Monday, August 30, 2010

mini-series

If you're interested in watching the mini-series, I found it on youtube.  That said, you have to watch it in parts.

mini series

I think you can figure out the rest...

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Hebrew dictionary

This Hebrew dictionary might offer you some insights.  Let me know if you discover anything interesting :)
Hebrew dictioanry

Friday, August 20, 2010

Lee

Lee is one of the most remarkable characters in American literature, a philosopher trapped by the racial expectations of his time. He is the essence of compassion, erudition, and calm, serving the Trasks while retaining a complex interior and emotional life. Do you understand why he speaks in pidgin, as he explains it to Sam Hamilton? How does his character change-in dress, speech, and action-over the course of the book? And why do you think Lee stays with the Trasks, instead of living on his own in San Francisco and pursuing his dream?

Sunday, August 15, 2010

Adam

Adam Trask struggles to overcome the actions of others-his father, brother, and wife-and make his own life. What is the lesson that he learns that frees him from Kate and allows him to love his sons? He says to Cal near the end that "if you want to give me a present-give me a good life. That would be something I could value." Does Adam have a good life? What hinders him? Would you characterize his life as successful in the end?

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Alienation in East of Eden: The Chart of the Soul

Probably the biggest question we ask in English classes is "How does the style of the text support its meaning?"  This essay tackles that question.


While reading Alienation in East of Eden: The Chart of the Soul, consider:
1) Steinbeck is well known from writing novels in which some chapters are connected to the rest of the book more by theme than plot.  In your opinion, are there any chapters which stand out as being different from the rest of the book?  How so?  Why do you think Steinbeck might have included these chapters?
2) What is Steinbeck's comment on alienation?  free choice?  How does he make these comments?
3) According to this article, why does Steinbeck use the pattern of A and C names?
4) Consider some of the character names or book titles that Steinbeck ultimately opted not to use.  How do they add to your understanding of the book?
5) What is the impact of presenting his thesis in the way that Steinbeck does?  What is the impact of presenting it at the point in the book when he does?

“Alienation in East of Eden: The Chart of the Soul”

In the following essay, McDaniel examines alienation as a psychological force in East of Eden.

“I think there is only one book to a man,” said John Steinbeck as he wrote East of Eden. “This is the book I have always wanted and have worked and prayed to be able to write” (JN, p. 5). Though Steinbeck wrote East of Eden, his “big book” (JN, p. 33), with a strong sense of purpose, critics have found it formless; and though he recorded his ideas about it daily, critics have been vague about his theme. Steinbeck expected these problems, but the expectation was not the confession of guilt it has been taken for. “My carefully worked out method will be jumped on by the not too careful critic as slipshod” (JN, p. 31), he predicted. Critics have taken as support Steinbeck’s occasional concern about whether he would be understood, discounting his dominating enthusiasm about the basic soundness of his plan. East of Eden should seem “ordinary” and “casual,” he wrote, but “it is the most uncasual story in the world” (JN, p. 40). “As you will have discovered . . . the technique of this book is an apparent lack of technique and I assure you that it is not easy” (JN, p. 60).

About midway through East of Eden Steinbeck wrote, “My patterned book is clear to me now— right to the end. And I am pleased that I am able to follow the form I laid down so long ago. I hope the book will sound a little formless at first until it settles in the mind” (JN, p. 112). As he drew toward the end he said, “What seems kind of accidental is not. I don’t think there is a single sentence in this whole book that does not either develop character, carry on the story or provide necessary background” (JN, p. 153). Again anticipating critical response to his work Steinbeck mused, “Years after I have finished a book, someone discovers my design and ascribes it either to a theft or an accident” (JN, p. 134). The purpose of the following essay is to do half of this, that is, to compare the novel and the East of Eden journal to clarify understanding of the theme; but it should exonerate Steinbeck from a felony regarding form. It will charge him, instead, with misdemeanors in tone.
Steinbeck thought a chapter should “have design of tone, as well as of form. A chapter should be a perfect cell in the whole book and should almost be able to stand alone” (JN, p. 25). But a chapter standing too strongly alone in East of Eden has often controlled interpretations of the book. These are the persuasive words in Chapter 34: Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence.

Out of context Chapter 34 seems a forthright statement of a theme of good and evil. Within the context of the book, however, this short essay relates to a point in the narrative much as the intercalary chapters did in TheGrapes of Wrath. In Chapter 34 Steinbeck is generalizing about death, good, and evil just after he has particularized feelings about these things as they affect one man, Tom Hamilton, in Chapter 33. These words do not state the major theme; they give only a hint of it in caught and net. It is possible to suggest, then, that East of Eden is even more complex than The Grapes of Wrath because along with tracing three generations of a fictional family, the Trasks, Steinbeck intersperses chapters about the Hamiltons, his own maternal relatives; sometimes intertwines the Hamiltons and the Trasks; and still writes essay chapters. But the materials are carefully related, and not at all “sloppy” and “confused” as Peter Lisca claims.

Another connection to the main theme appears in Chapter 34: “In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love.” But the theme is stated specifically in the middle of the book, Chapter 22; Steinbeck corroborates this fact (JN, p. 104). Lee, the wise Chinese servant of Adam Trask makes the thematic statement for the author:

I think this is the best-known story in the world because it is everybody’s story. I think it is the symbol story of the human soul. . . . The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt— and there is the story of mankind. I think that if rejection could be amputated, the human would not be what he is. . . . It is all there—the start, the beginning. One child, refused the love he craves, kicks the cat and hides his secret guilt; and another steals so that money will make him loved; and third conquers the world—and always the guilt and revenge and more guilt. . . . Therefore I think this old and terrible story is important because it is a chart of the soul—the secret, rejected, guilty soul.

Steinbeck’s publicized account of his writing of the novel, Journal of a Novel, consists of unmailed letters Steinbeck wrote his Viking editor, Pascal Covici about East of Eden. Writing daily letters to warm up for his work, he thus left a unique and valuable record of the composition of the novel, as well as of his creative processes per se. But it takes thorough knowledge of the novel as well as knowledge about Steinbeck to plumb all the letters because Steinbeck did not have to explain to Covici what other readers may not know.

There are also problems in correlating the books because the manuscript of East of Eden was cut and changed. Nevertheless, comparing the Journal and the published text can refine our understanding of the theme, for week by week Steinbeck commented on his theme and structure.

The most telling note appears June 11, 1951, when Steinbeck was writing the section containing the words of Lee quoted above: “if you wonder why I am spending so much time on this naming—you must know that I am stating my thesis and laying it out” (JN, p. 104). “This naming” refers to Adam Trask, Samuel Hamilton, and Lee naming Adam’s twin sons. Calling the boys Caleb and Aaron (which he shortens to Cal and Aron),

Steinbeck makes their initials match Cain’s and Abel’s. Steinbeck wants “the whole book illuminated by the discussion,” which is not “just a discussion of Biblical lore,” but uses “the Biblical story as a measure of ourselves” (JN, pp. 104–05). Rather than expressing the “theme of the individual’s struggle between good and evil, for even “the importance of the individual human soul,” the central chapters explain the causes of evil from a psychological point of view: evil comes from feelings of rejection. Believing that people follow patterns in their lives (JN, p. 151), Steinbeck wanted to show that to break out of destructive patterns begun by rejection, people must feel accepted by others. Simplified, the theme of East of Eden is alienation— the alienation that writes the history of evil in the world. Alienation in this respect means feelings of unwanted separation. Once this theme is understood, supposed flaws in Steinbeck’s structure disappear; the author’s confidence in his design makes sense; and some recent views defending the book get new support. Because the violent Cains are easiest to understand in East of Eden, people often see the Abel characters as simply “good.” Steinbeck shows their complexity in Adam. Abels are “good,” in that by personality, they are not inclined to be aggressive, but they can still experience alienation. (In real life, Abels as well as Cains suffer from guilt, but East of Eden is complex enough without trying to prove this.) Abels handle rejection subtly—by isolation and withdrawal, for example; by compulsive behavior; or by submitting to manipulation.

They may even commit suicide out of despair or guilt. When Robert DeMott notes that the relationship of major characters in East of Eden indicates their “psychological personalities,” he makes an important observation in this regard. Commenting on the behavior of Adam Trask, DeMott says the young Adam “foreshadows the separateness and isolation which characterizes Adam throughout the book.” DeMott’s “revisionary thesis” (his term) urges greater attention to three interests of Steinbeck—psychology, myth, and the processes of the creative imagination. In a manner of speaking, all three shaped the theme and structure of East of Eden, as will be seen in Steinbeck’s effort to explain the consequences of rejection with Cain and Abel as his frame.

