HISTORY'S MYTH: JOHN STEINBECK AND THE

TWILIGHT OF WESTERN CULTURE

by

CONNIE POST, B.A., M.A.

A DISSERTATION

IN

ENGLISH

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in

Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Approved

May, 1993

k

Copyright © 1993 by Connie Post

ACKNOWLEDGEMEhfTS

I am indebted to the following individuals: Associate Professor

John Samson, my mentor, who guided me through a journey of discovery

that began on Cannery Row; Horn Professor Emeritus Warren Walker, who

introduced me to the provocative subject of myth; Horn Professor David

Leon Higdon, who lent me charitable advice about scholarly writing;

Professor Donald Rude, who led me through bibliography boot camp;

Associate Professor Michael Schoenecke and Assistant Professor Bryce

Conrad, who offered many good ideas for revising this dissertation;

£ind my husband David, who provided financial assistance, computer

training and maintenance, copy-editing, and unwavering support.

11

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS iv

CHAPTER

I. INTRODUCTION: CHALLENGING THE PATTERNS OF DECLINE . . 1

II. A RETURN TO SACRED ORIGINS: TOTEMISM IN TO A GOD UNKNOiiJN 31

III. THE QUESTION OF DEITY IDENTITY: POLYTHEISM IN TO A

GOD UNKNOm 75

IV. TWILIGHT IN CANNERY BOH 110

V. PAGAN REGENERATION IN SliEET THURSDAY l47

VI. THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT: THE TALE OF A DARK

KNIGHT 183

VII. CONCLUSION: STEINBECK AND HISTORY'S MYTH 230

LITERATURE CITED 235

111

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AC Friedrich Nietzsche. The Anti-Christ

BT Friedrich Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy

FRR Jessie L. Weston. From Ritual to Romance

HTF Joseph Campbell. The Hero with a Thousand Faces

JSNfi Peter Lisca. John Steinbeck: Nature and Myth

LV John Steinbeck. The Long Valley

OED The Compact Oxford English Dictionary

OTNhl John Steinbeck. Once There Was a War

PM Joseph Campbell. The Power of Myth

QHG Jessie L. Weston. The (^est of the Holy Grail

SLL John Steinbeck. Steinbeck: A Life in Letters

SR Robert DeMott. Steinbeck's Reading: A Catalogue of Books Owned and Borrowed

TAJS Jackson J. Benson. The True Adventures of John Steinbeck,

Writer

TMT Joseph Campbell. Transformations of Myth Through Time

WWJS Peter Lisca. The Wide World of John Steinbeck

IV

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION: CHALLENGING THE PATTERNS OF

DECLINE

Published sixty years ago. To a God Unknown remains one of the

most neglected of Steinbeck's novels. Written by a young and

inexperienced author, it has been regarded primarily as one of several

warm-up exercises for Steinbeck's first works to receive critical

attention: Tortilla Flat (1935), In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice

and Men (1937), and The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Only a handful of

scholars have examined To a God Unknown at any significant length. In

general, as pointed out by Robert DeMott in "Toward a Redefinition of

To a God Unknown," their discussions contend that Steinbeck's novel is

based on a number of mythological patterns (34), the most notable of

which is the tale of Joseph in the Old Testament. They maintain that

Steinbeck uses these patterns to express the psychological as well as

physical trials of a turn-of-the-century homesteader drawn to the

mystique of California's diminishing wilderness. By and large, the

few critics who discuss To a God Unknown tend to focus on the most

obvious elements that the novel has in common with its mythological

models.

In examining Steinbeck's use of the biblical tale of Joseph, for

example, J. R. LeMaster states, "Steinbeck's central character is also

named Joseph, and as in the story from Genesis his younger brother is

named Benjamin" (8). Moreover, he claims that Steinbeck's main

character, following in the footsteps of his biblical namesake,

receives the patriarchal blessing and becomes his family's undisputed

leader (8). LeMaster's observation, however, overlooks the intense,

theological conflict between Joseph and Burton that eventually compels

the eldest brother to move away from Joseph's new settlement in the

wilderness. In John Steinbeck: Nature and Myth, Peter Lisca

maintains that "to some extent the events of the novel roughly

parallel the Old Testament story of Joseph and his brethren" (44), and

Lewis Moore Hopfe states that "the story of Joseph and his family

seems to have been one of the basic motifs behind the book" (7).

Likewise, Joseph Fontenrose says that the novel's "central core is the

Joseph story from Genesis" (14); furthermore, he asserts that "the

novel is plainly a mythical narrative told in terms of a California

farmer's struggle to build an enduring family community in a

treacherous land, universalizing that struggle as man's relation to

the universe" (19). Some critics characterize Steinbeck's treatment

of the novel's mythological dimension as being rather ingenuous and

heavy-handed, and unfortunately such opinions as the following have

discouraged others from studying or, for that matter, even reading To

a God Unknown: Thomas Kiernan describes the novel as "a high-blown

allegory dripping with symbolism" (l43); in like manner, Warren French

calls it "an involved and generally unsuccessful allegory" that has

been blamed for the career failure of Steinbeck's then publisher,

Robert 0. Ballou (John Steinbeck 22).

Although these critics are quick to maintain that To a God

Unknown is simple in structure and obvious in meaning, they offer less

than convincing motivation for Joseph's suicide, which occurs in the

last pages of the novel and which appears on a superficial level to

negate his life-affirming beliefs and actions that dominate the entire

literary work. Some scholars are frustrated by the novel's ending and

therefore regard To a God Unknown as nothing more than a lesson in

cynicism. Jackson Benson deems Steinbeck's novel a "catalogue of

superstitions" that illustrates "the futility of man's vanity and the

emptiness of his search for ultimate purpose in nature" (TAJS 245).

Even less plausibly, French, who, on the one hand, states rather

cavalierly that Steinbeck's literary reputation suffers in general

because his works "are easy to read" (John Steinbeck 8), on the other

hand suggests only the possibility that Steinbeck "may have intended

Joseph to be viewed as insane" (52).

Despite their differing interpretations of To a God Unknown, most

of the critics rightly concur that a major component in the novel is

the conflict between pagan and Christian systems of belief. They

fail, however, to perceive its ultimate purpose. The novel's title

and epigraph, which refer to the unknown god that is the subject of

Mandala X, Hymn 121 of the Hindus in Vedic Hymns (Miiller 32: 1-2)

(DeMott #825),^ have sparked a controversy over the identity of this

nameless deity. Lester Jay Marks and Richard Astro agree with Lisca

that Steinbeck also alludes to the unknown god that the Apostle Paul

mentions in the Book of Acts; however, their arguments precede the

posthumous publication in Steinbeck: A Life in Letters of Steinbeck's

note of January 3. 1933, to his publisher, stating that he wants "no

confusion with the unknown God of St. Paul" (67). Without having the

benefit of reading Steinbeck's formerly unpublished letter, Lisca

argues in The Wide World of John Steinbeck that the book's primary

concern is discovering "man's proper relationship to that God

[Unknown]" (42), which he maintains that Steinbeck expresses through a

character who is both Christian and pagan (46).

Steinbeck, however, clearly presents Joseph in opposition to

Christianity rather than in alliance with it through his pagan-like

behavior and beliefs as well as through his interactions with other

characters, especially those who represent both the Protestant and

Catholic factions of Christianity--Joseph's brother Burton and Father

Angelo, the priest of the nearby village of Nuestra Seftora. Like

Lisca, DeMott asserts that Joseph seeks "reconciliation, unification

and understanding" ("Redefinition" 35) as he teeters between the

Christian and the pagan, but unlike Lisca and others, he identifies

the unknown god as an internal force in the human unconscious rather

than an external deity or ideal, and therefore he argues that Joseph's

suicide represents "his moment of personal triumph when he has reached

the goal of the process of individuation where he can act according to

his fullest potency" (51). Following the general tendency among

Steinbeck's critics, DeMott interprets the novel as an individual's

solitary journey toward self-actualization. To focus solely on this

theme, however, is to overlook the novel's social stance.

The scholarly grumbling about the identity of the "God Unknown"

of Steinbeck's title as well as the meaning of Joseph's final act can

be quelled by reconsidering the novel's mythological dimension. Thus

far, critics have presented only a partial picture of Steinbeck's use

of myth in To a God Unknown. The present study attempts to complete

this picture, and in doing so, it demonstrates the remarkable

complexity of Steinbeck's treatment of it. Steinbeck's childhood

Sunday schooling in the Episcopal church of his mother's family, which

Joseph Fontenrose discusses in John Steinbeck (3), and his subsequent

readings about comparative religion and mythology are the most obvious

sources for his use of myth not only in To a God Unknown but also in

many of his other writings. This study examines works that are known

to be among Steinbeck's sources—such as Sir James Frazer's The Golden

Bough (DeMott #312), Robert Briffault's The Mothers (DeMott #124), and

Jessie L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance (DeMott #850) and The Quest

of the Holy Grail (DeMott #851)—as well as others that are necessary

to lend an understanding of the various traditions about which he

writes.

In addition to these works, another source for Steinbeck's use of

myth was his early acquaintance with the well-known mythologist,

Joseph Campbell. In The Outer Shores, Part I, Joel Hedgpeth points

out that Campbell moved next door to Steinbeck's closest friend, Ed

Ricketts, in 1932 (11), and that a camaraderie subsequently developed

between Campbell and Steinbeck for several months (l4). Jackson

Benson claims that Steinbeck read the first page of To a God Unknown

to Campbell shortly after his arrival in Monterey; furthermore, he

indicates that Carol Steinbeck recollected that "her husband picked up

a good bit of useful material from [Campbell]" [TAJS 22^,). Likewise,

DeMott maintains that during Campbell's residence in Monterey,

Steinbeck showed his novel's manuscript to the mythologist, who, in

turn, offered suggestions for its revision ("Redefinition" 38).

According to Benson, the acquaintance between Steinbeck and Campbell

was mutually rewarding: reflecting on his talks with Steinbeck,

Campbell admitted that "he may have learned more from Steinbeck about

the relevance of myth than vice versa"; moreover, from reading

Steinbeck's fiction, he "had the impression that some of the mythic

images in it may have come out of their discussions" {TAJS 22'^).

The intent of this discussion is to illustrate Steinbeck's

extensive knowledge of many, diverse mythological elements and to

present To a God Unknown as a personal and skillfully crafted

arrangement of those elements that gives them new meaning for a new

time. This study, unlike its predecessors, places the subject of myth

in a broader context that takes into consideration social,

theological, and philosophical issues as well as the novel's two

historical contexts, those being Steinbeck's setting it during the

onset of the Progressive Era and his writing it in the first years of

the Great Depression. This background offers the reader a greater

understanding of a novel that has never been far from obscurity.

Furthermore, it indicates that To a God Unknown reveals much about

Steinbeck and his work in general. Most critics agree that

Steinbeck's artistic mastery climaxed in the 1930s. Central to Howard

Levant's discussion of Steinbeck's works, for instance, is his

premise, "A sad parallel to the popularity of John Steinbeck is the

consensus among critics--Steinbeck is a flawed artist . . . there is

an absence of some essential quality, noticeable before 1940, and

pronounced—often disastrously pronounced—after 1940" (1). Likewise,

French claims, "Undeniably, Steinbeck's novels since World War II have

failed to live up to his earlier works" (John Steinbeck 7), and

"Steinbeck's early and late novels are so different from each other

that they cannot by lumped together as if they were the products of an

unvarying approach to certain technical problems" (Introduction x).

The present study, however, asserts that Steinbeck's writing as a

whole is much more uniform than his critics have previously

ascertained. It demonstrates that the ideas about history and myth

that appear in To a God Unknown continued to guide Steinbeck

throughout his career, as evidenced by several works that are

representative of his writings in the 40s, 50s, and even in the last

decade of his life. Cannery Row (1945), Sweet Thursday (1954), and

his last novel. The Winter of Our Discontent (196I), appear in this

discussion because they, in particular, fully illustrate Steinbeck's

engagement with the connection between myth and history in the middle

and late stages of his literary career, and therefore their inclusion

is essential to illustrate why scholars should regard To a God Unknown

as fundamental to the understanding of the basic concepts that form

his view of life and reveal his aesthetic aim.

To a God Unknown is a work that deserves further scrutiny because

it demonstrates an artistic pattern that Steinbeck repeats in these

other works that also illustrate the same concern about the destiny of

American society. Failing to consider its socio-historical context,

Benson mistakenly perceives To a God Unknown as a response to a

personal struggle against Steinbeck's "own private depression" (2l8).

To a God Unknown, however, is not an exercise in psychiactric self-

help (at least, no more than any act of writing is. in a sense, a form

of therapy). Neither is it a simple retelling of the Old Testament

story of Joseph and his heroic adventures. Moreover, Steinbeck did

not intend his readers to view it as some cynical compilation of

superstitions designed to comfort man in his unending battle against

natural forces that can suddenly and impersonally transform a

milk-and-honey lifestyle into a meager subsistence. It is an

allegory, as previously suggested by several critics, but an allegory

of what, exactly?

To a God Unknown is the story of America turned wasteland in the

Depression era. The novel portrays Joseph Wayne's attempt to

rejuvenate a dying land that signifies the entire twentieth-century

American landscape. Among Steinbeck's early, non-mythological

readings is Ellsworth Huntington's Civilization and Climate (DeMott

#407). Huntington observes, "Many of the great nations of antiquity

appear to have risen or fallen in harmony with favorable or

unfavorable conditions of climate" (6). Steinbeck's novel illustrates

Huntington's premise on a symbolic level. The physical barrenness of

Joseph's land represents the desolation in America's social climate

that was spreading throughout the land during the period in which

Steinbeck wrote the novel. On a metaphorical level, his protagonist

tries to alter an unfavorable social climate through his bringing

about a flood of remythologization. Steinbeck's own Joseph story

promotes the idea that understanding human existence and its place in

the universe is comprised of both experience and myth. It suggests

that humankind's account of these experiences and myths (what we

typically think of as "history") is really a malleable and continually

evolutionary collective fiction in which disjointed images are

arranged in certain and meaningful ways, or narratives. Steinbeck

exemplifies this interpretation of history through Joseph's encounters

with a number of rudimentary objects found in nature (i.e., the great

oak tree, the relentless sun, the moss-covered stone in the secluded

Indian grove, and the source of all life, water) as well as through

8

his own artistic development of the historically symbolic connections

among them.

Appropriately, Steinbeck turns to the novel as a forum for

challenging America's mythological base, for, according to Mikhail

Mikhailovich Bakhtin in his essay "Epic and Novel" from The Dialogic

Imagination, the novel is the only literary form that is evolutionary:

"the novel is the sole genre that continues to develop," a process

that "takes place in the full light of the historical day" (3).

Moreover, in "Discourse in the Novel," another essay from The Dialogic

Imagination, Bakhtin asserts that the development of the novel is a

manifestation of cultural decay:

Even in modern times, the flowering of the novel is always connected with a disintegration of stable verbal-ideological systems and with an intensification and intentionalization of speech diversity that are counterpoised to the previously reigning stable systems, an activity that goes on both within the limits of the literary dialect itself and outside it. (371)

To a God Unknown as well as the other novels discussed in the present

study exemplify Bahktin's assertion. In these novels, Steinbeck

depicts characters who attempt to replace the mytho-ideological base

of their society with one comprised of remnants from the remote past.

To understand Steinbeck's remythologization, it is necessary to

examine the body of myth to which it responds. American culture is

founded primarily on Christianity, as evidenced by copious references

to the Bible in early American politics. According to Sacvan

Bercovitch in The American Jeremiad, the Puritan founders of New

England used the political sermon, also known as the jeremiad, to

create the myth that America's destiny is to become a nation of

material prosperity and that this prosperity is linked to the progress

9

of God's kingdom (xiv). Bercovitch explains that the country's first

leaders turned to Judeo-Christian typology as a unifying force through

which they could develop and justify an economic system based on

capitalism:

Modern communities . . . have as much need for spiritual cohesion as did the communities of the past; and that need was particularly strong in the new republic: a nation without a past, a people without common customs, a territory without clear boundaries, and an economy without a stable center—variously agrarian, urban, pre-modern, and in transition toward modernization—but with extraordinary opportunities for personal aggrandizement. Surely a major reason for the triumph of the republic was that the need for a social ideal was filled by the typology of America's mission. As this was translated into the language of the times, it provided what we might call the figural correlative to the theory of democratic capitalism. (l40)

Because America was "a nation without a past," its founders turned to

the myth of the Bible as a substitute for history and out of it

manufactured a system of belief based on the notion that God had

established a New Canaein amidst the vast wilderness of the New World.

That is to say, they fused Christianity and patriotism in the myth

that God had predetermined America's destiny as a land of great

bounty.

This myth, however, had a drawback: most of the manna-like

prosperity was to be enjoyed by the socially elite. In an effort to

establish order, America's founding leaders turned to the Bible as

their authority for maintaining a class structure. John Winthrop,

aboard the Arbella in I63O, held the Massachusetts Bay Charter in one

hand; in the other, he held the means by which he would execute his

power as the colony's governor: a composition called "A Modell of

Christian Charity." In this famous sermon, Winthrop maintains, "God

10

Almightie in his most holy and wise providence that soe disposed of

the Condicion of mankinde, as in all times some must be rich, some

poore, some highe and eminent in power and dignitie; others meane and

in subjeccion," giving "the preservacion and good of the whole" as a

justification for the existence of a social system based on classes

(39). This new order, he claims, "shall be as a Citty upon a Hill"

(43).^ His sermon, known as the Puritan Covenant, is a cornerstone of

America's national religion. It instructs each individual to accept

his or her current social status as an indication of Divine

Providence, thereby promoting a political conservatism that serves the

elite rather than a progressivism that might benefit all. Views like

Winthrop's motivated America's founding upper class to prolong class

distinction by encouraging their poorest fellow countrymen to accept

the status quo woes of secular life because visible notification of

their own divine election was dependent on the contrast of their

social condition and that of the materially impoverished, who must

therefore be spiritually impoverished as well.

Steinbeck indicates in To a God Unknown that a society must have

a myth that provides a vision of prosperity for all of its citizens,

else the society will fall into a state of disillusion and despair,

such as it did during the years in which he wrote the novel. He

turned to the Old Testament tale of Joseph as a means by which to

voice his anxiety about what he perceived as the deteriorating state

of America's society. His use of the biblical story in To a God

Unknown is most fitting because this particular tale holds historical

significance in the shaping of America's identity through the

politicization of religion. Bercovitch cites several instances in

11

which America's forefathers refer to the tribal hero of the Old

Testament as a model of personal character and public success. In his

sermon "God's Promise to His Plantations," John Cotton, for example,

professes that merchantilism is synonymous with Christianity and

reminds his congregation that "God sent Joseph before to preserve the

Church: Josephs wisdome and spirit was not fit for a shepherd, but

for a Counsellour of State" (21).

In addition to his reference to John Cotton, Bercovitch also

points out that in Magnolia Christi Americana Cotton Mather uses the

story of the legendary Joseph as a rags-to-riches model for successful

New England governors, including Theophilus Eaton and Sir William

Phips (22), the latter of whom Mather characterizes in his account as

the lowly son of a gunsmith who recovered a great fortune of silver

lost in a Spanish shipwreck and later was knighted for this fortunate

deed (Mather 59). Individuals such as Eaton and Phips performed vital

roles as historical figures of whom legends were desperately needed by

a new nation. Another example of this sort of comparison between the

Old Testament patriarch and the leaders of the New World appears in

Mather's written version of the life of John Winthrop. Mather praises

the New England governor and calls him "the Joseph, unto whom the

whole body of the people repaired when their corn failed them ..."

(48).

In like manner, Steinbeck uses the biblical Joseph as a known

figure with whom to compare his fictional hero. The Joseph in To a

God Unknown indeed resembles the Joseph of the Old Testament, but

scholars have failed to recognize the key significance of their

likeness. It is important to recall that the biblical Joseph is

12

reborn metaphorically through the passage of a dry rather than wet

well to become the savior of a nation whose strength is looking toward

the future and preparing for its needs. Similarly, Joseph Wayne is on

an errand into the wilderness. He is reborn spiritually amidst the

barren wasteland of a California valley—aptly named Nuestra Seftora,

or Our Lady, to suggest the womb of the primal mother—and he answers

the call from an unidentified force—that is to say, the unknown god—

to fight for the valley's former destiny as a land of beauty and

bounty. Similarly, it is important to remember that the success of

the biblical patriarch comes from his ability to predict the fate of

the Egyptian nation by interpreting the Pharoah's dreams.

Allegorically, the United States is Steinbeck's Pharoah, whose dream

is the American dream, and Joseph's vision of it warns of lean years

to come unless the country prepares for the future by taking radical

steps to revitalize itself.

In 1927, when Steinbeck began writing To a God Unknown, America

was a land of paradoxical plenty. His own generation had witnessed a

number of declines, ironically in an era of material and intellectual

achievement that resulted from an unprecedented burst of scientific

discoveries, technological developments, and advancements of new

theories, such as the invention of the radio (I9OO), the formulation

of the quantum theory of light (1900), the commercialization of

automobiles (I903). the theory of radioactivity (1904), Freud's "Three

Contributions to the Theory of Sex" (1905), the exploration of the

South Pole (1911-12), Einstein's theories of relativity (1905 and

1915), the development of insulin for diabetics (1922), and the

invention of television (1925) (G un 453-89). Unpleasant side-effects

13

from the rapid progress of modernism, however, included the spread of

moral corruption among the country's industrial leaders and financial

magnates, the growth of urban slums and ethnic ghettos, the breakdown

of rural America, and the increasing doubts about the validity of

religion's authority.

Novelistically, Steinbeck reverses the Old Testament tale of

Joseph into a riches-to-rags story. As such. To a God Unknown charts

the general pattern of decay that took place during the first quarter

of this century. In the beginning of the novel, Steinbeck presents a

picture of cornucopian splendor, a California valley free for the

taking by willing homesteaders:

Nuestra Seftora, the long valley of Our Lady in central California, was green and gold and yellow and blue when Joseph came into it. The level floor was deep in wild oats and canary mustard flowers. The river San Francisquito flowed noisily in its bouldered bed through a cave made by its little narrow forest. (3; ch. 2)

During the course of the novel, this picture of idyllic bliss steadily

disintegrates into a nightmarish valley of death, a wasteland of

futility and despair. It comes to resemble "the dry dead place" of

the disturbing and foreshadowing dreams of Juanito's friend Willie

(13; ch. 3). Steinbeck uses the deteriorating condition of Joseph's

land to reflect the deteriorating condition of his America, which a

recent and visionary attempt at radical reform had failed to stop.

This reform effort, according to Richard Hofstadter in The

Progressive Movement, 1900-1915, was a countercurrent to the

mainstream support of America's industrialism and was concerned about

the growing threat of poverty, filth, poor administration, and

political corruption as America squandered natural resources and

14

compromised ethical values in the name of modernism (1-2). Born out

of the awareness that the nation was paying a high price for material

advancement, the turn-of-the-century Progressive Movement was "an

attempt to develop the moral will, the intellectual insight, and the

political and administrative agencies to remedy the accumulated evils

and negligences of a period of industrial growth" (2-3). Life was

difficult for many Americans at the beginning of the century because

unchecked power lay in the hands of private industrialists in a

laissez-faire economy. Lewis Gould reports in The Progressive Era,

"In contrast to the successful 5 percent who owned nearly half of the

property, more than one-third of the nation's seventy-six million

people in I9OO subsisted below the poverty line" (3). Besides their

aims to eradicate corruption in politics and industry and to reform

society through an increase in governmental regulations, taxes, and

attention to such issues as the plights of suffragettes and Negroes

(Hofstadter 3-4), the ecologically-minded progressives also strove "to

conserve and protect the country's natural wealth in forests,

minerals, and river systems" (Gould 4).

The movement gained relative support until the onset of World War

I, when interest in it quickly waned as industrialists enlisted their

representatives in Congress to invoke patriotism to further economic

growth. Religious leaders also endorsed the war. They regarded

America's involvement in the war as a religious mission, illustrating

the Puritan notion that America's national destiny is a key part of

God's plan for humankind. Billy Sunday, for example, proclaimed,

"Christianity and Patriotism are synonymous terms" (Anoll 369).

Besides being an evangelist, Sunday was such an extraordinary showman

15

that even the most fitful displays of emotion by contemporary

televangelists (such as Oral Roberts. Jimmy Swaggart, James Robison,

Robert Tilton, and the now incarcerated Jimmy Bakker) pale in

comparison with his legendary performances: "An ex-baseball player,

his sermons were filled with acrobatics, jumping, falling, whirling,

and sliding. When flushed with patriotism, he would end his sermons

by jumping on top of the pulpit and waving the American flag!" (370).

But this was not the first time in recent history for religious

crusaders to rally support for America's involvement in a war. In

1898, "voices from many pulpits were calling for intervention in Cuba

as a moral duty" because Protestants perceived Catholic Spain as a

threat to the belief that America's foreign missions were in the

process of transforming the globe into a Protestant civilization, as

maintained by Robert T. Handy in A Christian America (124). Their

anti-Romanist sentiments were no doubt also directed at the large

group of Catholic immigrants who, according to Anoll, settled in urban

America and provided manual labor for its industries (413).

In the first two decades of the current century, however,

American Protestantism went through a transition that led to its

inevitable decline as the major ideological force in the nation, due

in part to the growing number of Catholics. For the discussion of To

a God Unknown, it is particularly important to understand how the

growth of Catholicism affected the Protestant missionary effort to

acculturate the native races who lived in the New Canaan. "The

Indians," according to Francis Prucha in Indian Policy in the United

States, "were considered a barrier to the advance of civilization and

to the exploitation of the resources of the Great West" (229).

16

Organizations such as Friends of the Indians, a group directed by

Albert K. Smiley, a Quaker as well as a member of the government's

Board of Indian Commissioners, and the Women's National Indian

Association supported legislation including the Dawes Severalty Act of

1887, which was designed to decentralize the tribes and destroy their

own sense of communitarianism by allotting portions of reservation

land to specific individuals (231-38).

The Protestants, however, withdrew from their ongoing reform of

the Indians when they discovered that roughly two-thirds of government

funds for church-supported education for native Americans was going to

Catholic schools (247), and as a result, in 19OO, the government

terminated its funding altogether for religiously sponsored Indian

education (248). Steinbeck illustrates the conflict between

Protestantism and Catholicism through the characters of Burton and

Father Angelo in To a God Unknown. Burton represents the early

twentieth-century position of the Protestants who gave up on their

efforts to Christianize the Indians. Father Angelo. on the other

hand, represents the Catholic attempt to assimilate the native

Americans into its own Christian culture. But, as this study shows in

Chapters II and III, Steinbeck indicates in To a God Unknown that the

Catholics also fail.

Besides the growing conflict between Protestantism and

Catholicism, in 1925 an event of historic import occurred that

represented a menace to Christian authority in the school system: the

Scopes Monkey Trial. The Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr

blamed the sciences for the breakdown of traditional American

17

Christianity. In Does Civilization Need Religion?, published in 1927,

he maintains.

The sciences have greatly complicated the problem of maintaining the plausibility of the personalization of the universe by which religion guarantees the worth of human personality; and science applied to the world's work has created a type of society in which human personality is easily debased. The pure sciences have revealed a world of nature much more impersonal and, seemingly, much less amenable to a divine will and to human needs than had been traditionally assumed; and the applied sciences have created an impersonal civilization in which human relations are so complex, its groups and units so large, its processes so impersonal, the production of things so important, and ethical action so difficult, that personality is both dwarfed and outraged by it. (5-6)

Although it is not within the scope of the present study to determine

and analyze the complex of factors that contributed to the religious

depression that began to manifest itself in mainstream America in the

mid-1920s, it is important to note for the purpose of this discussion

that it occurred during the time in which Steinbeck wrote To a God

Unknown.

The result of this decline in American Christianity is

significant as context for Steinbeck's 1933 novel. According to Handy

in The American Religious Depression 1925-1935, by the end of the

first quarter of the century, it had become evident that involvement

in missionary work and funds for it had reached a woeful low and that

attendance in rural churches had waned also (5-6). By 1930, he

maintains, two-thirds of published opinions on Christianity were

unfavorable (9). Moreover, in The Old Christian Right, Leo P. Ribuffo

points out, "Unsatisfied by liberal and fundamental orthodoxies,

distressed Americans turned to cults promising earthly success and

18

rapport with the universe" (4). In fact, almost two hundred new

religious bodies and sects rose to replace the established

denominations in this era (Anoll 4ll). In other words, a new

restructuring of religious ideas was beginning to supplant traditional

Christianity, a course of action that Steinbeck's protagonist follows

in To a God Unknown.

Steinbeck's novel indeed reflects a number of declining patterns

that were evident in American life. Conventional religion was

breaking down, the Progressive Movement failed to prevent American

cities from being transformed into twentieth-century industrial

wastelands, and the Eighteenth Amendment, otherwise known as

Prohibition, proved to be no solution to America's social ills.

Another major area of decay was agriculture, an industry that

supported more people than any other in the country at the beginning

of the century (Woofter and Winston 4). American farmers expanded

their production significantly between 1914 and 1918 to assist in the

national war effort; however, because they had little representation

in Washington, they found themselves burdened with heavy debts and

overdeveloped land when the postwar market experienced a sharp decline

in the international demand for agricultural goods (Sobel 45). To

make matters worse, conservative Republicans, taking advantage of the

Red Scare of 1919, opposed government intervention to assist the

agricultural industry. In I928. Herbert Hoover, who had served as

Secretary of Commerce from 1921-28 as well as Director of the United

States Food Administration during the war, ran for President of the

United States against the Catholic Democrat Alfred E. Smith. In a

campaign speech in West Branch, Iowa, Hoover revealed his

19

laissez-faire policy for American agriculture: "My fundamental

concept of agriculture is one controlled by its own members, organized

to fight its own economic battles and to determine its own destinies"

(New Day 53)-

Besides the breakdown of rural America that resulted from the

continuation of depressed, postwar prices for agricultural goods,

other factors contributing to the nation's unhealthy economy included

overproduction and growing unemployment created by mass production and

mechanization in factories (Davis 269). On October 24, 1929. a nation

already injured by a complex of conditions suffered a final, fatal

economic blow when the stock market collapsed because European and

then American investors lost confidence in an unregulated industry in

which unscrupulous businessmen had inflated the prices of many stocks

(268-70). Hoover appeared optimistic and reassured the country of its

economic stability despite Black Thursday's Wall Street crash. More

than a year later, he still denied the severity of the depression,

advocating "voluntary cooperation" within the business community and

beseeching all American citizens, including "the vast majority whose

income is unimpaired," to "sustain faith and courage" and exercise

"self-reliance" ("Message to Congress" 96-97).

In 1931, Washington reporter Robert Allen presented a critical

view of Hoover, which was heralded as the "accepted truth" (Sobel

104). In analyzing the first years of the depression, Allen writes.

In the long and tragic travail of the economic depression, the most tragic thing was the President's fear of admitting that a great disaster had befallen the country. For months, while gloom, unemployment, and deflation settled on the land, he refused to admit their reality or do anything fundamental about the situation. His approach to the problem was wholly that of the

20

boomer, the bull-marker [sic] operator, concerned only with his own political interests, and willing to resort to any device or misrepresentation to further them. ("Words of Criticism" 104)

By now the country had lost faith in a president that it perceived as

ineffectual and uninspiring. Thus, when the Governor of New York ran

against Hoover in 1932, his unconventional ideas were welcomed as a

breath of fresh air in the stagnant atmosphere of presidential

politics.

Franklin D. Roosevelt disregarded the example set by his

predecessors when he appeared at the Democratic National Convention in

Chicago and accepted the presidential nomination, refusing to follow

"the absurd traditions [sic] that the candidate should remain in

professed ignorance of what has happened for weeks until he is

formally notified of that event many weeks later" (2). Roosevelt's

gesture was symbolic of his platform, maintaining that "unprecedented

and unusual times" warrant radical actions (2). He suggested that his

administration would usher in an era of great change to supercede the

so-called Decade of Normalcy, which ended in economic disaster.

Roosevelt sought to elevate the political dialogue from the profane to

the sacred: he accused Republicans of promoting Toryism through

designing policies to favor America's financially elite (3) when "the

welfare and the soundness of a nation depend first upon what the great

mass of the people wish and need"—"the spiritual values" of "[w]ork

and security" (10--emphasis added). "Republican leaders," Roosevelt

claimed, "not only failed in material things, they have failed in

national vision, because in disaster they have held out no hope, they

have pointed out no path for the people below to climb back to places

of security and safety in our American life" (12). In his crusade to

21

rectify the nation's social problems, Roosevelt pledged "a new deal

for the American people" (12).

In response. Hoover called his opponent's platform "the most

revolutionary new deal, the most stupendous breaking of precedent, the

most destructive undermining of the very safeguard of our form of

government yet proposed by a Presidential candidate," which would

"mean the total abandonment of every principle upon which this

Government and the American system are founded" (Addresses 13-14).

