In last week’s class, I asked my students at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Richmond, if they knew why John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath. They stirred and squinted their eyes, and then offered several answers. The ones they suggested were excellent reader responses, but not the ones that Steinbeck provided in his interviews, after publishing this masterpiece in 1939 and accepting the Pulitzer Prize for it in 1940.
I mentioned that the book sold over a million copies in the first year, and has since sold over 15,000,000 copies in thirty languages. Subsequently, some thought that he wrote it to sell a lot of books. He did say he wanted to write a book that captured the public’s attention, but having a best seller was not his main purpose. Sometimes authors get what they want, but not in the format they had hoped for. Immediately after The Grapes of Wrath was published, it was burned in the Salinas, California public square and banned in its library—in Steinbeck’s hometown. We will speculate why such strong actions might have been taken and why the public’s reactions to the book later shifted, in our the next class.
One student thought he wanted to comment on the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl and that he had used these characters as a vehicle to express his economic and political views. Now the group was getting warmer. I mentioned that Steinbeck was friends with Joseph Campbell and that perhaps the book was an example of Campbell’s Hero’s Journey model (see image below). However, after reflecting on that idea, I thought that the Hero’s model only offered a partial explanation of this book, since several of the main characters were on their own Journey, and they never got to their destination as a coherent group.
We will discuss the reasons that each character was on their own Journey, and why I think that this book varies from Campbell’s model in my next class on April 12.
We then discussed how almost every other chapter provided narrative lyrical descriptions of the varied landscape the migrants took as they escaped Oklahoma headed to California. These narratives formed the outer chapters that offered a macro-view of the migrants; whereas the inside chapters offered a view of the plot and the characters. Those who had been in my Travels With Charley class noticed that the way that Steinbeck crafted descriptions of people traveling through the landscape were similar to those they just read in The Grapes of Wrath:
“When the night came again it was black night, for the stars could not pierce the dust to get down, and the window lights could not even spread beyond their own yards. Now the dust was evenly mixed with the air, an emulsion of dust and air. Houses were shut tight, and cloth wedged around doors and windows, but the dust came in so thinly that it could not be seen in the air, and it settled like pollen on the chairs and tables, on the dishes. The people brushed it from their shoulders. Little lines of dust lay at the door sills…..”
Since I had recently completed a class on Steinbeck’s earlier book, Of Mice and Men, some who were in it commented that both Mice and Men and Grapes of Wrath focused on life in the work camps. Another obvious connection was that popular movies had been made of both of those books. But, although all of these ideas were coherent and logical, we still had not identified Steinbeck’s purpose for writing the book.
After all the suggestions to answer the question were dried up, I clicked a slide on the screen where Steinbeck answered the question of “Why had he written this book?” in the following peculiar way:
“I’ve done my damnedest to rip a reader’s nerves to rags, I don’t want him satisfied…I tried to write this book the way lives are being lived not the way books are being written. I’ve tried to make the reader participate in the actuality, what he takes from it will be scaled entirely on his depth or hollowness. There are five layers of this book, a reader will find as many as he can and he won’t find more than he has inside himself.”
Steinbeck further elaborated that the five Layers, or Levels, of The Grapes of Wrath, are as follows:
- The story of a family’s struggle for survival
- The story of the struggle of the migrants
- A story and history of America
- Allusions to the Israelites Exodus from Egypt and the trials of Christian Life
- A view of one of the most environmental calamities of the Twentieth Century
We discussed Steinbeck’s statement about his purpose in writing the book and his suggested “layers.” Several of us agreed that he was successful in “ripping our nerves to rags.” But, so far, we had only been assigned the first half of the book. If your nerves were ripped that early, I would have to say that “you haven’t seen anything yet.” Others suggested that they still enjoyed the book, despite having their nerves ripped. Most agreed that the way that Steinbeck wrote the book did offer a unique way of viewing the way people lived during that period. We haven’t compared the book to others written during this period, but we might get to that in the next discussion. One of the students said that Steinbeck was suggesting that the Reader’s Response to his book will merely reflect the interests, and values he or she already holds. I agreed with this response and added that:
“To fully appreciate The Grapes of Wrath on five of Steinbeck’s noted levels, one might have to read the book at least five times, looking at it with a different level-lens each time.”
However, we will only have one more class, on April 12, to do the best we can to view the book through some of Steinbeck’s layers and discuss what he was trying to say. If you are not an Osher LLI student, you can still read about our conclusions in a future Litchatte Forum, or offer your comments on the bottom of this posting. Thanks, Murray
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