It is interesting to note that Steinbeck considered giving his principal characters the family name of Canable (Cain-Abel). He limited the symbolism to first initials, instead, yet because he wanted a broad span of time and place to suggest the role of rejection in human history, he portrayed three generations of Trasks with such names. Cyrus Trask, the first, is married to Alice, the first Abel. In the next generation Cyrus has sons named Charles and Adam. Adam marries Cathy and has the sons Cal and Aron. The third generation characters are the most fully developed, so that they can show that the sins of the fathers are visited upon their sons, as the Bible has said. To examine the destructive cycle seems to have been Steinbeck’s plan from the start. The chief new discovery made while writing the novel was the way to give humanity hope of changing the pattern.

Lee expresses the challenge. “‘Couldn’t a world be built around accepted truth? Couldn’t some pains and insanities be rooted out if the causes were known?’” Almost overwhelmed with excitement, Samuel replies to Lee, “ ‘I don’t know, damn you. You’ve taken a contentious game and made an answer of it. Let me alone—let me think!’ ” Not the kind of artist he called “hard boiled,” Steinbeck believed there is one purpose in writing . . . beyond simply doing it interestingly. It is the duty of the writer to lift up, to extend, to encourage” (JN, p. 115). In the process of intently re-examining Genesis he suddenly discovered what he needed. “I have finally I think found a key to the story” (JN, p. 104). His key was the Hebrew word timshel. The letters to Covici show Steinbeck then sought justification for introducing a new translation of timshel (Chapter Four, Verse Seven). In the King James version of the Bible God says to Cain, “thou shalt rule over” sin, making a promise. The American Standard Version reads “Do thou”—an order. But through Lee, Steinbeck presents a translation that sets man free—“thou mayest.” This translation gives man a choice. At the same time that he saw this possibility in his materials, Steinbeck discovered a new and final title: “I think I have a title at last, a beautiful title, East of Eden. And read the sixteenth verse to find it. And the Salinas Valley is surely East of Eden. . . . What a strange story it is and how its haunts one. . . . I began to realize that without this story—or rather a sense of it—psychiatrists would have nothing to do. In other words this one story is the basis of all human neurosis. . . .” (JN, p. 104). Having abandoned the regional title Salinas Valley, the personal My Valley, and the narrow Cain Sign, Steinbeck found the title grew with him; but he worried that it might seem “a soft title” though “it is anything but soft. . . . I think the quotation ‘And Cain etc.’ should be at the bottom of the title page. . . . There should never be any doubt in the reader’s mind what the title refers to” (JN, p. 107). And believing it an author’s obligation to contribute “to our developing species and our half developed culture,” he wanted to show, to “say so sharply and so memorably that it will not be forgotten,” that “although East of Eden is not Eden, it is not insuperably far away” (JN, pp. 115–16).

With Chapter 1 almost complete Steinbeck had said, “the theme is beginning to emerge . . . It will emerge again and again . . . The gifts of Cain and Abel to their father and his rejection of one and acceptance of the other will I think mean a great deal to you but I wonder if it will be generally understood by other readers” (JN, p. 25). The painstaking deliberations about timshel show the same great concern with language and medieval texts he later demonstrated in The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights. “One of the most important mistranslations in the Old Testament” surrounds timshel, he said. “This little story turns out to be one of the most profound in the world.” Besides the possibility of free will in the story there is the “other thing,” a question of the significance of “firstling” and “fat.” “If firstling and fat are qualitative, then fruit of the earth without a qualitative might be some key to the rejection” (JN, p. 108; (my italics). Certainly Steinbeck was concerned about how all the parts of the story fit— especially the cause and the effect of Cain’s rejection. Though Steinbeck wondered whether he was getting his point across, he went on being intentionally subtle.
As he finished the chapter establishing his thesis, a very difficult section to write, he said with relief, “I could have put it in a kind of an essay but I think it was better to let it come out of these three” [Adam, Lee, and Samuel] (JN, p. 105). Following subsequent letters laboring over questions about Cain’s rejection and the meaning of God’s words, Steinbeck concluded: “Now tomorrow I will have a final statement of my theme and it will never again be mentioned in the book” (JN, p. 113).
Steinbeck was preparing for Samuel Hamilton’s death as he said this, and for Samuel’s final meeting with Adam “packed with information both about the men and about the story” (JN, p. 114). Several times he said that after Samuel’s death “the whole tempo and tone of the story is going to change. It will speed up and leap toward the future” (JN, p. 114). Having shown Adam’s life after Samuel’s death, Steinbeck confirmed “it is all down now. Its thesis is stated—all of it. Now we will see the thesis at work” (JN, p. 123).

In the section Steinbeck was talking about Samuel leads Adam out of the long depression that followed Adam’s rejection by Cathy. Samuel gives Adam some final advice and a push toward living without him. Thus a father figure, Samuel frees his “son” from rejection. For the first time in his life, Adam can live independent of the control of another.

But being free is a passage to knowledge—it is not knowledge itself. In the second half of the book Adam must repeat the errors of his own rejecting father, Cyrus, before he learns to set Cal free. Lee introduces the freedom of choice; Samuel exercises this freedom by taking the risk that frees Adam; Adam will free Cal. Steinbeck wanted to show that fathers visit sins upon their sons by denying them free choice. Freedom is a gift of love. Adam’s deathbed bequest to Cal is clear when he says “Timshel!”

Steinbeck laid out his vision of the cycle of rejection and alienation vs. reconciliation when he presented his thesis in Chapter 22, then illustrated it in 24. On June 21, 1951, anticipating the illustration he wrote, “I will take up the little flute melody, the continuing thing that bridges lives and ties the whole thing together, and I will end with a huge chord if I can do it” (JN, p. 116). Achieving his goal the next day he exulted, “I have never been more excited in my life about a chapter than I have been in this one which is just now concluding [the present Chapters 23 and 24]. . . . I know it needs lots of work but the form and the content of it seem right to me and right for the design of the book” (JN, p. 117). He had made Samuel confront Adam with the truth of Cathy’s perversion; and Adam had proved his strength. The focus of the book then shifted to Cal.

Two weeks later Steinbeck’s intentions remain firm; he says he has no sense of wandering from his purpose and he is about to reverse the “C-A theme” of the first section taking “the burden” from the Abel (Adam) and putting it on the Cain figure, Caleb, “my Cain principle.” “Charles was a dark principle who remained dark. . . . Part 3 is Caleb’s part—since he dominates and survives it. Thus we get no repetition but an extension of Part I” (JN, p. 128). In other words, in Part I, Charles, a Cain, did not struggle against evil, but Cal will; and because Lee intercedes for Cal, Adam will set Cal free to conquer “evil.” In a letter to Covici, Steinbeck calls Cal Trask his “baby”: “He is the Everyman, the battle ground between good and evil, the most human of all, the sorry man. In that battle the survivor is both” (SLL, p. 429). Cal is Steinbeck’s “baby” because of his struggle; Cal shows that the rejected, angry man can gain control over the forces that are directing him. In existential terms, alienation is a loss of freedom. In psychological terms, alienation is a force that can cause isolation, destruction, submission, or unnatural control. East of Eden can be read as a novel illustrating either that philosophical or that psychological view of humanity. Lee’s thematic statement closely resembles the classic statement on alienation of philosopher/psychoanalyst Erich Fromm in Escape from Freedom (1941). Loneliness, explained Fromm, is a powerful force in man derived from the need of others for the sake of survival. People feel insignificant when alone because they need love. But they need to relate to the world without losing their individuality. Not possessive love, nor materialism, but love which affirms others as well as the self, is the sign of a healthy person. Someone who feels insecure, doubtful, or powerless not only perpetuates isolation, but may perform destructive acts or seek or submit to unhealthy controls. Fromm concludes:

If human freedom is established as freedom to, if man can realize his self fully and uncompromisingly, the fundamental cause for his asocial drives will have disappeared and only a sick and abnormal individual will be dangerous. This freedom has never been realized in the history of mankind, yet it has been an ideal to which mankind has stuck even if it was often expressed in abstruse and irrational forms. There is no reason to wonder why the record of history shows so much cruelty and destructiveness. If there is anything to be surprised at—and encouraged by— I believe it is the fact that the human race, in spite of all that has happened to men, has retained—and actually developed—such qualities of dignity, courage, decency, and kindness as we find them throughout history and in countless individuals today.

East of Eden is not only less formless, it is less sentimental than it has been taken to be. Just as it is not loosely “about good and evil,” it is not vaguely “about morality.” It is about morality only in the sense that it looks at human behavior from established perspectives. Steinbeck saw the Cain and Abel story as embodying the basis of all neuroses: “if you take the fall along with it, you have the total of the psychic troubles that can happen to a human” (JN, p. 104). Here he brings up, separately, the Garden of Eden, the classic symbol for themes of good and evil; he had used the Cain story because his theme was different. Steinbeck might have pleased “the neurosis belt” (JN, p. 115) if he had offered mankind no hope, but if timshel weakens his art, it strengthens his value to more readers, which was more important to him. His worst offense was belaboring the words that “lift up . . . extend” (JN, p. 154). Perhaps overstating his beliefs resulted from too much planning and from overwhelming intentions—hence the misdemeanors in tone. His basic structure is sound.