Devastated by the state of decay, many Americans, however, were ready

to take a chance on the promise of a New Deal, which like the

Progressive Movement, sought to right the wrongs of unrestrained power

in the hands of private industrialists. According to Otis Graham in

An Encore for Reform: The Old Progessives and the New Deal, "A basic

progressive belief was in the possibility of a conscious re-ordering

and subsequent control of society and its direction, a re-ordering

accomplished by a public awakened by ideas, a control guided by

trained intelligence and backed by right values" (11).

Although Graham points out that the ideology of Roosevelt's New

Deal eventually proved to be quite different from that of the old-time

progressives—the New Deal, for example, sought to increase the power

of the government by expanding its control whereas Progressivism did

not (l80)--he suggests that much of the initial support for the New

Deal grew out of a reawakening of the progressive awareness of "the

need to restore the balance between the public good and the private

gain" (6). The turn-of-the-century movement to restructure society

also inspired Steinbeck's writing of To a God Unknown, suggested by

the fact that he sets the novel in the first years of the Progressive

22

Era. Graham maintains that the progressives truly believed that they

could persuade the populace of America to accept their program:

"fundamentally, their faith was in the word, written and spoken, and

it was in that coin that they dealt most comfortably" (112). Using a

literary form as his medium, Steinbeck took up the unfinished agenda

of Progressivism; therefore. To a God Unknown signifies the educating

process through which the progressives advocated the reorganization of

society. Steinbeck suggests, though, that such a restructuring must

take place at a fundamental level: the mythological foundation of

American society.

The declining patterns in recent American history and the

political movements that sought to reverse those declines are

essential contexts in which to examine To a God Unknown. To

understand fully the social message of Steinbeck's novel, it is also

necessary to keep in mind the literary and theoretical models of

history with which Steinbeck was familiar. He owned copies of Edward

Bellamy's Looking Backward (DeMott #74) and Henry Adams' account of

his own life as self-perceived failure. The Education of Henry Adams

(DeMott #6). Both of these works speculate on the direction in which

humankind is developing. Set initially in I887 and then in the year

2000, Looking Backward is a Utopian novel in which a degenerated

humanity is resurrected into a social "paradise of order, equity, and

felicity" (125). Bellamy's protagonist named Julian West—"Julian,"

like "Julia," meaning "youthful" (Carole Potter 247) and "West"

suggesting Western culture—awakes one day from his tomb-like,

"subterranean sleeping chamber" (11) to find himself in the new

millennium, in which a classless culture has eradicated the social

23

diseases of poverty, dishonesty, distrust, corruption, and demagoguery

by breaking down the institutions of capitalism. West's mentor of the

new order. Dr. Leete, explains the change that has transpired during

West's unnaturally long slumber:

The enfranchisement of humanity in the last century, from mental and physical absorption in working and scheming for the mere bodily necessities, may be regarded as a species of second birth of the race. . . . Since then, humanity has entered on a new phase of spiritual development, an evolution of higher faculties, the very existence of which in human nature our ancestors scarcely suspected. . . . We believe the race for the first time to have entered on the realization of God's ideal of it, and each generation must now be a step upward. . . . The long and weary winter of the race is ended. Its summer has begun. Humanity has burst the chrysalis. The heavens are before it. (I63)

The optimism of Bellamy's depiction of a futuristic collectivism

that will unite Western society strikingly contrasts the pessimism of

Adams' view of the continuance of capitalism in the West. DeMott

maintains that in a paragraph deleted from America and Americans

(1966), Steinbeck considers Adams' dynamic theory of history, to which

he refers simply as "dynamism," a part of an effort to study

historical events and to discover their patterns, which signify

"'substitutes for the gods'" (129). According to Adams' theory,

humankind's onward and upward materialistic development is a

progression from an existence of unity to one of ever-increasing

multiplicity:

In the earliest stages of progress, the forces to be assimilated were simple and easy to absorb, but, as the mind of man enlarged its range, it enlarged the field of complexity, and must continue to do so, even into chaos, until the reservoirs of sensuous or supersensuous energies are exhausted, or cease to affect him, or until he succumbs to their excess. (487)

24

Adams foresees a grim future for humanity. As it continues to be

acted upon by a greater number of forces, all of which accelerate

as time goes by, it loses its sense of equilibrium. In an

industrial, capitalist society, this meems the breakdown of values.

Although Adams' view of the future differs radically from Bellamy's,

which is based on the belief that a socialist nationalism will rise

out of the ashes of the capitalist West, the purpose of both writers

is to expose the economic system of capitalism as a source of moral

degeneration.

A contemporary of Bellamy and Adams with whom Steinbeck was also

familiar is the younger and lesser-known brother of Adams. In The Law

of Civilization and Decay (DeMott #4), Brooks Adams shares his

brother's position concerning the impact of modernization on

humankind:

When surplus energy has accumulated in such bulk as to preponderate over productive energy, it becomes the controlling social force. . . . In this last stage of consolidation, the economic, and, perhaps, the scientific intellect is propagated, while the imagination fades, and the emotional, the martial, and the artistic types of manhood decay. When a social velocity has been attained at which the waste of energetic material is so great that the martial and imaginative stocks fail to reproduce themselves, intensifying competition appears to generate two extreme economic types—the userer in his most formidable aspect, and the peasant whose nervous system is best adapted to thrive on scanty nutriment. At length a point must be reached when pressure can go no further, and then, perhaps, one of two results may follow: A stationary period may supervene, which may last until ended by war, by exhaustion, or by both combined, as seems to have been the case with the Eastern Empire; or, as in the Western, disintegration may set in, the civilized population may perish, and a reversion may take place to a primitive form of organism. (60-61)

25

This passage exemplifies Brooks Adams' view that the West is in a

state of rapid decline due to the intensely competitive nature of

capitalism.

The view of Western society in a state of degeneration is also

the subject of one of Steinbeck's most influential sources: Oswald

Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes, or The Decline of the West

(DeMott #749). Both DeMott and Benson point out that Joseph Campbell

loaned a copy of Spengler's work to Steinbeck during the early 1930s,

when Steinbeck was writing To a God Unknown; however, Benson also

reports that Steinbeck's close friend Carlton Sheffield recalled that

Steinbeck read Spengler's work several years earlier (224), which

exemplifies Paul Carter's assertion in Politics, Religion, and Rockets

that "the twenties were years of considerable vogue for Spengler's The

Decline of the West" (77). In it, Spengler attempts to predetermine

the history of Western European-American culture by comparing its

pattern of development with that of other great cultures. He

maintains that every major culture (e.g., the Arabian, the Egyptian,

the Chinese, etc.) undergoes a predictable series of stages that

culminate in fulfillment. After reaching its fruition, the culture

then begins to deteriorate until finally "it loses its desire to be"

(75). He claims that Western culture reached its stage of fulfillment

around the beginning of the nineteenth century (l82), and from that

point on it has been declining steadily. He uses the term

"civilization" to identify a culture's inward decay, which is its

"inevitable destiny" (24). A primary indication that a culture has

lapsed into the weaker state of civilization is its loss of religion

(185), a condition that announces the imminent death of the once

26

thriving society. A culture must have a viable, spiritual mythos in

order to survive; without one, it begins to wane until it reaches a

twilight state of existence. Twilight, in fact, is Spengler's major

metaphor for the declining Western culture, and the present study

shows that it is a metaphor that Steinbeck adopts and incorporates in

a number of his works that span his literary career.

Through his writings, Steinbeck expresses a concern for

humanity's finding its way in a world in which the basic instincts

that are passed down from generation to generation are no longer

enough to sustain it—a world in which cultural nurture has overtaken

nature. Moreover, he reveals that contemporary culture is failing in

its responsibility to provide the necessary guidance for humankind's

ongoing development. Chapters II and III of the present discussion

explore how Steinbeck's main character in To a God Unknown rejects the

artificial structuring of a failed society and returns to nature to

learn its own, hidden patterns of order. That is to say, Joseph

represents the sage, and as Spengler writes, "The sage goes back to

Nature—to . . . Indian groves—which is the most intellectual way of

being a megalopolitan" (344).

Chapter IV of the present study examines Cannery Row, a work in

which Steinbeck uses twilight as a metaphor for cultural transition.

Whereas To a God Unknown depicts an individual's attempt to establish

a new settlement in the midst of a remote California wilderness.

Cannery Row depicts a collective effort to cultivate a countercultural

society on the edge of Monterey. Steinbeck wrote To a God Unknown in

response to the beginning of the Great Depression; similarly, he wrote

this 1945 novel as a result of his experience as a war correspondent

27

during World War II, an event that imperiled the destiny of Western

culture. In Cannery Row. Steinbeck portrays the breakdown of society

not as a physical wasteland, but rather as an industrial wasteland, by

which he emphasizes the detrimental effects of American capitalism and

its patriotic participation in the war. He presents characters who

thrive in the midst of social decay because they reject the

conventional Christian vision of America's destiny; instead, they

practice a way of life that resembles the ancient Chinese philosophy

of Taoism.

Chapter V of the present study explores Steinbeck's incorporation

of the dynamics between history and myth in Sweet Thursday, his sequel

to Cannery Row. It maintains that his 1954 novel illustrates how the

process of remythologization can reshape history and thus alter

cultural identity. In Sweet Thursday. Steinbeck suggests that the

countercultural community of Cannery Row flourishes in the postwar era

because it transcends America's Puritan ideology. Like Joseph in To a

God Unknown, the inhabitants of Cannery Row (as well as the citizens

of the neighboring community of Pacific Grove, which was founded in

the late nineteenth century as a retreat for fundamentalist

Christians) return to the pagan origins of Western culture, as

exemplified by their unconscious performance of pre-Christian

fertility ceremonies, which Frazer discusses extensively in The Golden

Bough.

Chapter VI of the present discussion examines The Winter of Our

Discontent, which is Steinbeck's best and final literary demonstration

of the relationship between history and myth in American culture. In

this novel, America is represented not as a biological or industrial

28

wasteland, but rather as a spiritual wasteland. Unlike To a God

Unknown, Cannery Row, and Sweet Thursday, which depict how characters

break through the pattern of cultural decline, Steinbeck's 196I novel

illustrates how an individual succumbs to the social deterioration

around him. Ethan Allen Hawley, a character named after a dubious

hero from the American Revolution, "goes along with the national

follies and uses them when he can" (77; ch. 5). The novel is set

between two of America's annual observances. Good Friday and the

Fourth of July, during 196O, a year of political uncertainty in which

many Americans, including Steinbeck, feared that a Nixon presidency

would drive the nation to ruin. Moreover, Steinbeck's last novel is

an indictment against a generation that has disregarded his previous

warnings about a failing society; it signifies a passing of the torch

of remythologization to the next generation in hopes that it will

accomplish what Steinbeck set out to do novelistically—to reinvent

America.

29

Notes

^ Robert DeMott's Steinbeck's Reading: A Catalogue of Books Owned and Borrowed (SR) led me to numerous sources to which I refer in this and subsequent chapters. Specific sources in the bibliography are identified in the text by number (i.e., DeMott #407).

2 The meaning of Winthrop's phrase "Citty on a Hill" has evolved into a political term, as Washington, D.C. has been nicknamed "Capitol Hill." A recent example of the coming together of the sacred and the secular was the Philanders Smith College Choir's performance at President Clinton's inauguration on January 20, 1993 of a song entitled, "City on the Hill," composed for the occasion by Dr. Marvin V. Curtis.

30

CHAPTER II

A RETURN TO SACRED ORIGINS: TOTEMISM IN TO A

GOD UNKNOWN

To a God Unknown portrays Joseph Wayne as a primitivist who

returns to a truly authentic way of human life unencumbered by the

demands of civilization, the artificiality of which, the novel

suggests, has led to its inevitable decay. Steinbeck presents the

current state of social deterioration as an unmerciful wilderness.

His choice of metaphor places him in the company of other early

twentieth-century American writers, the most prominent being T. S.

Eliot. Like Steinbeck's To a God Unknown, Eliot's The Waste Land

(DeMott #261) uses myth to describe the contemporary breakdown of

Western culture. In "Notes on 'The Waste Land'," Eliot reveals his

primary sources: Jessie L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance, a study

of the grail legend, and Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough,

particularly its discussion of various vegetation ceremonies (47). It

is important to note that these two works are also among Steinbeck's

primary mythological sources for To a God Unknown. According to

DeMott, Steinbeck read From Ritual to Romance "in the late 1920s"

(180). Similarly, he read The Golden Bough, which Lisca claims

"absorbed" Steinbeck while he attended Stanford on and off during the

first half of the same decade (JSNM 4l). The present study shows in

this chapter and others that The Golden Bough is unquestionably

Steinbeck's major mythological source for To a God Unknown as well as

Sweet Thursday.

31

Because Steinbeck relied on these two sources as Eliot had before

him, it is not surprising if he also referred to The Waste Land as a

literary model for his own work. Evidence is inconclusive regarding

when, exactly, Steinbeck read Eliot's poem; however, it is likely that

he read it before the early 1930s because significant details in To a

God Unknown also appear in the first section of Eliot's poem. The

following lines are from "Burial of the Dead," the language of which

brings to mind the description of the nation of Israel as a valley of

dry bones (a wasteland, in other words) in the Old Testament Book of

Ezekiel, in which God repeatedly addresses the prophet as "Son of

Man":

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man. You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats. And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief.

And the dry stone no sound of water. . . . (lines 19-24)

Four images that Eliot invokes here—the relentless sun, the dead

tree, the dry stone, and the absence of water—appear as the major

symbols of nature through which Steinbeck's protagonist explores his

place in the universe.

In The Waste Land, the narrator perceives nature's images of

death as fragments of a corresponding, crumbling social structure in

which characters often grope for non-existent meaning in their

politely superficial conversations while they disregard the meaning of

nature's own language; likewise, in To a God Unknown, Steinbeck

contrasts the cultural language of society with the symbolic language

of the natural world, concluding that only by silencing the former and

conversing in the latter can humankind obtain a deeper understanding

of its condition. Having rejected Christianity, a religious culture 32

that suppresses humanity's natural character, Joseph explores and

defines himself through his totemic relationships with objects of

nature, each having a rich history of early mytho-religious

associations; therefore, his actions suggest those of primitive

peoples, who sought God everywhere and in all things of this world.

As Joseph Campbell points out in Transformations of Myth Through Time,

humankind first sought spirituality in the natural world: "This

particular grove is a sacred grove, and we go there to get the

inspiration of the powers of nature that are experienced there. Or

this pond, or this particular old tree, or this strange, interesting

rock is sacred" (104). Likewise, Spengler maintains, "Nature is the

shape in which the man of higher Cultures synthesizes and interprets

the immediate impressions of his senses" (7). In To a God Unknown,

Joseph's return to nature represents humankind's return to its sacred

origins.

Totemism, a primitive form of religion, is the belief in a

mystical affiliation between an individual or a group and a totem;

moreover, totemism is a system of social organization in which a group

of kinsmen band together because of their totemic relationships. In

Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of

Savages and Neurotics, Freud maintains that the totemic object is

usually an animal, plant, or natural phenomenon, such as water or rain

(5). To a God Unknown depicts Joseph's return to the origin of

society, where he performs the primordial act of defining the totem.

His difficulty in establishing a new social order is reflected in the

way that the totemic object shifts during the course of the novel from

a tree to the sun and finally to a rock. In each case, Joseph

33

believes the totem will enable him to make rain, which is essential

for the continual vitality of his land as well as the clan that he

leads. Freud explains that the savage regards the totem as a common

ancestor of the clan and also as a guardian spirit that sends oracles

to the clan (5). The totem is a father-figure, similar to the Judeo-

Christian perception of God as humanity's spiritual father, a strict

and fearful patriarch whose rules are to be followed without question

to preserve cosmic order. The totem, like the more sophisticated

notion of a deity, also functions as a device for preserving order,

but on a local level.

For any reader, the great oak tree is undoubtedly the most

provocative image in the novel. It emerges as a primary source of

conflict among the characters because Joseph comes to regard it as a

totem through which he attempts to establish order within the Wayne

clan. He perceives the tree as his father's reincarnated spirit and

thus as the family patriarch; moreover, he regards it as the guardian

spirit of the land. His view of the oak is unacceptable to Burton,

his Bible-thumping brother, as well as to the Catholic priest of the

nearby Indian village. Early in the novel, Joseph elects to build his

house beneath the big tree despite the warning of Romas, the old

driver: "One of those limbs might crack off and take your roof with

it, and smash you, too, some night while you're asleep" (9; ch. 3).

The Mexican man's name, a variation of the Spanish "Roma," suggests

Rome and within the novel's religious context alludes to the city

within Rome: Vatican City, the independent state of the papal

government and the center of the Catholic world. As if on behalf of

the Church, Romas counsels against Joseph's affiliation with the great

3^

oak and cautions him that the tree could destroy the foundation of his

new homestead as well as Joseph himself. Despite the old man's

advice, Joseph is drawn to the enormous tree and its ability to offer

a kind of shelter beyond the physical.

The fact that trees have always held a spiritual significance for

humankind provides an explanation for Joseph's feelings toward the

giant oak. In The Tao of Symbols, James Powell states that "our words

'truth,' 'trust,' and 'tree' can all be traced back four thousand

years to an ancient Proto-Indo-European word for the tree that to them

was the Truth" (67). Also, early peoples relied on wood, like stone,

as a primary substance out of which they constructed things. For

these reasons, it is little wonder that trees stand in the foreground

of many mythological tales, especially creation stories concerning the

birth of humankind, the birth and resurrection of gods, and the birth

of the cosmos. In Norse Mythology, for instance, Rasmus Anderson

maintains that the ancient Norse believed that humankind was

originally created from trees (198). In The Mothers, a work that

reveals much about Steinbeck's choice of mythological imagery in To a

God Unknown, Robert Briffault points out that the Greek god Adonis is

"represented as born from a tree, his material image being a rough

wooden figure of a mere log of wood" (368). Similarly, Campbell

discusses the Egyptian myth that on the edge of the Nile a tree grows

around the corpse of the Egyptian god Osiris, who, in death, is

associated with the annual rising of that great, life-providing river

(TMT 82-83). Furthermore, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he

points out that Buddha's awakening takes place beneath Bodh-Gaya, the

35

Bo Tree, which he calls "the great Tree of Enlightenment" and "the

Immovable Spot" (32).

According to Anderson, the Elder Edda (also called the Poetic

Edda or the Sxmundar Edda), which is connected to the Vedic hymns from

which Steinbeck takes his title and epigraph (116), opens with a song

called Vdluspa ("the Vala's prophecy") that praises the great

Ygdrasil, the Tree of Existence, whose limbs and roots penetrate the

entire universe (120). Moreover, Briffault indicates that Yggdrasil

(a Teutonic spelling of the Icelandic "Ygdrasil") "is also the Tree of

Mimir, who appears to have been an ancient Nordic moon-god" (Mothers

303). William Cord, in The Teutonic Mythology of Richard Wagner's

Ring of the Nibelung, reveals that Yggdrasil, also known as Askr

Yggdrasil (translated as "The Ash Steed of the Terrible One" or "The

Ash Steed of Woton"), is identified with Woton, the great all-father

god of ancient Teutondom (15). One of Woton's alternate names was

Hangatyr, which means "God of the Hanged." Moreover, all criminal

hangings were conducted in his name and blood of the criminals was

smeared on the the trunks of the trees from which they were hanged

(9).

The Judeo-Christian tradition also incorporates trees in its

mythology, as established in the book of Genesis. Eating from the

tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden of Eden separates

Adam and Eve from eternal union with God. The other tree in Eden, the

tree of life, symbolizes the life-force itself. It reappears in the

Book of Revelation, this time bearing the fruit of eternal life that

Christ, after overcoming death on a tree-turned-cross, promises for

his true believers: "He that hath an ear, let him hear what the

36

Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh will I give to

eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God"

(2:7). Thus, according to John of Patmos, the tree of life will

enable humankind to restore its lost state of oneness with God.

Campbell reveals the relationship between the two biblical trees in

this way: "The tree of knowledge of good and evil is the tree of

going from unity into multiplicity, and the tree of eternal life is

that of going from multiplicity to unity. It's the same tree in two

directions" (TMT 207).

The numerous examples above illustrate how various mythologies

throughout time and throughout the world, in considerably arid and

heavily forested regions alike, have attached human fate to trees,

which have been commonly regarded as the largest forms of life on the

earth's surface. To a God Unknown reflects Steinbeck's knowledge of

the importance of trees in early religious beliefs and practices.

Undoubtedly, Frazer's The Golden Bough as well as Briffault's The

Mothers are among the most significant sources that influenced the

development of mythological ideas and imagery in Steinbeck's second

novel. For instance, Frazer claims, "Sometimes it is the souls of the

dead which are believed to animate trees" (133).^ Furthermore, he

reveals that an aboriginal tribe called the Dieri, who live in Central

Australia, "regard as very sacred certain trees which are supposed to

be their fathers transformed; hence they speak with reverence of these

trees, and are careful that they shall not be cut down or burned"

(133). Frazer shows that other cultures have embraced a similar

notion. The 1922 Macmillan edition of The Golden Bough indicates that

he also had knowledge of a Sumatran belief that the spirits of

37

deceased kinsmen sometimes linger in pieces of wood or in tree

branches (184). In the same vein, Gertrude Jacobs maintains that the

ancient Norse held their council beneath the oak tree because they

believed that it was the home of the departed souls of their

countrymen (II90).

In Chapter 2 of To a God Unknown, the following scene indicates

that Steinbeck was familiar with at least some of these ideas about

the connection of trees to the spiritual world:

The trail forced its way up the long narrow ridge and came to a belt of trees, tan oak and live oak and white oak. Among the branches of the trees a tiny white fragment of mist appeared and delicately floated along just over the treetops. In a moment another translucent shred joined it, and another and another. They sailed along like a half-materialized ghost, growing larger and larger until suddenly they struck a column of warm air and rose into the sky to become little clouds. All over the valley the flimsy little clouds were forming and ascending like the spirits of the dead rising out of a sleeping city. (6; ch. 2)

In this passage, Steinbeck foreshadows the relationship that figures

prominently in the novel between Joseph and the great oak by hinting

that a connection exists between trees—oak trees in particular—and

the spirits of the dead. In a scene that shortly follows Steinbeck's

description of the ghostly oaks, Joseph confesses to his Indian

friend Juanito, "My father is in that tree. My father is that tree!"

(17; ch. 4). In Frazer's discussions of other beliefs in the

supernatural properties of trees, he points out that the ancient

Aryans were a people who revered trees as the givers of rain,

sunshine, plentiful animals, bountiful harvests, and even human

offspring (136-37). In To a God Unknown, Joseph's brother Thomas

intimates that Joseph hangs dead hawks in the oak, not "[t]o warn off

38

other hawks" (27; ch. 6) as Joseph claims, but as sacrifices to ward

off the dry years to come.

Joseph's actions toward the oak tree illustrate the process by

which religions developed in early societies. Maureen Henry points

out in The Intoxication of Power that the ancient Romans and Greeks

did not believe that human souls pass on into an afterlife in a

separate world; instead, they believed that the dead remain close to

this world and live underground. As a result,

A great emphasis was placed on performing the proper rites for the dead in order to insure their rest and happiness. Eventually, the dead were regarded as gods who required worship, and the practical consequence of this belief was a religion of agricultural households, each preserving the worship of its own ancestors as gods and each centered around its own sacred fire, through which offerings were made to the household gods. The entire familial and social structure seems to have been based on this private domestic worship of household divinities. (1-2)

Joseph's actions directed toward the oak therefore reveal more than

primitive tree worship, illuminating in part the meaning of the

novel's title. As religion became more sophisticated, trees were no

longer directly responsible for such acts, but instead became totems

for the various European gods.

Frazer points out that the early Greeks and Romans associated the

god of the oak with Zeus and Jupiter, their respective gods of

thunder; likewise, he indicates that the oak tree was the chief symbol

of the ancient Teutonic race and appears to have been dedicated to the

god of thunder, Donar or Thunar, who is the equivalent of the Norse

god Thor (186). Furthermore, Frazer's research indicates that the

Teutonic words for "temple" suggest that "amongst the Germans the

oldest sanctuaries were natural woods" (127). He also notes that

39

Dionysus, who was also associated with the oak, was "a god of trees in

general. Thus we are told that almost all the Greeks sacrificed to

'Dionysus of the tree.'" (449). Moreover, as a baby, Dionysus

mimicked Zeus, his father, by "brandishing the lightning in his tiny

hand" (450-51). Frazer indicates that the ancient Celts also

worshiped the oak, and their term for sanctuary corresponds to the

Latin word "nemus," which means "grove" and which survives in the name

of Nemi (127), the grove of the Roman goddess Diana (4). Likewise, in

The Druids, T. D. Kendrick points out that third-century Roman

historian Valerius Maximus reported that the oak tree was a symbol of

the Celtic thunder-god (123-25). Most likely, all of these early and

separate societies singled out the oak as the symbol of their various

thunder gods because it is struck by lightning more than any other

tree in European forests (Frazer 821). As Campbell states, "The voice

in the thunder is the first suggestion of a power greater than that of

a human system" (TMT 4). Thus these people regarded the tree as a

mediator of a higher and supernatural force.

According to Powell, since the oak tree was the channel through

which the thunder gods from above communicated with the earth's

inhabitants, it represents "the immeasurable Truth, the Cosmic Pillar,

the Axis of the World, extending into heaven" (68). In a similar

fashion, Joseph views the great oak in Steinbeck's novel as "the

center of the land" (154). From its earliest times, humankind has

believed that the earth contains a sacred center, a reservoir, so to

speak, of cosmic order. In The Power of Myth, Campbell asserts, for

instance, that the Sioux Indians possess this important mythological

realization: "The center of the world is the axis mundi, the central

40

point, the pole around which stillness and movement are together.

Movement is time, but stillness is eternity" (89). Moreover, Mircea

Eliade points out that the World Tree is one of "the most widespread

mythical images of the 'Center of the World'" in A History of

Religious Ideas (3: 7). In Steinbeck's story, the oak tree is

Joseph's axis mundi. It is the center of his orientation to the

external world. Moreover, it is the channel through which he reaches

for spirituality and identity.

Even though the cycles of nature stress the flux of time,

Joseph's tree remains a permanent and sacred force until Burton

commits the pernicious act that throws Joseph's world into a state of

imbalance and peril. Steinbeck suggests that Burton, too, believes

that his father's spirit resides in the tree. Shortly before leaving

the ranch. Burton tells Joseph, "The rot was in our father, and it was

not dug out. It grew until it possessed him" (113; ch. 19). The

words "rot" and "dug out" are most often associated with vegetation

and less frequently associated with people, indicating that Steinbeck

intends for Burton's use of these words to reveal that Burton, too,

connects the giant oak to his deceased father. Therefore, his

girdling the oak is an act of premediated patricide, which he deems

necessary to sever the brothers' ties to their father and his pagan

ways. Burton's behavior brings to mind Freud's assertion in Totem and

Taboo that "deferred obedience" motivates primitive clansmen to forbid

"the killing of the totem, the substitute of their father" (I78).

Burton's killing the tree therefore signifies an attempt to end the

social phase of totemism and to seek civilization in the Christian

community of Pacific Grove.

41

In addition to the writings of the Old Testament and Frazer's

detailed study, 0 Pioneers! (DeMott #170), Willa Gather's 1913 novel

about the diminishing Nebraskan frontier, provides a literary model

that incorporates the pagan worship of trees. In that work, Marie

reveals to Emil that she attributes her unusual affinity for trees to

their early associations with idolatry:

The Bohemians, you know, were tree worshipers before the missionaries came. Father says the people in the mountains still do queer things, sometimes,—they believe that trees bring good or bad luck. . . . The old people in the mountains plant lindens to purify the forest, and to do away with the spells that come from the old trees they say have lasted from heathen times. I'm a good Catholic, but I think I could get along with caring for trees, if I hadn't anything else. . . . I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything; I begin just where I left off. (152-53)

This passage intimates that humans possess an almost instinctive

belief that trees are special repositories of knowledge, of Truth

itself, and therefore that it is only natural that primitive societies

constructed their religions around them. It is very likely that 0

Pioneers! is a source for To a God Unknown. According to his first

wife, Carol, Steinbeck owned and read it as well as Gather's My

Antonia (1918), The Professor's House (1925), and Death Comes for the

Archbishop (1927) (DeMott, SR 139). Furthermore, in 1935, only a few

years after his completion of To a God Unknown, Steinbeck told Lewis

Gannett that "Willa Gather writes the best prose in America ..."

(24).

Besides Steinbeck's readings, at least one other source exists as

background for the oak tree, and it is part of Steinbeck's own

42

personal history. In a letter written in late 1930 to his friend Carl

Wilhelmson, Steinbeck relates an ironic account of a big pine tree

that grew beside his family's three-room summer cottage in Pacific

Grove, a community notorious for its roots in Christian

fundamentalism^ and one that therefore would disapprove of Steinbeck's

notion about the pine tree (much in the same way that Burton, who

leaves the ranch in disgust for the Christian settlement in Pacific

Grove, condemns Joseph's arboreal affiliation):

I planted it when it and I were very little; I've watched it grow. It has always been known as "John's tree." Years ago, in mental playfulness I used to think of it as my brother and then later, still playfully, I thought of it as something rather closer, a kind of repository of my destiny. This was all an amusing fancy, mind you. Now the lower limbs should be cut off soon, and I have a very powerful reluctance to do it, such a reluctance as I would have toward cutting live flesh. Furthermore if the tree should die, I am pretty sure I should be ill. This feeling I have planted in myself and quite deliberately I guess, but it is none the less strong for all that. (SLL

31)

Benson credits Steinbeck's relationship with the pine tree as the

source for Joseph's father's spirit residing in the great oak in To a

God Unknown (TAJS 221). Steinbeck's peculiar account concerning the

big-brotherly pine, however, is probably, like the account in To a God

Unknown, the fictional result of his reading Frazer's The Golden

Bough. The fact that Steinbeck chooses the phrases "mental

playfulness" and "amusing fancy" to describe his connection to the

tree indicates that he is intentionally distancing himself from this

personal myth. Moreover, his letter to Wilhelmson demonstrates his

understanding of one of the two principles of magic that Frazer

discusses. According to the law of contact, "things act on each other

43

at a distance after physical contact has been severed" (12).

Steinbeck's "amusing fancy" about the pine suggests that he and the

tree are bound together for their joint lifetime and furthermore that

the illness of one affects the other.

Ideas for the oak tree in To a God Unknown may also have resulted

from Steinbeck's acquaintance with Joseph Campbell. Interestingly,

Campbell also recounts a boyhood story involving a mystical

relationship with a tree in The Power of Myth:

I think it's Cicero who says that when you go into a great tall grove, the presence of a deity becomes known to you. There are sacred groves everywhere. Going into the forest as a little boy, I can remember worshiping a tree, a great big old tree, thinking, "My, my, what you've known and been." I think this sense of the presence of creation is a basic mood of man. (92)

Whether or not Campbell and Steinbeck swapped tree stories during the

months of their friendship in 1932 will never be known with any

certainty, although the possibility remains an intriguing speculation

since, after all, Steinbeck's protagonist is also named Joseph.

In the novel, Steinbeck's character worships the tree and

provides it with sacrificial dead hawks and ear notchings from branded

calves (27; ch. 6), the blood of slaughtered pigs (79; ch. 15), wine

(86; ch. 16), and even the burnt offering of barbequed meat (94)--

actions that are reminiscent of the practices of the ancient Druids,

who made offerings to their sacred oaks as part of their religious

rites (Powell 233). Shortly after Burton accuses his brother of "the

offering of [Joseph's] own first-born child" (112; ch. 19), Joseph

places his tiny son "within the crotch of the tree" (ll4), an act that

repeats Joseph's placing his own hand on his father's loins in order

to receive the patriarchal blessing of fertility (3; ch. 1). Before

44

Joseph leaves the family farm in Vermont for the unsettled west, his

aged and declining father promises the following: "I'll go right

along with you, over your head, in the air. I'll see the land you

pick out and the kind of house you build. I'd be curious about that,

you know. There might even be some way I could help you now and then"

(2). Joseph fulfills his father's prophecy in part by believing that

the older Wayne's spirit resides in the oak whose branches shelter his

house.

Joseph attempts to maintain the oak tree's fitness because he

believes its condition is a barometer of the health of the entire

land. His doing so illustrates Frazer's second principle of magic,

the law of similarity, which operates on the assumption that like

produces like (l4). An example of this type of magic, also called

sympathetic or homeopathic magic, is the following: "a fruitful woman

makes plants fruitful, a barren woman makes them barren" (33). In the

case of Steinbeck's story, Joseph believes that life abounds in the

fertile California valley as long as the oak remains alive; but then

its dying functions as a signal to him of the death of many more

things to come. Even before he learns that Burton has killed his

"ambassador" (116), Joseph senses that he has lost his rapport with

the land:

Everywhere he went, inquiring with his fingers after the earth's health. . . . The earth told him nothing . . . he walked back to the house and stood under his own tree. "I was afraid, sir," he said. "Something in the air made me afraid." And as he stroked the bark, suddenly he felt cold and lonely. "This tree is dead," his mind cried. "There's no life in my tree." The sense of loss staggered him . . . Joseph sat at the foot of the tree, and not even the hard bark held any comfort for him. It was as hostile as the rest of the

45

earth, as frigid and contemptuous as the corpse of a friend. (II7-I8)

The once stately oak continues to tower over Joseph's house even after

its demise. Its fate brings to mind Spengler's description in The

Decline of the West of the previously thriving and pliant cultures

that hardened into civilizations, which, "like a worn-out giant of the

forest, thrust decaying branches towards the sky for hundreds or

thousands of years" (74). According to Spengler, "Pure Civilization,

as a historical process, consists in a progressive exhaustion of forms

that have become inorganic or dead" (25). As an individual, Joseph,

however, attempts to break the inevitable pattern of decline that

Spengler describes. Once he realizes what Burton has done to his

spiritual liason, he severs his emotional ties with the decaying tree

and seeks counsel elsewhere.

