human experience. After all, the psychoanalysts incessantly used literary works as a part of their evidence for their theories about the human mind. With science providing countless insights on the human psyche, literature’s role as a valid lens to observe the self is challenged. To make matters worse, literature’s role in illustrating human aesthetics is becoming increasingly vulnerable to oversaturation and cliches. After all, with centuries of documented works, original narratives are almost impossible. One can easily question the originality of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath due to its binary moral structure. The Joads, despite their imperfections, are illustrated as heroes resisting the evil servants of capitalism through their arduous struggle for survival. If one were to solely examine the Joad chapters of the Grapes of Wrath, the novel becomes a period piece that has no relevance in today’s world. This critique, however, does not apply to the novel’s chapters with a more macro focalization. In those chapters, Steinbeck beautifully illustrates the invisible power that rules over the entire nation affably labeled as the monster. By analyzing The Grapes of Wrath through these chapters, the novel becomes a modernist classic that disempowers the human perspective that predominated the narrative voice of literature. An in-depth exploration of this monster through concepts such as the symbolic order and the sublime further elevates the status of the novel as a noumenal piece of literature that isn’t bound by time.
The binary moral structure in The Grapes of Wrath is caused by the migrant workers’ dominance over the narrative voice. The Joads implicitly skew the novel’s moral compass in their favor through this dominance. Their suffering evokes sympathy from the readers. This bias is pronounced in parts of the novel that describe the Californians. Californians are depicted to be cruel and manipulative. For instance, Steinbeck describes a migrant woman’s hand which was mutilated by a Californian sheriff with gruesome detail: “The fingers hung on strings against her palm, and the torn flesh was white and bloodless.” (Steinbeck 264) These starkly opposing depictions of the two parties establish the narrative of the migrant workers rebelling against the force of evil Californians. This rudimentary narrative prevalent in The Grapes of Wrath is additionally condemnable when it is compared to other novels published around its time. William Faulkner, who wrote his works during Steinbeck’s life, actively avoids the binary moral structure by creating complex characters who interact in an absurd world that does not abide by a moral compass. For example, Thomas Sutpen in Absalom! Absalom! is a cruel, violent man who hosts carnal, bloody fights at his estate to sate his bloodlust. However, the reader is at the same time shown Sutpen’s desperate yet futile struggle to escape the racist environment of the South. With Sutpen becoming the victim of the greater evil rather than being the source of it, the novel challenges binary moralism at its core.
Instead of the character-driven technique employed by Faulkner, Steinbeck portrays the world of moral ambiguity by altogether confiscating his characters’ authority over the narrative. This lack of power can be observed from the characters’ enslavement to the symbolic order that dictates their speech and the meaning of the words. Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories are insightful tools to examine symbols linguistically. Lacan describes the birth of symbols as a consequence of socialization and immersion into one’s environment: “In the course of socialization, the body is progressively written or overwritten with signifiers; pleasure is localized in certain zones while other words are neutralized by the word and coaxed into compliance with social, behavioral norms.” (Fink 24) In short, core entities that are integral to one’s life become the foundation in which words receive their symbolic definition. For the farmhands, this core entity was their land. With their lives being inherently tied to their farmland and its needs, the symbolic order of the tenant farmers naturally is based on it. The farmhands’ bond to their land is exemplified through this quote, “We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it … That’s what makes it ours — being born on it, working it, dying on it.” (Steinbeck 33) The effect of this symbolic order is shown in chapter 9 when a farmhand sells his belongings before moving to California. He describes his horses’ physical attributes in reference to their role as a beast of burden in a farm: “These fine bays, matched they are, … matched in the way they walk, stride to stride. In the stiff pull-strained hams and buttocks, split-second timed together.” (Steinbeck 87) The farmhand goes on to say later that the horses are “years of work, toil in the sun” (Steinbeck 87). With the Dust Bowl, the land in which the farmhands’ symbolic order is founded is destroyed. With its destruction comes the demise of their symbolic order.
With the death of the old symbolic order, a new order rises from the foundational base of capitalism. Like land was the core entity for the past symbolic order, this new one is based on money. Money becomes the entity that acts as the means to value the signifiers. This change is shown through this quote, “Crops were reckoned in dollars, and land was valued by principal plus interest.” (Steinbeck 231) The immense power of this symbolic order is further exemplified in chapter 25, where the crops lose their identity as a form of sustenance:
“The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges … A million people hungry, needing the fruit — and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.” (Steinbeck 349)
This absurd image gains additional terror when the capitalists confirm their helplessness in controlling this symbolic order just like the farmhands before them: “The bank is something more than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.” This monster continues to enslave humanity even today as identities of everyday objects are often framed around their monetary value.
Instead of leaving the monster as the inexplicable terror, Steinbeck uses Edmund Burke’s concept of the sublime to add further insight. Burke describes the sublime as, “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.” (Burke 324) This terror originates from the subject’s inability to understand the mechanics of the sublime. Without this understanding, there is no way to control it. As such, humans are inevitably affected by the sublime regardless of their compliance to it. This may be similar to theological entities such as God, but this is a crude association to make. The sublime does not possess sets of commandments that must be followed by its subjects written in stone tablets. If anything, the sublime is closer to a natural disaster than a deity. And this is where readers can find Steinbeck’s genius. While the monster is only identified through the physical entity of the bank, the bank is another signified rather than a signifier. In the agrarian world, the monster reveals itself through the land and the Dust Bowl. Ultimately, the sublime remains to exist as it shifts from across the ages. The Grapes of Wrath takes advantage of the transitional era of the early 1900s to explore the presence of the sublime that resides in the realm of noumena, a place unbound by the concept of time.
Reading the last part of The Grapes of Wrath through the lens of the sublime provides a potential justification for the presence of binary moralism in the novel. The migrant workers’ struggle for justice nor the Californian’s acts of cruelty can affect the cosmic nature of the sublime. This is exemplified through the storm in the last few chapters of the novel that devastates both parties. The flood ruins the crops of the plantations and submerges the migrants’ possessions without discrimination. With this part of the story, Steinbeck seems to allude that the binary moral structure was solely used to show its futility against the acts of the sublime. This irony, in essence, is John Steinbeck’s achievement that allows The Grapes of Wrath to earn its place in the literary canon of the West.
Works Cited
Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton University Press, 1997.
Burke, Edmund. “Section VII: Of the Sublime.” A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. the Ninth Edition, Etc.., Basil, 1792, pp. 324–324.