Works Cited

McDaniel, Barbara. “Alienation in East of Eden: The ‘Chart of the Soul,’” in Steinbeck Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 1–2, Winter/Spring 1981, pp. 32–39.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Movie Version

Check out the trailers for the two film versions of East of Eden.

This one was made as a TV mini-series in 1981.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KViALN9bwo8
This 1954 version starred James Dean.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RAoXn0RGgQ

Having seen the previews, which do you think is most true to the book and why do you think so?

Is it a quintessentially American novel?

Steinbeck has a character refer to Americans as a "breed," and near the end of the book Lee says to a conflicted Cal that "We are all descended from the restless, the nervous, the criminals, the arguers and brawlers, but also the brave and independent and generous. If our ancestors had not been that, they would have stayed in their home plots in the other world and starved over the squeezed-out soil." What makes this a quintessentially American book? Why would this book be included in an American Literature course?  Can you identify archetypically American qualities or characters?

“Changing Attitudes toward Steinbeck’s Naturalism and the Changing Reputation of East of Eden: A Survey of the Criticism since 1974”

If you have read other Steinbeck novels and are interested in understnading this one in relation to those others, or if you were interested in the message of the novel, I recomend this article.

While reading Changing Attitudes toward Steinbeck’s Naturalism and the Changing Reputation of East of Eden: A Survey of the Criticism since 1974, consider:
1) This article uses some big and unusual words.  You may need to look them up.
2) What do literary critics mean when they say that Steinbeck is a naturalist?  what do they mean when they describe some of his works as "dramas of conscious"?  From your point of view, in which category does East of Eden belong?
3) Steinbeck is more than just a story teller.  He is also a bit of a philosopher. How so?

“Changing Attitudes toward Steinbeck’s Naturalism and the Changing Reputation of East of
Eden: A Survey of the Criticism since 1974”

In the following essay, Etheridge examines how “the perception of Steinbeck’s naturalism has changed since the early 1970s,” and how “these changes have affected the reevaluation of East of Eden.”

Until a few years ago, John Steinbeck’s literary reputation depended upon how critics perceived his naturalism. As long as he wrote in what was perceived as a naturalistic vein, he received high praise. When his work became less overtly naturalistic, his reputation declined drastically. During the past fifteen years this pattern of criticism has changed as critics have begun to question whether or not Steinbeck was a naturalist. No novel is a better barometer of how Steinbeck’s reputation is faring than East of Eden. Upon its initial publication, it was considered a disaster; now some scholars call it Steinbeck’s finest work. The purpose of this study is to survey how the perception of Steinbeck’s naturalism has changed since the early 1970s, when scholars began to reevaluate Steinbeck’s post–World War II fiction, and to speculate on how these changes have affected the reevaluation of East of Eden.

The Steinbeck Society Session at the 1974 Modern Language Association Convention marks the beginning of the reevaluation of Steinbeck’s Naturalism. These papers were collected and published in a special issue of the Steinbeck Quarterly in 1976. In his “Introduction,” Warren French divides Steinbeck’s work into two distinctive categories: the “Naturalistic” works and the “Dramas of Consciousness,” placing both The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden in the latter category. That he grouped these two novels into the same category marks a departure from previously held views such as the one Leo Gurko stated in his 1952 review of East of Eden: “The Steinbeck who was as much the genius of the 30’s as Sinclair Lewis was of the 20’s is scarcely in evidence” (235).

French continued to explore what he felt was a change on the part of Steinbeck from naturalistic to other forms of writing in “John Steinbeck: A Usable Concept of Naturalism,” originally published in 1975. French finds three distinctive stages in the novelist’s naturalism. Steinbeck’s first two works exhibited no naturalism, the works from Pastures of Heaven to Chapter 14 of The Grapes of Wrath are decidedly naturalistic, and everything from that chapter on is neither naturalistic nor post-naturalistic. French concludes that in 1938 Steinbeck “was shaken out of the pessimistic viewpoint undergirding [his naturalistic novels]” (78) and points to Lee’s speech explaining the significance of the “thou mayest” translation of timshel to show that “Steinbeck’s post–World War II novels . . . are not naturalistic.”

Although it was probably not apparent in 1975, the concluding sentence of French’s essay marks an important step forward both in Steinbeck criticism and in the reevaluation of East of Eden: Apparently from his observation during and after World War II, he reached the conclusion that man must take responsibility for his actions and that man is capable—however reluctantly—of taking this responsibility. (78)
Unlike critics who had previously written on East of Eden, French was not holding Steinbeck to a
preconceived standard of what his work should have been like. By concluding that Steinbeck’s apparent departure from naturalism was a result of a conscious artistic and philosophical choice, French anticipates a generation of critics who will begin to examine and appraise the artistic choices Steinbeck made and the changes he underwent, rather than making the a priori assumptions that the later works were different from the earlier and are therefore inferior.

One of the most damning comments made about East of Eden was that in it Steinbeck virtually abandoned naturalism. Yet in papers such as Peter Copek’s “Steinbeck’s ‘Naturalism?,’” critics began to question an assumption which a critic writing two decades earlier would have thought self-evident and unquestionable: that John Steinbeck was a naturalist. While Copek does find strong evidence of naturalistic elements in Steinbeck’s fiction, he concludes that such elements do not necessarily a naturalist make; he does not find the author of East of Eden or The Grapes of Wrath a naturalist “in that this does not lead to a pessimistic vision, a cynical vision, or even one which I could comfortably describe as a fiction whose characters are ‘at the mercy of’ omnipotent determining forces” (10).

Changing Attitudes toward Steinbeck’s Naturalism and the Changing Reputation of East ofEden: A1 8Survey of Copek then points to a passage from Steinbeck’s own work which apparently refutes a conventionally naturalistic reading of his work: “whoever employs this type of [nonteleological] thinking with other than few close friends will be referred to as detached, hard hearted, or even cruel. Quite the opposite seems to be true. Non-teleological methods more than any other seem capable of great tenderness, of an all-embracingness which is rare otherwise” (Log 147). Copek continues, “such thinking-without-blaming becomes ‘living into’” (11). Rather than seeing Nature as something which places people “at the mercy of omnipotent determining forces,” Steinbeck finds an “almost spiritual” quality in nature. What critics call Steinbeck’s naturalism should instead be referred to as “ecology” or “a spirit of ecstasy” (12). Copek affirms the label Woodburn Ross placed on Steinbeck in 1949: “Naturalism’s High Priest” (206). But Copek is careful to emphasize a less often-quoted passage from Ross in which he notes that Steinbeck was “the first . . . to build a mystical religion upon a naturalistic base” (Ross 214). Copek stresses over and over that when the term “naturalism” is used in conjunction with the work of John Steinbeck, it should not be confused with the naturalism of a Stephen Crane or a Frank Norris or an Ernest Hemingway.

Donald Pizer, author of a number of books on naturalism, reinforces Copek’s thesis when he says, “I am uncertain that calling John Steinbeck a naturalist offers a useful insight into the distinctive nature of his work or of his literary imagination” (12). Like Copek, Pizer believes that “the term is too encrusted with the clichés and polemics of past literary wars to serve as a guide to the complex individuality of either a major Steinbeck novel or Steinbeck’s work as a whole.” Clearly, both critics felt in 1974 that the term “naturalism” as it had come to be understood was “not particularly useful” when applied to Steinbeck. Such comments show the beginning of a movement toward a reevaluation of Steinbeck’s work, and they question previously held views. And it is not unreasonable that such a critical reexamination may ultimately rejuvenate Steinbeck’s literary reputation. Pizer implies that perhaps Steinbeck’s work has been read in a less than advantageous light when he says, “it would probably be disastrous to attempt a complete explication of a Steinbeck novel as a reflection of naturalistic themes and techniques” (12). Ultimately, Pizer concludes that the naturalistic elements in Steinbeck’s writing bear stronger affinity to the naturalists of the nineteenth century than of the twentieth.
Although in their discussion of Steinbeck’s naturalism critics such as Pizer, Copek, and French do not always consider East of Eden, the issue of Steinbeck’s naturalism is nevertheless central to an understanding of how critics perceive the book. One of the most bitter criticisms leveled against the novel by its earliest reviewers was that in it Steinbeck “abandoned” his naturalism. It would be inaccurate to say that the naturalism they found missing had never been there, but it would not be incorrect to look at the comments of a Pizer or of a French and conclude that the naturalism Steinbeck displayed in East of Eden is not the naturalism the book’s reviewers expected to see. Whatever the critics ultimately conclude about it, the issue of what form of naturalism is present in Steinbeck’s writing will appear again and again in criticism which seeks to reevaluate the work.