Images of death, however, are also connected to the sun, the next

object through which Joseph develops his religion. After Burton

delivers the fatal blow to the oak's trunk and departs for the

fanatically Christian community of Pacific Grove, Joseph and his other

brother, Thomas, encounter a nameless old man, a character-type that

evolves from Merlin in Cup of Gold and that recurs as the old Chinaman

in Cannery Row and the seer in Sweet Thursday, all of whom bear

resemblance to the character of Merlin from the Arthurian legend.

DeMott points out that Geoffrey of Monmouth is a writer for whom

Steinbeck "maintained a life long enthusiasm" (SR l48); therefore, it

is not surprising that Steinbeck based a number of characters

throughout his career on one of most intriguing figures that Geoffrey

created in the mythology that he presents as a historical account.

Campbell calls Merlin "the great 'guru' of the Arthurian world" {TMT

46

214). Similarly, in The King and the Corpse (DeMott #933), Heinrich

Zimmer calls Merlin "a representation of the prophetic spirit of the

race, like those seers and magicians, druids and primitive workers of

weather magic, who dream the dreams of their tribe and interpret them"

(187).

It is important to note for the present discussion that Merlin,

as a cultural visionary, ironically gathers his wisdom not from

humankind, but rather from nature. Thus he corresponds to the only

human type that, according to Spengler, is capable of surviving the

process of cultural decline: "At the last, the primitive blood

remains, alive, but robbed of its strength and most promising

elements. This residue is the Fellah type" (251). Similarly,

Steinbeck's characters—Merlin in Cup of Gold, the nameless old man in

To a God Unknown, the old Chinaman in Cannery Row, and the seer in

Sweet Thursday—are associated with nature rather than society.

Steinbeck's presentations of these enigmatic characters intimate that

they possess a keener understanding of the mysteries of existence than

do ordinary people because they choose to be disconnected from

society. Their reward is understanding the natural world and living

in harmony with it.

In To a God Unknown, Joseph is drawn toward the strange old man,

who identifies himself as follows:

I am the last man in the western world to see the sun. After it is gone to everyone else, I see it for a little while. I've seen it every night for twenty years. Except when the fog was in or the rain was falling, I've seen the sun-set. . . . Sometimes . . . I go to town for salt and pepper and thyme and tobacco. I go fast. I start after the sun has set, and I'm back before it sets again. (l43; ch. 22)

47

Joseph recognizes a similarity between the old man's connection to the

sun and his own previous attachment to the oak tree because each man

performs the role of a magician. Frazer states, "As the magician

thinks he can make rain, so he fancies he can cause the sun to shine,

and can hasten or stay its going down" (90). The old man and Joseph

fit together almost like yin-yang components that have been pried

apart. The former devotes himself solely to the sun while the latter

is obsessed with producing rain. Only rain and fog prevent the old

man's daily sacrifice; likewise, the sun's relentless heat, without

the relief of rain, transforms Joseph's paradisaical settlement into a

valley of ashes, in which, ironically, the only things to survive are

the oaks (170). The duality of this condition emphasizes that life

exists in the delicate balance of these two forces.

The old man desires to prolong the sun's daily life, which he

accomplishes through his game of watching it set in the valley below

and then racing home to see it set again. Every time he performs this

eccentric ritual, he witnesses a resurrection that both assures him of

the sun's continued vitality and also prophesies its return to life

each morning. In addition, the old man prepares a live animal

sacrifice each evening at his makeshift altar, such as he does during

Joseph's visit:

He half ran around his house in his eagerness. A little platform was built on the cliff's edge, with a wooden railing in front and a bench a few feet back. In front of the bench was a large stone slab, resting on four blocks of wood, and the smooth surface of the stone was scoured and lean. The two men stood at the railing and looked off at the sea. . . . The old man pointed to the horizon, where a rim of black fog hung. "It'll be a good one," he cried. "It'll be a red one in the fog. This is a good night for the pig." (l45; ch. 22)

48

Campbell reveals that the American Indians of the Southwest regard the

sun as their father (HTF 69-7O) and also as "the eating bowl of God,

an inexhaustible grail, abundant with the substance of sacrifice,

whose flesh is meat indeed and whose blood is drink indeed" (42).

Likewise, Frazer establishes that the ancient Mexican people offered

human and animal sacrifices "to the sun to maintain him in vigour and

enable him to run his course in the sky" (91).

The nameless old man in Steinbeck's novel believes in a similar

superstition. He ritualistically slaughters a pig, rabbit, squirrel,

thrush, quail, or other small animal at sunset. In godly fashion, he

takes life in order to give life. According to Brif fault, a

slaughtered sacrifice functions as a substitute for the life of the

sacrificer (Mothers 324), and, as DeMott observes ("Redefinition" 48),

the old man intimates that his own life will be his final offering to

the sun: "Some time it will be perfect. . . . When it comes, I,

myself, will go over the edge of the world with the sun" (147-48). In

the 1922 Macmillan edition of The Golden Bough, Frazer maintains that

the sunset glow "is the light cast by the souls of the dead as they

pass in and out of the under-world, where the sun goes to rest" (I83).

In the same vein, Steinbeck's character believes that the right sunset

will assure his passage into the afterlife, and so he waits each

evening for the sun's death that will take him with it into the

approaching twilight.

The promise of resurrection--of life after twilight--is central

to the tenets of many religions. Christendom, for instance, embraced

the sun's daily resurrection as part of its early doctrine. "The New

Testament," explains Campbell, "is a testament of Sunday, the rising

49

of the new eastern sun" {TMT 30), evidenced by the fact that the nadir

of the solar year, regarded by ancient Syrians and Egyptians of the

Northern Hemisphere^ as the Nativity of the Sun, occurs on December

25th on the Julian calendar (Frazer 4l6). According to Frazer, the

ancient Eyptians symbolized the sun's new birth "by the image of an

infant" (4l6). That being so, he maintains, "The Christian church

chose to celebrate the birthday of its Founder on the twenty-fifth of

December in order to transfer the devotion of the heathen from the Sun

to him who was called the Sun of Righteousness" (4l7). The fact that

Christianity regards the winter solstice as the birthday of Christ as

well as the fact that it celebrates Christmas (e.g., Christ's mass) on

this day each year indicate that followers of Christ incorporated the

practices of earlier solar cults into their own, especially since

neither the date of Christ's birth nor any indication that it should

be celebrated is stated in the New Testament.

In "Heroes and Hero-Worship," Thomas Carlyle says that early

Christian missionaries found the Norse god Balder, the "White God" of

light who is identified as the sun itself, to resemble Christ (23-24).

As well, Constantine accepted Christianity as an extension and

refinement of the sun cult, according to Martin Henig in Religion in

Roman Britain (214), and Eliade maintains that Constantine "considered

the sun the most perfect symbol of God" (2: 4ll). Eliade also reveals

Constantine's identification of the cross of Christ with the object of

his older religion. He quotes Eusebius' version of Constantine's

conversion experience in Vita Constantini, in which Eusebius claims

that Constantine reported

about mid-day, when the sun was beginning to decline, he saw with his own eyes the trophy of a

50

cross of light in the heavens, about the sun, and bearing the inscription Conquer by this . . . He doubted within himself what the import of this apparition could be; . . . and in his sleep the Christ of God appeared to him with the same sign which he had seen in the heavens, and commanded him to procure a standard made in the likeness of that sign, and to use it as a safeguard in all engagements with his enemies. (2: 4l2)

These examples provide an additional context for Steinbeck's use of

sun imagery in To a God Unknown.

In preparation for the coming of Christmas, the children of the

Wayne clan ask Rama about "the kind of conduct most admired by the

saints of the solstice" (37; ch. 8) in order to assure that they will

receive plenty of gifts. The children's desire to please their

solstice-worshiping elders parallels the way that Joseph gives his

attention to the great oak tree in the hopes that the land will be

bountiful with crops and animals. Steinbeck's use of the term "saints

of the solstice" deconstructs the Christian process by calling

attention to its pagan origins, suggesting that these older ways of

nature worship survive in the contemporary disguise of Christianity,

and it aligns Joseph and his clan with these older beliefs and

rituals. Furthermore, a common Christmas practice suggests a

connection between Joseph's tree and the old man's sun. According to

Campbell,

The tree is the World Axis in its wish-fulfilling, fruitful aspect—the same as that displayed in Christian homes at the season of the winter solstice, which is the moment of the rebirth or return of the sun, a joyous custom inherited from the Germanic paganism that has given to the modern German language its feminine Sonne. (HTF 213)

Like the sun each evening, Christ came to be regarded as the

passageway through which one may enter God's spiritual paradise. He

51

was crucified on a cross made of two beams of wood that suggest the

coming together of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree

of Life, an intersection that signifies the axis mundi of the

Christian world.

The sun (also spelled "Son"), however, offers no salvation for

the land in Steinbeck's novel even though, ironically, the sun is

recognized universally as a symbol of "absolute life" (Campbell, TMT

20). The ancient Druidic calendar reveals a different yet

complementary relationship between Joseph's oak tree and the old man's

sun. The Druids' seventh month was called the oak month, spanning

from June 11th to July 9th and therefore connecting the oak tree to

the summer rather than winter solstice (Jacob ll89). Similarly, the

Arthurian legend indicates that the oak king is burned sacrificially

on St. John's Day (1189), a holy day that commemorates the birth of

John the Baptist on the longest day of the year and therefore exists

in parity with the celebration of Christ's birthday on the shortest

day of the year. Both of these observances illustrate that tree

worship is linked directly to solar rituals, with the tree signifying

the permanent axis mundi around which the sun revolves during its

fluctuating cycle, at least according to a pre-Copernican point of

view. As a context for Steinbeck's novel, these patterns of ancient

belief provide a basis for the relationship between Joseph as guardian

of the oak tree and the old man as caretaker of the sun. His totem

destroyed, Joseph attempts to follow the elder's example but

eventually rejects belief in the solar ritual when he cuts the

starving calf's throat. At that moment, Joseph realizes, "His [the

52

old man's] secret was for him. . . . It won't work for me" (I78; ch.

25).

The resulting failure from Joseph's sacrifice, which he patterns

after the old man's, holds additional meaning on a social level.

Steinbeck incorporates the image of the waning sun as, in the

tradition of social historians, a symbol of cultural decline, no doubt

because the sun is brightest when it is just about to sink beyond the

western horizon. In The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche

describes the later period of the Greek culture as "the glow of a sun

about to set" (4). Spengler likewise uses the setting sun as a

metaphor of cultural decline, and he specifically associates twilight

with Western culture in The Decline of the West. In the following

passage, he contrasts the time-conscious art of the West from the

timeless brightness of the Classical:

The Classical vase-painting and fresco has no time-of-day- . . . There is neither morning nor evening, neither spring nor autumn, but pure timeless brightness . . . our oil-painting developed in the opposite direction, towards an imaginary darkness, also independent of time-of-day, which forms the characteristic atmosphere of the Faustian soul-space. There are early mornings, sunset-clouds, the last gleams upon the sky-line of distant mountains, the candle-lighted room, the spring meadows and autumn woods, the long and short shadows of bushes and furrows. But they are all penetrated through and through with a subdued darkness that is not derived from the notion of the heavenly bodies. In fact, steady brightness and steady twilight are the respective hallmarks of the Classical and the Western. . . . (172)

When this passage is brought to bear on Steinbeck's novel, the old man who calls himself "the last man in the western world" becomes the personification of Western culture, watching its passing into the "subdued darkness" of death in endless repetition.

53

Joseph's last name is additional evidence that Steinbeck alludes

to Spengler's work. "Wayne" is an obvious alternate spelling for the

word "wane," which as a verb means "to decline" or "to ebb and flow"

and is most commonly associated with the flux of water and the lunar

and solar cycles. Steinbeck changed the protagonist's name from "Andy

Wane" to "Joseph Wayne" when he inherited Webster F. Street's

unfinished play called The Green Lady, which, according to Astro, is

"a bulky and jumbled dialogue which runs off in all directions" (82).

Unable to complete his work about "a man in love with a forest near

his ranch which he loves as one loves a beautiful woman," Street gave

the manuscript to Steinbeck in 1927, hoping that his friend could

salvage ideas from it and transform them into his own writing project

(82). It is probable that Steinbeck consciously developed the

significance of the name "Wane" during his rewrite and modified its

spelling to give the allusion more subtlety. His last name meaning

"decline," Joseph functions as another of Steinbeck's symbols of

Western culture, which, according to Spengler, has already grown dim

and weak after reaching its culminating point and is now falling

toward its inevitable death. Can the old man's loyalty and routine

sacrifice to the sun pause its daily death? Can Joseph's love for the

land prevent the natural cycle of drought? Can the attempts of a

modern-day Western man postpone the end of his culture and preserve

its meaning for humanity's posterity? On each level, Steinbeck

portrays humankind as a pattern-breaker fighting against all odds to

control its own destiny.

The next object with which Joseph develops a totemic relationship

is the moss-covered rock in the ancient Indian glade. Like the sun,

54

it represents the external forces that ultimately determine man's

fate. The grove is a magical field, a place consecrated for the

purpose of worship, and therefore is reminiscent of the great oak.

Eliade maintains, "Certain trees, certain springs, and certain spots

were considered sacred, inhabited by the gods" in pre-Christian times

(3:27). Juanito recounts to Joseph a story that illustrates the

historical significance of the Indian grove and the rock within it:

My mother brought me here, seftor. My mother was Indian. I was a little boy, and my mother was going to have a baby. She came here and sat beside the rock. For a long time she sat, and then we went away again. She was Indian, seftor. Sometimes I think the old ones come here still . . . . I am sorry I brought you here. But when I was so close the Indian in me made me come, seftor. (30; ch. 6)

The grove is an ancient and holy place visited by generations of

Indians seeking reproductive potency from the moss-covered rock.

Steinbeck describes the edifice of the rock as "something like an

altar that had melted and run down over itself" (29; ch. 6), thus

bringing to mind the Druids' sacred oak groves where they made

offerings to the powers of nature. Upon Joseph's discovery of the

rock, a large, black, hornless bull is lying beside it. The presence

of this bull is highly significant and indicates that Steinbeck was

familiar with at least some of its mythological associations.

According to Irish myths, for example, various deities are

reincarnated in the form of a bull (Jacobs 259). Interestingly,

ancient Semitic stelas depict the thunder god, the giver of rain, with

the horns of a bull (260), which therefore provides a mythological

connection between the giant oak tree and the moss-covered stone in

55

To a God Unknown. The bull is also a chief symbol of Dionysus as well

as of Thor and Zeus (260).

In Steinbeck's novel, the bull guards the sacred grove; however,

it is important to note that this bull has no horns. According to

Finno-Ugric mythology of northern Europe and northwestern Siberia, a

bull stands on a stone in the midst of the cosmic ocean and supports

the world on his horns; when his horns break, however, the earth comes

to an end (260). The bull's horns, then, represent the life force

itself. Steinbeck's description of the hornless bull lying by the

moss-covered rock in the dry spring is suggestive of this

eschatological myth, and therefore it indicates that the world in

which Joseph lives has come to its end. Furthermore, Dionysus was

frequently represented as the horns of a bull, probably because the

shape of a horn resembles a phallus, which signifies regenerative

power, as well as a lunar crescent, which symbolizes darkness and the

unconscious in addition to cyclic rebirth. The ironic hornlessness of

the virile-looking bull in To a God Unknown reflects the barrenness of

the land and also suggests that contemporary society has castrated

Dionysus in order to make him powerless. During Elizabeth's

subsequent visit to the glade, an image of the goat, in contrast to

the presence of the bull, is connected to the rock. Harold Willoughby

explains in Pagan Regeneration: A Study of Mystery Initiations in the

Graeco-Roman World that both animals are symbols of Dionysus: "In a

goat-raising country the normal representation of the power of life

and generation would be the goat. Similarly, in a cattle-raising

country the embodiment of the divine power in the form of a bull was

to be expected" (72). The rock, then, suggests the altar of Dionysus

56

and a thing that Joseph recognizes as "ancient—and holy" (30; ch. 6).

He feels a dependency on the rock for food and comfort in hard times

to come and perceives it as a guiding and revitalizing force. Thus

Steinbeck intimates that the much-needed regeneration in the novel

must be Dionysian in nature.

The rock, though, also holds biblical associations. Jeremiah

22:27 refers to pagans "who say to a tree, 'You are my father,' and to

a stone, 'You gave me birth,'" supporting Joseph's totemic attachment

to the oak and the stone, both which function much like common

ancestors. Despite such pagan connections, however, rockiness is akin

to godliness in both the New and Old Testaments. In Deuteronomy, God

is described as "the rock" (32:4), and the Psalmist similarly calls

God "the rock of salvation" (89:26). In addition, Christ compares his

disciple Peter to a rock and says "upon this rock I will build my

church" (Matt. I6:l8), although, of course, Peter denies Christ three

times (27:69-75). Joseph comes to believe that the salvation of the

land is connected to the rock on which he builds his own religious

ideas. J. R. LeMaster even likens Joseph to John the Baptist in his

relationship to the rock:

From the time he settles on his land he cries out against drought in much the same way that John the Baptist cries out against the sins of Herod. Furthermore, Joseph Wayne is a Baptist. When the drought has parched the land, he baptizes the rock that has become his sanctuary and altar. Just as the baptismal water in the Jordan River symbolizes the life-giving process, so does the water with which Joseph baptizes the rock. (9)

John the Baptist prophesies everlasting life to humankind; Joseph,

however, prophesies the maintenance of a fertile, almost pre-lapsarian

valley, thereby stressing the land's destiny but not necessarily the

57

human species'. He pours water on top of the rock's mossy coating,

which in his mind has replaced the oak as a barometer of the land's

condition. Throughout the novel, Joseph's emphasis on physical

salvation is in opposition to the Christian belief of spiritual

redemption.

Joseph resembles John the Baptist nevertheless in at least three

ways. First, as mentioned previously, while Christ's birth, on the

one hand, is connected to Midwinter Day, the winter solstice, and thus

emphasizes an increase to come in the sun's strength, the nativity of

John the Baptist, on the other hand, is commemorated on Midsummer Day,

the summer solstice, and therefore, like Joseph's last name, intimates

a decline to follow in the sun's intensity and presence and prophesies

a greater force to succeed it, a new order to rise out of the

approaching twilight. Second, Joseph, who "felt that the trees were

his children and the land his child" (7; ch. 2), assumes a parental

role in his relationship to the land and thus resembles John the

Baptist as well as the New Testament Joseph in their roles as

surrogate fathers to Christ. Third, like his Baptist predecessor,

Joseph is a man of the wilderness, a character who does not operate

within the boundaries of society, and who is therefore perceived by

others as a threat as well as an eccentric because he advances ideas

that undermine the dominating social mores. As disciples of Christ,

Father Angelo and Burton reproach Joseph's pagan rebellion against the

religious movement introduced by John the Baptist, whose beliefs were

regarded equally blasphemous by the Pharisees of two thousand years

ago. The irony here reveals a different sort of alpha and omega,

creation being paired with insurrection rather than with resurrection.

58

Thus the example of John the Baptist shows a new religious inception

being born out of discontent with a currently existing system of

beliefs, practices, and social codes. In turn, the new religion

becomes the basis for a new social order.

In Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth, Norman 0. Brown

illustrates that politics is an outgrowth of religion by revealing the

connection between Hermetic mythology and Greek history. The half-

brother of Dionysus, Hermes was the messenger of Zeus who became the

messenger of men. Brown argues that the cult of Hermes "comprises not

only a complex of myths but also a complex of rituals" (33), which

aptly describes the development of Joseph's religious thought in To a

God Unknown. Like Joseph, the Greek "god of the mountain wasteland"

(5; fn.) is connected to a stone. Brown supposes that "[t]he name

Hermes is probably derived from the Greek word for 'stone-heap,' . . .

and signified 'he of the stone-heap'" (33). Also called a boundary

stone, it is "associated with wasteland" (38) and marks "a point of

communication between strangers" (34). As a god of a cult, Hermes

became the hero of a culture because he represented "[c]rossing the

boundary" (38), an essential element in the development of Greek

commerce. The boundary stone of the merchant god Hermes was "regarded

as the gift of a supernatural being who inhabits the place" (4l),

illustrating why "political institutions at the rudimentary stage

needed the support of religious sanctions, and were organized as

religious ceremonies" (27). In Steinbeck's novel, the rock functions

as a boundary stone. Through his affiliation with it, Joseph crosses

the boundary of contemporary, light- and reason-oriented Western

culture, rejecting the socio-political system that it fosters, and

59

enters the darker and instictive realm of Dionysus, half-brother of

the messenger of gods and men. Acting as a modern-day messenger of

Dionysus, Joseph represents the possibility of a new social order that

places emphasis on the welfare of the group as a whole rather than on

the individual's personal needs and happiness.

Politics often wears the cloak of religion—an old idea, and one

that Steinbeck likely encountered in his readings, including Edward

Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (DeMott #332).

Gibbon maintains that Roman religion permeated all aspects of life:

The innumerable deities and rites of polytheism were closely interwoven with every circumstance of business or pleasure, of public or private life; and it seemed impossible to escape the observance of them without at the same time renouncing the commerce of mankind and all the offices and amusements of society. (271)

Another of Steinbeck's sources is A Short History of the World (DeMott

#842), in which H. G. Wells explains the relationship between religion

and politics. He asserts that the prophets of the Old Testament, such

as Ezekiel and Amos, "came without license or consecration. 'Now the

word of the Lord came unto me'; that was the formula. They were

intensely political. . . . Some of them turned their attention to

what we now call 'social reform'" (125). However, corruption

transpired out of so-called "social reform," evidenced by the fact

that in the thirteenth century the Church owned as much as one-fourth

of the land in many European countries (274). After acquiring control

of the land, the Church's corruption changed directions. Wells

writes. "The story of its decline tells of no adequate foemen from

without but continually of decay from within" (276).

60

The grail legend is an example of the restoration of a culture

that has been destroyed by inward decay, and it illustrates how the

spiritual is woven into the fabric of politics. After all, the goal

of the grail quest is the regeneration of land, which also means the

restoration of the order governing it (e.g., Arthur's court and the

Round Table of Camelot). Therefore, on a political level, the drought

signifies the loss of property and the collapse of an economic system,

thus bringing to mind the Great Depression, which was plaguing the

United States when Steinbeck was writing To a God Unknown.

Furthermore, Spengler characterizes the legend of the grail as an

"intensely Western symbol" (ll4), and Campbell calls it "a symbol of

the highest spiritual achievement" {PM 254). For all these reasons,

it is little wonder that Joseph's relationship to the rock in the

secluded glade alludes to the grail quest. During his discovery of

the rock, Joseph tells his brother Thomas. "There's something strong

and sweet and good in there. There's something like food and like

cool water. We'll forget it now, Tom. Only maybe sometime when we

have need, we'll go back again—and be fed" (30; ch. 6). An

enthusiast of the Arthurian legend, Steinbeck read Weston's From

Ritual to Romance as well as The Quest of the Holy Grail. From

Weston, Steinbeck learned that the grail talisman is not always a cup;

in some versions of the story, it is "a stone, endowed with food- and

life-giving properties, which also from time to time assumes the role

f oracle . . . " (QHG 1). Joseph attributes these three properties to

the moss-covered rock. He believes that it will give him food in hard

times to come, that it has the ability to bring life-giving rain to

61

the sun-scorched earth, and that its condition is indicative of what

will become of the entire land.

Other similarities also exist between the grail legend and

Steinbeck's story. The grail's guardian, sometimes called the Maimed

King, lies helpless from a wound, old age, or illness (QHG 2), and in

some versions, even from sterility (94), as the land lies in waste.

Both Joseph and Juanito, his companion and instructor in the ways of

the ancient Indians, function as guardians of the grail stone.

Juanito, like King Arthur, suffers from the wound of his wife's

infidelity, lives in solitude in the wilderness, £ind frequents the

altar site. Joseph also performs the role of guardian of the rock,

toward which he is drawn all the more strongly after his wife dies at

its base. LeMaster argues that "upon the death of Elizabeth Joseph is

once again incapable of procreation and the land goes to waste" (10).

Granted, Joseph is preoccupied with the mystery of propagation

throughout the course of the novel, but his thoughts are primarily

concerned with the land's regeneration rather than his own generative

desires. His preoccupation, however, becomes an illness to the extent

that he alienates himself from the rest of humanity and finally

commits suicide on top of the stone. In this respect, Joseph deserves

comparison to the Maimed King.

Weston also points out that the grail is always associated with

the sea, a lake, or a river, and the result of the quest "restores the

rivers to their channels and causes dried-up waters to flow" (QHG 8l).

From a deep hole in the rock runs a spring that naturally ebbs and

flows according to the wet and dry seasons. The fact that the rock

has a hole in it holds mythological importance. Eliade maintains that

62

KQ^MBB^^B^i^nW^ "-—' - '"

throughout western and northern Europe early groups of people

perforated table stones called "dolmens" (1: 115) with "soul holes"

that enabled them to communicate with the dead (1: 117). Similarly,

they worshiped megalithic structures called "menhirs," which they

believed functioned as substitutes for the human body and housed the

souls of their ancestors, who would provide help for the living (1:

ll6). Joseph tries to coax water to flow from the hole in the stone

so that he can continue to pour water from the spring on the rock's

mossy covering to keep it alive. Despite his attention, however, the

water dries up and creates a condition remarkably similar—too

similar, in fact, to be attributed to coincidence—to one that Eliot

describes in the last section of The Waste Land, "What the Thunder

Said" (a title that, like Steinbeck's, draws attention to higher and

greater forces in man's life):

If there were water And no rock If there were rock And also water And water A spring A pool among the rock If there were the sound of water only Not the cicada And dry grass singing But sound of water over a rock Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop But there is no water. (lines 346-59)

Both Eliot and Steinbeck illustrate that humanity is truly powerless

in its struggle against nature, or, in other words, that it cannot

completely overcome its primitive, Dionysian urgings.

Over the course of time, humanity's denial of its inability to

control nature manifests itself in the special power of other things,

including certain rocks. Such belief precedes the grail legend and is

63

common among different peoples throughout the world, evidenced by

well-known examples: the remains of Stonehenge; the basalt upright

stone discovered at Jericho, the world's oldest known city; and the

sacred Black Stone inside the Kaaba of the Great Mosque at Mecca,

which is the goal of Islamic pilgrimages and the point toward which

Muslims turn in prayer. The current New Age interest in crystals,

used for meditation, channeling, and healing, is proof of humankind's

on-going belief in their supernatural qualities. According to Frazer,

some stones are believed to have special magical virtues in accordance

with their shape and color (38). Used as rain charms, rocks dipped in

water or sprinkled with it possess the ability to bring rain; the

Apaches in the arid regions of Arizona and New Mexico, for instance,

throw water from a certain spring on a high point on a rock to make

rain (88). Moreover, Campbell says that in the trouvere Chretien de

Troyes' Arthurian tale Yvain (later known as The Lady of the Fountain

in a Welsh version), the knight dips water from a spring onto a stone

to entice the Black Knight, also known as the Thunder Knight, to

engage in battle {TMT 236), a metaphorical image that indicates that

Europeans relied on rocks as rain charms as early as the twelfth

century.

Whether an Apache of the New World or a legendary knight of the

Round Table, humankind seeks the same result: the rain's restoration

of the land. It is the same goal of all early nature cults, such as

the Celtic Druids, the Dionysian revelers of Greece, and the Egyptians

of the Nile. Similarly, in The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche maintains that

the ancient Israelites trusted their God to "provide what the people

needed--above all rain" (l45). It is also the goal of the Hindu

64

i ^ . , . : L

n followers of the great nature god Indra. The Vedas, sacred writings

of the Hindus, concern a people "to whom the regular and ordered

sequence of the processes of Nature was a vital necessity" (Weston,

FRR 26). Furthermore, the Vedic hymns and the grail stories contain

"closely analogous rites and ceremonies" (33), which were devised for

obtaining "above all, sufficient water" (26).

The grail legend, like the Vedas, probably precipitated out of a

nature cult (33)» hence establishing the connection between the two.

According to a Vedic legend, Vritra, the Covering, obstructed the flow

of creation until Indra, the Bright One, "with his thunderous

lightningbolt kills Vritra, bursting the demon's belly and the Stone

. . . thus releasing, like milk from a huge udder, the lowing cows,

the sonorous rivers, the light of the dawn, and the Sun" (Powell 53).

Steinbeck undoubtedly recognized the Veda (the word itself meaning

"knowledge") as an expression of humanity's universal quest for

understanding. A commonality among all these nature cults is a

stronger emphasis on the regeneration of the land than on the

generation of the human species, which is also characteristic of

Joseph. This observation suggests that early peoples possessed an

innate awareness of nature's permanence in contrast to their own

transience, and so they clung to its ability to endure all hardships,

such as, in the case of Steinbeck's novel, the cycle of drought.

Regeneration of the land does mean stable property, but on a more

primitive level it means the preservation of the world as a living

superorganism.

Clearly, primitive humans saw themselves as a smaller part of a

greater living thing than do their modern descendants. In other

65

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words, less civilized people more easily gave into their Dionysian

inclinations to succumb to the power of the natural world and to

delight in its organic anonymity. Contemporary Western humanity.

however, asserts its Apollonian individualism and perceives its

existence as something separate from and elevated above the banality

of nature. To a God Unknown reflects Steinbeck's interest in an

animistic theory that regards the entire world as a single, living

entity. In a letter to George Albee in 1933, Steinbeck calls this

system of thought his phalanx theory:

The phalanx has its own memory—memory of the great tides when the moon was close, memory of starvations when the food of the world was exhausted. Memory of methods when numbers of his units had to be destroyed for the good of the whole, memory of the history of itself. And the phalanx has emotions of which the unit man is incapable. (SLL 79)

Steinbeck's use of the term "phalanx" to describe his theory brings to

minds its use by Charles Fourier, an eigtheenth-century French social

Utopian.

In his writings. Fourier imagines a Utopia based on a social unit

called the Phalanx (99). comprised of 1500 to l600 individuals brought

together to work as a collective autonomy (235). Believing that the

rural-based Phalanx will transform civilization into a state of

harmony, he claims that its residents

will discover that in the activities and relations of the series there is never any cheating, and that people who are so dishonest and crude in civilization will become paragons of honesty and refinement in the series. When they have seen all this they will acquire an aversion for the household, the cities and the civilization of which they are now so fond. They will want to associate themselves in the series of a Phalanx and live in its edifice. (100)

66

\

ff Similarly, in To a God Unknown, Joseph intends to transform his land

in the remote valley of Nuestra Seftora into a social Utopia. In a

letter, he beckons his brothers in Vermont to join him, maintaining

that together they can establish a homestead in the midst of nature's

hospitable setting:

There's land untaken next to mine. Each of you can have a hundred and sixty acres, and then we'll have six hundred and forty acres all in once piece. The grass is deep and rich, and the soil wants only turning. No rocks, Thomas, to make your plough turn somersaults, no ledges sticking out. We'll make a new community here if you'll come. (18; ch. 4)

Joseph's settlement, therefore, resembles Fourier's Phalanx on a small

scale.

Benson maintains that Steinbeck's ideas about the phalanx came

out of C. V. Taylor's lectures in elementary zoology at Hopkins Marine

Station in the summer of 1923 (240). His theory probably also

developed out of his many readings in mythology, anthropology,

physics, history, and philosophy, as well as his discussions with Ed

Ricketts.* Among Steinbeck's sources is The Making of Humanity

(DeMott #123). in which Briffault maintains that

the conception of humanity as an organic whole is no metaphoric abstraction, no loose verbal expression, but a sober and accurate scientific fact. Humanity, as a whole, is the only organism which transmits the products of human evolution . . . . It is the vast organism, the human world, which makes [man] what he is, and determines to what stage of human evolution shall belong. (64)

In developing his theory, Steinbeck may have turned to literary models

as well. One of the books that he read is James Stephens' Crock of

Gold (DeMott #758), a highly philosophical and mythological novel that

poses the question, "is the Earth anything more than an extension of

67

^.

f^

our human consciousness, or are we. moving creatures, only projections

of the Earth's antennae?" (153). Stephens' novel features an often

nude Irish shepherdess named Caitilin who follows the sylvan deity Pan

around the countryside as he instructs her in amorality until she

leaves him to marry a greater god named Angus Og. At the dawn of her

wedding day. the shepherd girl awakes and sees herself anew as "part

of a mighty organism ordained, through whatever stress, to achieve its

oneness" (288). Many gods and fairies attend the wedding, where

These people though many were one. . . . and they moved also with the unity of one being . . . Through the many minds there went also one mind, correcting, commanding, so that in a moment the interchangeable and fluid became locked, and organic with a simultaneous understanding, a collective action—which was freedom. (295)

Steinbeck and Ricketts express a similar notion in The Log from the

Sea of Cortez, a scientific and philosophical treatise, in part, on

the phalanx theory: "Each member of the colony is an individual

animal, but the colony is another individual animal, not at all like

the sum of its individuals" (I65).