John Ditsky sought to explain the apparent change in Steinbeck’s style in the first chapter of his 1977 book Essays on East of Eden. Entitled “Toward a Narrational Self,” Ditsky’s essay deals mainly with biographical elements, showing passages from Steinbeck’s works and letters in the 30s and 50s and using them as examples of how Steinbeck’s work changed. For the Steinbeck of the 1930s, the role of the artist is to become “merely a recording consciousness, judging nothing, simply putting down the thing” (1); as a result the author “developed the device of the objective and dispassionate narrational voice.” Later, as Steinbeck’s interests changed, he became less concerned with the idea of “group-man,” a semi-deterministic theory about the biological nature of man which is central to what is probably the most naturalistic of Steinbeck’s novels, In Dubious Battle, and informs the earlier chapters of The Grapes of Wrath.

In a letter which bears a strong resemblance to Chapter 13 of East of Eden, Steinbeck recants much of his previous belief in group man: I think I believe one thing powerfully—that the only creative thing our species has is the individual, lonely mind. Two people can create a child but I know of no other thing created by a group. The group ungoverned by individual thinking is a horrible destructive principle. (Ditsky 4)
At this point, says Ditsky, “John Steinbeck has finally resolved the issue of the group-man by returning to something like the Christian idea of moral responsibility—and is ready to incorporate the changes in his attitudes, and in himself as a person, into the novel” (4).

Ditsky maintains, as does French in “A Usable Concept of Naturalism,” that the break from naturalism apparent in East of Eden is a stage in Steinbeck’s development as artist. Ditsky takes his case farther than do either French or Copek, and provides for the first time in print an overt denial of Steinbeck’s naturalism, saying, “Throughout a lifetime of writing third-person fiction, John Steinbeck had resisted the temptation to moralize, but he had done so at the cost of sundering spirit and substance. The price of his apparent objectivity was a mistaken reputation as a naturalist, however impressive the achievement” (13, emphasis added). Ditsky’s position is clear; he is dissatisfied with prevailing wisdom about Steinbeck and about East of Eden and, like French and other critics who question Steinbeck’s naturalism, feels that aspects of Steinbeck’s art are as yet unexplored. It is Ditsky who labels much Steinbeck criticism “cookie cutter” (ix).
The question of naturalism and other strong disagreements with previous Steinbeck criticism figure prominently in Karen J. Hopkins’ “Steinbeck’s East of Eden: A Defense.” Hopkins echoes Ditsky’s commentary about “cookie cutter criticism” when she notes “that most critics who read East of Eden expect it to live up to some standard they’ve set, either for the novel as a genre, or for Steinbeck in particular, especially the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath” (63). Furthermore, “both points of view respond to conventions rather than to the individual work.” Like Ditsky, Hopkins feels that commentary about East of Eden has been prescriptive rather than descriptive. Steinbeck irritated a generation of critics by violating these conventions, or, as Hopkins puts it, “there are certain things which can’t be done in a novel, and Steinbeck does them, QED” (63).

Borrowing from Charles Child Walcutt’s American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream, Hopkins notes that “American naturalism has refused to accept” that “the mind is merely a chemical reaction” (65). In other words, American literary naturalism has tended to be idealistic. In East of Eden, Steinbeck articulated this tension between naturalism and idealism by incorporating elements of both.

Many critics have considered this novel anti-naturalistic because of the Old Testament elements and the discussion of timshel. However, says Hopkins, “The problem with this . . . is that the universe of the novel is as fiercely deterministic as even the most determined naturalist could want, more deterministic and much less pleasant, in fact, than exterior nature in some of Steinbeck’s other novels” (67).

Hopkins also says that the essential element in East of Eden is the way characters react to their universe; she divides the characters in the novel into two categories: “those who tend to fictionalize and those who tend to analyze” (68). Characters who hold too closely to their fictions—Cyrus, Aaron, Cathy—are often destroyed. Put another way, “Man, enjoying a narrow and therefore false security in his ability to decipher and understand his surroundings, is suddenly destroyed or nearly destroyed by the intrusion of facts that imagination has refused to acknowledge” (68). The world of this novel is naturalistic.

Hopkins’ study is instructive for a variety of reasons. Obviously, this work is a landmark in that it is the first article in a critical collection or journal which openly praises East of Eden. Also, it is instructive to note theway in which Hopkins summarizes and appraises earlier criticism of the work; to her it is a book whose reputation has sunk low enough (and in her opinion, unfairly so) that she feels it needs defense. Her reasoning anticipates Steinbeck criticism in the 1980s which seeks to reevaluate Steinbeck’s naturalism.

During the 80s, the view that Steinbeck never was a naturalist gathered momentum. Robert DeMott’s view, which he himself labels “extremely revisionary,” stems from the proposition that “we have misread Steinbeck” who is “primarily a Romantic ironist, who experimented tirelessly with varying formal and technical elements in his fiction, and maintained an intense lifelong interest in psychology, myth, and the shaping processes of the creative imagination” (“The Interior Distances of John Steinbeck” 87–88). DeMott, who bases his case solely on Steinbeck’s post-1945 fiction, notes that “in his later years, from 1945 on, he consciously moved toward fabulation . . . in order to explore the implication inherent in the structural and epistemological tradition of the Romantic expressive fictional line” (88). Most of DeMott’s premise hinges upon his discussion of the “interior life” of certain characters East of Eden and Winter of Our Discontent (a more detailed analysis of this argument follows here in discussion of changing critical reactions toward Steinbeck’s characters such as Kate/Cathy). DeMott concludes his discussion of Steinbeck’s “Romanticism” with a quote from Travels With Charley: “I am happy to report that in the war between reality and romance, reality is not the stronger” (136). DeMott is not the first to find Romantic tendencies in Steinbeck, but he is among the first to view these tendencies positively.

DeMott backs away from his somewhat radical suggestion in the last sentence of his essay by saying, “It is time, I suggest, to recognize Steinbeck’s adherence not only to the tradition of mimetic or empirical writing, but to the larger and infinitely more exciting tradition of Romantic fictionalizing” (99); apparently Steinbeck used not only naturalistic elements but other elements as well.

DeMott is not alone in suggesting that Steinbeck should be read as a Romantic rather than a Naturalist. In 1979, Daniel Buerger writes that “the hero of East of Eden is the Romantic ‘I’ narrator” (12). By 1980, Paul McCarthy can write of “Steinbeck’s Realism” as a “necessary realignment” to aid in the reading of Steinbeck’s post–World War II fiction: “romance provides . . . [the] influence and mode in East of Eden” (118) and “something romantic is perceptible in the general patterns of East of Eden” (119).

Although it is risky to use a term such as “consensus” in connection with any Steinbeck novel, one might say that two of the most recent and influential works concerning Steinbeck have reached some sort of consensus in Steinbeck’s naturalism. The first is Jackson J. Benson’s The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer, a book which has rapidly become the “standard” biography of the writer. Benson contends that Steinbeck was a naturalist, but differed from other American writers of this tradition: “he would become, to use a term more familiar to those involved in literature, the most thoroughgoing naturalist among modern writers” (236). What distinguishes Steinbeck’s particular brand of naturalism was that “he was the only major writer within the American tradition of naturalism who reacted to science in a positive way, embraced a scientific perception of the universe with enthusiasm, and who knew something about science” (244). Furthermore, “Steinbeck’s own lack of ego made it easier for him to accept the relative unimportance of man and turn instead to a calm and even joyful realization of man’s interdependence with the whole of nature.” The works of other naturalistic writers constitute something of a lament; Steinbeck accepted this view of the universe. Benson does not view East of Eden as a “departure” or an “abandonment” of naturalism. Rather, he feels that it was an “outgrowth” of Steinbeck’s naturalism, a further formulation or refinement of an idea he had worked out in his previous novels:

Basic to his philosophy and carried over into East of Eden are the beliefs that man is but a small part of a large whole that is nature and that this whole is only imperfectly understood by man and does not conform to his schemes or wishes. Furthermore, as a part of nature, man often obscures his place and function and the true nature of his environment by putting on various kinds of blinders—whereas it is essential to both his happiness and his survival that he learn to see himself and his surroundings . . . In East of Eden, Steinbeck adds a further element, prompted by his own recent struggle to survive and his concern for the future of his sons: in this materialistic, mechanistic universe, is there any chance for the individual to affect his own destiny? (236–37). Benson’s view gains strength because he is the “authoritative” biographer of Steinbeck. His opinion, as well, anticipates the increasingly accepted stance that East of Eden is philosophically consistent with Steinbeck’s previous fiction. This is as “revisionary” as DeMott’s thesis that Steinbeck was never a naturalist. And although Benson does not suggest that East of Eden is Steinbeck’s best novel (in fact, he finds it seriously flawed), neither does he suggest that the work is without merit or reflects a “decline” in the novelist’s powers.

John Timmerman’s view, put forth in his 1986 John Steinbeck’s Fiction: The Aesthetics of the Road Taken, takes a synthetic view, somewhere between that of Benson, who called Steinbeck “the most thoroughgoing naturalist” in American letters, and DeMott, who denies that Steinbeck ever was a naturalist. Instead, Timmerman finds in Steinbeck a “supernatural naturalism” and “a world which God has departed, like the dissipation of other ancient myths” (15). Timmerman places this aspect of Steinbeck’s naturalism “solidly within the framework of his literary precursors” such as Crane, Hart, or Dreiser (26).
However, Steinbeck is also outside the naturalist tradition; “the term ‘naturalistic’ simply will not do as a final description of Steinbeck’s view of humankind” (29). Instead, he “finds a supernatural power and presence observable in the natural, in the flora and the fauna and earth itself, and in humankind” (29). Where Crane would find the cosmos indifferent or perhaps even hostile, Steinbeck would find something which is nurturing and generative. He “probes the supernatural with typology and symbolism” (30). In East of Eden, says Timmerman, Steinbeck’s conception was basically naturalistic:

Furthermore, its vastness was compelling to him. Instead of being a small slice of life like Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, or Sweet Thursday, this work took on the whole life. It contained in practice the theory of The Log from the Sea of Cortez—that all life must be seen whole in its whole environment, in relation to the all. It would bring all the threads together for him. It is no accident that over and over in Journal of a Novel he concludes a letter to Covici with this phrase: “I will get to my knitting.” (211)

Although Timmerman’s view is unique, it presents a plausible synthesis of other views. The various attitudes towards Steinbeck’s naturalism, particularly its relationship to the novel under discussion, indicate recent changes in critical perception. Certain assumptions are simply no longer held or clung to. The issue of whether or not Steinbeck “declined” is no longer argued and, while the question has never been resolved, it has been replaced by new and perhaps more productive studies which examine the wealth of the Steinbeck canon. Perhaps the clearest indication that East of Eden is finally being given a close reading and judged on its own merits is that many studies of the novel make no mention of The Grapes of Wrath. Perhaps Steinbeck critics have abandoned the “cookie cutter” John Ditsky complained of more than a decade ago.

Works Cited

Etheridge, Jr., Charles L.. “Changing Attitudes toward Steinbeck’s Naturalism and the Changing Reputation of East of Eden: A Survey of the Criticism since 1974,” in The Steinbeck Question: New Essays in Criticism, edited by Donald R. Noble, Whitston Publishing, 1993, pp. 250–59.

Friday, August 6, 2010

Steinbeck’s Exploration of Good and Evil: Structural and Thematic Unity in East of Eden

Not sure what the point of the book is?  Read this for help figuring it out...

While reading Steinbeck’s Exploration of Good and Evil: Structural and Thematic Unity in East of Eden, consider:
1) Would you describe the novel as "sentimental"?  Why or why not?
2) Heavilin mentions Steinbeck's thesis.  What is his thesis?
3) Heavilin gives a number of examples of ways that Steinbeck portrays good and evil in his novel, from the physical location to the depiction of characters.  What other instances did you find?  Were there any symbols of good and evil?

“Steinbeck’s Exploration of Good and Evil: Structural and Thematic Unity in East of Eden”

In the following essay, Heavilin focuses on Steinbeck’s theme of humans being able to triumph over evil in East of Eden, and explores how Steinbeck develops characters and scenes to communicate this.

In the final scene of East of Eden, Steinbeck employs a cinematic device that he used in the ending of The Grapes of Wrath, where Rose of Sharon nurses a starving stranger, bringing to its epitome the theme of hospitality, or kindness to strangers, that has run throughout the novel. This scene has the effect of freezing characters in the enactment of theme. With similar effect, in the final scene of East of Eden, Adam lies paralyzed by a stroke. His friend Lee, his son Cal, and Abra, who will eventually marry Cal, stand around him. With Lee’s admonition and encouragement, Adam summons the strength to speak one final word of forgiveness, instruction, and inspiration to Cal: the Hebrew word Timshel, translated as “Thou mayest,” from God’s assurance to Cain in Genesis that he has the power to triumph over evil.

This final grouping of characters, like that in The Grapes of Wrath, symbolizes and affirms the theme that has run throughout East of Eden—that human beings can triumph over evil. This grouping serves also, however, to define Steinbeck’s own view of the nature of good and evil, a necessary and corollary theme, which has also run throughout the novel to reach its epitome in this final scene. The enormous wickedness of Cathy/Kate has not endured, for in Steinbeck’s view, overwhelming as evil may seem sometimes, it ultimately proves empty and transitory. Like Cathy/Kate’s life and suicide, evil lacks endurance and continuity. With his final word Adam has assured their son Cal that he is not bound by his mother’s evil nature, that he has the power to choose what is good.

Since the enduring strength of goodness lies in connections and continuity, this scene shows these characteristics, or qualities, in action. Adam’s Chinese friend, Lee, is by his side, faithful to the end. Concerned with both the peace of Adam’s own soul and the future of his troubled son Cal, Lee reminds Adam that “Cal will marry and his children will be the only remnant left of you.” Cal and his future wife Abra, therefore, show the continuity of generations. As Adam’s loving word Timshel sets Cal free to choose the good, by implication he and Abra will pass on to their own children the same freedom and power of choice, of transcendence.

In conversation with Cal and Abra before they enter Adam’s room, Lee reveals his own feeling of destitution when Samuel Hamilton died—“the world went out like a candle”—and his “stupidity” in thinking that “the good are destroyed while the evil survive and prosper.” With the analogy that the “craftsman” never loses “his hunger to make the perfect cup—thin, strong, translucent,” Lee affirms his belief that “whatever made us” never stops trying for perfection and that human beings have this same innate desire. They must, therefore, either keep striving to achieve their goals or else end up on “the slag heap.”

Like The Grapes of Wrath, then, the final scene of East of Eden ascends into the realm of the mythic, of the mysterious, of faith and religious belief in the human power of transcendence. The final scene is an accolade to the human spirit and to the human experience. Human beings need not be defeated by the evil they encounter, for there is greater strength in goodness than in evil. And they have the power of choice. These beliefs some critics label “Romantic,” or “sentimental.”

Steinbeck, however, is a kindred spirit of Viktor Frankl, whose work no responsible, thoughtful person would dare label sentimental. Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist imprisoned in Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps during World War II, emerged from his experiences with an optimistic belief in the capacity of human beings to withstand evil even in the face of the most monstrous evils in human history. Out of his own experience and from his own observations, Frankl declares that human beings have the potential to behave like “saints” or “swine,” that they have both potentials within themselves, but “which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.” This power of choice, Frankl writes, is “the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Enacting Steinbeck’s similar belief in the human powers of choice and of transcendence, the dying Adam whispers to his son Cal, “Timshel,” thus assuring him that his own decisions—not genetic predetermination, not his monstrously wicked mother, Cathy/Kate—will determine his destiny. As Frankl authenticates his pronouncement that human beings have the potential to behave like “saints” or “swine,” or to choose good or evil, so by his own observation and experience, Steinbeck must authenticate his own belief that human beings can overcome evil, that not all are destroyed. In doing so, through the lives of his characters, the Hamiltons and the Trasks, he carefully delineates and defines the nature of good and evil. Closely allied to the timshel theme, “Thou mayest rule over sin,” is this corollary and necessary metaphysical exploration that seeks to discover what goodness is and what evil is. This thematic exploration is closely allied to the novel’s structure, running from the opening pages describing the Salinas Valley to its dramatic enactment in the final scene. “pace,” “balance,” “proportion,” “necessity,” and “purpose.” About two months before the novel’s completion, he wrote to Pascal Covici: “This book which seems to sprawl actually does not at all. It is almost as tight as a short story.” A survey of his exploration of the nature of good and evil, a necessary corollary of the timshel theme, reveals that Steinbeck has an Aristotelian sense of wholeness in which the parts of the action fit together so that structure and theme in East of Eden melt into a unified, coherent whole. In “Outside of Paradise: Men and the Land in East of Eden,” John Ditsky points out the role of the opening setting in Stienbeck’s exploration of good and evil:

The dual possibilities of good and evil, life and death, which the Valley affords its onlookers, its potential settlers, are emphasized by the contrast of moods associated with the two opposed mountain ranges: the “light gay mountains” to the east, suggesting as they do a “brown grass love,” a maternal welcome, birth, and morning; and the “dark and brooding” peaks to the west, which intimate the “unfriendly and dangerous” sentiments, death and night.

Against this backdrop, symbolic of the good and evil poles between which human beings gravitate, Steinbeck sets the history of “the long Salinas Valley,” beginning with a nondescript tribe of Indians, then Spaniards who were greedy “for gold or God,” and finally Americans, who were even “more greedy because there were more of them”—who “took the lands, remade the laws to make their titles good.”