In his 1933 letter to Albee, Steinbeck reveals the following

about his phalanx theory: "I have written this theme over and over

again and did not know what I was writing. I found at least four

statements of it in the God [To a God UnknownY (SLL 8I). Although

Steinbeck describes a thunderstorm as "a huge black phalanx" (7), the

first true phalanx statement in To a God Unknown appears later in

Chapter 2:

All things about him, the soil, the cattle and the people were fertile, and Joseph was the source, the root of their fertility; his was the motivating lust. . . . Joseph did not think these things in his mind, but in his chest and in the corded muscles of his legs. It was the heritage

68

: ^

w of a race which for a million years had sucked at the breasts of the soil and co-habitated with the earth. (22)

The next such statement is Rama's description of Joseph in Chapter 12:

"I tell you this man is not a man, unless he is all men" (66),

identifying him as a repository of humanity in toto. The third

phalanx statement, in Chapter 16, describes the unity of the guitar

players at the New Year's fiesta: "the guitars sat on boxes in a

half-circle and played softly, bringing their rhythms together,

feeling for a mood, so that when the dancing started they might be one

passionate instrument" (87). The most poignant of the four

statements, however, appears in Chapter 21: Rama says to Joseph,

"You aren't aware of persons, Joseph; only people. You can't see

units, Joseph, only the whole" (134). Her statement reveals Joseph's

rejection of Apollonian individuation and his sole focus on Dionysian

anonymity, which allows him to experience a deeper participation with

the earth as a larger unit of consciousness, although he sacrifices

his own life in the process of Dionysian unselving.

In a key passage in the novel, Joseph reaches an understanding

that for the individual-oriented Apollonian man "the cycle is too

cruel" (107; ch. I8). His words call to mind the opening lines of

"Burial of the Dead" in Eliot's The Waste Land:

April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain, (lines 1-4)

Here, the return of rain does not lessen the cruelty of nature's cycle

because, in the end, everyone and everything must die. The life-

giving process is as delicate as the condition of the rock's mossy

coat, beneath which is cold stone. The rock in To a God Unknown is a

69

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stela to remind humanity that below the thin and fragile surface that

it knows as life exists a vast and insensitive sepulcher of all that

has come before, all that is, and all that will come to be.

All too painfully, Joseph experiences the darker side of the

rock's dual nature when Elizabeth falls from it to her death. Earlier

in the novel, she instinctively visits the grove during her pregnancy,

an act that connects her to the primitive ways of Juanito's native

American ancestors. Similarly, Eliade explains that as late as the

turn of the twentieth century, European peasants believed that women

who rubbed or slid against or sat on a menhir would become fertile

(117). They attributed this condition to their ancestors' spirits,

which resided in the stone and furnished vitality and power to their

living descendants (II8). Elizabeth's experience at the stone,

however, is ultimately a frightening one because the rock reminds her

of "how her father said his ancestors a thousand years ago followed

the Druidic way" (100; ch. 17). Having established this character as

a descendant of the Druids, Steinbeck generates a connection between

the rock and "the stone of Destiny," one of the four talismanic

treasures of the Irish race that correspond "with single accuracy to

those of the Grail castle" (Weston, QHG 76). While confessing about

her excursion to Joseph, she recounts strange sensations coming from

the rock: "It seemed to be giving me something I needed. . . . While

I sat there I went into the rock. The little stream was flowing out

of me and I was the rock, and the rock was--I don't know--the rock was

the strongest dearest thing in the world" (122-23; ch. 21). The

feeling of euphoric oneness, however, changes: "Something evil came

into it. . . . Something malicious was in the glade, something that

70

wanted to destroy me. I ran away. I thought it was after me, that

great crouched rock, and when I got outside. I prayed. Oh, I prayed a

long time" (123). The food- and life-giving associations of the moss-

covered rock are offset by its other properties. Indicative of the

ecstasy and destruction that comprise Dionysian duality, it resembles

both the grail stone and the "large stone slab" on which the old man

offers the living to the sun.

The "something evil" that Elizabeth fears is death, the ultimate

threat to every human being; "being." after all. most basically

connotes existing, or being alive. She perceives "being" in the

Christian monadic sense, rejecting the Nietzschean-Dionysian view that

the essential life-essence lies beyond the appearance of being.

Frazer claims that "the fear of the human dead [is] . . . probably the

most powerful force in the making of primitive religion" (vii). The

uncertainty of death compels man to believe in magic and to worship

trees and to offer living sacrifices to the sun. It is like the

Grail, about which Steinbeck would write in I96I, "It's a promise that

skips ahead and it never fails to draw us on. So it is that I would

greatly prefer to die in the middle of a sentence in the middle of a

book and so leave it as all life must be—unfinished" (DeMott, SR

Ixv). Had Steinbeck thought this idea thirty years earlier, perhaps

Elizabeth would have died in the middle, rather than at the end. of

her own sentence. "I'll climb up on its back and tame it" (128; ch.

21). But she gets no opportunity to attain her last goal in life—to

tame the rock whose shape she regards "as evil as a crouched animal

and as gross as a shaggy goat" (100; ch. 17). Wells explains why

humans experience feelings such as Elizabeth's toward the rock:

71

"Primitive man probably thought very much as a child thinks, that is

to say in a series of imaginative pictures. He conjured up images or

images presented themselves to his mind, and he acted in accordance

with the emotions they aroused" (60). Elizabeth's imagination, then,

manufactures her fear, which she attempts to master by climbing on the

rock. Unable, however, to get a firm footing on its back, she falls

to her death. In an instant, Elizabeth's life goes unfinished, and

Joseph thinks, "It was too simple, too easy, too quick" (128). Her

life ends at the base of the rock, but his ends on top of it—a

subtle, yet symbolically significant difference.

At the moment of his own death, Joseph perceives himself as the

union of the earth and the heavens. He experiences a final sense of

oneness with all-embracing life—"I am the land . . . and I am the

rain. The grass will grow out of me in a little while" (179; ch. 25).

His identification with the rain brings to mind the ancient Egyptians'

association of the dead Osiris, who was regarded as the ultimate

fertilizing force, with the annual rising of the Nile. As he is

dying, Joseph experiences a connection with the divine although soon

he will become like the cold and indifferent rock covered by a coat of

living moss. Soon he will become a part of the earth-cemetery on

which the living will continue to scamper and scramble. He undergoes

what Nietzsche calls the "mystical process of unselving" (BT 24), and

at the moment of his death, "the storm thickened, and covered the

world with darkness, and with the rush of waters" (179). The rain

begins to fall, signifying the "swiftly rising Dionysiac tide" (65).

As Eliade maintains, Dionysus represents the "king of the new age" and

therefore is connected to "a periodic regeneration of the world"

72

n (2: 284). By sacrificing his own life on the altar of a god

forgotten, Joseph functions as a prophet-signal of a new cycle, the

coming Dionysian resurgence that Steinbeck hopes to inspire

novelistically because he perceives it as essential to save

contemporary humanity from a stagnant and failing society.

73

Notes

^ Documentation of Frazer's The Golden Bough refers to the I985 Collier-Macmillan edition unless otherwise specified in the text as references to the 1922 Macmillan edition.

2 See Steinbeck's description of Pacific Grove in Sweet Thursday (54), which is quoted in the present study (I5I).

3 This and all future discussions of the significance of the winter and summer solstices in the present study refer to those occurrences taking place in the Northern Hemisphere. Therefore, the reader must keep in mind the fact that the shortest and longest days of the year, as discussed in the various literature cited, are perceived from a Eurocentric point of view.

^ In Steinbeck's Reading, DeMott writes: "What Steinbeck unearthed from these seemingly desparate sources was 'gratifying': Huntington, Spengler, Ouspenski, Jung, Briffault, Schrodinger, Planck, Bohr, Einstein and Heisenberg, he reported to Carlton Sheffield, 'have all started heading in the same direction . . . toward my thesis. This in itself would indicate the beginning of a new phalanx or group unit'" (xxvii). Steinbeck's statement is taken from a letter dated June 30, 1933, which is part of the Stanford University Library collection; however, it does not appear in the letter's published version in Steinbeck: A Life in Letters. For more on Steinbeck's theory, see two of his published letters: one to Sheffield, dated June 21, 1933 (SLL, 74-77), and the other to George Albee, also of 1933 (79-82). In addition, Nietzsche seems a likely source for Steinbeck's ideas. See, for instance, his discussion of the "mystical experience of the collective" in The Birth of Tragedy (24).

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CHAPTER III

THE QUESTION OF DEITY IDENTITY: POLYTHEISM IN

TO A GOD UNKNOWN

The opening scene in To a God Unknown shows the completion of one

cycle and the beginning of another. At the end of the harvest season,

the young and robust Joseph Wayne informs his father that he has

decided to head out West in the hope of homesteading his own land

rather than remaining on his family's farm. The older and physically

"waning" Wayne bestows the patriarchal blessing on his favorite,

though not eldest, son and shortly thereafter Joseph begins his

adventure into a world of the unknown. Wittingly, he relinquishes the

comfort, safety, and familiarity of his family's land in Vermont to

forge a new path that takes him on an errand into the wilderness of

California. Joseph terminates his membership in a pre-existing

community amidst the civilized East and ventures forth to establish

his own order in the West. Outside the pale of civilization, he forms

a settlement that represents a new society at its point of origin in a

remote land where ideological as well as geographical barriers

separate him from mainstream culture.

Steinbeck sets the novel in 1903, a time when most Americans were

unfamiliar with the radio and the automobile, two modern innovations

that would soon bring about the end of the frontier stage in the

history of the United States. Without these new technologies of the

twentieth century, Joseph is limited in his interaction with the

outside world to his contacts with residents of the nearby Indian

village of Nuestra Seftora. The small community is a marginal society

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in that it represents the point at which two cultures intersect. It

signifies the meeting place of savagery and civilization, as exhibited

by its blend of pagan and Christian elements. The only authority

figure in the entire landscape of Steinbeck's novel is Father Angelo,

who, like the European culture that he represents in his role as

Catholic priest, perceives that he is morally superior to the native

people. He regards his parishioners as chronic sinners because they

periodically revert to pagan acts of dancing, mud-wallowing, public

nudity, and orgiastic sex—behavior that is suggestive of the

Dionysian goat dance and its "predisposition to mischief and

licentiousness, and a great phallic potency" (Leach 456).

The Indians, however, do not consider these things that they do

to be immoral. Their actions are in response to something that to

them is very sacred: the cyclic regeneration that comes from the

life-sustaining rains that return to their land each year. According

to Briffault, one of Steinbeck's most significant sources on

comparative mythology and ancient religious practices, early peoples

relied on homeopathic magic to ensure the fertility of their soil

(Mothers 380). Therefore, promiscuity was an important element in

regeneration ceremonies, which explains why nudity played a prominent

role in all of their rain-making activities (38O-8I). The Catholic

priest takes offense with the villagers' display of ancient worship

and all the more because their revelry takes place in the presence of

the biblical God, whose near-forgotten church is the structural

foundation of their primitive and secluded community:

The huts of Indians clustered about the mud walls of the church, and although the church was often vacant now and its saints were worn and part of its tile roof lay in a shattered heap on the

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ground, and although the bells were broken, the Mexican Indians still lived near about and held their festivals, danced La Jota on the packed earth and slept in the sun. (4; ch. 2)

In this passage, Steinbeck portrays a group of people who express a

greater faith in the power of nature, as evidenced by its cult-like

activities, than in the Christian religion that it has all but

abandoned except for the presence of the priest and the crumbling

remains of his church.

Disconnected from modern civilization, the inhabitants of Nuestra

Seftora align themselves with the only environment that their people

have known for many generations. Therefore, the mysterious and

visually dynamic forces of nature signify the mainspring of their

spirituality rather than Father Angelo's petrifactio icon of a man

hanging lifelessly on a cross. Juanito, for example, perceives the

crucifix in an Indian way, which defeats its intended Christian

meaning: "He saw the crucified Christ hanging on His cross, dead and

stained with blood. There was no pain in His face, now He was dead,

but only disappointment and perplexity, and over these, an infinite

weariness. Jesus was dead and the Life was finished" (168; ch. 24).

Juanito's mental description of the crucifix hanging in the crumbling

church of Nuestra Seftora reveals the way in which the Indians identify

with Christ. Instead of perceiving him as a savior, they regard him

as a victim in the hands of his crucifiers, much in the same way that

they regard themselves as victims of an intrusive culture that

replaced the nature religion of their ancestors with an artificially

ordered process. The Indians respond to the customs of the new

culture with the same feelings of disappointment, perplexity, and

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weariness. To them, the new culture threatens to bring about the

death of their own way of life.

A race that has been adulterated by European blood, the Indians

in To a God Unknown embrace the culture of the more primitive side of

their lineage despite the fact that their native forebearers were

forced by their vanquishers to accept Christianity. In Idols Behind

Altars (DeMott #121), a book that Steinbeck borrowed from Ed Ricketts'

personal library and that DeMott identifies as among Ricketts'

"desiderata" (SR 18), Anita Brenner explains that, after their defeat

by the Spanish, Mexican Indians who owned idols were severely punished

by the Spanish. Therefore,

Led by their chieftains and priests, they hid the gods in habitual private places. They shifted them back to the original sources: pushed them into caves, dropped them in lakes, covered them in growing vines. They buried them deep in granaries and between bundles of maize in the fields. The little ones they rolled in petates, dropped in cooking-pots and baskets, put in crevices, tree trunks, and puddles of large stones. (136)

The Indians returned the images of their gods to nature itself, which

explains why Steinbeck depicts the Indians in To a God Unknown as

attracted to the forces of nature, evidenced by their continued visits

to the secluded and sacred pine grove of their progenitors as well as

their seasonal celebrations. Such actions demonstrate that nature

cults survived the invasion of Christianity. As Camille Paglia

notes, "Historiography's most glaring error has been its assertion

that Judeo-Christianity defeated paganism" (25).

Father Angelo puts up with some of his congregation's non-

Christian practices to avoid alienating them. For example, he

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tolerates their annual New Year's fiesta because, as he explains to

Joseph,

It is this way: The Devil has owned this country for many thousands of years, Christ for a very few. And as in a newly conquered nation, the old customs are practiced a long time, sometimes secretly and sometimes changing slightly to comply with the tenor of the new rule, so here, my son, some of the old habits persist, even under the dominion of Christ. (86; ch. 16)

It is significant to note that Father Angelo's use of the word "owned"

in this passage suggests that a capitalist substructure exists within

Christianity, which therefore reflects the American Puritan notion

that material gain is connected to spiritual salvation. He believes

that a campaign of accommodation serves his long-term objective of

gaining the Indians' loyalty and therefore determining the course of

their lives. It is very likely that Steinbeck relied on Brenner's

book as a source for Father Angelo's view. Brenner explains that even

though centuries have passed since the Spanish Conquest of the New

World, the native Mexicans have continued to worship their own ancient

gods in the guise of Christianity. Because their Catholic conquerors

strictly forbade the possession of idols, on occasion the Indians have

hidden them inside Christian altars as acts of subversion. Brenner

relates the story of a certain incident in which an altar cracked in a

Catholic church in Mexico: "In the course of repairs an idol nearly a

yard high was found under the feet of Christ. The idol was carted to

a museum; whereupon promptly, devotion ceased" (144). This account,

which provided the inspiration for the title of Brenner's book. Idols

Behind Altars, sheds light on the dynamics between Christianity and

paganism in To a God Unknown and explains why Father Angelo has little

success in maintaining the order of the Church in Nuestra Seftora.

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Besides his competition with the gods of the villagers'

ancestors. Father Angelo's uncertain authority is moreover imperiled

by the new figure who transcends Christianity's suppression of human

nature. Joseph breaks through the boundaries of the Christian

religion, which substitutes an elusive and transcendental world for

the reality of nature and which transfers authorship and authority

exclusively to a distant deity whose interests are interpreted and

overseen through the institution of the Church. His name meaning "he

shall add" (Carole Potter 249), Joseph brings together various

fragments of ancient beliefs and practices that have lost their

meaning for humankind through the ongoing process of modernization,

and out of them he develops a religious philosophy that opposes

Christianity's. Joseph's need to explore religious alternatives

suggests that Christianity no longer provides a viable mythos for

society. As Spengler notes, the failure of a culture's religion

indicates that the culture has reached a state of inward decay, a

phase which he defines as "civilization" (24). Moreover, he

maintains,

Civilizations are the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion, intellectual age and the stone-built, petrifying world-city following mother-earth and the spiritual childhood of Doric and Gothic. They are an end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity reached again and again. (24)

Thus the point at which a culture becomes a civilization is the point

at which it begins to decay. The purpose of a culture's religion is

to guide it to the state of fulfillment; therefore, when a culture

reaches this state, its religion becomes obsolete.

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}

To a God Unknown focuses on the religious struggle of a

culture-turned-civilization. Some characters explore an unfamiliar

religion (i.e.. the "unknown" suggested by the novel's title), while

Joseph's brother Burton and Father Angelo tenaciously hold on to

different factions of the old (i.e.. Protestantism and Catholicism).

A letter to Robert Ballou discloses Steinbeck's intention: "The title

will be To a God Unknown. . . . The unknown is this case meaning

'Unexplored'" (SLL 67), which links Joseph to another explorer, Henry

Morgan in Steinbeck's first novel. Cup of Gold.^ A newcomer to the

dramatic wilderness, Joseph explores the primitive and unfamiliar

religion of the Indian counterculture and its ancient worship site,

the moss-covered rock in the secluded pine grove. He does so in an

effort to discover its hidden truths about life rather than exhausting

the main current of religion through an attempt to revive it. In

Transformations of Myth Through Time, Campbell points out that "God is

simply our own notion of something that is symbolic of transcendence

and mystery" (I6). Myth, therefore, provides an explanation of the

underlying order of the world. Steinbeck indicates that Joseph

explores an unknown myth because the known one no longer works.

In another letter to his publisher, Steinbeck states: "Boileau

. . . insisted that only gods, kings, and heroes were worth writing

about. I firmly believe that. The detailed accounts of the lives of

clerks don't interest me much, unless, of course, the clerk breaks

into heroism" (SLL 69).^ Steinbeck depicts Joseph as a hero because

he breaks away from a declining cultural pattern; therefore, he

reveals his literary aim to transcend Spengler's predestiny of Western

Culture. Central to the conventional American myth is the belief that

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Christianity is the substance that holds its culture together, yet in

To a God Unknown Steinbeck shows the Church literally falling apart.

To save the West, he intimates that America's mythological basis must

be replaced by one that will better keep up with modernization and

provide a cohesive cultural vision. Joseph's actions signify an

attempt to develop one.

Joseph's breaking out of a declining pattern, however, poses a

great challenge not only for himself, but also for a number of other

characters who interpret his heroism as heresy or even mistake it for

godhood. In fact, Joseph serves some of the members of the community

as the earthly avatar of the unknown god, much in the same way that

the giant oak serves Joseph as the reincarnation of his father. Some

of them perceive Joseph's heroic attributes to be those of a man-god,

a term which Frazer defines as "a human being endowed with divine or

supernatural powers" (106). According to Frazer, primitive humans

expected the king or tribal leader to provide rain and sunshine when

those things were needed because they regarded the natural and the

supernatural as one and the same world (11). In The Mothers,

Briffault concurs that the savage mind made no differentiation between

men and gods (322). Therefore, a primitive clan regarded its leader

as the embodiment of the ancestral god himself, who

has a specific function, closely related to his original totemic character: rain-making. Whatever may be the sources of a people's food supply, the most important factor determining its abundance is the weather, and especially the rainfall. . . . The rain from heaven has been the supreme determinant of the history of humanity. The great movements of pre-history, which have determined the present distribution of human races, took place mainly, if not solely, under the urge of the fatal drought. (270)

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f

Thus an early society believed that its fate was tied directly to the

success or failure of its leader, the man-god, in his capacity as the

provider of rain.

In Steinbeck's novel, all of the primary characters perceive

Joseph in dissimilar ways, which is indicative of an underlying

perspectivism that threatens the sense of unity within their society.

They attempt to classify Joseph's actions into patterns that they can

understand. Burton, for instance, considers his brother a blasphemer

of Christianity. Because he uses the Bible as his sole authority, he

identifies Joseph with the pagan idolaters of the Old Testament. In

contrast, Juanito, because he is Indian, regards Joseph as a man

trying to discover the ancient mysteries of life through primitive

nature worship. Three other characters who represent fragmented views

of Western culture identify Joseph as a man-god; each, however,

interprets him in a different context. Joseph's sister-in-law Rama

sees him as a primitive man-god of a nature cult; Elizabeth

comprehends her husband as a contemporary symbol of Christ, ironically

through which she discovers her true, pagan nature; and Father Angelo

fears the newcomer as an anti-Christ. Steinbeck's presentation of

these contradictory views of Joseph is rather disconcerting at times,

and most likely it is responsible for some of the novel's criticism.

For instance, Levant complains, "The difficulty lies mainly . . . in

Steinbeck's conception of the central character" whose "ultimate role

as a priest or god of nature emerges only at the conclusion" (24).

The present study maintains that Steinbeck intentionally presents

Joseph as a personal expression of various characters to emphasize

their cultural division.

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Rama informs Elizabeth on their first evening together of her

feelings toward Joseph: "I will worship him, and there's no need of a

return in that. And you will worship him, too, with no return" (67;

ch. 12). Elizabeth does worship her husband, but within her

interpretation of Christianity instead of nature. "Rama" is the name

of a man-god, the avatar of the Hindu deity Vishnu, who, according to

Eliade. "periodically destroys the universe at the end of each cosmic

cycle" (2: 246). The purpose of Vishnu as the destroyer of old forms

is to make way for the creation of new ones, which suggests that

Steinbeck chose the name "Rama" as a conscious indication of his

artistic aim to inspire a remythologization that he deems necessary to

save his culture. "Rama" also means "bough" in Spanish, which

establishes her affiliation specifically with Joseph's oak tree as

well as with primitive nature cults in general by alluding to the

title of Frazer's book on comparative religion. To Rama, Joseph is

more than a property owner and even more than the ranch's protective

patriarch. She describes the forces of the natural world that Joseph

possesses:

Perhaps a godling lives on earth now and then. Joseph has strength beyond vision of shattering, he has the calm of mountains, and his emotion is as wild and fierce and sharp as the lightning and just as reasonless as far as I can see or know. When you are away from him, try thinking of him and you'll see what I mean. His figure will grow huge, until it tops the mountains, and his force will be like the irresistible plunging of the wind. . . . You cannot think of Joseph dying. He is eternal. (66; ch. 12)

Joseph fulfills Rama's desire for a man-god. Frazer indicates that,

typically, the man-god is deemed proficient in sympathetic magic (12);

therefore, his own physical and emotional states, indicative of the

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land's condition, must remain sound for the land to prosper. That is

to say, it is essential for the man-god to remain youthful.

Paradoxically, however, he can only achieve eternal youth through the

act of dying a premature death. "The man-god," Frazer states, "must

be killed as soon as he shows symptoms that his powers are beginning

to fail" (309) because, if he is allowed to grow old, his natural

physical decay will bring about the decay of the world (310). Old age

heralds man's fatal loss of control to the greater forces of nature,

whereas youth signifies invincibility and infinite possibility, which

explains why throughout history the man-god is more often than not

immortalized as young and robust. His early achievement in status is

usually affirmed by an early death. Part and parcel of his being

identified as a man-god, Joseph is expected to comply with the fatal

destiny patterned by historical predecessors.

One such model is Christ, the man-god that Elizabeth identifies

with Joseph. Her name means "consecrated to God" (Carole Potter 246),

which is ironic because she becomes, instead, consecrated to Joseph

through matrimony and unsuspectingly to Joseph's "God Unknown" in a

prior ceremony. Before their nuptials, Elizabeth visits the ranch and

sees the giant oak for the first time. When she asks her future

husband if she may climb his tree, a strange look comes over his face,

and he responds in the following way:

Joseph moved quickly toward her and held out his hand. "You must climb the tree, Elizabeth. I want you to. Here, I'll help you." He cupped his hands for her foot and steadied her until she sat in the crotch from which the great limbs grew. And when he saw how she fitted in the hollow and how the grey arms guarded her, "I'm glad, Elizabeth," he cried. . . . "I am glad that you are sitting in my tree. A moment back I thought I saw that my tree loved you." (46; ch. 9)

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9

This scene reveals Joseph performing a ceremony that establishes a

relationship between his oak tree and his future bride. Later in the

novel, he repeats this act when he puts their infant son in the crotch

of the tree. Both times his actions signify pagan fertility rites.

In the case of his son, Joseph wants to extend the patriarchal

blessing of fertility that he himself receives when he places his own

hand on his father's genitals. Steinbeck's use of the word "crotch"

in conjunction with the tree establishes this affiliation.

In the case of his bride-to-be, Joseph wants to ensure the god's

blessing of fertility on their future marriage. In The Mothers,

Briffault discusses this sacred ritual, which has been practiced

widely throughout the East, central Africa, the Americas, and

elsewhere:

In many cultures it is regarded as essential that all women should have connection with the deity at least once in their lives to ensure fertility and, in particular, before their human marriage. Such connection may take place by marriage to an image of the god, often with defloration by a sacred lingam. (383)

Based on this primitive ritual, Joseph's placing Elizabeth in the tree

signifies her consecration to the "God Unknown." Her physical contact

with the tree's crotch implies her symbolic defloration, which is

intended to make her future union with Joseph a fruitful one.

Furthermore, the fact that this ritual involves the giant oak

indicates that Steinbeck is also incorporating Frazer's insistence

that "the power of blessing women with offspring is a special

attribute of tree-spirits" (75^).

Elizabeth's marriage to Joseph confirms her new religious

affiliation and therefore severs her ties to Christianity. She

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perceives Joseph, in fact, as a replacement for Christ. During their

wedding ceremony, "when she drew a picture of the Christ in her mind,

he had the face, the youthful beard, the piercing puzzled eyes of

Joseph, who stood beside her" (47; ch. 10). The ceremony completed,

she confesses to herself, "I'm praying to my own husband" (48). She

becomes an antithesis of the "bride of Christ"--a figurative term used

in the New Testament to describe Christ's church. On their journey to

the ranch, the couple reaches the pass, which geographically separates

the bride from her old life as well as metaphorically consummates her

marriage to Joseph. It is here that Joseph reveals his own sense of

identification with the New Testament god: "Christ nailed up might be

more than a symbol of all pain. He might in very truth contain all

pain. And a man standing on a hilltop with his arms outstretched, a

symbol of the symbol, he too might be a reservoir of all the pain that

ever was" (52),

Joseph understands Christ in an abstract, figurative sense, by

which he associates the Nazarene with the painful side of the human

condition. He concentrates on Christ's internal "reservoir" of angst.

Water, the traditional symbol of life, becomes an emblem of suffering

for Joseph because the Indian's prophecy of the returning drought

assures his need to be a vessel of pain. Since Joseph regards Christ

as a masochistic symbol, it is not surprising that Elizabeth, who

thinks of Joseph as a physical representation of Christ, becomes

fearful and regards her metaphorical rebirth with reluctance. She

ascertains that she will become a new person as Joseph guides her

through the birth-canal-like pass to an unknown land: "I'll have to

go, but I'll be leaving myself behind. I'll think of myself standing

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here looking through at the new one who will be on the other side"

(53). Some Christian sects stress that a new follower in Christ is

"born again." The act of Christian salvation therefore denounces the

view that man is a product of nature, that he is born out of this

world; rather, it promotes the notion that man is a product of God,

that he is a spiritual being who has been transplanted into the alien

soil of the earth. Steinbeck reverses the Christian process of born-

again redemption, Elizabeth is reborn out of the world of

Christianity and into the world of nature and the pagan worship of it.

Having crossed the threshold that separates her old life from her

new one, Elizabeth experiences a foreshadowing sensation of "being

lost" (a common metaphor that Christians use to describe non-

Christians) on their journey to the ranch during a crepuscular

interlude. She explains this concern to Joseph:

I mean there's a danger of being lost, , . , I thought I suddenly felt myself spreading and dissipating like a cloud, mixing with everything around me. It was a good feeling, Joseph, And then the owl went over, and I was afraid that if I mixed too much with the hills I might never be able to collapse into Elizabeth again. (57; ch.

11)

Because it is associated with the nocturnal world, the owl in this

passage is a harbinger of the unknown, of unconscious darkness, of

anonymity. Its appearance at twilight is a sudden reminder to

Elizabeth that the bliss of nature's all-embracingness comes at a

price--the loss of her conscious identity as Elizabeth. Shortly

thereafter she encounters another image of death. On the couple's

arrival at the Wayne ranch, they learn that Joseph's youngest brother,

Benjy. has been fatally stabbed. Before the marriage, Elizabeth is

secretly in love with Benjy, who, as a faceless figure, serenades her

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from the street. Therefore, his death signifies an end to the

yearnings of her old life and marks the completion of her being

concecrated to Joseph.

Steinbeck complicates the relationship between Joseph and Christ

by introducing the image of a goat, an animal with unholy associations

in the New Testament. Christ calls himself "the good shepherd" (John

10:11) and his followers his sheep (21:17); moreover, he prophesies

one day to separate the righteous from the wicked "as a shepherd

divideth his sheep from the goats" (Matt. 25:32). Joseph, though, is

attracted to the goat. Its image mesmerizes him in the glowing and

fading light (which is from the same sunset that hypnotizes Elizabeth

and enables her to experience a sense of oneness with the earth):

A black cloud sailed in from the ocean and rested on the ridge, and Joseph's thought made it a black goat's head. He could see the yellow, slanting eyes, wise and ironic, and the curved horns. He thought, "I know that it is really there, the goat resting his chin on a mountain range and staring in on the valley. He should be there. Something I've read or something I've been told makes it a fitting thing that a goat should come out of the ocean." He was endowed with the power to create things as substantial as the earth. "If I will admit the goat is there, it will be there. And I will have made it. This goat is important," he thought, (57)

Joseph considers it appropriate for a goat to come out of the ocean

because it is one of the chief symbols of Dionysus, who, after having

drowned presumably at the bottom of the sea, "reappears--as in the

Anthesteria festival—in a ship on the waves" (Eliade 1: 359).

Joseph's thought about the goat coming out of the ocean is undoubtedly

a reference to Dionysus. Briffault maintains that even though

Dionysus is commonly considered to be much younger than the Olympian

gods, he is actually a god of great antiquity, having appeared "in

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every region of Greece in the most primitive strata of ideas" (Mothers

372), Thus he claims that it is more accurate to say "that Olympian

religion was a late importation into Dionysian cults" (372).

The image of a goat resurfaces two more times in the novel.

The next occurs when Rama tells a story in which "[h]er father had

seen a fiery goat crossing the Carmel Valley one night at dusk" (76;

ch. 14). This description is virtually identical to Joseph's vision

of the Dionysian goat overlooking the valley of Nuestra Seftora on his

wedding day in the evening twilight. Moreover, it is significant to

note that Rama tells this story during one of the interactions among

the Wayne family women—Rama, Elizabeth, and Alice—and their

children, Steinbeck describes these gatherings, which occur in the

absence of the men, as "good times, filled with mystery and ritual"

(76), Each Wednesday, the women meet to form a triangle, a shape

suggesting holy trinities, such as the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost of

Christianity as well as Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva of the Hindu faith.

Briffault mentions many more mythological threesomes, including "the

three Charities, the three Horai, the three Syrens, the three

Hesperides, [and] the three Erinyes" (296-97). His study of

comparative societies and their religions is based on the theory that

lunar superstitions "constitute the germ of a cosmic religion" (319).

He maintains that moon worship is the oldest form of religion and that

many younger religions are derived from it, evidenced by their triadic

nature because "lunar deities are usually threefold. Among uncultured

people the waxing, the full and waning moons had three different names

and were conceived as three different persons" (296). Briffault

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asserts that in the development of lunar worship, humans regarded the

moon as the husband of all women (294).