Into this valley Steinbeck’s grandfather, Samuel Hamilton, brought his wife Liza. In chapter 2, depending “on hearsay, on old photographs, on stories told, and on memories which are hazy and mixed with fable,” Steinbeck introduces the Hamiltons. In the second part of the chapter, he tells of the original settlers—some penniless and some wealthy, with Adam Trask among the latter. Steinbeck has thus set up two family strands that run through the novel to the end of Part 3, after which the Hamiltons are no longer present—at least not physically. Since Samuel has in a sense passed his patriarchal mantle of goodness on to Adam, however, this physical absence poses no structural problem—for both Lee and Adam are Samuel’s spiritual sons. Their relationship to Samuel is what Steinbeck calls “the continuing thing that bridges lives and ties the whole thing together” (JN, p. 116). He further elucidates what he means by “the continuing thing” in the next day’s letter: “I have the same reluctance you have to lose Samuel except that we won’t lose him. That is one of the theses” (JN, p. 117). Part of the power of goodness, then, lies in its continuity. Samuel has been a good man, he has lived a good life, and his goodness will survive. For both Adam and Lee take up his mantle: “Maybe both of us have got a piece of him,” said Lee . . . “I seemed to come out of a sleep,” said Adam. “In some strange way my eyes have cleared. A weight is off me.” “You even use words that sound like Mr. Hamilton,” said Lee.

Samuel’s presence and influence are felt, then, in the final scene when Lee recalls Samuel’s parting exultation—“like a bird song in the night”—in his affirmation that there are those “who like pillars of fire guide frightened men through the darkness.” Remembering, Lee acknowledges the “stupidity” of his previous belief that “the good are destroyed while the evil survive and prosper.” And Adam, also Samuel’s spiritual heir, whispers Timshel to his son Cal—freeing him from his fears that he is genetically predisposed to evil, enabling him to choose his own way.

As in character, deed, and word, Samuel is one of those who define the nature of goodness through their lives, he is also one who shows that goodness in this world always has some alloy, some stain. The alloy in Samuel’s goodness is a remembered love who comes to his mind “night after month after year, right to the very now. And I think I should have double-bolted my mind and sealed off my heart against her, but I did not. All of these years I’ve cheated Liza. I’ve given her an untruth, a counterfeit, and I’ve saved the best for those dark sweet hours,” he tells Adam.

This stain of one sort or another—this mark of Cain—all human beings share. Others in the novel share as well in this awareness of stain. John H. Timmerman points out, for example, that Horace Quinn “knows the evil that stands just on the other side of goodness; his response is to hold it communally in the delicate balance that brings peace.” Although goodness, then, has endurance and continuity and is not finally destroyed, at the same time it nevertheless has an alloy, or flaw—for nothing in this world achieves perfection. In this belief, as well as in his belief in the human power of transcendence, Steinbeck again reveals an affinity to Frankl. For, acknowledging his own stain, Frankl proclaims honestly of his Auschwitz experience that “the best of us”—those unwilling to sacrifice others to save themselves—did not come back.

Just as the continuing capacity of goodness is balanced by the diminishing quality of evil, so the alloy, or stain, inherent in all human goodness is balanced by at least a glimmer of a redeeming human quality even inthe most wicked. Even Cathy/Kate, in the midst of plotting Ethel’s murder— unaware that she is already dead—realizes that she does not want her son Aron “to know about her.” Daydreaming, she imagines his visiting her in New York:

He would think that she had always lived in an elegant little house on the East Side. She would take him to the theatre, to the opera, and people would see them together and wonder at their loveliness, and recognize that they were either brother and sister or mother and son. No one could fail to know.

Before committing suicide, she writes a note: “I leave everything I have to my son Aron Trask.” This slight glimmer of maternal protection and pride provides a glimpse of what might have been—connections she might have made, and affection she might have shared with her sons.

Here Steinbeck’s introduction of what to some has seemed contradictory and out of character stems from his observation that even the most evil may have a modicum of goodness. Steinbeck’s observation in this instance is similar to the Quaker tenet that along with the breath of life, God imparts a light that shines in every human being. That is, however wicked, a person may have some redeeming quality— even the Cathy/Kates of this world.

Despite this tiny speck showing the possibility of goodness—she is daydreaming after all—as Robert DeMott has pointed out, Cathy “embodies evil,” and she is written large purposefully in order to depict later the emptiness the nothingness, the void that is evil’s true nature. Thus, as the embodiment of evil she stands alone, her eventual diminution balanced by the continuity of goodness represented in Samuel, the Hamilton women, and Abra, who also participates in the legacy of Samuel because his mantle of goodness has passed to Adam and his heirs. From youth Cathy has followed a life of perversion, violence, and prostitution, corrupting young boys, instigating her Latin teacher’s suicide, burning her parents to death in their own home, shooting her husband Adam, forsaking her twin sons for a house of prostitution, and torturing and murdering Faye, the madam who loved her as a daughter and bequeathed her establishment to her.

The balance between the enormity of Cathy’s wickedness, which finally diminishes into nothingness, and the goodness of the Hamilton women, which extends in a long, continuing line, is probably best illustrated in two contrasting scenes: one depicting Kate’s house and her room and the other depicting the house of Olive, Steinbeck’s own mother, and his grandmother Liza’s room in that house. For the character of human beings and their attributes of good or evil may be discerned in their surroundings and their possessions. Having learned from Samuel that Cathy is in Salinas and that she is now a madam notorious for wickedness, after Samuel’s funeral Adam gathers the courage to encounter her for the first time since she shot him and deserted her family. He finds her house a picture of an anti-Eden. The path to the house is “overgrown.” The porch is “dark,” “sagging,” and “dilapidated,” and its steps “shaky.” “The paint had long disappeared from the clapboard walls and no work had ever been done on the garden. . . . The stair treads seemed to crumple under his weight and the porch planks squealed as he crossed them.” As the front door opens, he sees “a dim figure holding the knob.” Images of darkness, decay, and the chaos of neglect provide a fitting backdrop for Cathy’s own psyche.

Inside the house, however, Adam finds “richness and order,” and “Kate’s private room was comfort and efficiency”:

The walls were clad in saffron silk, and the drapes were apple green. It was a silken room—deep chairs with silk-upholstered cushions, lamps with silken shades, a broad bed at the far end of the room with a gleaming white satin cover on which were piled gigantic pillows. There was no picture on the wall, no photograph or personal thing of any kind. A dressing table near the bed had no bottle or vial on its ebony top, and its sheen was reflected in triple mirrors. The rug was old and deep and Chinese, an apple-green dragon on saffron. Luxurious as a showroom in a furniture store or the bedroom in a house decorated for display, Kate’s room mirrors the emptiness of her life—“no picture on the wall, no photograph or personal thing of any kind,” “no bottle or vial” on the ebony top of her dressing table The “apple-green dragon” on the deeppiled, saffron Chinese rug symbolizes her only connection— probably intended here to be “the dragon, the serpent of old, who is the devil and Satan” described in the Revelation of the Apostle John.

On a later occasion when Adam goes to see Liza Hamilton “to pay [his] respects,” he walks up “wide veranda steps” to the “high white house of Ernest [and Olive] Steinbeck”—Steinbeck’s own parents. “It was an immaculate and friendly house, grand enough but not pretentious, and it sat inside its white fence, surrounded by its clipped lawn, and roses and catoneasters lapped against its white walls.” When Olive opens the door, John and his sister, Mary, peek “around the edges of her.” Images of whiteness, neatness, and cultivated vegetation connect this house and the continuation of the Hamilton family living there—Liza, Olive, and her children, John and Mary—to the Edenic vision of goodness.

Liza’s “pleasant little bed-sitting room” is the polar opposite of Kate’s luxurious room, which has neither photographs nor knick-knacks. It is “crowded with photographs, bottles of toilet water, lace pin-cushions, brushes and combs, and the china and silver bureau-knacks of many birthdays and Christmases.” On the wall hangs “a huge tinted photograph of Samuel.” With her pet, an irreverent Polly parrot, who, despite all her efforts, refuses to “substitute psalms for the picturesque vocabulary of his youth,” Liza, who is new “old and old,” faces the end of her life with “iron gallantry.” Her room mirrors a life full of connections to loved ones, of affections and fulfillment, of celebrations and losses. She has been a fitting mate for Samuel. Her goodness matches his. Confident of her goodness and sure of her insights, when he and Lee have dreadful forebodings after the birth of Cathy’s twins, Samuel cries:

“I want my wife. . . . I want her here. They say miners take canaries into the pits to test the air. Liza has no truck with foolishness. And, Lee, if Liza sees a ghost, it’s a ghost and not a fragment of a dream. If Liza feels trouble, we’ll bar the doors.” Unlike Cathy, then, Liza is like the ideal woman portrayed in Proverbs 31, for the “heart of her husband” could safely trust in her. And as Samuel’s portrait is Liza’s counterpart to Cathy’s satanic “apple-green dragon,” so their lives have run opposing courses—Liza’s as a giver and nurturer of life and Cathy’s as a destroyer of lives.