In regard to the female gatherings in To a God Unknown, it is

important to note that Briffault titles his work ''The Mothers" because

his underlying claim is that human societies, at least in their

primitive stages, were gynaecocracies, or matriarchal societies:

In our inquiry we shall start from the fact that primitive societies approximate more closely to animal groups in structure than advanced ones, and their character is a consequence of this. In animals there is nothing corresponding to a patriarchal social group—the male has little or no share in the formation or maintenance of the animal family, and is often absent from it. If human society developed out of such groups, it must have had its origin in an association which represented female instincts only, and human culture must have been moulded in the first instance not by the fierce passions of hunters battling for food and women but by the instincts of the mother, (28)

In light of Briffault's influence on Steinbeck, the women's sitting in

a triangle that encloses the children represents an ancient

configuration and indicates that what occurs while they are within it

is sacred. Furthermore, it undermines the notion advanced in the

Bible that early societies were patriarchal in nature. The fact that

Rama tells this story to the children in the sacred family triangle

shows that it is a part of the mythology that binds their clan

together, and it is to be passed down from generation to generation

through the females. Moreover, it reveals that a connection exists

between the trio of Wayne women and Dionysus for two reasons that are

provided in The Mothers: because he has a feminine character and

therefore is associated with female cults (372), and because he is a

moon-god (300),

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The last image of a goat appears during Elizabeth's solitary

visit to the ancient Indian grove. She feels strangely drawn to the

rock whose mossy covering "was as thick as fur" (99; ch, 17),

Steinbeck describes her encounter with it as follows: "Her eyes

centered upon the rock and her mind wrestled with its suggestive

shape, 'Some place I've seen this thing,' she thought, 'I must have

known it was here, else why did I come straight to it?'" (99).

Elizabeth's mind becomes entranced and wanders across vague memories

until she hears a rustling in the grove that startles her. At this

point, she returns her focus to the rock and imagines "that its shape

was as evil as a crouched animal and as gross as a shaggy goat" (100).

Her response to the goat's image is similar to her earlier reaction to

the twilit view of the Nuestra Seftora Valley, with initial, euphoric

communion with the land supplanted by intense fear of losing her

monadic Christian identity as one who exists separately and apart from

the natural world. Fleeing from the rock, she prays to Christ, whom

she no doubt visualizes as Joseph: "Guard me against the ancient

things in my blood" (111; ch, 17). Steinbeck connects "the Druidic

way" (100) of her primitive ancestors to her attraction to the

Dionysian image of the goat, thereby intimating that Elizabeth is

really just a goat in sheep's clothing,3 The denial of her true,

maenadian nature is the implicit cause of Elizabeth's obsession to

dominate the rock from which she falls to her death.

In addition to his incorporation of the goat's image, Steinbeck's

reliance on several details that appear in The Mothers indicates that

he patterned his "God Unknown" after Dionysus to a substantial degree,

Briffault reveals, for instance, that followers of Dionysus credited

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him as the inventor of agriculture (372), which ties him to Joseph's

efforts to settle an uncultivated land. Furthermore, Briffault

indicates that Dionysus' worshipers represented him as several

objects—other than the goat—that Steinbeck also employs in the

novel: the oak and the pine trees (373) of the Indian grove as well

as the bull (373) that guards the moss-covered stone. The

anthropologist also asserts that, as a moon-god, Dionysus was known as

"the Lord of generation and of moisture" (374), which is explained by

the fact that primitive humans throughout the world have regarded the

moon as the "cause of rains," the "ruler over waters," and "the

governess of floods" (304), These details link him to the

supplications of Joseph in his role as rain-maker. As well, Briffault

claims, "All fertility is held to be derived from the moon, which may

be represented by a tree or stone" (339). This statement suggests

that the giant oak and the stone in the Indian grove in To a God

Unknown represent a moon-god, such as Dionysus, The stone's covering

of moss, which signifies "maternal love" (Carole Potter 258), also

reflects Briffault's assertion that Dionysus had a feminine nature,

evidenced by the fact that his human image as well as his priests wore

women's clothing (372),

Other details from The Mothers that connect Steinbeck's unnamed

deity to the lunar god of madness include Briffault's claim that

"[t]he moon occupied the central place in the Vedic belief and cults"

(373), thus revealing why Steinbeck refers to a Vedic hymn in his

title and epigraph, Briffault also points out that solar cults are

derived from the more ancient worship of the moon and that sun gods

often disclose their origin in their continuation of the lunar

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function (320), That is to say, some sun gods die a periodic death

and rise after three days that signify the three interlunar days of

the new moon when it is hidden from view between cycles (320), In

regard to Steinbeck's novel, this claim brings to mind Christianity in

particular because Christ, "the Sun of righteousness" (Mai. 4:2),

rises from the dead after three days. It is also significant to note

that the lunar cycle determines the date on which Christians observe

the resurrection of Christ, According to The Proposed Book of Common

Prayer, to which the Episcopal Church refers as a guide for conducting

all religious activities, "Easter Day is always the Sunday after the

first full moon that occurs on or after the spring equinox on March

21" (880).

The relationship between solar and lunar cults, as advanced by

Briffault in his study, explains why Joseph rejects the old man's

religion. Sun worship is only an imitation of the older religion that

Joseph is trying to uncover. As Nietzsche notes in regard to the

ancient Greek who worshiped Apollo, "his Apollonian consciousness was

but a thin veil hiding from him the whole Dionysiac realm" (BT 28).

Joseph's last name therefore identifies him with the waning moon as

well as the declining sun, the latter being a function of the former.

Moreover, Briffault points out that before the astronomical invention

of the solar year, the moon was the only reliable measurement of time

and thus it "stands for the conception of fate or destiny" (295),

which indicates that the moon, as represented by Dionysus, is

connected to the destiny of Western Culture in Steinbeck's allegory.

Briffault implies that Dionysus was a god of cultural synthesis

because the primitive pre-Olympian gods "became unified under the name

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Dionysus" (373). In other words, Dionysus was the force that united

an ancient, divided culture. For all of these reasons, it is almost

certain that Steinbeck modeled his "Unknown God" primarily after

Dionysus.

Besides its direct connection to Dionysus, To a God Unknown

brings to mind Friedrich Nietzsche, who identifies himself as "the

last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus" (120-21) in the closing

lines of Twilight of the Idols and who calls Christianity's concept of

God "the low-water mark in the descending development of the God type"

in The Anti-Christ (I38). Moreover, Nietzsche suggests that

Christieinity advocates cultural decline because it is a faith that

"has waged war to the death against . . . the precondition of every

elevation, every increase in culture" (AC I66). To Nietzsche,

Christianity's development over a period of almost two thousand years

is an extended pattern of cultural decline; therefore, his writings

imply that breaking away from Christianity's repressive dogma will

break Western culture's pattern of decline, which is also Steinbeck's

message in To a God Unknown.

DeMott lists Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra (DeMott #605) as

a book with which Steinbeck was familiar. Steinbeck obviously

considered Nietzsche as an important philosopher, for he includes

Nietzsche among the writers who influenced the thinking of Jim Nolan,

his protagonist in his 1936 novel, In Dubious Battle (8; ch. 1). For

purposes of the present study, it is interesting to note that, at the

beginning of his own writing career, Nietzsche composed a poem

entitled "Dem unbekannten Gott," or "To the Unknown God":

Once more, before I wander on and turn my glance forward,

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I lift up my hands to you in loneliness— you, to whom I flee, to whom in the deepest depths of my heart I have solemnly consecrated alters so that your voice might summon me again.

On them glows, deeply inscribed, the word: To the unknown god I am his, although until this hour I've remained in the wicked horde: I am his—and I feel the bonds that pull me down in my struggle and, would I flee, force me into his service.

I want to know you. Unknown One, you who have reached deep into my soul, into my life like the gust of a storm, you incomprehensible yet related one! I want to know you, even serve you, (25-6)

In The Poetry of Friedrich Nietzsche, Philip Grundlehner argues that

the namelessness of Nietzsche's god "indicates its individual,

undogmatic essence" (29), In Irrational Man: A Study in Existential

Philosophy, however, William Barrett claims that the poet "mistakenly

took [the "Unknown One"] for Dionysus" (l86), Nietzsche himself

identifies his unknown god with Dionysus in The Birth of Tragedy, in

which he, "the disciple of an unrecognized god," is "rife with

questions, experiences, secrets, all of which had the name Dionysos

attached to them like a question mark" (7), He explains that he

selects the name of Dionysus for want of a better name--"for who can

tell the real name of the AntiChrist?" (11). Thus Nietzsche

associates the name of Dionysus with the "unrecognized god" that

represents his "radical counterdoctrine, slanted esthetically, to

oppose the Christian libel of life" (11),

In To a God Unknown, Father Angelo's Christian fortitude weakens

in Joseph's presence because he perceives that Joseph is an

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Anti-Christ figure: "He was shaken by the force of the man. He

looked up at one of his pictures, a descent from the cross, and he

thought, 'Thank God this man has no message.' And, in sudden heresy,

'Else there might be a new Christ here in the West'" (172; ch. 24).

Nietzsche defines the Christian priest as "a parasitic kind of human

being which prospers only at the expense of every healthy form of

life" (AC l47). To prosper, the priest must maintain his control over

his followers; in Steinbeck's novel, however, Joseph's strength and

charisma weakens Father Angelo's already ineffectual influence in his

parish. The priest's attitude toward Joseph as religious rival is

established early in the novel during the New Year's fiesta. Although

the occasion is tied to the pre-Christian ways of the Indians, Father

Angelo seizes the opportunity to incorporate Catholic mass into their

ancient festivities. Old Juan, however, undermines the priest's own

subversive plan by constructing the altar beneath Joseph's giant oak.

The living tree's natural splendor contrasts the artificiality of

Father Angelo's crucifix and hand-carved images of the Virgin Mary and

the holy child. Steinbeck presents a rather comical scene in which

the priest unfolds the hinged figures that have been blessed and

sanctioned by the archbishop and screws on their heads in preparation

for mass. Onlookers at the fiesta regard the priest's handling of the

figures with the sort of curiosity evoked by a side-show attraction:

"As soon as the mass was done, people gathered close to watch Father

Angelo fold up the Christ and the Mary. He did it well, genuflecting

before each one before he took it down and unscrewed its head" (85;

ch. 16), a detail that Steinbeck intended, perhaps, to emphasize what

he considered the mindlessness of Father Angelo's religion.

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After the mass, Joseph begins the New Year's fiesta. The

Catholic priest, however, disapproves of the way that Joseph uses the

holiday to put himself in accord with nature rather than with God; in

particular. Father Angelo is bothered by Joseph's iconoclastic

addendum to the local community's custom of pouring some wine on the

earth and then drinking more of it in four swallows:

To start the fiesta Joseph did a ceremonial thing Old Juan had told him about, a thing so ancient and so natural that Joseph seemed to remember it. He took a tin cup from the table and went to the wine cask. The red wine sang and sparkled into it. When it was full, he raised the cup level with his eyes emd then poured it on the ground. Again he filled the cup, and this time drank it, in four thirsty gulps. Father Angelo nodded his head and smiled at the fine way in which the thing was done. When his ceremony was finished, Joseph walked to the tree and poured a little wine on its back, and he heard the priest's voice speaking softly beside him: "This is not a good thing to do, my son," (86)

Joseph's act juxtaposes the Catholic mass and Dionysia. Opening the

cask and pouring some of the wine on the tree suggests Dionysian

rituals. In Hermes the Thief, Brown describes the festival of the

Anthesteria:

This ritual was a ceremonial opening of the jars of new wine; the new wine was, according to Plutarch, a pharmakon; the word, which is untranslatable, signifies a thing fraught with special magic powers which can produce either favorable or unfavorable effects, according to the circumstances. (59)

Marija Gimbutas mentions another of Dionysus' festivals in The

Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, 6500-3500, B.C. It was known as

Lenaia and, like the fiesta in Steinbeck's novel, was held in January

(228), The purpose of Lenaia was to arouse Dionysus from his winter

slumber because his followers considered him a vegetation god (228).

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Briffault indicates that Dionysus was represented by many plant forms,

such as ivy, barley, beans, vines, apples, and all other fruits (373)-

Furthermore, he was a tree god. His presence was often depicted as

one of a number of trees, including the fig, the maple, the plane, the

evergreen pine, and, of course, the oak (373). In To a God Unknown,

Joseph connects the Dionysian wine ceremony to the great oak, which

intensifies the oak's negative affiliations, documented in the Bible,

The fiesta scene suggests that Joseph's unexpected action reminds

the priest of several biblical accounts in which the oak tree is used

in the worship of false gods, especially since the priest warns

Joseph, "Be careful of the groves, my son. Jesus is a better savior

than a hamadryad" (86; ch. l6), His use of the word "hamadryad," the

term for a wood nymph who inhabits a tree and lives only as long as

the tree is alive, indicates that he underestimates the force

represented by Joseph's oak tree as well as the pines in the ancient

grove. The first negative account of the oak that appears in the

Bible is in the Genesis story of Jacob, a figure remembered not only

as the father of Joseph and Benjamin, but also by his other name,

Israel, as the father of the twelve tribes of the nation by the same

name, Jacob, who, like Steinbeck's Joseph, receives the patriarchal

blessing that rightfully belongs to the first-born male child, is

ordered by God to put away the strange gods among his people, so he

buries his household's idols beneath an oak tree (35:4), Similarly,

Joshua sets a great stone under the oak tree by God's sanctuary as a

reminder of the Israelites' rejection of the strange gods of their

ancestors (Josh, 24:2, 26),

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These Old Testament passages establish the oak's association with

the worship of pagan gods. Another biblical story reveals that the

punishment for such idolatrous practices is drought. The book of

Ezekiel provides an account of the land becoming desolate as a

consequence of pagan worship and refers to the thick oak as "the place

where they did offer sweet savour to all their idols" (6:13),

Clearly, Steinbeck associates Joseph's pouring wine on the tree with

the "sweet savour" offered to the oak in Ezekiel, These biblical

references to the oak's connection with pagan worship explain Father

Angelo's concern about the potentially ominous relationship between

Joseph and the oak tree, particularly since Joseph's deed is coupled

with his guests' primal dance.

In describing the dance, Steinbeck writes, "The dancers lost

identity, , , , each person became a part of the dancing body, and

the soul of the body was the rhythm" (87; ch, l6); furthermore, he

indicates that Joseph perceives the Indians' dance as "a kind of

powerful prayer" (88) as well as "a thing eternal, breaking through to

vision for a day" (91). According to Weston,

The importance of movement, notably of what we call group movement, as a stimulant to natural energies, is thoroughly recognized among primitive peoples; with them Dance holds a position equivalent to that which, in more advanced communities, is assigned to Prayer, (FRR 88)

Briffault's research on the significance of tribal dancing confirms

Weston's:

What are spoken of as "dances" are generally not so much festive entertainments as religious ceremonies or "mysteries"; in fact, with all African peoples the terms for "dance" and for religious worship are the same. On the Gold Coast the general appellation for a priest is "dancer". Dancing is, of course, prominent in all primitive

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'•-••<-«J».1*»-kV.

religious rituals, but the connection of dancing with primitive moon-rites is particularly close. The Iroquois state that the moon-goddess, Aataentsic compelled the ghosts of the departed to dance before her. In fact such dancing was absolutely essential to her health; that is to say, when she is on the wane or not fully grown. The Indians of California state that their religious dances were "to please the moon and prevent her waning," (Mothers 340)

Steinbeck uses the Indian dance and the implication of its lunar

associations to intensify Joseph's pagan reverence toward a tree that

signifies an ancient lunar god. The dance is reminiscent of

Nietzsche's description of the "endemic trances" of Dionysian revelers

(BT 8), and therefore it also brings to mind Elizabeth's two instances

of experiencing "Dionysiac rapture," a state in which "the individual

forgets himself completely" (22).

Father Angelo is not alone in his interpretation of Joseph's

relationship with the tree. Burton, who represents the traditional

Protestant view of Christianity, disapproves of the Catholic mass

taking place on the ranch, characterizing it and all of the other

fiesta activities as "devil-worship" (88), After the fiesta, he

witnesses Joseph's secretive rite of laying some barbecued meat in the

crotch of the tree and asking it to protect the land in return.

Burton confronts his brother and warns, "I've seen the pagan growth in

you, , . , I've seen you creeping out to the tree, Joseph, and I've

remembered Isaiah's words. You have left God, and His wrath will

strike you down" (94; ch, 16), His admonition is a reference to

Isaiah 1: 29-3O: "For they shall be ashamed of the oaks which ye have

desired, and ye shall be as an oak whose leaf fadeth, and as a garden

that hath no water," Unable to accept Joseph's pagan ways. Burton

decides to leave the isolated ranch for the Christian community of

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Pacific Grove, The word "pagan," after all, is a derivative of the

Latin word "paganus," which means "country fellow" or "backwoodsman,"

Burton chooses to live in the strictured community of Pacific Grove

rather than the wilderness with his heretical brother, the Catholic

priest, and the neighboring Indians, The latter represent a pagan

race that the Protestant founders of America thought must be the

progeny of the dark brothers of the Bible—Cain, Esau, Ishmael, and

the heathen natives of Canaan (Bercovitch 75). Because Burton

represents the traditional Protestant view of Christianity, the mere

existence of the Indians in the valley of Nuestra Seftora undermines

his idea of progress in God's new paradise. The wilderness,

therefore, is in direct contrast to the civilized settlement of

Pacific Grove, the existence of which supports the Protestant notion

of Christian advancement.

In addition to juxtaposing the Catholic Mass and Dionysia,

Joseph's actions of pouring wine on the tree and then offering it the

flesh of an animal actually deconstructs Christian myth by revealing

its pagan roots, and it demonstrates the process of uprooting existing

religious practices and transplanting them into a new one. Joseph's

actions at the fiesta imitate those of Christ on the eve before his

arrest. As Christ sat among his twelve apostles at their last supper

together (itself a Passover observance), his actions demonstrated an

acute understanding of the importance of absorbing widely practiced

rituals of competing religions into his own as a strategy of

downplaying their inherent differences and thereby accommodating the

newly converted with the comforts of their old religion. In essence,

he transformed the Passover custom into something new, something with

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which he would be associated from that moment on. There exists,

however, another model for Christ's last supper. Much earlier,

participants of Dionysia drank wine, believing the intoxicating spirit

to be "the god who himself is offered in libation" (Willoughby 71),

Likewise, eating raw flesh was part of the feasts. The people tore

live men and animals to pieces and quickly consumed them in the belief

that their god's divine life resided in the sacrificial flesh (76),

To drink wine and eat the warm flesh of men and animals was to drink

Dionysus' blood and eat his flesh. The ceremony enabled a participant

to become as divine as the god himself. In the present day, a similar

ceremony continues to be practiced by many members of the Christian

faith who follow the example set by Christ at the last supper, in

which he identified the bread and wine with his own flesh and blood.

Now called the sacrament of communion, or Eucharist, the solemn ritual

allows the believer to communicate with the divine. Moreover,

Catholics believe that the act of communion constitutes

transubstantiation, by which ordinary bread and wine miraculously

become the actual body and blood of Christ while retaining their

original appearances. Therefore, the Christian sacrament of communion

is remarkably similar to the sacred cannibalism that took place among

worshipers of Dionysus,

Other similarities exist between Dionysus and Christ, According

to Briffault in The Mothers, one of Dionysus' first miracles was

turning water into wine (372), an act that is recorded in the Gospel

of John as Christ's first miracle (2:7-9), In The Dead Sea Scrolls

Deception, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh ascribe such likenesses

between Christ and other gods to the creative imagination of the

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Apostle Paul, whom they call "the first 'Christian' heretic" (l8l).

Moreover, they maintain,

Paul, who never met the historical Jesus, shunts God aside and establishes, for the first time, worship of Jesus—Jesus as a kind of equivalent of Adonis, of Tammuz, of Attis, or of any one of the other dying and reviving gods who populated the Middle East at the time. In order to compete with these divine rivals, Jesus had to match them point for point, miracle for miracle. It is at this stage that many of the miraculous elements became associated with Jesus' biography, including, in all probability, his supposed birth of a virgin and his resurrection from the dead. (l82)

Besides the similarity of miracles that are attributed to Christ

and Dionysus, another commonality exists: both gods belong to the

poor. Unlike his father, the aristocratic sky-god Zeus, Dionysus "was

rather an earth-deity, a god of the peasantry" (Willoughby 69)•

Likewise, Wells asserts that Christ was a beggar, "a penniless

teacher, who wandered about the dusty sun-bit country of Judea, living

upon casual gifts of food" (2l4), and therefore he became a god of the

masses because he advocated earthly poverty, condemning "all

gradations of the economic system, all private wealth, and personal

advantages" (217-18), Both gods opposed the economic and political

systems of their times and experienced painful deaths. Like Christ,

Dionysus was a god of suffering, which explains why Joseph identifies

himself with Christ, the better known of the two gods in modern times.

In Mythology, Edith Hamilton explains:

He , . , was afflicted, not because of grief for another , , , but because of his own pain. He was the vine, which is always pruned as nothing else that bears fruit; every branch cut away, only the bare stock left; through the winter a dead thing to look at, an old gnarled stump seeming incapable of every putting forth leaves again. (61)

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However, the vine flourishes when spring returns.* Dionysus, like

Christ, was a god of recovery whose triumphant return to life inspired

his dejected followers, who probably were not so different from

millions of disillusioned and poverty-striken American suffering from

the Great Depression during the period in which Steinbeck wrote To a

God Unknown.

People need heroes, especially in times of social hardship and

chaos. Sadly, Steinbeck's novel implies that heroism is such a rare

thing that people easily mistake it for something else. Rama,

Elizabeth, and Father Angelo confuse the deeds of a hero with those of

a god. Steinbeck portrays Joseph, however, as only a man with

extraordinary sensibility, who, like the others, yearns to understand

his place in the universe. In Chapter 2, Steinbeck presents Joseph

with a situation in which he must choose whether or not to assume the

role of a god on the ranch. He reacts initially to the scene of a

boar eating its own piglet in a manner that is reminiscent of an angry

god who is about to pass judgment on one of his sinful creatures:

"His face contracted with anger and his eyes paled until they were

almost white. 'Damn you,' he cried. 'Eat other creatures. Don't eat

your own people.' He pulled his rifle from its scabbard and aimed

between the yellow eyes of the boar" (6). Joseph's response, though,

quickly changes: "And then the barrel lowered and a firm thumb let

down the hammer. Joseph laughed shortly at himself. 'I'm taking too

great power into my hands,' he said. 'Why he's the father of fifty

pigs and he may be the source of fifty more'" (6). Unlike God, who

opts in Genesis to destroy all of humankind except for the

extraordinarily pious Noah and his family (and then later decides to

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eradicate the communities of Sodom and Gomorrah as well), Joseph

allows the boar to live despite his sin against his own kind. The

propagation of species is Joseph's primary concern in this scene.

Thus he observes the cannibal's activity from a natural rather than a

moral perspective.

This situation exemplifies the realization that Steinbeck and

Ricketts would later articulate so eloquently in The Log from the Sea

of Cortez:

There would seem to be only one commandment for living things: Survive! And the forms and species and units and groups are armed for survival, fanged for survival, timid for it, fierce for it, clever for it, poisonous for it, intelligent for it. This commandment decrees the death and destruction of myriads of individuals for the survival of the whole. Life has one final end, to be alive; and all the tricks and mechanisms, all the successes and all the failures, are aimed at that end. (244; ch. 25)

This is not the view of a Christian moralizer, but rather the

naturalistic view that "life lives by killing" (Campbell, TMT 10), In

To a God Unknown, Joseph sincerely believes that his father bestows

upon him a special gift enabling him to perceive things with non-

judgmental detachment: "Now I know that the blessing was. . . . I

can have no knowledge of any good or bad. Even a pure true feeling of

the difference between pleasure and pain is denied me" (6l; ch. 11).

That is to say, Joseph is beyond good and evil, beyond the realm of

duality, approaching Nietzsche's model of the Ubermensch in Thus Spoke

Zarathustra. What separates Joseph from the other characters is his

ability to transcend society's man-made system of order in favor of

the primordial order, in which, to use Nietzsche's words from Beyond

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Good and Evil, "There are no moral phenomena at all, only a moral

interpretation of phenomena. . ." (96),

In his essay "Dionysus in 1990," which appears in Apocalypse

and/or Metamorphosis, Brown urges a Dionysian remythologization of

contemporary society. To embrace the Dionysian, he maintains,

means to discard the pseudo-scientific posture of clinical detachment or political rationality, and recognize madness as the universal human condition, not the distinctive stigma of a separate class distinguished as insane. It means that madness is not an individual but a social phenomenon in which we all participate collectively: we are all in one and the same boat or body. It means also that madness is inherent in life and in order to live with it we must learn to love it. That is the point of honoring it with the name of a god. (l80)

Brown's words resound Steinbeck's own realization almost sixty years

earlier.

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Notes

^ Although Steinbeck's first novel is less than an artistic success, it is significant to the discussion of To a God Unknown for at least two reasons: first, as a historical romance. Cup of Gold establishes Steinbeck's interest in the relationship between history and myth; and second, as an explorer of life, Henry Morgan learns that Merlin's poetic vision is a better guiding force than the quest for material prosperity,

2 Steinbeck's fondness for Boileau's argument in L'Art Poitique about gods, kings, and heroes being the only worthy subjects of literature is indisputable. He quotes Boileau several more times during his literary career, each time altering the statement to fit his current view. In 1939, he maintains the following: "Boileau said that Kings, Gods and Heroes only were fit subjects for literature, the writer can only write about what he admires. Present day kings aren't very inspiring, the gods are on vacation and about the only heroes left are the scientists and the poor," A few years later, "the scientists and the poor" would become Doc and Mack and the boys in Cannery Row. Between the writing of Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday, Steinbeck changes the statement again: "Boileau said, I believe, that only kings, gods, and heroes were worthy of literature, I think this holds true still. Kings we do not have, gods we do not write about and heroes no longer come home with their shields or on them. The pattern breakers come closest." Doc and Mack and the boys, are therefore also "pattern breakers," much in the same way that Joseph is a pattern breaker in To a God Unknown. Steinbeck's lament for humanity's former glories is most apparent, however, in a letter dated May l4, 1959, in which he refers once again to Boileau's words: "Kings, God and Heroes—maybe their day is over, but I can't believe it." The next year, however, Steinbeck wrote The Winter of Our Discontent, in which he suggests that the days of heroism are over for his own generation. In his final novel, Steinbeck depicts Ethan Allen Hawley as a clerk who breaks into anti-heroism. See also I85. All of these quotes regarding Boileau appear in DeMott's Steinbeck's Reading (15-16),

3 In this respect, the character of Elizabeth provides a model for the similarly-named Elisa in "The Chrysanthemums," written shortly after the publication of To a God Unknown. See David Leon Higdon's discussion of Steinbeck's knowledge of Greek mythology and his analysis of Steinbeck's employment of Dionysia in "Dionysian Madness in Steinbeck's The Chrysanthemums," Classical and Modern Literature, 11,1 (I99O): 59-65.

* Steinbeck's interest in Dionysus is also evident in "The Chrysanthemums," which Higdon observes (above, note 3). I disagree, however with Higdon's assertion that the tinker "is a manifestation of Dionysus, the scorned, vegetative god" (63). The fact that the tinker, as Higdon puts it, "wishes to achieve a permanent springtime" (63), which he accomplishes by following the sun's annual journey to the south during the winter and its return to the north in the summer, indicates the tinker's rejection of the vegetative god rather than his

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affiliation with him. It is essential to remember that ecstatic madness is only half of the Dionysian equation, with the other half being tragedy, from whence came the term "tragoidia" or "goat-song." For a discussion of the god's dual nature, see Hamilton (46. 61-62). Instead of associating the tinker with Dionysus, I maintain that Steinbeck presents the Dionysian spirit as Elisa's chrysanthemums. After all, the title suggests that they are the focus of the story. I base this interpretation on a number of Steinbeck's sources. Frazer, for example, reveals that Dionysus was sometimes represented as flowers: "One of his titles was 'teeming' or 'bursting' (as of sap or blossoms); and there was a Flowery Dionysus in Attica and at Patrae in Achaia" (449), In addition, Briffault points out that Dionysus as well as his priests wore "women's clothes" (372), a practice that suggests an adrogynous nature that is characteristic of the plant life that often represents Dionysus, Since the name "Elisa" is a variation of "Elizabeth," meaning "consecrated to God," Steinbeck's character is a Dionysian priestess, and her "gardening costume" (4) that includes "a man's black hat" (4) therefore signifies a holy vestment that she wears in her role as an adrogynous priestess of the vegetative god. Compare to the present study's discussions of the rock's mossy coating in To a God Unknown (92-93) as well as Ethan's apron in The Winter of Our Discontent (218), Moreover, Huntington, whose work Steinbeck perceived as "heading in the direction" of his own "thesis" (see Chapter II, note 3), maintains in Civilization and Climate that "seasonal changes" (291) are essential for stimulating human development, which provides a basis for viewing the tinker, whose profession was traditionally ill-regarded (hence the negative connotations of the term "tinker"), as a stunted individual rather than as the flourishing god of vegetation. The fact that the tinker throws away the chrysanthemum shoots that Elisa so carefully prepares for him indicates that he is not so different from Henry, Elisa's oppressive husband—the name "Henry" meaning "home ruler" according to Carole Potter (249)—who makes his living by growing apples and raising steers (i.e., castrated bulls). Frazer notes that Dionysus "was said to have discovered all tree-fruits, amongst which apples and figs are particularly mentioned; and he was referred to as 'well-fruited,' 'he of the green fruit,' and 'making the fruit to grow" (449), Elisa, however, refuses to work her "planters' hands" (5) on Henry's apple orchard, no doubt because his apples are associated with the system of capitalism, as opposed to her chrysanthemums, which have no monetary value. Because Dionysus was often represented by bulls, Henry's livelihood, moreover, suggests the castration en masse of the Dionysian spirit to which Elisa devotes her life through the care of her chrysanthemums. Also compare the bulls' castration in "The Chrysanthemums" to the symbolic castration of the hornless bull in To a God Unknown, as discussed in the present study (56).

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CHAPTER IV

TWILIGHT IN CANNERY ROW

Like To a God Unknown, Cannery Row is typically regarded as one

of Steinbeck's lesser works. In comparing it to the novels in which

his social messages are most explicit, those being the novels that he

wrote during the last half of the 1930s, particularly In Dubious

Battle and The Grapes of Wrath, many readers regard Cannery Row as an

entertaining but trivial piece of fiction. For example, John

Chamberlain says. "It is fun to read, and that is all" (xvi);

similarly, Warren French contends, "The remoteness of the book from

the pressing issues of the day indicates that it is certainly a kind

of 'escapist' literature" {John Steinbeck 120). Hugh Holman considers

Cannery Row to be a whimsical book about "the delights of poverty and

lawlessness" (9), and Edmund Wilson describes it as "amusing and

attractive" (62). In addition, Margaret Marshall calls Steinbeck's

novel "a 'simulated gem' which has neither intrinsic luster nor

permanent worth" (76), and J. Donald Adams says that "it falls

curiously between the inconsequential and the pretentious" (2).

Moreover, C, G, Paulding maintains, "It is not worth much for anyone

who has seen man's pity for man expressed by any of the great and

honest writers of world literature" (380).

Steinbeck himself claims that he wrote Cannery Row because some

soldiers had told him, "Write something funny that isn't about the

war. Write something for us to read—we're sick of war" ("My Short

Novels" 39). However, it is essential to remember that his contact

th those troops occurred between June and October of 1943 while he wi

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was a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. According to

Benson. Steinbeck's four months in Europe and North Africa during

World War II were comprised of traumatic experiences: he was hit in

the head by a 50-gallon oil drum during a German air raid, suffered

blackouts and temporary memory loss, ruptured both eardrums, and also

saw children who had been maimed by the war {TAJS 540), As evidenced

in his reports, which were later published in book form as Once There

Was a War, he watched the war transform parts of the world into giant

and twisted junk heaps of burned-out artillery and smashed up trucks

and tanks (100-02), Benson notes that Steinbeck, a physical and

emotional wreck, returned to New York in early October of

1943 instead of completing his contract with the Herald Tribune

through December (539), Gwyn, his wife at the time, claimed that for

"one solid year after he came back from the war, he had no sense of

humor at all. He had a chip on his shoulder the whole time. He was

mean, he was sadistic, he was masochistic, he resented everything"

(5Z|0-4l). It was during this period of personal and global twilight

that he wrote Cannery Row.

Twilight, in fact, is Steinbeck's chief symbol in Cannery Row.

In To a God Unknown, he identifies it with Western culture, probably

(as noted previously in the present study') because Spengler maintains

in The Decline of the West that "steady twilight" is the hallmark of

Western culture (172). In the earlier novel, Steinbeck only refers to

the twilight that follows the setting sun. However, in Cannery Row,

he also refers to the morning twilight, which more strongly suggests

that Steinbeck's works are about the establishment of a new social

order as well as the end of an old one. That is to say, Steinbeck

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uses the dual image of twilight in his 1945 novel to indicate that

Western culture is in a state of instability and transition.

Appropriately, the novel is set in 1937, a time that marked a critical

point in the history of modern Western culture, after Mussolini

invaded Ethiopia and civil war erupted in Spain and immediately before

Hitler initiated his sweep through Europe by absorbing Austria in the

Anschluss. Although Steinbeck never explicitly mentions World War

II in Cannery Row, he nevertheless responds to it—a war that existed

well beyond the boundaries of Europe. Asia, and Africa; a war that

seeped into the marrow of American society. Evidence that he intended

the novel to be viewed on one level as a sharp commentary of the

devastating effects of war on humanity is the fact that, in describing

the goings-on of a group of characters known as Mack and the boys, he

evokes several war images and even makes references to two of

America's prior wars.