In the voice of the narrator, Steinbeck broadens the scope of this exploration of the nature of good in the setting and in the two families, the Hamiltons and the Trasks, to include anecdotes and observations that further elucidate this theme. In one of these anecdotes, he tells at length about his own mother— briefly of her teaching experiences and marriage and then in great detail the events leading up to the United States Treasury Department’s awarding her the prize of “a ride in an army airplane.” Some critics of Steinbeck’s structuring of East of Eden have found this particular incident a diversion from the main story line, unnecessary to the novel’s thematic design. But, like her mother, Liza, Olive is one of those Hamilton women who, in the continuity of their goodness, serve to give balance to Cathy who, though written large, stands alone as an evil monstrosity.

Like Liza, Olive furnishes an antithesis to Cathy. As Olive is associated with the “light and beauty” that her son humorously describes her as forcing “down the throats of her reluctant pupils,” so Kate is associated with the darkness and grayness with which she surrounds herself, claiming that “light hurts [her] eyes.” As Olive has the “great courage” it takes “to raise children,” so Kate has attempted to abort hers. As Olive spared no effort in trying to save her son John from death from pleural pneumonia when he was sixteen—asking for the prayers of the Episcopalian minister” and the “Mother Superior and nuns,” and the “thought” of a distant Christian Science relative, as well as seeking out “every incantation, magic, and herbal formula, . . . two good nurses and the town’s best doctors”—so Kate has heartlessly shot her husband and abandoned hungry twin sons. As Olive is known for her love and courage, so Cathy is noted for her self-absorption and wickedness. Olive’s altruism and courage during the occasion leading up to her ride in the Army airplane further distances her from Cathy. Even though the anecdote is humorous, it nevertheless shows Olive’s love and courage in action. Tongue in cheek, Steinbeck tells of his mother’s reactions to the death of one of the neighborhood boys in Germany in World War I:

If the Germans had known Olive and had been sensible they would have gone out of their way not to anger her. But they didn’t know or they were stupid. When they killed Martin Hopps they lost the war because that made my mother mad and she took out after them. She had liked Martin Hopps. He had never hurt anyone.
When they killed him Olive declared war on the German empire.

She devotes herself, therefore, to the sale of Liberty bonds even though “she had never sold anything in her life beyond an occasional angel cake for the Altar Guild in the basement of the Episcopal church.” Whereas Olive, therefore, increases the size of her personal world to take on moral combat with the international enemy, Cathy’s world shrinks finally to her suicide in “the gray room” where in the end she grows “smaller and smaller and then disappeared—and she had never been.”

First awarded “a German Helmet,” then “a bayonet” and “a jagged piece of shrapnel set on an ebony base,” when Olive quadruples her sales record, she is “awarded the fairest prize of all—a ride in an army airplane.” Although she is terrified, she is courageously courteous and considerate of the pilot as he “barrel-rolled, made Immelmann turns, inside and outside loops, and turned over and flew over the field upside down” because he thinks she has consented to a “stunt,” a word which, distorted by his “goggled face and the slip stream,” Liza has interpreted as meaning that the throttle is “stuck.” Swallowing her terror because she believes that she must “encourage” him in a difficult situation, she keeps nodding and smiling brightly to “give him courage.” In contrast, when she is in labor, Cathy savagely bites the hand of the gentle Samuel who is trying to help her. Thus, this anecdote in the narrator’s voice is an essential part of the intricate “balance” for which Steinbeck expresses concern in Journal of a Novel. Furthermore, for Steinbeck’s own two sons, it endorses their own proud, continuing heritage of familial goodness.

Besides anecdotes, the narrator’s voice introduces also some of the personal observations that give authenticity to Steinbeck’s exploration of the nature of good and evil. One such observation is that in which the narrator muses on the attributes and contributions of “the church and the whorehouse,” which “arrived in the Far West simultaneously.” Although the narrator ironically relates the two, asserting that both accomplish “a different facet of the same thing”—to take “a man out of his bleakness for a time,” Steinbeck’s overall view of churches and whorehouses is not this simplistic or reductive. Rather, in the fuller context of the novel, the comments on churches and whorehouses serve to corroborate his observations of the alloy in goodness and the glimmer of light, or goodness, in evil. For the churches brought with them the Scripture on which our ethics, our art and poetry, and our relationships are built. . . . And they brought music. . . . And they brought conscience, or, rather nudged the dozing conscience. They were not pure, but they had a potential of purity, like a soiled white shirt. Though stained, the church has the potential for purity—its goodness flawed but not destroyed. The brothels, “the sister evangelism,” brought “release and joy for the body,” and their “celebrated madams,” who each combine “the brains of a businessman, the toughness of a prize fighter, the warmth of a companion, the humor of a tragedian,” are remembered by customers as “philanthropist, medical authority, bouncer, and poetess of the bodily emotions without being involved with them.” Despite this very male view of brothels, Steinbeck is not blind to the very dark, reductive, and destructive life of the whore, whose life lacks the sweet connections and continuity he associates with the life of the Hamilton women and Abra. To illustrate, in the narrator’s guidelines for being a madam, he notes, “You have to keep suicide at an absolute minimum, and whores, particularly the ones getting along in years, are flighty with a razor; and that gets your house a bad name.”

And even a madam does not want her daughter to become a whore, for when Faye begins “to think of Kate as her daughter, . . . her natural morality took hold. She did not want her daughter to be a whore.” In his reductive statement, “A whore is a whore,” the sheriff denies their personhood—seeing them as objects to be used, not as human beings with intelligence, feelings, and potential for anything higher than prostitution. Connected with this view of whores as non-persons, Steinbeck portrays them also as being among the lost ones, the drug addicts, who find solace in oblivion, in escape from the reality of their surroundings. For instance, in a conversation with Kate, a whore named Eva becomes so jittery that “her mind went to the box in her dresser drawer where her hypodermic needle lay.”

Although he recognizes the momentary “release and joy for the body” for the male frequenter of brothels, Steinbeck also faithfully portrays the isolation, loneliness, darkness, and sorrow of the life of the whore. No glimmer of light reduces the inevitability of her destruction—physically or psychically, or both. After all, even Kate herself, who glories in her brothel, is finally reduced to suicide and nothingness, as though “she had never been.”

In the end Kate is notable only because Adam must set Cal free of his fear that he is like his mother, that because of her he may be genetically predisposed to evil. Choosing her own isolation, she has left both husband and son to exult in their freedom from her as Adam whispers his parting word, Timshel. The cinematic freezing of this final scene brings to a fitting finale Steinbeck’s exploration of the nature of good and evil.

In Kate is also shown the possibility of goodness in her daydream of what life might be like with her son, Aron. And the continuity of goodness is portrayed in Adam and Lee, who carry the mantle of Samuel’s goodness, to be passed on in continuity to Cal and Abra’s children. The alloy of goodness, the impossibility of human perfection, has been illustrated in all of their lives. Representative of Steinbeck’s optimistic belief in the human power of transcendence, Lee, Cal, and Abra surround the dying Adam.

The scene is not one of defeat, but rather of triumph. In Adam’s courage to speak through his paralysis, in Lee’s faithful encouragement and support, in Cal and Abra’s love for each other and for Adam and Lee, the sting has been taken from death. For in this final scene Steinbeck once more shares a vision with the psychiatrist Frankl, who tells of its experience of communing with his wife during his imprisonment in the Nazi death camps, not knowing whether she was alive or dead:

Had I known then that my wife was dead, I think that I would still have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of her image, and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying. “Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death.”

Love and goodness, for both Steinbeck and Frankl, are inexorably intertwined, and that goodness, that love, endures—“the continuing thing,” “the thesis,” of which Steinbeck writes also in Journal of a Novel. Adam, like Samuel, will continue.

Works Cited

Barbara A. Heavilin, “Steinbeck’s Exploration of Good and Evil: Structural and Thematic Unity in East of Eden,” in Steinbeck Quarterly, Vol. 26, Nos. 3–4, Summer/Fall 1993, pp. 90–100.

Thursday, August 5, 2010

multicultural novel?

Some of Steinbeck's ethnic and racial characterizations are loaded with stereotype. Yet he also makes extremely prescient comments about the role that many races played in the building of America, and he takes the time to give dignity to all types of persons. Lee is one example of a character that constantly subverts expectations. Can you think of other scenes or characters that might have challenged conventional notions in Steinbeck's time? In ours? How unusual do you think it might have been to write about America as a multicultural haven in the 1950s? And do you agree that that is what Steinbeck does, or do you think he reveals a darker side to American diversity?

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

East of Eden as a Letter

Sometimes when we read it's nice to hear what other people think about the book.  (No doubt you are familiar with things such as sparknotes, which summarizes books and points out the main themes.)  Literary Critics also write about books, but unlike sparknotes, they begin with the assumption that you have already read the book.  Their purpose is to engage in a discussion about the text.  They express opinions and defend them (sounds a bit like an essay, huh?)  I enjoy reading what the critics have to say because as I consider their reactions, I find myself internally debating with them, thus further formulating my own ideas.  I hope you find this article interesting.  I think it might be helpful for your in your "Deepening" work.