The plot of Steinbeck's novel centers around Mack and the boys'

attempt to give a surprise party for Doc, the eccentric marine

biologist who. like them, lives on Cannery Row- While the honoree is

away, they invade his lab, which they shrewdly pick to be the location

of the event, and transform it into a collage of national and cultural

observances by adorning it with a variety of holiday paraphernalia.

Through a clever barter system based on frogs, they acquire these

ornaments from Lee Chong's store, for. as Steinbeck writes, "If you

wanted to decorate a laboratory in a general way, not being specific

about the season but giving the impression of a cross between

Saturnalia and a pageant of the Flags of all Nations, Lee Chong's was

the place to go for your stuff" (76; ch. 20).^ Year round, the Chinese

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grocer sells Valentines and shamrocks; papier-mache pumpkins,

broomsticks, and masks; firecrackers and flags, along with red, white,

and blue bunting; and paper cherry trees and hatchets (75-76). What

is especially important to note for the present discussion is that Lee

Chong's store is a virtual treasure trove of historical images that

promote popular American myths such as George Washington's cutting

down his father's cherry tree—a story fabricated by Washington's

biographer, Parson Weems (Davis 70), The Chinese grocer even sells

badges that say "Remember the Maine" and felt pennants that remember

"Fighting Bob" (76).

These last two items deserve special attention because they

reveal much about the novel's historical context. "Remember the

Maine" is a slogan made famous by U.S. newspapers and those who

campaigned for the Spanish-American War—upper class bankers,

steelmakers, newspaper mogels, and other large-scale capitalists who

stood to profit handsomely from such a venture, as well as America's

Protestant leaders who regarded Catholic Spain as a threat to their

foreign missionary efforts.3 To remember the Maine is to remember

America's pretext for declaring war against Spain. According to

historian Kenneth C. Davis, tabloid newspapers in America alleged that

the Spanish government was brutalizing American citizens in Cuba,

which was a Spanish colony at the time (219). As a result of the

disturbing reports, the U.S. battleship Maine was dispatched to Cuba

at the end of January in I898 (219). When the Maine exploded under

mysterious circumstances two weeks later while anchored in Havana

harbor, Americans blamed the Spanish, who, however, claimed that the

battleship's own arsenals must have triggered an internal explosion

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(220). The incident ignited a movement among capitalist warhawks and

members of the U.S. government to declare war on Spain (220). In the

wake of the war. which lasted only three months, the United States

seized control not only of Cuba, but also of other Spanish colonies:

Puerto Rico. Wake Island, Guam, and the Philippines (220). A U.S.

naval publication called Sea Power: A Naval History maintains, "If

any single event marks the emergence of the United States as a major

power, it is the Spanish-American War of I898" (I76).

Like the war cry to "Remember the Maine." "Fighting Bob" is a

phrase that evokes questions about the integrity of America's foreign

policymakers and their influential supporters, "Fighting Bob" was the

nickname for Robert La Follette, a U.S. senator from Wisconsin who

sought to overthrow corporate control of the American government and

its expansionist doctrine. Steinbeck no doubt alludes to La Follette

because he was one of the prominent leaders of the Progressive

Movement.^ Historian David Thelan points out in Robert M. La Follette

and the Insurgent Spirit that the senator accused conservative

Republicans and their corporate benefactors of promoting an expensive

campaign to arm the United States and labeling it patriotism in order

to rally sympathy among America's populace when war broke out in

Europe in 19l4 (127-28). During the following year. La Follette

argued that the only way to prevent America's involvement in the

international confrontation was to "take the profit out of war" (128).

His concerns about American industrialists' support of the war effort

were not unwarranted. According to Thelan, in the years between 19l4

and 1916. U.S. Steel, for example, watched its profits soar from $24

million to $272 million. Furthermore, he maintains, "More than

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one-third of all millionaires living in the United States in I916 had

become millionaires that very year as a result of the war boom" (129).

In 1917, La Follette suffered public humiliation when he voted against

the declaration of war on Germany. In 1924. "Fighting Bob." as he was

known, fought his last political fight and lost when he ran for

President of the United States on the Independent and Progressive

ticket.

"Fighting Bob" and "Remember the Maine" are politically charged

phrases that, in the context of Cannery Row, indict the upper class

for America's involvement in World War I and the Spanish-American War.

It is importemt to note that Steinbeck evokes these two phrases in his

description of Mack and the boys' party preparations. He uses Mack

and the boys to parody the American upper class, who have

traditionally been the group responsible for America's involvement in

wars. Throughout the course of the novel. Steinbeck shows these

materially indigent characters exhibiting, ironically, several

dominant traits of the leisure class, as exemplified by Thorstein

Veblen's definitive model in The Theory of the Leisure Class. It is

fitting that Mack and the boys function as a parodic leisure class in

a novel that Steinbeck wrote in response to World War II, for.

according to Veblen.

The evidence afforded by the usages and cultural traits of communities at a low stage of development indicates that the institution of a leisure class has emerged gradually during the transition from primitive savagery to barbarism; or more precisely, during the transition from a peaceable to a consistently warlike habit of life

The institution of a leisure class is the outgrowth of an early discrimination between employments, according to which some employments are worthy and others unworthy. Under this ancient distinction the worthy employments are

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those which may be classed as exploits; unworthy are those necessary everyday employments into which no appreciable element of exploit enters. (7-8)

Because society's most wealthy members are associated with exploitive

and warlike behavior, it is little wonder that Steinbeck uses

additional war images to describe the escapades of his parodic leisure

class in Cannery Row.

Mack and the boys, for example, engage in a skirmish against a

colony of frogs, which they collect with the intention of selling them

"twenty for a buck" to Doc (72; ch. 20). In describing the

confrontation between men and frogs, Steinbeck writes, "never in frog

history had such an execution taken place" (58; ch. 15) . Because Doc

is collecting specimens at La Jolla when Mack and the boys return to

Cannery Row from their excursion, they trade their amphibious

prisoners of war to Lee Chong "twenty-five frogs for every buck of

groceries" (73; ch. 20), with the understanding that he, as a

middleman, will then sell the frogs to Doc at a "five frog profit"

(72), Lee Chong goes along with Mack and the boys' enterprising

scheme for the simple reason that "[f]rogs were cash as far as Doc was

concerned" (73). Mack and the boys, therefore, use their live

"greenbacks" to purchase everything from "two dollars' worth of bacon

and eggs and bread" to Bull Durham, Coca-Cola, steak, canned peaches,

and "a pair of yellow silk arm bands" (73).

Steinbeck points out. however, that this primitive system of

trade favors one party over the other, for "bitterness arose as the

day wore on and prices went up" since "Lee had a stranglehold on the

customers" (73). Nevertheless, Mack and the boys are ultimately the

winners of the corrupted trading system that began as an "innocent and

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laudable merchandising agreement" (73). They convince the Chinese

grocer that, although the frogs are currently his property, they

should be prominently displayed in a packing case adorned with "red,

white, and blue bunting" (78) as part of the festivities for Doc. who

will later kill, embalm, and then sell them as biological specimens to

be dissected in academic studies. The frogs represent American

liberal capitalism, and. as Steinbeck shows in his description of Mack

and the boys' first attempt to honor Doc with a party, they end up

getting loose and running amuck in all different directions, thus

suggesting that the economic system, as exemplified by the simple

trade agreement between Lee Chong and Mack and the boys, cannot be

kept under control. In the final analysis, Mack and the boys' have

bellies full of Lee Chong's bacon, eggs, steak, whiskey, and canned

peaches, and the Chinese grocer is left holding only a worthless

"paper transferring the frogs" to him "in case there should be any

question" (78),

In addition, there are other war images associated with Mack and

the boys' intended party for Doc, One of the boys named Eddie elects

to make a cake for the occasion. While it is baking, a large crater

forms in its center, so Eddie whips up a new batch of batter and fills

in the hole. The result, Steinbeck writes, "looked like one of Bel

Geddes' miniatures of a battlefield on a lava bed" (77; ch. 20), an

omen of the "bloody battle" that transpires during the party between

Mack and the boys and a group of excited sailors from the nearby Bear

Flag, who mistake Doc's Western Biological Laboratory for a competing

brothel (78), The next morning. Doc returns from collecting octopi to

a home that resembles the abandoned site of a recent war: the sagging

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front door and the broken windows; the empty and broken whiskey

glasses; the cold, white grease on the kitchen floor; the broken

phonograph crystal and the broken favorite records; the toppled

bookcases; the pricy museum glass shattered everywhere. Doc comes

home to find the frogless packing case bedecked with the patriotic

red, white, and blue bunting and a sign saying "Welcome Home. Doc"

(79)f a greeting more appropriate for someone returning from a war

rather than returning to one.

The image of Doc's ravaged laboratory in Cannery Row brings to

mind the primary concerns of the soldiers for whom Steinbeck wrote the

novel, as exemplified in his Herald Tribune article dated July l6,

19^3:

Talking to many soldiers, it is the worry that comes out of them that is impressive. Is the country to be taken over by special interests through the medium of special pleaders? Is inflation to be permitted because a few people will grow rich through it? Are fortunes being made while these men get $50 a month? Will they go home to a country destroyed by greed? If anyone could assure them that these things are not true, or that, being true, they will not be permitted, then we would have a singing Army, This Army can defeat the enemy. There is no doubt about that. They know it and will accomplish it. but they do not want to go home to find a civil war in the making, (OTWW 56)

In this passage. Steinbeck indicates that these soldiers' major fear

was not the war itself, but rather what was happening at home, in

America, in their absence. In contrast to the critics who contend

that Cannery Row is no more than a frivolous display of showmanship,

the present study maintains that Steinbeck's 1945 novel is a serious

critique of a political system that promotes patriotism through

private enterprise instead of community good will and national

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solidarity. Mack and the boys transform Doc's lab into a reflection

of the war itself--an industrial wasteland of junked trucks and tanks

and burned-out artillery. Thus Steinbeck uses these characters to

parody the barbaric upper class, who. during times of war, prosper

financially while many of their fellow countrymen and countrywomen

become casualties of the national patriotism that they, the social

elite, promote for their own gain.

Besides exhibiting an exploitive, combative nature. Mack and the

boys display other behavior that is reminiscent of Veblen's analysis

of the socially privileged. In The Theory of the Leisure Class, he

maintains. "Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of

reputability to the gentlemen of leisure" (75). Mack and the boys

foster conspicuous consumption as lords of the Palace Flophouse and

Grill, the name that they give to the flimsy little shed that they

occupy, Steinbeck's characters also display a predatory nature—

another characteristic that Veblen associates with the leisure class

(79)—when they seize this former fish meal storehouse from Lee Chong

through subtle extortion, suggesting to the Chinese grocer that their

supervision of the property would deter people (such as themselves)

from breaking its windows or burning it to the ground. Once inside

the building. Mack and the boys create imaginary, square partitions

with lines of chalk drawn on the floor to establish individual

property rights, with the understand that one of them "could legally

fight a man who encroached on his square" (23; ch. 7), This conduct

sharply contrasts their previous, communal living "under the black

cypress tree" at the beginning of the novel (2; prologue).

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After Mack and the boys take over the Palace Flophouse, their

obsession with property escalates, Veblen notes, while "the general

principle , . . is that the base, industrious class should consume

only what may be necessary to their subsistence . . . luxuries and

comforts of life belong to the leisure class" (70). The following

passage in Steinbeck's description of Mack and the boys illustrates

Veblen's observation:

The boys outdid one another in beautifying the Palace Flophouse until after a few months it was. if anything, overfurnished. There were old carpets on the floor, chairs with and without seats. Mack had a wicker chaise longue. There were tables, a grandfather clock without dial face or works. The walls were whitewashed which made it almost light and airy. Pictures began to appear—mostly calendars showing improbable luscious blondes holding bottles of Coca-Cola, Henri [the local artist] had contributed two pieces from his chicken-feather period. A bundle of gilded cattails stood in one corner and a sheaf of peacock feathers was nailed to the wall beside the grandfather clock. (24; ch. 7)

The fact that some of their furnishings are broken and no longer serve

their original purposes emphasizes that Mack and the boys become more

interested in appearance rather than utility. As gentlemen of a

parodic leisure class, they acquire these things for the simple sake

of possessing them rather than depending on them for their

subsistence,

Veblen maintains, moreover, that as a member of the leisure class

accumulates more wealth, "The aid of friends and competitors is

therefore brought in by resorting to the giving of valuable presents

and expensive feasts and entertainments. Presents and feasts , , ,

acquired their utility for this purpose very early" in the development

of the leisure class (75). In Steinbeck's novel. Mack and the boys

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display this behavior in their plot to give Doc a party. The one

thing that critics seem to agree on unanimously is that what holds

together the novel's loosely episodic structure is Mack and the boys'

party plans. At first glance, such a plot seems rather superficial,

which explains why Steinbeck's readers have dismissed it as trivial.

The present discussion, however, shows that this plot deserves

attention because it reveals much about the novel's social dimension.

Evidenced by the fact that Mack and the boys spangle Doc's laboratory

with "miles of crepe paper commemorating every holiday in vogue and

some that had been abandoned" (76; ch. 20), Steinbeck intends their

merrymaking to function as a holiday (the politicization of "holy

day")—something that, in present times, only politicians decree.

Political office, according to Veblen. is one of the few proper and

essentially predatory employments of the leisure class (79). In

Steinbeck's microcosmic community. Mack and his compatriots perform

the role of a political party in control, scheming to legislate public

policy in the form of a community holiday. Veblen observes that any

holiday is a "tribute [ which] is paid in vicarious leisure . . , Such

a tithe of vicarious leisure is a perquisite of all members of the

preternatural leisure class and is indispensable to their good fame"

(310), It is also an honor bestowed through conspicuous consumption

and waste.

Steinbeck suggests that America's privileged social class is

responsible for transforming the nation into a conspicuously

consumptive wasteland. Like To a God Unknown, Cannery Row suggests

that American society is in a state of decay. Steinbeck sets the

novel on the edge of Monterey. California, a previously thriving

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community that is now representative of Spengler's view of Western

culture in The Decline of the West. In "Cannery Row Revisited:

Steinbeck and the Sardine," Ward Moore points out,

Once Monterey was not only the capital of California but its metropolis. Boston ships might neglect San Diego, San Pedro. Santa Barbara, or Yerba Buena, but they didn't sail the coast without anchoring in promising Monterey Bay. A hundred years before the Golden State sent forth oil and oranges, plastic toys and TV shows . . . Monterey was the economic as well as the political and social capital. (325)

In Steinbeck's novel, Monterey's former glory as the mecca of the

California coastline has faded into the darkness of the historic past.

No longer the major point of communication and commerce among

Californians and seafaring strangers of the Pacific, the Monterey that

Steinbeck portrays is a diminished society that must rely primarily on

the erratic influx of fish and conventioneers to keep it afloat

economically.

The novel's title refers to the long row of sardine factories

that embellished the coast of Monterey prior to the end of World War

II; however, as Moore observes, "the reader is never taken inside a

cannery or introduced to even minor characters directly involved with

fish-packing and with wages and work, unions and families" (326),

That is to say, what Steinbeck omits in his representation of society

is as meaningful as what he includes. He intentionally denies the

reader intimacy with the "superintendents, accountants, [and] owners"

who arrive each day in their "shining cars" (1; prologue). Neither

does he acquaint the reader with "the dripping, smelly, tired Wops and

Chinamen and Polaks" who come down the hill at the sound of the

canneries' screaming whistles "to clean and cut and pack and cook and

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can the fish" and then trudge back up the hill at the end of the day

(1-2), The exclusion of the cannery society—the proletariat as well

as the bourgeosie--indicates that in Cannery Row Steinbeck attempts to

transcend the Marxist view of society that readers identify with works

such as In Dubious Battle and The Grapes of Wrath, evidenced by the

fact that he uses a band of materially impoverished misfits to parody

the upper class, which fosters a socio-economic system that primarily

benefits themselves. Traces of labor, nevertheless, pervade the

landscape of Cannery Row in the form of industrial carnage: junk

heaps, abandoned boilers, and scattered tin and rust. These images

bring to mind Steinbeck's 1943 description of "The Bone Yard" of a

North African post, in which "[t]he wrecked equipment comes in in

streams from the battlefields" (OTWW 102) as well as his description

of Father Angelo's crumbling church in To a God Unknown. The

industrial litter of Cannery Row therefore signifies the petrifactic

remains of the corrosive society from which Mack and the boys "retired

in disgust" (2) prior to the beginning of the novel's time frame.

Although Steinbeck reveals more about Mack and the boys than any

other subject, his critics regard them as minor characters or overlook

them completely. Many readers are distracted by the novel's

unconventional structure, Marshall calls Cannery Row "essentially a

string of anecdotes" (75); likewise. Chamberlain characterizes it as

"merely a collection of loosely integrated episodes (xvi). Similarly,

Wilson says the novel is "a series of little pictures and incidents

that are often not related in any way" (62). and Adams maintains.

"Some episodes crawled into 'Cannery Row' which add nothing to the

picture, which seem to have no bearing on the underlying intention"

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(2), Despite its relatively short length, however. Cannery Row is a

literary work of startling complexity. Granted, like its predecessor

The Grapes of Wrath, it contains a number of episodes—what Steinbeck

calls "those little inner chapters" in a letter to his publisher

(Fensch 43)—that have no direct connection to the superficial plot

that focuses on Mack and the boys' scheme to throw a party for Doc,

However, it is erroneous to maintain, as Adams does, that such

episodes "add nothing" to Steinbeck's story.

Most of these intercalary chapters (2, 4, 8, 10, 12, l4, l6, 19,

22, 24, 26, and 31) introduce other figures who have no substantial

relationship to the main characters or the party plot. Their

existence in the novel continues to perplex Steinbeck's critics, who,

trying to make Cannery Row fit into conventional patterns that they

understand, label it as many different things, including a fable,5 a

western parody,^ a pastoral poem,7 and an allegory.^ Lisca suggests

that the intercalary chapters "comment on various aspects of civilized

man—his business, his illusions, his sex drive, and his relations

with his fellow man" (WWJS 201); however, he fails to examine Chapter

2, and he is at loss to explain the inclusion of Chapter 4, which

introduces the mysterious old Chinaman, as well as Chapter 12, which

concerns Monterey's dubious honor of embalming the body of Josh

Billings, a popular nineteenth-century American humorist. In John

Steinbeck, French provides a detailed discussion of these intercalary

chapters, as well as 6 and 28.9 He suggests that the purpose of

Chapter 2 is to establish the fact that Cannery Row is "an allegory—

that these characters are not only themselves in Monterey, but symbols

of universal tendencies in the world that this setting microcosmically

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represents" (124). Furthermore, he regards the "cryptic account" of

the old Chinaman as a treatise on loneliness (125) and calls the story

about John Billings "a savage burlesque on the ignorance and

literalism of the respectable" (127). French suggests that the

novel's technique of embedding these intercalary chapters within the

novel's overall plot follows "the pattern of a wave, growing slowly,

hitting a reef or barrier, dividing and crashing prematurely, re­

forming, rising to a great height and crashing at last on the beach."

thereby representing a "'natural' rather than a conventionally

artistic structure" (122).

In contrast to French and his elaborate interpretation, the

present study maintains that Steinbeck's rationale for including

"those little inner chapters" appears on the first page of the novel.

Despite the fact that the opening passage has already been quoted ad

nauseam, its significance to the present argument warrants its

reiteration:

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. (1)

The inclusion of the intercalary chapters as part of the novel's form

appropriately reflects its content. In no uncertain terms. Steinbeck

indicates here, in the first paragraph of the novel, that his

fictional community is a conglomerate of little fragments fused

together. As such, the character of Cannery Row resembles the

religious system that Joseph develops out of various fragments of

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ancient beliefs and practices in To a God Unknown. Like Joseph's

religion, the result of the coming together of many different elements

in Cannery Row deconstructs the traditional picture of American

society along with the American dream, which Steinbeck exemplifies

most poignantly through the characters of Mack and the boys and their

attempt to give Doc a party. However, to understand Steinbeck's novel

more fully, it is also important to examine the inter-chapters, which

provide a general context for Mack and the boys' plot.

In response to previous criticism, the present discussion focuses

primarily on the intercalary chapters that have been most problematic

for Steinbeck's readers. One of these is the previously mentioned

Chapter 12. which concerns the death of Josh Billings. According to

Steinbeck's account, an uproar developed when the townspeople of

Monterey discovered that their French doctor, who introduced their

community to the new and controversial practice of embalming,

discarded Billing's internal organs in the nearby gulch, from which

they were retrieved by a dog and a boy who intended to use his share

of the find as fish bait. This story, as French suggests, mocks

society's sense of respectability; however, he fails to examine its

full significance, Billings was born Henry Wheeler Shaw in I818, and,

according to Jennette Tandy in Crackerbox Philosophers in American

Humor and Satire, he "had the advantages of good New England ancestry

and upbringing" (l46). His father was the long-time political manager

for the American statesman Henry Clay, and his uncle was Chief Justice

of the state of New York (146). The younger Shaw, however, did not

share his family's regard for social authority. In The Greatest Pages

of American Humor, Stephen Leacock maintains that Shaw was expelled

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from Hamilton College "for removing the clapper from the chapel bell"

(83), Rejecting the upper-class society in which he was raised, Shaw

left New England on a peregrination that yielded a panoramic view of

the vast American landscape inhabited by the common folk.

Like Steinbeck's description of the physical composition of

Cannery Row, Shaw was a hodgepodge of many things—"farmer, coal

operator, captain of an Ohio River steamboat, real estate agent, and

auctioneer"—before he began a successful career "transliterating"

under the pen name of Billings (Tandy l47), and he actually died in

Monterey on October 14, I885 (Wallace 4lO), His writings and pithy

sayings reflect a comic disrespect for the conventions of the society

in which he was raised, and they also demonstrate a disrespect for the

conventions of grammar and spelling. In his Aulminak for 1869, Shaw

forecasts March 9th as follows: "This is the Sabbath, a day that our

fathers thought a good deal ov. Mutch wind (in sum ov the churches)

. , , prize fight on the palisades; police reach the ground after the

fight is aul over, and arrest the ropes and the ring" (Tandy l49).

Because Shaw earned his livelihood by wandering about the country as a

crackerbox philosopher who butchered the English language, it is a

fitting tribute that Steinbeck strows the satirist's dissected organs

across the literary landscape of Cannery Row,

While the account of Josh Billings clearly adds dimension to the

novel as social commentary, the inter-chapters that reveal the most

about Steinbeck's literary purpose are Chapters 2 and 4, In Chapter

2, for example. Steinbeck explains his own philosophy concerning man's

relationship to nature. The spiritual quality of the chapter

indicates that it is a sort of gospel intended to transcend

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Christianity. The beginning and end of the chapter, in fact, allude

to scripture from John and Matthew's accounts of the New Testament

Gospel. Steinbeck begins the chapter this way: "The word is a symbol

and a delight which sucks up men and scenes, trees, plants, factories,

and Pekinese. Then the Thing becomes the Word and back to Thing

again, but warped and woven into a fantastic pattern" (8), Similarly,

the Book of John begins with the following statement: "In the

beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was

God" (1:1-2), Steinbeck's comment on language in the opening lines of

Chapter 2 indicates that the true meaning of nature has been distorted

through society's (i,e,, Christianity's) translation of it. Likewise,

the final sentence in this chapter, which reads, "Our Father who are

in nature" (9), is an allusion to Matthew's account of the Lord's

prayer, which begins. "Our Father who art in heaven" (6:9). In

altering two of the key passages from the Christian Gospel, Steinbeck

suggests that humankind must return to nature and relearn its

primordial, symbolic language in order to attain life's meaning, which

is reminiscent of the way in which Joseph rejects society's language

and seeks understanding through various objects of nature.^°

Another significant inter-chapter in Cannery Row is Chapter 4.

Here. Steinbeck introduces the old Chinaman: "Some people thought he

was God and very old people thought he was Death and children thought

he was a very funny old Chinaman , , , But the children did not taunt

him or shout at him , , , for he carried a little cloud of fear about

with him" (l4). This mysterious character exhibits a ritualistic

attachment to the sun's daily cycle, which bears a resemblance to the

nameless old man's in To a God Unknown and also to the seer's in Sweet

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Thursday.^^ This trinity of Merlin-like characters serves an

important purpose in Steinbeck's works: each figure is associated

with twilight and therefore each is a reminder of what Steinbeck sees

as the declining state of Western culture. In contrast to the working

immigrants, whose comings and goings are determined by the screaming

whistles of the canneries, the old Chinaman exclusively and routinely

appears "in the time between sunset and the lighting of the street

light" and then reappears "during that time when the street light has

been turned off and the daylight has not come" (13),

Chapter 4 provides an account of a supernatural phenomenon

involving the old Chinaman, which occurs one evening during the "small

gray period" that precedes nightfall. Andy, a ten-year-old boy

visiting Cannery Row while on vacation, makes fun of the old man's

non-Western ethnicity, chanting "Ching-Chong Chinaman sitting on a

rail—'Long came a white man an' chopped off his tail" (l4). In

response to the boy's brazen display of a culturally superior

attitude.

The deep-brown eyes looked at Andy and the thin corded lips moved. What happened then Andy was never able either to explain or to forget. For the eyes spread out until there was no Chinaman. And then it was one eye--one huge brown eye as big as a church door, Andy looked through the shiny transparent brown door and through it he saw a lonely countryside, flat for miles but ending against a row of fantastic mountains shaped like cows' and dogs' heads and tents and mushrooms , , , And the loneliness--the desolate cold aloneness of the landscape made Andy whimper because there wasn't anybody at all in the world and he was left, (l4)

The old Chinaman's transformation into a huge, transparent eye

strongly echoes passages found in two of Ralph Waldo Emerson's most

famous essays: "Nature" and "Circles."

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According to DeMott, Steinbeck read Emerson's major essays before

1935; moreover, he maintains that Steinbeck's "indebtedness to Emerson

and to the influence of the native American philosophical tradition

stemming from Transcendentalism . . . has been among the most

persistent refrains in Steinbeck's criticism," which is supported by

the fact that some critics maintain that sections of The Grapes of

Wrath as well as of East of Eden demonstrate Emerson's influence on

Steinbeck {SR 144).^^ In "Nature." Emerson records his greatest

transcendental experience while he looks across the cold, desolate

landscape one evening at dusk:

Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune. I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration . . . . Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God. (24)

With the same concept in mind, Emerson begins "Circles," written a few

years later, with this line: "The eye is the first circle; the

horizon it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary

figure is repeated without end. It is the highest cipher of the

world" (168). Because Steinbeck's description of his Asian

character's mystical transformation seems to be based, in part, on

passages from Emerson's writings, it is likely that he intended the

old Chinaman to represent a sort of transcendentalism.

Reminiscent of the ideas promoted by American Transcendentalism,

Cannery Row advocates humanity's return to its natural origins. In

contrast to Judeo-Christianity's conventional view of nature as the

opponent of humankind—established in the Book of Genesis by God's

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condemnation of Adam and Eve to a life of "thorns and thistles"

outside Eden (3;l8)—the leaders of the nineteenth-century

philosophical and literary movement regarded nature as the wellspring

from which divinity flows. Therefore, their doctrine, as rendered by

Emerson in his writings, encourages humanity's communion with the

things of the natural world because, as Emerson maintains in the

account of his twilit experience, it is through nature that humankind

transcends the boundaries of mind and the physical senses. Likewise.

Steinbeck suggests that it is in this world that humankind attains

Truth in its highest, attainable form.

In examining the significance of the old Chinaman in Cannery Row,

it is important to understand that he differs from the nameless old

man in To a God Unknown and the seer in Sweet Thursday in one notable

respect: whereas the other two figures are associated only with the

evening twilight, he is associated with the morning twilight as well.

He reappears in Chapter l4. another inter-chapter, which begins with

the following description:

Early morning is a time of magic in Cannery Row-In the gray time after the light has come and before the sun has risen, the Row seems to hang suspended out of time in a silvery light. The street lights go out. and the weeds are a brilliant green. The corrugated iron of the canneries glows with the pearly lucence of platinum or old pewter. No automobiles are running then. The street is silent of progress and business. And the rush and drag of the waves can be heard as they splash in among the piles of the canneries. It is a time of great peace, a deserted time, a little era of rest. . . , The old Chinaman comes out of the sea and flapflaps across the street and up past the Palace. , , , It is the hour of the pearl--the interval when time stops and examines itself, (52-53)

131

This passage presents a paradox: during the morning twilight, the Row

"seems to hang suspended out of time." yet real twilight exists only

briefly. The description here indicates that twilight is both eternal

and ephemeral, both timeless and timeful. where stillness and movement

come together. Thus Steinbeck suggests in Cannery Row that twilight

is as a point in time what the axis mundi, represented by the oak tree

in To a God Unknown,^^ is as a point in space.

It is also significant that Steinbeck describes twilight in

Chapter l4 as "the hour of the pearl" and points out "the pearly

lucence" of the canneries at this time of day. He refers again to

morning twilight in Chapter 17, stating that Doc "worked through the

pearly time , . ." (63), and then, in Chapter 21, indicating, "It was

the hour of the pearl" (80). In each of these instances, the image of

the pearl is associated expressly with the waxing of daylight as

opposed to its waning; that is to say, Steinbeck uses the pearl as a

symbol of birth and resurrection in Cannery Row. Various sources

reveal that the symbolism of the pearl is very ancient. In The

Mothers, Briffault maintains that early societies believed that

"pearls are the products of the moon" (328). which furthermore

suggests that they were connected to the primordial, female worship of

the lunar orb and its deities. Similarly, in Patterns in Comparative

Religion, Eliade indicates that primitive Asiatic cults used the pearl

in magic and religious worship as well as in their medical practices,

•To them, the pearl was sacred. As Eliade notes. "Everything works to

transform the pearl into a 'cosmological centre' bringing together the

prerogatives of moon, woman, fertility and birth" (439). It is

fitting that many cultures have regarded the pearl as an important

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X; religious symbol, for the pearl is a transcendence of substance and

form, beginning as a single grain of common sand that transforms layer

by layer into a perfect, shiny sphere.

Another example of the pearl's significance in conjunction with

early religious ideas is the "Song of the Pearl," also called the

"Hymn of the Pearl." which appears in the apocryphal "Acts of the

Apostle Thomas," According to Robert Grant in Gnosticism, these

writings commonly attributed to the Apostle Thomas date back to the

third century as preserved in two texts: the original Syriac, which

A. A, Bevan translated into English in Texts and Studies in 1897, and

another version in Greek, which R. A, Lipsius and M. Bonnet translated

into German as Acta Apostolorum Apocrypha in 1903 (ll6). According to

Hans Jonas' translation in The Gnostic Religion, The "Song of the

Pearl" tells the story of a king's son who is sent to Egypt to

retrieve "the One Pearl which lies in the middle of the sea which is

encircled by the snorting serpent" (113). Once in Egypt, the prince

finds the pearl; however, he takes up with the Egyptians, who provide

food and drink for him, and so. the prince confesses, "I forgot the

Pearl for which my parents had sent me" (ll4). When the king and

queen learn what has happened to their son in Egypt, they write a

letter to remind him of his errand. The letter awakens the prince

from his "deep slumber" (ll4) of irresponsibility: "I remembered the

Pearl for which I had been sent down to Egypt, and I began to enchant

the terrible and snorting serpent. . . . I seized the Pearl, and

turned to repair home to my Father" (114-15).

Jonas suggests that the story is an allegory, with the sea

representing "the world of matter or of darkness into which the divine

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has sunk" (117), the serpent representing "original chaos, the ruler

or evil principle of this world" (116). and Egypt being a common

Gnostic as well as biblical symbol of "the material world" (ll8). The

chief symbol in the story is. of course, the pearl. In the New

Testament, the pearl is a metaphor for heaven: "Again, the kingdom of

heaven is like a merchant man. seeking goodly pearls: Who. when he

had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all he had, and

bought it" (Matt. 13:45-46). Jonas, however, points out that in the

Gnostic tradition the pearl is a primary symbol for the "soul";

moreover, he maintains the following about the pearl's religious

significance: "Whereas almost all other expressions can apply equally

to divinity unimpaired and to its sunken part, the 'pearl' denotes

specifically the latter in the fate that has overtaken it. The

'pearl' is essentially the 'lost' pearl, and has to be retrieved"

(125).

It is certain that Steinbeck was aware of the pearl's spiritual

significance, particularly the Gnostic insistence of its being "lost,"

during the time in which he wrote Cannery Row. Immediately after he

completed the novel, he began writing a screenplay that he

subsequently adapted into novel form as The Pearl {SLL 273). This

work also illustrates Steinbeck's use of twilight imagery, beginning

"in the near dark" of morning (3; ch. 1) and ending in the twilight

following "the setting sun" (81; ch. 6). Furthermore, like the

Gnostic "Song of the Pearl." Steinbeck's novel is an allegory. It

portrays a Mexican pearl diver named Kino who finds a pearl of

unmatched value; however. Kino learns that no pearl broker will buy it

from him for a fair price. The pearl becomes an object of great

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covetousness. forcing Kino and his wife Juana to take their young son

Coyotito and flee from danger. After the baby is killed by trackers.

Kino and Juana return to their village, where the people say, "the two

[of them] seemed to be removed from human experience; that they had

gone through pain and had come out on the other side, that there was a

magical protection about them" (80). Against the light of sunset.

Kino throws the pearl into the sea from whence it came.

While critics, such as Harry Morris in "The Pearl: Realism and

Allegory." typically credit Steinbeck and Ricketts' story in The Log

from the Sea of Cortez about an Indian boy from La Paz who found a

great pearl as the source for The Pearl,^'^ Lisca suggests that another

source for the novel is "'The Song of the Pearl,' a phrase which in

several modifications is often repeated in the text of The Pearl:

'the Song of the Pearl That Might Be' and 'the music of the pearl,'

for example" (WWJS 223). In addition to a number of passages that

Lisca points out allude to the title of the Gnostic hymn, Steinbeck

demonstrates his understanding of the symbolism of the "Song of the

Pearl," The first sentence of The Pearl, for example, reveals that an

essential element of the story is the fact that the pearl begins and

ends as a lost pearl: "In the town they tell the story of the great

pearl—how it was found and how it was lost again" (1—emphasis

added). Furthermore, as in the Gnostic tradition, Steinbeck's

protagonist, in representing Western culture, claims, "This pearl has

become my soul" (62; ch. 5). Finally, considering the fact, as Jonas

indicates, that the Gnostics stressed the pearl's being "sunken," Kino

returns the pearl to the ocean, which Steinbeck and Ricketts indicate

in The Log from the Sea of Cortez is a metaphor for "the low dark

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levels of our minds in which the dream symbols incubate" (31; ch. 4).

In The Pearl, Kino flings the object that he identifies with his soul

into the primal waters of the unconscious, watching "it go. winking

and glimmering under the setting sun" (8l; ch, 6). Here, at the end

of the novel, Steinbeck ties the pearl to evening twilight. In this

respect. Cannery Row and The Pearl are companion pieces, with the

pearl signifying transcendence in both novels. In Cannery Row, it

heralds a cultural rebirth of the West; similarly, in The Pearl, it is

connected to the decline of Western culture, which, as represented by

Kino, undergoes a transcendence--the realization that its dying soul

must return to what Spengler calls "the darkness of proto-mysticism,

in the womb of the mother, in the grave" (75) in order to become

reborn,

In addition to his knowledge of the symbolism of the pearl and

his affiliation with the ideas advanced by American Transcendentalism,

Steinbeck's understanding of Asian holistic thought influenced his

metaphoric use of twilight in Cannery Row. As Richard Bedford points

out in an article entitled "Steinbeck's Use of the Oriental." many of

Steinbeck's works, including "Johnny Bear" (a story included in The

Long Valley), The Grapes of Wrath, The Log from the Sea of Cortez,

Cannery Row, East of Eden, Sweet Thursday, and The Winter of Our

Discontent feature Asian characters or make references to Orientalism,

In John Steinbeck and Edward Ricketts, Astro maintains that the Asian

holistic ideas that dominate The Log from the Sea of Cortez came from

Ricketts. suggesting that "Steinbeck composed the narrative almost

entirely from Ricketts' journal" (13). Whether or not Astro's

assertion is true, Ricketts was indeed the catalyst for Steinbeck's

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interest in Orientalism. According to DeMott, Ricketts loaned

Steinbeck his copies of The Works of Li Po (DeMott #501), a Chinese

poet of the eighth century, as well as the Tao Teh Ching (DeMott

#485). In "Cannery Row and the Tao Teh Ching," Lisca calls

Steinbeck's novel "a philosophically based and impassioned celebration

of values directly opposed to those dominant in Western society" (22);

furthermore, he maintains that "the novel's informing spirit is , , ,

the Tao Teh Ching of Laotzu, a Chinese philosopher of the 6th century

B. C," (23), Lisca's assertion is supported by the fact that

Steinbeck mentions Lao Tzu (calling him "Lao Tze") in Chapter 2 of

Cannery Row (8),

For the purpose of this discussion, what is essential to

understand about Taoism, the name given to the philosophy advanced by

Lao Tzu, is that it is a system of thought that developed in

opposition to Confucianism, In The Tao Te Ching; A New Translation

with Commentary, Ellen Chen explains the key difference between the

two primary modes of Asian thought:

Confucianism builds upon law and order, on moral distinctions and cultivation; it encourages the pursuit of "fame and reputation" through distinguished service to society. Taoism, transcending the distinction of morality to the unity of all in the ground, sees all these as "so many handcuffs and fetters." (17)

In this respect, American Transcendentalism's effort to transcend the

doctrine of conventional Christianity is reminiscent of Taoism's

reappraisal of Confucian order. The commonality between Chinese

Taoism and American Transcendentalism provides an explanation for

Steinbeck's blending of these two philosophies in Cannery Row, as

exemplified in his account of the old Chinaman in Chapter 4, The

137

coming together of the Asian with the Occidental—that is, the binding

of the East with the West—takes the transcendental form of twilight.

It is apparent that Lao Tzu himself regarded twilight as an

important transcendental image because he refers to it in two

different chapters of the Tao Te Ching. In Chapter l4, Lao Tzu

emphasizes twilight's state of in-betweenness in his description of

what Chen calls "the transitional point between being and non-being"

(89):

What is looked at but not seen. Is named the extremely dim. What is listened to but not heard. Is named the extremely faint. What is grabbed but not caught. Is named the extremely small. These three cannot be comprehended. Thus they blend into one.

As to the one, its coming up is not light. Its going down is not darkness. Unceasing, unnameable. Again it reverts to nothing. Therefore it is called the formless form. The image of nothing. Therefore it is said to be illusive and evasive.

(88-89)

This passage refers to that which exists beyond the boundaries of

human tangibility. It is "not light," yet it is "not dark." What

exists between light and dark is called the Tao, which means "the

Way," or path of life, A counterpart to this passage appears in

Chapter 21, in which Lao Tzu again evokes twilight imagery to describe

the Tao:

Tao as a thing. Is entirely illusive

and evasive. Evasive and illusive In it there is image. Illusive and evasive. In it there is thinghood. Dark and dim,

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Mill B^j—saw

In it there is life seed. Its life seed being very genuine, In it there is growth power, (107)

Chen provides the following analysis of the relationship between these

two chapters, illustrating the duality of the Tao: "In chapter l4 Tao

recedes and becomes the nothing; here [in chapter 21] . , . Tao moves

forward to become the realm of beings, , , , There Tao is , , . the

image of nothing; here Tao contains the seeds and images of all beings

that are to be" (107),

Like the Tao, twilight moves in two different directions to

become two different things. The evening twilight regresses into

darkness, which, according to Lao Tzu's teachings, signifies the

primal chaos of nothingness. The morning twilight, in contrast, grows

into daylight, which is the realm of things. According to the Tao Te

Ching, twilight, then, is the meeting place between two worlds: one

of existence and the other of non-existence. Held in the balance

between form and formlessness, twilight brings to mind the Chinese

yin-yang symbol, "the combination or fusion of the two cosmic forces,"

represented as "a circle divided by an S-shaped line into a dark and a

light segment, representing respectively yin and yang, each containing

a 'seed' of the other" {OED 2361). In Chapter 2 of Cannery Row,

Steinbeck suggests the parity of these forces in his description of

Lee Chong, the Chinese grocer of Cannery Row, as "evil balanced and

held suspended by good—an Asiatic planet held to its orbit by the

pull of Lao Tze by the centrifugality of abacus and cash register--Lee

Chong suspended, spinning, whirling among groceries and ghosts" (8;

ch. 2), Like the old Chinaman, who is associated with the duality of

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twilight, Lee Chong balances his own personal elements of light and

darkness. As such, he represents the quintessential Taoist,

Between the descriptions of Lee Chong in Chapter 2 and the old

Chinaman in Chapter 4, Steinbeck reflects on a past time in Chapter 3,

in which he provides an account of one of the Row's former residents

who did not maintain the Taoist emphasis on balancing light and

darkness. This character is William, who used to be the watchman of

the Bear Flag. Steinbeck describes William as "a less well-balanced

man" than Alfred, his replacement (10), In disharmony with himself,

William "was a dark and lonesome-looking man" who had "dark and broody

thoughts" (11), Mack and the boys sensed his disunity and rejected

him from their social circle. They refused to offer William a drink

from their wine jug: a surprisingly smooth blend of "rye, beer,

bourbon, scotch, wine, rum, and gin" (25; ch, 7), not to mention

anything else left in the glasses on the nights that one of the boys

named Eddie was fill-in bartender at La Ida. Because William's own

mixture of elements did not blend together very well, other people

rejected him. As a result, he snapped an ice pick through his heart,

the organ regarded as the center of life.

In contrast to his description of William, Steinbeck indicates

that Mack and the boys resemble Lee Chong and the old Chinaman in that

they too follow the path of the Tao, for they are "balanced on the

scales of good and evil" (88; ch. 23). Furthermore, their behavior is

reminiscent of the motion of the Tao, exemplified by their ability to

move into opposing directions during the course of the novel. In the

prologue, Steinbeck reveals the dual nature of the characters who

reside on Cannery Row:

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Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, "whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches," by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, "Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men," and he would have meant the same thing. (1)

This passage indicates that these characters are comprised of both

negative and positive elements. Like twilight, they sometimes move

into darkness and at other times into light.

Steinbeck devotes sixteen of the thirty-two chapters to Mack and

the boys, their aberrant social behavior, and their attempt to honor

Doc by throwing him a party. Doc. who represents "the fountain of

philosophy and science and art" (17; ch 5) of Cannery Row, is another

character who embodies the Taoist duality of positive and negative

elements, which Steinbeck reveals in his description of Doc: "his

face is half Christ and half satyr," "he has helped many a girl out of

one trouble and into another," and he has "a cool warm mind" (l6; ch.

5). Moreover, "Doc would listen to any kind of nonsense and change it

for you to a kind of wisdom. . . . He could talk to children, telling

them very profound things so that they understood" (17; ch. 5). In

other words. Doc embraces a sort of Apollonian-Dionysian duality,

comprised of both light and darkness.

As Steinbeck unfolds Mack and the boys' plot to give Doc a party,

he shows them to be resourceful characters who live off the industrial

process rather than within it. As pointed out by Louis Owens in John

Steinbeck's Revision of America, the fact that Steinbeck's characters

are associated with the geographical border between land and water

suggests that metaphorically "they are marginal Americans. They exist

on the edge of an ironic Eden and they repudiate the American dream"

(7). Distancing themselves from society by living on its edge enables

141

Mack and the boys to break the pattern of Spenglerian decline by

transcending American ideology and its Puritan work ethic. They find

haven in a toxic Utopia, where they transform society's waste into

things of new meaning. Steinbeck says that they are able to succeed

because

They are the Virtues, the Graces, the Beauties of the hurried and mangled craziness of Monterey and the cosmic Monterey where men in fear and hunger destroy their stomachs in the fight to secure certain food, where men hungering for love destroy everything lovable about them. Mack and the boys are the Beauties, the Virtues, the Graces. In a world ruled by tigers with ulcers, rutted by strictured bulls, scavenged by blind jackals. Mack and the boys dine delicately with the tigers, fondle the frantic heifers, and wrap up the crumbs to feed the sea gulls of Cannery Row. What can it profit a man to gain the whole world and to come to his property with a gastric ulcer, a blown prostate, and bifocals? Mack and the boys avoid the trap, walk around the poison, step over the noose while a generation of trapped, poisoned, and trussed-up men scream at them and call them no-goods, come-to-bad-ends, blots-on-the-town, thieves, rascals, bums. (9; ch. 2)

Steinbeck indicates that Mack and the boys are exempt from the woes of

modern society. Moreover, his language suggests that they possess a

spiritual quality. While Lisca argues in "Cannery Row and the Tao Teh

Ching" that this passage is reminiscent of Christ's sermon on the

mount (23), it is actually a reference to another part of the Book of

Matthew, in which Christ asks, "For what will it profit a man if he

gains the whole world and forfeits his life?" (16:26),

Steinbeck's description of Mack and the boys in Chapter 2

indicates that they are the spiritually elite of Cannery Row, which

represents their positive element. Of course, their negative element

is parodying the pattern set by America's Puritan forefathers, who

regarded material prosperity as the visible confirmation of their

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spiritual election,^5 Furthermore, Steinbeck's characterization of

these figures is reminiscent of the teachings of American

Transcendentalism, Steinbeck reverberates Emerson's notion in

"Circles" that "[t]he life of man is a self-evolving circle, which,

from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new

and larger circles, and that without end" (l69) in his description of

Mack and the boys as "the stone dropped in the pool, the impulse which

sets out ripples to all of Cannery Row and beyond, to Pacific Grove,

to Monterey, even over the hill to Carmel" (104; ch, 27), These

characters therefore function as the cosmological center in Cannery

Row. The stone cast into a pond creates a series of circles to

develop in the water, which is similar to the way that a pearl grows

outward through a series of spherical layerings. Described as "the

stone," Steinbeck's characters resemble the solitary grain of common

sand that becomes a pearl through the process of irritating its host.

In the case of Mack and the boys, the host is mainstream American

society.

As aristocrats of a countercultural community. Mack and the boys

are survivors of a caustic system in which many individuals simply

give up. In Chapter 1, for example, Steinbeck relates the story of a

"worried gentleman" (4) named Horace Abbeville who shoots himself in

the head because he is unable to provide for his "two wives and six

children" (4). Similarly, Chapter 26 focuses on the conversation

between two little boys named Willard and Joey. Willard taunts Joey

about the fact that Joey's father died from rat poison, which he took,

according to Joey, because "[h]e couldn't get a job" (103). Both men

commit suicide because American society in the Depression has failed

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them. Unlike such unfortunate characters. Mack and the boys "retired

in disgust" (2; prologue) from the socio-economic system in which the

quality of human life is based on labor and measured in money. Doc,

the detached scientist who studies the nature of organisms and the

intricacy of their relationships in the Great Tide Pool, also observes

the behavior of Mack and the boys. He concludes. "I think they

survive in this particular world better than other people. In a time

when people tear themselves to pieces with ambition and nervousness

and covetousness, they are relaxed" (88; ch. 23).

Doc, however, does not trust these characters, who are constantly

vacillating between the Taoist elements of good and evil. Even though

they possess a spiritual quality that sets them apart from ordinary

people, they also function as the governing elite of Cannery Row's

counterculture. When they fail in their attempt to give Doc a party.

Mack and the boys simply decide to throw another. The second one,

however, differs from the first in a very significant way. This time

Doc knows about the secret plans and prepares for their invasion. He

gathers up "some of his best records and his microscopes" and locks

them up in the back room (110; ch. 29). As he awaits Mack and the

boys' arrival, his thoughts drift to the great battle of Marathon,

where the Greeks succeeded in defending their home from Persian

advances almost 2500 years ago: "The observers in Athens before

Marathon reported seeing a great line of dust crossing the Plain, and

they heard the clash of arms and they hear the Eleusian Chant" (ll4;

ch. 29). This picture foreshadows Doc's own personal success in

outsmarting the Row's parodic leisure class and therefore averting a

second disaster. Steinbeck, a war correspondent dejected by the

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bitter reality of capitalist patriotism, returned to the craft of

writing fiction, which enabled him to transform the gloom of global

twilight into the dawn of victory.

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Notes

'See 53.

^ Documentation of Cannery Row refers to the 1954 Bantam edition.

3 See Handy's A Christian America (124).

* See 14-15. 22-23.

5 See Lawrence W. Jones' "John Steinbeck as Fabulist." Ed. Marston LaFrance. Steinbeck Monograph Series 3 (1973): 3-35; and also, "Poison in the Cream Puff: The Human Condition in Cannery Row." Steinbeck Quarterly 7.2 (1974): 35-40.

^ See Jackson J. Benson's "John Steinbeck's Cannery Row: A Reconsideration." Western American Literature 12.1 (1977): 11-40.

7 See Stanley Alexander's "Cannery Row: Steinbeck's Pastoral Poem." Western American Literature 11.4 (1968): 28I-95.

^ See French (John Steinbeck) 120-136.

9 I disagree with French's classification of Chapters 6 and 28 as intercalary chapters. Chapter 6 provides an additional description of one of the boys nsimed Hazel and reveals the nature of his relationship with Doc, and Chapter 28 concerns Frankie's attempt to get Doc a present for the party.

10 See 32-33.

11 See 46-47 and 174-75-

^ As DeMott suggests, see the following for their discussion of Emerson's influence on Steinbeck: Frederic Carpenter's "The Philosophical Joads" in Steinbeck and His Critics: A Record of Twenty-Five Years: 124-249 and John Ditsky's Essays on "East of Eden" in Steinbeck Monograph Series 7 (1977): 47-

13 See 40-41.

^ The story about the Indian boy who finds a great pearl appears in Chapter 11 of The Log from the Sea of Cortez (104-105). Morris also suggests that an anonymous fourteenth-century poem called Pearl is a possible source for The Pearl: 495, 505-

5 For a discussion of the connection between spiritual election and material wealth, see Bercovitch 46.

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HMMMMJBHi^EBBHB

CHAPTER V

PAGAN REGENERATION IN SWEET THURSDAY

The majority of Steinbeck's critics maintain that Sweet Thursday,

the postwar counterpart to Cannery Row, is novel that is both

uninspiring and inconsequential. Timmerman, for example, calls it "a

light and giddy book" that is "imperfect artistically" (169).

Likewise, in John Steinbeck, French, who praises the 1945 novel as "an

artistic triumph" (30), calls Sweet Thursday a "tired book" (157);

furthermore, he attacks it as an "ill-advised attempt to return to

Cannery Row" (30). He characterizes it as well as its immediate

predecessors--The Wayward Bus (1947), Burning Bright (1950), and East

of Eden (1952)—as "failures" (l43). French's view, therefore,

reflects the general concurrence among scholars that Steinbeck's skill

as a writer continued to decline in the postwar era. Even Levant,

who, in contrast to the others, admires the novel as "a finely

accomplished structure" (272), admits that it "is not ambitious in its

scope" and that its plot is "conventionally sentimental" (260).

While these critics complain that a lack of artistry prevents

Sweet Thursday from being a first-rate novel, others contend that its

inferiority is the result of a dramatic change in Steinbeck's personal

thinking, which denounces the naturalistic philosophy that governs his

earlier works. Fontenrose, for example, says that the 1954 novel is

"all part of one thing—the good and bad" and that "[t]his serious

moral undertone reveals that Sweet Thursday was deliberately written

to reject the teaching of Cannery Row and replace it with a new

gospel" (128). Similarly, Astro maintains that Steinbeck's earlier

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passion for nature is missing from the novel: "Even a cursory reading

of Sweet Thursday reveals that Steinbeck is not nearly so preoccupied

with nature and natural phenomena in this book as in Cannery Row"

("Bittersweet" 38). What Astro perceives as inconsistencies in

Steinbeck's attitude about nature in these two works lead him to

regard Sweet Thursday as "Steinbeck's disturbing picture of defeat, of

frustration toward a world that has either consumed or annihilated the

people and the type of existence the novelist loved most" (37).

In contrast to the arguments mentioned above, the present study

maintains that the view of nature that Steinbeck displays in his 1954

novel remains unchanged from the view that he presents in To a God

Unknown. Like the earlier novel. Sweet Thursday depicts a society in

decline. Set in 1947, the novel opens with a lament about the effects

of World War II on the small California community:

When the war came to Monterey and to Cannery Row everybody fought it more or less, in one way or another. When hostilities ceased everyone had his wounds.

The canneries themselves fought the war by getting the limit taken off fish and catching them all. It was done for patriotic reasons, but that didn't bring the fish back. As with the oysters in Alice, "They'd eaten every one." It was the same noble impulse that stripped the forests of the West and right now is pumping water out of California's earth faster than it can rain back in. When the desert comes, people will be sad; just as Cannery Row was sad when all the pilchards were caught and canned and eaten. The pearl-gray canneries of corrugated iron were silent and a pacing watchman was their only life. The street that once roared with trucks was quiet and empty.

Yes, the war got into everybody. . . . Change was everywhere. (3-^; ch. 1)

Steinbeck reveals in this passage that the effects of war have cast a

dark shadow on the community of Cannery Row. Moreover, he indicates

that during the war, American capitalism disguised itself as

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^ - - • • - . " • '

patriotism (a term that America's clergy equated with "Christianity"

during World War V). Steinbeck, therefore, suggests that America,

which is the epitome of Western culture, is in the process of

exhausting its natural resources, which is an outward symptom of a

failing ideology.

According to Terry Eagleton in Literary Theory: An Introduction,

religion is "an extremely effective form of ideological control. , , ,

capable of operating on every social level" (23), Sweet Thursday

illustrates Steinbeck's understanding of religion's social authority.

The present study maintains that it is a work in which Steinbeck

advocates a return to humanity's pagan origins. It examines the

carefully crafted way in which he continues to incorporate beliefs and

practices associated with pre-Christian myths in his writings.

Steinbeck's references to primitive religions indicate that he

advocates a Nietzschean transvaluation of cultural values in order to

bring about a postwar regeneration of society. In particular. Sweet

Thursday, like To a God Unknown, challenges America's Puritanical

vision of national destiny. It promotes a mythology that regards

humankind's relationship with nature as one of communion as opposed to

the biblical claim that God gave man dominion "over all the earth, and

over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth" (Gen. 1:26).

Sweet Thursday advances the same idea that Steinbeck promotes in

another novel's title, Of Mice and Men, which alludes to Robert Burn's

poem "To a Mouse." In that poem, the narrator apologizes to the mouse

for disrupting her nest in his field:

I'm truly sorry Man's dominion Has broken Nature's social union. An' justifies that ill opinion

which makes thee startle

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At me, thy poor, earth-bound companion

An' fellow mortal! (stanza 2)

Like Burns, Steinbeck challenges the anthropocentric view of life that

Western culture embraces.

Moreover, Sweet Thursday demonstrates, at least novelistically,

the way in which remythologization occurs; in other words, it reveals

how Steinbeck himself attempts to use myth to reshape history and thus

to alter America's cultural identity. As tree myth plays a

significant role in To a God Unknown, as exemplified in Joseph's

relationship with the giant oak, it provides the entire basis of the

mythological dimension in Sweet Thursday, as exemplified by a number

of events that involve pine trees. In The Golden Bough, Frazer notes

that the ancient European god most often identified with the pine was

Dionysus: "Amongst the trees particularly sacred to him, in addition

to the vine, was the pine-tree"; therefore, he often carried "a wand,

tipped with a pine-cone" (450). As in To a God Unknown, a central

element in Sweet Thursday is the worship of the god of vegetation, or

the tree-spirit, as evidenced primarily by three primitive festivals,

Frazer explains that such festivals were designed to promote the

welfare of humans by ensuring the fertility of their land and animals

through the participants' use of homeopathic magic (743-44),

Steinbeck disguises these festivals in Sweet Thursday as other events.

He provides a clue to his intention by referring to another literary

work, notorious for its presentation of things as other things: Lewis

Carroll's Through the Looking Glass.^ Steinbeck quotes the last line

from "The Walrus and the Carpenter"--a poem that Tweedledee recites to

Alice (Carroll 236)—in his explanation of the closing of Monterey's

canneries (3), His direct reference to Carroll's work at the

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N ^

beginning of his own suggests that he too embeds hidden meaning and

structure within the topsy-turvyness of seemingly random nonsense.

The first appearance of an event that signifies a primitive tree

festival occurs in Chapter 8, entitled "The Great Roque War," which is

an account of the neighboring town of Pacific Grove, The chapter

begins with a short description of Pacific Grove's origin and history,

which also serves to establish the fundamental difference between its

community and that of Cannery Row, which is a sub-community of

Monterey:

Pacific Grove and Monterey sit side by side on a hill bordering the bay. The two towns touch shoulders but they are not alike. Whereas Monterey was founded a long time ago by foreigners, Indians and Spaniards and such, and the town grew up higgledy-piggledy without plan or purpose. Pacific Grove sprang full blown from the iron heart of a psycho-ideo-legal religion. It was formed as a retreat in the l880s and came fully equipped with laws, ideals, and customs. On the town's statute books a deed is void if liquor is ever brought on the property. As a result, the sale of iron-and-wine tonic is fantastic. Pacific Grove has a law that requires you to pull your shades down after sundown, and forbids you to pull them down before. There is one crime which is not defined but which is definitely against the law. Hijinks [sic] are or is forbidden. It must be admitted that most of these laws are not enforced to the hilt. The fence that once surrounded the Pacific Grove retreat is no longer in existence. (54)

This passage reveals that Pacific Grove cannot abide by its self-

imposed system of order. The fact that its fence "is no longer in

existence" suggests that it is vulnerable to other (i.e., non-

Christian) influences. This passage also indicates that Steinbeck

juxtaposes Christianity and paganism in Sweet Thursday much in the

same way that he does in To a God Unknown. In the earlier novel,

Joseph's brother Burton abandons the ranch and the nearby pine grove

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where Indians continue to worship their ancient gods in secret.3 He

retreats to the Christian community of Pacific Grove, whose name

alludes ironically to another grove of pines that, in Sweet Thursday,

Steinbeck intimates have pagan affiliations as well.

Steinbeck's tale of "The Great Roque War" suggests that the

religious fanaticism on which Pacific Grove was founded has been

redirected into the creation and annual observance of a pagan fire-

festival. According to his account of the town's history, this

ceremony came into existence as a consequence of a calamitous chain of

events that began with a philanthropist's seemingly innocuous gift to

the community. Steinbeck maintains that a generous man named Mr.

Deems donated two courts on which to play roque, a complicated version

of croquet, because he wanted his fellow citizens to have something to

do other than "interfering in everything and causing trouble" (54-55).

Steinbeck suggests that the townspeople's annoying behavior was a

natural outgrowth of their strict laws of moral conduct; Mr. Deem's

introduction of a form of recreation that involves adhering to

challenging rules, therefore, had the opposite effect of what he

intended. Instead of providing a distraction from their meddling in

each other's affairs, the game intensified their piously antagonistic

nature, leading them into a series of high jinks, or boisterous sport,

which Steinbeck maintains was against the letter of the law. This

account brings to mind a chapter entitled "The Queen's Croquet-Ground"

in Carroll's other famous book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

(DeMott #165). In it, the Queen of Hearts sponsors a "difficult game"

(112) of croquet, in which the participants, observes Alice, "all

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\^

quarrel so dreadfully . . . and they don't seem to have any rules in

particular" (113).

According to Steinbeck's story, the establishment of two roque

teams, the Blues and the Greens, destroyed the town's sense of a

common identity. A social rift affected every aspect of daily life in

the community as the teams developed into segregated clans. Out of

this division evolved a number of social taboos regarding interaction

between the two groups: affiliates of the Blues and the Greens

refused to vote for each other or to sit beside one another in church,

and they also discouraged intermarriages (55). Moreover, they "even

developed secret languages so that each wouldn't know what the other

was talking about" (56). Steinbeck implies that partisans of the two

teams became the targets of each other's hate crimes: a Blue's house

was burned down, and the body of a Green, having been clubbed to

death, was found along with a roque mallet in the nearby woods (56).

The warring behavior between the two clannish groups grew to the point

that finally "[t]he old men got to carrying mallets tied to their

wrists by thongs, like battle-axes" (56).

Steinbeck indicates that the approach of Pacific Grove's annual

roque tournament only heightened the tension between the two factions

and that Mr. Deems considered himself responsible for the disastrous

effect that his well-intentioned gift had on the community:

When he saw what he had created by giving the roque courts to the Pacific Grove retreat he was saddened and later horrified. He said that he knew how God felt.

The tournament came July 30, and feeling was so bad that people were carrying pistols. Blue kids and Green kids had gang wars. Mr. Deems, after a period of years, finally figured that as long as he felt like God he might as well act like God. (56)

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Appropriately, Steinbeck names his character "Deems," which comes from

the Old English "demon," meaning "to judge"; "demon," moreover, is

related to the Old English "dom," which means "doom" as well as

"judgment" (OED 400). According to Steinbeck's story, Mr. Deems

judged the actions of the townspeople, and, reminiscent of the God of

Noah, he demolished his own creation with the omnipotent power of a

bulldozer on the eve of the Pacific Grove annual roque tournament.

The townspeople, however, perceived the destruction of their courts to

be a "Deem-onic" act rather than a godly judgment. That being so.

They ran Mr, Deems out of Pacific Grove. They would have tarred and feathered him if they could have caught him, but he was safe in Monterey, cooking his yen shi over a peanut-oil lamp.

Every July 30, to this day, the whole town of Pacific Grove gets together and burns Mr. Deems in effigy. They make a celebration of it. dress up a life-size figure, and hang it from a pine tree. Later they burn it. People march underneath with torches, and the poor helpless figure of Mr. Deems goes up in smoke every year. (57)

Steinbeck indicates that the act of burning Mr, Deem's effigy reunited

the two rivaling factions; however, the religious implication of their

action marks a departure from the Christian doctrine on which their

community was originally based.

Frazer's The Golden Bough is undoubtedly a source for the ritual

that Steinbeck purports is part of the local customs in Pacific Grove.

Their annual ceremony of burning an effigy of Mr. Deems is reminiscent

of numerous fire-festivals that Frazer discusses in three chapters:

"The Fire-Festivals of Europe," "The Interpretations of the Fire-

Festivals," and "The Burning of Human Beings in the Fires." Frazer

explains that the ancient fire-festivals that took place throughout

Europe originated "in a period long prior to the spread of

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Christianity" (706). In general, the fire in such a rite acts as "a

cleansing agent, which purifies men, animals, and plants by burning up

and consuming the noxious elements, whether material or spiritual,

which menace all living things with disease and death" (751). Many of

these festivals involved actions that signified "burning the witch"

(709), "carrying out Death" (711). or "burning the Judas!" (7l4). The

participants of these festivals, like the Pacific Grove townspeople in

Steinbeck's novel, carried lighted torches (708), marched around the

fires (709), and often burned effigies that resembled human figures

(711).

Frazer explains that early Europeans blamed witches for virtually

all of their difficulties, and thus in many instances they burned the

likenesses of witches at the festivals in order to ensure fertility

and good fortune (751); however, he also points out that the witch­

like figures that the people burned at some of these festivals really

represented their vegetation deity (754). Therefore, many fire-

festivals also signified vegetation rites in which the effigies were

representations of the tree-spirit (754). According to Frazer, when

an effigy is connected to a tree, as in the case that Steinbeck

describes in his novel, "the effigy and the tree are regarded as

equivalent to each other, each being a representative of the tree-

spirit" (755). Frazer maintains that primitive people believed that

the vegetation spirit must die by fire because, based on the principle

of homeopathic magic, the fire functioned as a sun charm: "by burning

the spirit of vegetation in a fire which represents the sun, you make

sure that, for a time at least, vegetation shall have plenty of sun"

(755)• Because it seemed unnatural to these people that they should

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burn a beneficient god, they came to identify the effigy not with the

deity, but rather with someone whom they regarded with opprobatory

feeling, "such as Judas Iscariot, Luther, and a witch" (755). For

that reason, they often disguised their god as a witch or another

figure of comparable disdain in order to burn him. Such details

explain why in Steinbeck's account of Pacific Grove the people burn

the likeness of a former god-like figure whom they used to regard with

reverence, but now regard with aversion.

Frazer indicates that over time most of the fire-festivals of

Europe became attached to one of several seasonal celebrations:

Christmas, the commencement of Lent, Easter, May Day, Midsummer Eve or

Midsummer Day, and Halloween or the following day, Allhallows' Day.

He notes, however, that some fire-festivals were not designed to

commemorate various points during nature's recurring cycle, but rather

with certain times of "distress and calamity" (740). On such

occasions, the people lit "need-fires," from which all fire-festivals

likely originated (740). In Sweet Thursday, Steinbeck suggests that

the people of Pacific Grove created a need-fire in response to their

distress of losing the roque courts and that they, following the

pattern of their ancient European ancestors, transformed it into a

seasonal celebration.