While reading East of Eden as a Letter, consider:
1) How does Steinbeck's choice of title support the overall novel?
2) Do you agree with Aubrey that the "A" characters share culpability with the "C" characters?  If so, is the culpability equal?  How does this relate to Steinbeck's comment about good and evil?

“East of Eden as a Letter”

Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on twentieth-century literature. In this essay Aubrey discusses East of Eden in the context of a series of letters Steinbeck wrote to his friend and editor Pascal Covici as he was writing the first draft of the novel.

Steinbeck labored long and hard on East of Eden, declaring it to be the most difficult book he had undertaken. For a long time he had wanted to be able to write such a book and had carefully prepared himself for the task. During the writing of the first draft, he wrote a remarkable series of letters to his friend and editor Pascal Covici. The letters were published as Journal of a Novel: The “East of Eden” Letters in 1969, a year after Steinbeck’s death.

Steinbeck wrote one letter early each day from January to November 1951 as a way of limbering up for the writing task that lay ahead. The letters give a close-up view of the ups and downs of a novelist at work, his successful days as well as the days when nothing went right. One day he wonders whether the novel will be interesting to anyone other than himself. On another occasion he wonders whether his “devilish playing with the verities” (his metaphysical ideas) will put people off in an age when readers of novels want plot and action. Often, however, his enthusiasm for his task bubbles over, and he conveys how it feels to be a writer when the full rush of creativity sweeps through him. It is a very physical feeling for Steinbeck: “The joy comes in the words going down and the rhythms crowding in the chest and pulsing to get out.”

The East of Eden letters provide many fascinating details about the novel (all the anecdotes about the Hamilton family are true, for example) and leave no doubt about the primary significance Steinbeck attached to the Cain and Abel story. His first idea for the title of the novel was “Canable.” Then he thought of “Cain Sign” before settling on East of Eden, which is itself taken from the Cain and Abel story. Steinbeck thought the story of jealousy and strife between siblings lay at the basis of all neuroses, and he was thrilled by his interpretation of the Hebrew word timshel as “thou mayest.” He went to great trouble to be certain that his etymology was at least possible. He felt sure it would interest scholars and psychiatrists and provoke great argument and scholarly discussion (it did not).

Perhaps the most important idea to emerge from Steinbeck’s letters is his great affirmative vision of what the purpose of the writer should be. He comments on this in the context of his character Samuel Hamilton, a man of energy and vision who goes through life without being defeated. Steinbeck laments the fact that it has become fashionable amongst writers to show the destruction rather than the endurance of the human spirit. He argues that there have been a few men—he names Plato, Lao Tze, Buddha, Christ, and Paul—who were not destroyed by life, and these are the men the world lives by. They are remembered not for negation and denial, but for affirmation. Steinbeck goes on to argue that “It is the duty of the writer to lift up, to extend, to encourage.” Great writing must give out strength, courage, and wisdom rather than dwell on the weakness and ugliness that is also part of the human condition. Steinbeck believed he had achieved this affirmative vision in his novel. “Although East of Eden is not Eden,” he said in the same letter, “it is not insuperably far away.”
How far away from Eden is it? Some readers may feel that there are so many cruelties, vices, and tragedies in this novel, culminating in Aron’s unnecessary death and Adam’s devastating stroke, that if it is “not insuperably far away” from Eden, it is not far away from hell either. But that may be part of Steinbeck’s point. It is unlikely that he conceived the condition of Eden as one of perpetual bliss, but rather one of perpetual striving, because wherever there is good, there is also evil. In the interaction between the two lies the possibility of human growth and freedom. Steinbeck said as much in the letter he wrote to Covici on January 29, 1951, before he had written a single word of the novel. He wrote that the opposites of good and evil, strength and weakness, love and hate, beauty and ugliness, are inseparable: “neither can exist without the other.” Out of the interaction of these opposites, “creativeness is born.” This comment is the key to so much of what goes on in the novel. Although the idea that good and evil are mixed up together in most individuals is not an especially interesting or original one, there is a more subtle idea at work too: the fact that even those characters in the novel who are firmly in one or other of the opposing camps are drawn inexorably together. Each quality, good and evil, has a kind of gravitational pull for the other, which is beyond the control of either. So it is that the mysterious processes of life place Charles (a Cain character) in close proximity to Adam (an Abel character) and through their stormy interaction Adam is forced to seek his own destiny, away from his brother. But then in his turn, Adam cannot help but pull into his life Cathy, who has as little good in her as Adam has evil.

It is interesting to note that while Cathy is as close to pure evil as one is likely to get this side of hell, the “good” characters Adam and Aron share culpability for the bad things that happen to them. Their errors are failures of perception, knowledge, and imagination. They fail to understand that life must be grasped whole, that it is a mixed bag of good and evil. Adam, for example, never comes close to seeing Cathy as she really is. He idealizes her, projecting onto her an unreal image of sweetness that he never questions. When Cathy indicates that she does not want to move to California, Adam does not listen; he does not take her objections seriously. Nor does he notice her unhappiness in California. He is too busy creating his Eden in the Salinas Valley. But this manmade Eden is not built on solid foundations, so it is no surprise (except to Adam) when it crumbles. In a sense, he is just as much to blame as Cathy is for the bullet she fires into his shoulder.
It is the same with Aron. Steinbeck alerts his correspondent Covici to the importance of Aron, telling him to note the gradual, subtle development of Aron’s character. During his childhood, Aron’s simple goodness wins him the affection of everyone. As soon as he reaches adolescence, however, he starts to lose his innocence and his balance. He channels all his emerging passions into religion. Deciding to become a minister, he devotedly attends the Episcopal church and takes spiritual instruction from the clergyman. Of course, there is nothing wrong with this, but Aron takes it to excess. He desperately needs (or thinks he needs) to shut out anything that seems to him impure. He soon reaches “a point of passionate purity that made everyone else foul.” When he learns from the clergyman that the owner of a brothel is starting to attend church services—he does not yet know this is his mother, Cathy—he tells Lee that he wants to go away, because Salinas is a “dirty” town. Lee tries to prod him into a more realistic view of life (“Try to believe that things are neither so good nor so bad as they seem to you now”), but Aron does not have the maturity to grasp it. And when he goes off to Stanford, he shuts himself off from the life around him.

Aron’s biggest mistake is in his attitude to Abra, in which he replicates his father’s idealization of Cathy. Abra is mature enough to notice this. She says to Lee, of Aron, “He doesn’t think about me. He’s made someone up, and it’s like he put my skin on her. I’m not like that—not like the madeup one.” Aron wants a girl who is absolutely pure, with not a single bad thing about her. Abra knows that she can never live up to such an ideal. “He doesn’t know me,” she says. “He doesn’t even want to know me.” Like father, like son, and the outcome is inevitable. Abra and Aron drift apart.

The consequences for Aron of his refusal to accept life in its wholeness—the ugliness as well as the beauty—are dire. He is so devastated by his discovery that his mother runs a brothel that he literally runs away as far as he can go—to the battlefields of Europe, where he is killed. The false world in which he tried to wall himself off from the real one cannot stand the light of real experience.

If Aron and Adam are examples of the inadequacy of a one-dimensional view of reality, Steinbeck also offers many moments of illumination, when wisdom about life shines through. He poured himself into this novel with a passion, writing to Covici that it had to contain everything in the world he knew. Whether it is in the practical wisdom of Samuel, or the studious reflections of Lee, there are many such moments to savor. Each reader will find his or her favorite. The scene near the end of the novel, when Abra talks with Cal on their way home from school (chapter 52, section 3), is as good an example as any. Abra is only in her mid-teens, but she expresses a wisdom that others spend a lifetime missing. Steinbeck alerted Covici to Abra’s importance in the story (she is “the strong female principle of good”), and in this scene Abra is explaining to Cal that Aron never grew up. He lived in a story-world that he made up, and he refused to accept any outcome different from the one he wanted. But Abra’s attitude is different. Not only has she outgrown the story that she and Aron made up for themselves, she comments, “I don’t want to know how it comes out. I only want to be there while it’s going on.” Abra’s refusal to live in a fantasy world, her determination not to be trapped by fixed expectations, and her courageous desire to live fully in the present, without illusions, make her, like Lee and Samuel, a touchstone of how life can be lived truthfully and with integrity.

Works Cited

Aubrey, Bryan. “East of Eden as a Letter.” Critical Essay on East of Eden, in Novels for Students, Gale, 2004.

Sunday, August 1, 2010

Name resources

These might be fun:
baby names
more names
even more names
Let me know if you find any other good sites for names.  I have to say all this name stuff makes me want to do some creative writing... what name would you give the antagonist?  The wise teacher?  The love interest?