The annual fire-festival in Pacific Grove holds even more

significance, suggesting the meaning of the novel's title. Frazer

indicates that fire-festivals were sometimes intended as a measure of

protection against storms: "the fire which burns the witches

necessarily serves at the same time as a talisman against hail,

thunder, and lightning" (752). The fact that primitive Europeans used

156

these fires to mollify the forces that send storms from the sky

suggests that their festivals alluded to the various European thunder

gods,* Considering the fact that Steinbeck titles his novel Sweet

Thursday, Pacific Grove's fire-festival suggests the Norse god Thor

because Thursday is named for him, Thor, like the other thunder gods

of Europe, was linked to the vegetation spirit. As Frazer claims,

Thor "was regarded as the great fertilizing power, who sent rain and

caused the earth to bear fruit" (186),

As the ancient Teutons identified Thor with a tree, in

Steinbeck's novel, the people of Pacific Grove identify their former,

god-like benefactor with a pine tree from which they hang his

likeness. On a subliminal level, their ceremony functions as a ritual

that is designed to bring about good fortune and thus ensure that all

of "Thor's days" are "sweet." This interpretation of the Pacific

Grove fire-festival suggests that Steinbeck attaches a pagan meaning

to the term "Sweet Thursday," probably as a contrast to another:

"Maundy Thursday," which refers to the day preceding Good Friday on

the Christian calendar. Maundy Thursday--"maundy" being a derivative

of the Old French "mand^," meaning "mandate" (OED 1050)--commemorates

Christ's Last Supper, which, according to John 3:5, ends with Christ's

washing his disciples' feet; therefore, its observance traditionally

includes washing the feet of poor people, which is performed by the

clergy as well as other upstanding individuals in the community.

The fact that "Sweet Thursday" serves as a contrast to "Maundy

Thursday" also suggests that it functions in opposition to two other

Christian terms: "Ash Wednesday" and "Good Friday," which refer to

the only two days on which the Church mandates fasting by its members,

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Moreover, the fire-festival of Pacific Grove bears resemblance to

events that Frazer maintains occurred at one time in Europe on both of

these days. First, Ash Wednesday refers to the Christian practice of

priests sprinkling ashes on the foreheads of their parishioners.

These ashes are a reminder of the Church's own annual ritual of

burning palm leaves from the previous year's Palm Sunday. In a

chapter of The Golden Bough entitled "The Killing of the Tree-Spirit,"

Frazer claims that rural peasants in France chose Ash Wednesday as a

day on which to burn effigies. Likewise, he indicates that throughout

Central Europe they picked Good Friday, the day that marks Christ's

death on the cross, to drive away witches from their houses,

farmyards, and cattle-stalls while they carried brooms and made loud

noises (649).

In light of Frazer's discussion, the annual fire-festival

commemorating the day that the people of Pacific Grove drove out Mr.

Deems from their community represents a primitive vegetation rite

among fanatical Christians who do not even realize what it is. As in

To a God Unknown, Steinbeck suggests that these pagan rites, which

Frazer indicates have been discovered throughout the European

continent as well as in many other places, are instinctual expressions

of humankind's reliance on nature and therefore that they survive in

the midst of a Christian culture that denies their existence or

strives to Christianize their meanings by assimilating them into its

own culture. Furthermore, Steinbeck suggests that the worship of

nature is what unifies a group of people, and that Christianity, in

contrast, leads to the breakdown of the group, as evidenced by the

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social division produced in America by an economic system based on

Puritan typology.

At the end of Steinbeck's story about the development of Pacific

Grove's fire-festival, he admits, "There are people who will say that

this whole account is a lie, but a thing isn't necessarily a lie even

if it didn't necessarily happen" (57). This statement reveals the

novel's resemblance to one of Steinbeck's early readings: Geoffrey of

Monmouth's Histories of the Kings of Britain (DeMott #329). The

significance of the work of a twelfth-century British ecclesiastic to

the discussion of Steinbeck and his writings is that it presents

fables, such as those about the legendary Arthur, as actual events.^

That is to say, Geoffrey's so-called "histories" of British Kings are

actually mythistories (the word "mythistories" signifying the blending

of "myths" and "histories"). Unlike Geoffrey, Steinbeck admits in

Sweet Thursday that his story about Pacific Grove's fire-festival is

mythistorical. In doing so, he suggests that humankind needs myth to

reveal basic truths about its existence that cannot be explained by

factual limitations and that such myths unite a group of people into a

culture by providing them with a shared identity of ancestors,

leaders, and cultural heroes. Myth, then, creates an ordered past; in

turn, this ordered past creates an ordered vision of the future.

Furthermore. Steinbeck's statement concerning the nature of his story

about Pacific Grove is a confession that this mythistory is an attempt

to counter-acculturate a community that represents America on a

microscopic level and therefore to undermine its Christian authority.

The second event in Sweet Thursday that signifies a pre-Christian

tree festival occurs not in Pacific Grove, but rather on Cannery Row

159

in Monterey. Despite the fact that these communities came into

existence in radically different ways—Pacific Grove being founded by

Protestants promoting a conventionally American ideology, and Monterey

being formed out of a mishmash of ethnic groups that were assimilated

into one countercultural identity--Steinbeck intimates through the

juxtaposition of their festivals that these two groups of people share

a basic human predisposition that transcends the boundaries of their

respective cultures. The festivals reveal that on a subliminal level

both communities acknowledge nature as a sacred force that affects

human life and that both exhibit a fundamental need to express

reverence toward it. This second celebration of the tree-spirit

occurs in the form of the Row's party for Doc, In accordance with his

description of the higgledy-piggledyness of Monterey itself, Steinbeck

presents this party as a hodgepodge of disparate details from various

vegetation ceremonies that Frazer claims are still practiced by many

old-world communities in Chapter 10 of The Golden Bough, entitled

"Relics of Tree-Worship in Modern Europe." Members of Cannery Row,

who adorn themselves in various costumes to resemble celebrated

figures from a well-known fairy tale as well as other mythic

characters fostered by American popular culture, perform these

practices unknowingly. Because their party is a masquerade, it brings

to mind a well-known juxtaposition of Christian and pagan behavior:

Mardi Gras. Also known as "Shrove Tuesday" and "Fat Tuesday," Mardi

Gras is the day of unbridled merrymaking that precedes Ash Wednesday

and the beginning of the somber season of Lent.

Inhabitants of the Row profess that the purpose of their party is

to restore Doc's well-being, which they intend to accomplish by

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presenting him with a bride. Mack and the boys, however, have an

ulterior motive for hosting the party, a motive based on their

erroneous supposition regarding the ownership of the little shed that

they converted many years ago into their residence and that is known

up and down Cannery Row as the Palace Flophouse:

It had belonged to Lee Chong. Long before the war Mack and the boys had rented it from him for five dollars a month, and, naturally enough, they had never paid any rent. Lee Chong would have been shocked if they had. Then Lee Chong sold out to Joseph and Mary, Did the Palace go with the rest? Mack didn't know, but if it did, the Patrdn didn't know it. He was no Lee Chong. He would have demanded the rent. But if the Patrdn did own the place, he would get a tax bill. If he got a tax bill, he was sure to be on the necks of Mack and the boys. (87; ch. l4)

Ergo, Mack and the boys decide to raffle off the Palace Flophouse at

Doc's party, convince the Patrdn himself to sell some of the tickets,

and rig the raffle so that Doc, who already owns the Palace Flophouse.

will win it. They hope that this elaborate scheme will deter Joseph

and Mary from claiming his rights to the Palace Flophouse if and when

he receives notification that its property taxes are due. In other

words. Mack and the boys, who represent the forces of natural

paganism, plan to wrest ownership of the Palace (i.e., the Temple)

from its false Christian "owner," a character named for the parents of

Christ, in order to give it to their pagan god. Doc, who already owns

it.

Mack consults Fauna, a character who replaces Dora in Sweet

Thursday as the madam of the Bear Flag Restaurant and Grill, about

planning Doc's party. On her suggestion, they determine that the

party's theme will be Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. In Steinbeck's

fairy tale parody. Fauna decides that the role of Snow White will be

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played by Suzy, who is ironically suited for the part of an ingenue

because she is the Bear Flag's newest prostitute. Fauna, however, has

her own reason for playing matchmaker. Suzy is a poor business

investment because, as Fauna puts it, she "ain't a good hustler" (132;

ch. 20). Therefore, Fauna wants "to dress Suzy in a certain way" for

the party since "[t]here's little difference between the wardrobe of

Snow White and that of a lovely young bride" (I76; ch. 27). Mabel,

who, in contrast to Suzy, is "a natural-born, blowed-in-the-glass

hustler," loans Suzy an appropriate costume that once belonged to

Mabel's immigrant grandmother: "a wedding dress of sheerest white

linen embroidered with sprays of white flowers—stitches so tiny they

seemed to grow out of the cloth" (I78),

The dress that Suzy wears to Doc's party is reminiscent of her

previous date with Doc at Sonny Boy's restaurant, where Doc mentions a

Welsh story "about a poor knight who made a wife completely out of

flowers" immediately before he uncontrollably burps out the words

"I'm lonely" (153; ch, 23), The bridal gown also alludes to the

discussion of European tree-worship in The Golden Bough. Frazer

includes numerous examples of festivals at which a pretty girl or

young woman, known by such names as the Little May Rose (l45) and the

May Queen (152), represents the tree-spirit. The color of her dress,

when noted, is always white. One explanation for this figure wearing

white is that a number of these festivals became associated with

Whitsunday—"Whitsunday" being a term that comes from the Old English

"hwita sunnandaeg," meaning "white Sunday" (OED 2310), According to

The Proposed Book of Common Prayer used by the Episcopal Church,

Whitsunday, also called Pentecost, immediately follows the seven

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Sundays of the lunar-determined Easter season and always occurs

between May 10th and June 13th (884-85). The purpose of this

principal, movable feast is to celebrate the descent of the Holy

Spirit on Christ's disciples after his ascension into Heaven, The

fact that modern Europeans observe these tree-festivals on or around

Whitsunday suggests that the Christian religion may have absorbed the

pagan rites that summoned the annual return of the tree-spirit into

its own practices as it spread throughout the continent.

Another reason for the tree-spirit's female representative to

wear white is that she is often called "the Bride" and thus dresses

"in wedding attire" (Frazer I56). She does so because these festivals

were designed to bring about fertility. Thus many involve a marriage

of trees, as represented by a bridegroom and bride, a lord and lady,

or a king and queen (152). In Sweet Thursday, Fauna presents Suzy to

Doc as "Snow White, the bride!" (I98; ch. 28). The couple's

anticipated union symbolizes the marriage of the tree-spirits, which

is necessary to ensure the fertility of the land--or, in this case, of

Cannery Row. Frazer notes that the female representative often holds

a bough or small tree in her hands to symbolize the tree-spirit. The

Little May Rose, for instance, "carries a small May-tree, which is gay

with garlands and ribbons" (l45). Steinbeck incorporates this detail

in Sweet Thursday, but he uses it to describe what Mabel and the other

Bear Flag prostitutes, as well as "some of the best-known and most

respected hookers north of San Luis Obispo" (191; ch. 28), wear to the

party as Snow White's attendants. Instead of holding symbols of the

tree-spirit, the women sport another sort of "spirit" in their hands:

"The ladies were dressing in filmy gowns of red, yellow, and green,

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and each one was to carry a bottle of whisky garlanded with ribbons to

match her dress" (191).

Among the various costumes. Fauna's is also revealing—that is.

in the sense that it illustrates how things in Steinbeck's novel are

more than they appear to be. She devises a costume within a costume

to wear to a party that signifies a masquerade within a masquerade:

Fauna was going as a witch. It was her own idea. The only costume she really needed was a broom, but she had made a peaked black hat and a black alpaca wrap-around to carry the part off. But Fauna had a payoff. When the big moment came she was prepared to fling off her black gown, switch broom for wand, and emerge as the fairy godmother. (191)

Her two-part costume brings to mind Pacific Grove's fire-festival and

its allusion to Frazer's discussion of witches' effigies being burned

in place of the vegetation deity. Fauna's costume, therefore,

suggests that she represents the vegetation deity, which is fitting

because she oversees the procreative spirit of Cannery Row in her role

as the Bear Flag's madam in similar fashion to the way that the

primitive vegetation deity oversees the fertility of the land and all

of its inhabitants, human and otherwise. Moreover, the duality of

Fauna's costume fits in with the duality of her name, which also makes

her an appropriate representative of the vegetation deity. It is

important to recall that Fauna's given name is Flora. Both names

denote Roman vegetation goddesses (Hamilton 327). "Flora,"

furthermore, is the collective term for the plant world, whereas

"Fauna" is the collective term for the animal world. For that reason,

Steinbeck's character signifies the coming together of the plant and

animal kingdoms and therefore is an animal representation of the

vegetation spirit.

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Fauna's costume also brings to mind another of Steinbeck's

sources: The Mothers. In it, Briffault maintains that witches were

associated with the moon (301), probably because all magical powers,

such as those exemplified by prophets, magicians, and lunar priests,

are derived from the moon (290). Accordingly, in Steinbeck's novel.

Fauna dabbles in the occult, as evidenced by her horoscope readings as

well as her apprenticeship in headshrinking when she "went missionary

down in South America" (47; ch. 7), the latter being a situation in

which paganism prevailed over Christianity. Fauna's multi-layered

costume also represents the party's numerous layers of meaning: on

the most superficial level, the costume party, being based on Snow

White and the Seven Dwarfs, is intended, to use Mack's words, "to get

Doc's ass out of the sling of despond" (79; ch. 11); on another level,

it serves as part of Mack and the boys' superfluous scam against

Joseph and Mary; on a third level, the party signifies Fauna's scheme

to unload a business liability. On yet another level, the masquerade

party represents an ancient pagan festival, unbeknownst to Fauna and

the others.

Another costume that suggests the party's multiple meanings is

Hazel's. Set on the idea of going as Prince Charming, Hazel enlists

the help of Joe Elegant, the Bear Flag's cook, to devise an

appropriate ensemble. Taking advantage of Hazel's feeble mind, Joe

"worked all day to get his revenge on mankind" (192; ch. 28). The

following description of Hazel's party attire reflects the cook's

creative, though questionable, character:

The basis of his costume was long gray underwear, to which were sewed hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs in red and black. Hazel's army shoes had yellow pompoms on the toes. An Elizabethan ruff

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of stiff paper was around his neck, and on his head a Knight Templar's hat with a white ostrich plume. From the belt around his middle hung a long scabbard. His right hand proudly held a cavalry saber at salute. . . . The drop set of the costume had been removed and in its place, right on the essential surface of Hazel himself, was painted a bull's eye in concentric circles of red and blue. (193)

Much like Fauna's costume within a costume. Hazel's motley apparel

represents a hodgepodge of sorts. Reminiscent of a court jester.

Hazel is an unwitting mockery of the intended Prince Charming, who

turns out to be the unsuspecting Doc. It is appropriate that Hazel

resembles a clown because Frazer mentions the presence of a clown at a

certain type of tree-festival held in Silesia (currently southwestern

Poland), According to Frazer, the male participants race one another

on horseback to the May-pole (152), The first to reach it is crowned

the Whitsuntide King while the last to reach it becomes the clown

(152-53).

Perhaps as ludicrous as Hazel's costume are those of Mack and the

other boys, who "all agreed to be trees" (190), Frazer points out

that at many of these European festivals "the tree-spirit is

represented simultaneously in vegetable form and in human form, which

are set side by side as if for the express purpose of examining each

other" (l44). Frequently, he maintains, an elected member dresses up

in vegetation, by which human and plant "form a sort of bilingual

inscription, the one being, so to speak, a translation of the other"

(l44). Arrayed as trees. Mack and the boys bear a resemblance to a

number of male characters that are associated with these festivals.

They are known throughout the European continent by a variety of

names: Green George (l46). Jack-in-the-Green (l48), the

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Whitsuntide-lout (l48), the Little Leaf Man (l48), the May King (l49),

the Leaf King (150), the Wild Man (346), and the Grass King (348). As

representatives of the tree-spirit, these merrymakers go about the

villages collecting "food such as eggs, cream, sausages, and cakes"

and performing various pranks, including "sprinkling water on

everybody" (l48). On Whit-Monday in Bohemia, for instance, a band of

"young fellows disguise themselves in tall caps of birch bark adorned

with flowers," gathering around the one designated as king while the

village crier recites lampoons (150). After this game, the men remove

their leafy mantles and "go about the village in holiday attire,

carrying a May-tree and begging" (150). Mack and the boys'

mischievous and parasitic behavior make them appropriate

representatives of such leaf-clad mummers.

While Mack and the boys are preparing for the party, customers at

Wide Ida's are getting into their own festive mood: "Eight Happys,

four Sneezeys, six Dopeys, and nineteen Grumpys clustered around the

bar, earnestly singing 'Harvest Moon' in one and a half part harmony"

(191; ch, 28), The song "Harvest Moon" is probably an allusion to a

similar term, "Harvest-May," which Frazer explains is the name of a

custom that communities in rural Germany and France still practice

(137). According to Frazer, the Harvest-May "is a large branch or a

whole tree, which is decked with ears of corn, brought home on the

last waggon from the harvest-field, and fastened on the roof of the

farmhouse or of the barn, where it remains for a year" as the

embodiment of the tree-spirit (137). Therefore, the fact that Snow

White's dwarfs are singing "Harvest Moon" off-key at Wide Ida's

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X

suggests that they are nevertheless in tune with the hidden meaning of

the impending festivity.

Besides dressing themselves as trees. Mack and the boys spruce up

the Palace Flophouse with foliage: "Beds were pushed together, and

the interior was a bower of pine boughs crossed to make a canopy"

(l89; ch. 28). The image of a pine bough sheltering the party-goers

is reminiscent of the great oak tree sheltering Joseph's house in To a

God Unknown. Like Steinbeck's implementation of the Spanish name

"Rama," meaning "bough," in the earlier novel, the image of the pine

bough at the masquerade party in Sweet Thursday alludes to the title

of Frazer's work. Furthermore, it refers to a practice that Frazer

discusses in his chapter on tree-worship in modern Europe: at a Whit-

Monday festival in Bohemia, representatives of the tree-spirit dressed

in the costumes of "a king and queen march about under a canopy"

(152), In Steinbeck's novel, however, there is no marching about

beneath the pine canopy in the Palace Flophouse because the designated

queen refuses to perform her part in the charade.

When the rather stunned Doc finds himself accepting Suzy publicly

as "my—girl" (199).

Suzy opened her eyes and looked in Doc's eyes. Then her jaw muscles tightened and her eyes grew fierce; her sweet mouth hardened to a line. She took off the crown and veil , , , "Listen, you mugs," said Suzy . . . "I could live with a stumblebum in a culvert and be a good wife. I could marry a yellow dog and be nice to him. But good Christ! Not Doc!" Suddenly she turned and darted out the door. (199)

Moments later she confesses to Fauna why she rejects Doc: "'I love

him,' said Suzy" (199). The inconsistency of her words and actions

implies that her real reason for rejecting Doc is that she thinks

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herself unworthy to be his wife. Suzy's opinion of herself is no

doubt connected to her being a prostitute, as evidenced by the fact

that she immediately moves out of the Bear Flag and into the abandoned

boiler inhabited by Mr. and Mrs. Malloy in Cannery Row. Suzy's shame

in being a prostitute is the product of mainstream society, which

advocates monogamy as an essential part of Christian behavior and

therefore denounces prostitution as a legitimate livelihood.

Two of Steinbeck's sources, however, indicate that primitive

societies would have considered Suzy's sexual experience to be

desirable for a bride-to-be,^ Briffault, for example, maintains, "In

the earlier phase of society, there is an actual preference for women

who are not virgins, for one of the chief objects of marriage is to

obtain children" {Mothers 398), Furthermore, he claims that some

modern communities still hold this view: "Indeed, even in European

society, among the lower orders and peasant populations, where

patriarchal influence is weaker, little importance is attached to the

virginity of a bride" (396), The significance of the Bear Flag and

its residents to the goings-on in the novel indicates that the

community of Cannery Row is at least to some degree a matriarchal

society. For example, in Chapter 26, Mack seeks advice from Fauna

about rigging Doc's party. Fauna also orchestrates Doc and Suzy's

date at Sonny Boy's restaurant, where the cocktails "arrived with a

speed that indicated they were already mixed" (l49; ch, 23) Moreover,

it is Fauna who promotes society proper. Under the sign of the Bear

Flag which refers to California's state flag. Fauna conducts lessons

in etiquette to turn her girls into acceptable brides for many of its

distinguished citizens, an ironic practice because it simultaneously

169

undermines society's virginity-obsessed, patriarchal authority. On a

wall in the Ready Room of the Bear Flag, Fauna has "a large framed

board on which were pasted enormous gold stars" (91; ch. 15). She

explains the significance of the stars to Suzy:

Every one of them stars represents a young lady from the Bear Flag that married, and married well. That first star's got four kids and her husband's manager of an A and P, Third from the end is president of the Salinas Forward and Upward Club and held the tree on Arbor Day, Next star is high up in the Watch and Ward, sings alto in the Episcopal church in San Jose. My young ladies go places. (94)

This passage reveals that Fauna has transformed the world's oldest

profession into a business for manufacturing productive citizens who

use their skills to further society.

Similarly, Frazer points out that primitive societies placed a

high value on sexual performance as a means of ensuring the land's

productivity. He suggests that the principle of homeopathic magic led

ancient Europeans to believe that human intercourse affected the

growth of their crops. Moreover, he explains in the following passage

from a chapter entitled "The Influence of the Sexes on Vegetation" why

it was so important to these people that their tree-festivals be

successes:

They were charms intended to make the woods to grow green, the fresh grass to sprout, the corn to shoot, and the flowers to blow. And it was natural to suppose that the more closely the mock marriage , , . aped the real marriage of the woodland sprites, the more effective would be the charm. Accordingly we may assume , , , that the profligacy which notoriously attended these ceremonies was at one time not an accidental excess but an essential part of the rites, and that , . . the marriage of trees and plants could not be fertile without the real union of the human sexes. (156-57)

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It is evident from Frazer's discussion that these people believed that

the failure of the human representatives to consummate their mock

marriage at these festivals would have terrible consequences on their

land,

Steinbeck indicates in his novel that all of Cannery Row's

inhabitants suffer because their charm to ensure Doc's happiness

fails, Steinbeck makes clear the reason for their concern for the

marine biologist's welfare: "Doc was more than first citizen of

Cannery Row, He was healer of the wounded soul and the cut finger

, , , , When trouble came to Doc it was everybody's trouble" (58; ch.

9). Doc, then, is much like the leader of a primitive clan (i,e,, a

"witch-Doc-tor"), and so his physical and emotional state is an

indication of the land's well-being."7 To stress Doc's resemblance to

an ancient tribal leader, Steinbeck even points out that one of the

Row's denizens regards Doc as nothing less than a man-god: "Hazel

thought Mack was the world's greatest human, while Doc he didn't

consider at all. Sometimes he said his prayers to Doc" (212; ch. 30).

This last statement identifies Doc as a resurrection of the character-

type that Steinbeck originally presents as Joseph in To a God

Unknown.^ Since Doc functions as a man-god to the people of Cannery

Row, the failure of his union with Suzy signifies "a catastrophe"

(200; ch, 29) that brings about "the disintegration of the Row" (201).

On a personal level. Doc also ascertains that his union with Suzy

is a necessary thing: "I am not whole without her. . , , Even when

we were fighting I was whole" (244; ch, 35), That is to say, his yang

must have a yin. Doc comes to this profound realization only after he

confesses his feelings for Suzy to his rattlesnakes:

171

"You are looking at a fool." he said, "I am a reasonable man, a comparatively intelligent man— IQ one hundred and eighty-two. University of Chicago, Master's and Ph.D. An informed man in his own field and not ignorant in some other fields. Regard this man!" he said. "He is about to pay a formal call on a girl in a boiler. He has a half-pound box of chocolates for her. This man is scared stiff. Why? I'll tell you why. He is afraid this girl will not approve of him. He is terrified of her. He knows this is funny, but he cannot laugh at it." (243-44; ch. 35)

Immediately after Doc's speech to his reptilian audience (who,

ironically, cannot hear^), Steinbeck writes, "The eyes of the snakes

looked dustily at him--or seemed to" (244), His description of the

snakes alludes to his last sentence in Cannery Row, which reads: "And

behind the glass the rattlesnakes lay still and stared into space with

their dusty frowning eyes" (123). Steinbeck uses the terms "dusty"

and "dustily" in connection with the rattlesnakes' eyes to refer to

ecdysis, the process by which snakes periodically shed their outer

layers of skin. The primary physical indication that a snake is

initiating this process is the clouding of its eyes,

Steinbeck refers to the process of ecdysis in order to indicate

that Doc is going through a transformation in Sweet Thursday, which is

prophesied a decade earlier in the last sentence of Cannery Row.^°

This change is Doc's realization that his life is missing something:

a woman. In Sweet Thursday, Steinbeck alludes to ecdysis when Doc the

suitor is about to call on Suzy, In Cannery Row, he refers to it

immediately after Doc finishes reading about a man's love for a girl

in exerpts from a poem called "Black Marigolds," written by the first-

century Brahman poet Chauras, According to E, Powys Mathers, Chauras

lived at the court of King Sundava and loved the king's daughter,

Vidya, Mathers claims that "on the discovery of their love Chauras

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was imprisoned and executed; and that it was in the last few hours of

his life that he composed his love lament, the Chaura-panchasika:

'the Fifty Stanzas of Chauras'" (7), a poem that therefore describes a

moment of transformation. In Mather's translation of Chauras' poem,

the poet refers seven times to the term "my girl," twice to "my lost

girl." once to "my soft girl." and twice more to "my bride," Doc's

acceptance of Suzy at the masquerade party in Sweet Thursday as "my—

girl" is undoubtedly a reference to the poem that he recites at the

end of Cannery Row.

In Chapter 3 of Sweet Thursday, Steinbeck writes, "Doc was

changing in spite of himself, in spite of the prayers of his friends,

in spite of his own knowledge" (20). Furthermore, he makes it clear

that Doc's need for a mate is the cause of this metamorphosis. Just

as a snake displays occasional spurts of restlessness and irritability

before it sloughs off its old skin. Doc exhibits signs of discontent,

manifesting itself in behavioral changes that include his loss of

taste for whiskey and beer, his lack of interest in other people, and

his inability to concentrate on his research (24-25). Moreover,

Steinbeck uses the word "discontent" seven times in connection with

Doc's restless state of mind. The last time appears in the following

passage, which also reveals the community's interest in Doc's well-

being: "Doc thought he was alone in his discontent, but he was not.

Everyone on the Row worried about him. And Mack said to Fauna, 'Doc

looks like a guy that needs a dame'" (25), This passage establishes

the Row's attempt to help Doc get a girl as the novel's central plot,

Steinbeck indicates that Doc needs the help of his friends to

succeed in the game of love. Relying almost solely on his records of

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^ \

• -|- IT !T-T 1

Gregorian chant to seduce the opposite sex in Cannery Row, Doc is

inept when it comes to courting his true love in Sweet Thursday, as

exemplified by his lack of preparation for their dinner date. Fauna

spends two and a half hours outfitting Suzy with such things as "clean

gloves," "a white handkerchief," "a white piqu6 dickey and cuffs," and

a purse chocked with other female necessities (l40-4l; ch, 22). Doc,

on the other hand, arrives at the Bear Flag "dressed in an open-

collared shirt, leather jacket, and army pants" (146) before he

returns to the lab and changes into "clean slacks, a tweed jacket, and

a tie he hadn't used in years" (l47). Later, in preparation for his

visit to Suzy's boiler. Doc puts more care into his appearance: he

"scrubbed himself until his skin was soap-burned and red," "brushed

his teeth until his gums bled," "gouged at his discolored nails,"

"brushed at his overgrown hair," and "shaved so close that his face

was on fire" (244; ch. 35). However, he learns that overzealous

hygiene and a half pound of chocolates are not charm enough to win

Suzy's favor. She explains her criteria for a man:

I want a guy that's wide open. I want him to be a real guy, maybe even a tough guy, but I want a window in him. He can have his dukes up in every other place but not with me. And he got to need the hell out of me. He got to be the kind of guy that if he ain't got me he ain't got nothing. (250)

Unable to convince Suzy that he is this sort of guy, the rejected

lover returns to Western Biological "sick with loss" (252),

The dim-witted Hazel, whose name appropriately means

"reconciliation" (Carole Potter 255), is the one who finally figures

out a way to bring the couple back together. Before he carries out

h*s plan Hazel seeks advice from the seer, a character similar to the

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mystic types that appear in some of Steinbeck's other works.'' Much

like the nameless old man in To a God Unknown, the seer believes that

he makes the sun go down each evening (73; ch. 10). Astro, who calls

the seer "an utter buffoon," describes his belief as a "highly selfish

insistence" (42). In The Golden Bough, however, Frazer shows that

many primitive cultures thought they controlled the sun's course. "In

ancient Egypt," writes Frazer, "the king, as the representative of the

sun, walked solemnly round the walls of a temple in order to ensure

that the sun should perform his daily journey round the sky without

the interruption of an eclipse or other mishap" (90), The seer, whose

"face was granitic—chiseled out of the material of prophets and

patriarchs" (68; ch. 10), advises Hazel, "you must do anything to

help [Doc]--anything" (256; ch. 36),

In light of Steinbeck's allusions to tree-worship in the novel,

it is important to note that both Hazel and the seer exhibit a special

affinity for trees. The seer lives below a bower of pine trees (69;

ch, 10), Similarly, Hazel lived with the rest of the boys beneath the

branches of a black cypress tree, according to the prologue in Cannery

Row (2), and in Sweet Thursday, he seeks solace at the base of the

same cypress when he "sat brooding" (74; ch, 11) over Doc's welfare

and also immediately before and after he performs the act that brings

Doc and Suzy together (257; ch, 36). In describing Hazel's decision

to go through with his plan, Steinbeck writes.

No one knows how greatness comes to a man. It may lie in his blackness, sleeping, or it may lance into him like those driven fiery particles from outer space. These things, however, are known about greatness: need gives it life and puts it in action; it never comes without pain; it leaves a man changed, chastened, and exalted at the same time--he can never return to simplicity, (256)

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Greatness overtakes Hazel, who breaks into heroism by breaking Doc's

arm. He performs this act while Doc is asleep, which is reminiscent

of Hazel's telling Doc about the way that Gay's wife "waits 'til he

gets to sleep and then hits him" in Cannery Row (20; ch, 6),

Moreover, breaking Doc's arm ensures Doc's dependence on Suzy, who

tells Doc in the boiler that her guy has "got to need the hell out of

me" (25O; ch, 35). Steinbeck suggests that Hazel assumes

responsibility for Doc's welfare because of his belief in Fauna's

horoscope reading, which destines him to become President of the

United States, That is to say, myth is what empowers Hazel to perform

the heroic action that restores Cannery Row's oneness and well-being.

Another significant demonstration of humankind's reliance on myth

occurs at a critical point in the novel's plot, between the time when

Hazel breaks Doc's arm and Suzy finally accepts Doc. Like Chapter 8,

Chapter 38 is an account about the nearby town of Pacific Grove,

entitled "The Pacific Grove Butterfly Festival," According to

Steinbeck, the townspeople established this annual celebration to

mimic the third event in Sweet Thursday that signifies the worship of

trees. Unlike the other two, this event is a natural phenomenon, and

its participants are not people, but butterflies:

On a certain day in the shouting springtime great clouds of orangy Monarch butterflies, like twinkling aery fields of flowers, sail high in the air on a majestic pilgrimage across Monterey Bay and land in the outskirts of Pacific Grove in the pine woods. The butterflies know exactly where they are going. In their millions they land on several pine trees—always the same trees. There they suck the thick, resinous juice which oozes from the twigs, and they get cockeyed. The first comers suck their fill and then fall drunken to the ground, where they lie like a golden carpet, waving their inebriate legs in the air and giving off butterfly shouts of celebration, while their

176

places on the twigs are taken by new, thirsty millions. After about a week of binge the butterflies sober up and fly away, but not in clouds: they face their Monday morning singly or in pairs. (259)

The butterflies' attraction to the sweet pine sap bears an uncanny

resemblance to Frazer's description of the Roman Saturnalia, the most

famous "period of license, when the whole population give themselves

up to extravagant mirth and jollity" (675). The purpose of Saturnalia

was to commemorate a former era of peace and harmony—a time that

therefore contrasts Steinbeck's opening description in Sweet Thursday

of war and discord. According to Frazer, the Roman Saturnalia

reflected back on the time when Saturn ruled the earth:

His reign was the fabled Golden Age: the earth brought forth abundantly: no sound of war or discord troubled the happy world: no baleful love of lucre worked like poison in the blood of the industrious and contented peasantry. (675)

Moreover, Frazer maintains, "Feasting and revelry and all the mad

pursuit of pleasure" marked the event, which, like the butterflies'

inebriate binge in Sweet Thursday, lasted for one week (676),

Furthermore, he notes that the most remarkable feature about

Saturnalia is the fact that "[t]he distinction between the free and

the servile classes was temporarily abolished" (676), Similarly, in

Sweet Thursday, all of the participants of the butterfly Saturnalia

are "Monarchs," Reminiscent of the Roman Saturnalia, the butterflies'

behavior signifies the restoration of social harmony that is missing

at the beginning of the novel,

Steinbeck indicates, however, that what the people of Pacific

Grove find most remarkable about the butterflies' annual pilgrimage to

their pine woods is that it attracted many curious people to their

177

community. As a result, they organized the Pacific Grove Butterfly

Festival and a corresponding Butterfly Pageant, illustrating the

inception and development of a myth. Steinbeck's second tale about

Pacific Grove shows how a group of people created a myth to satisfy a

certain need. In this case, the need is purely secular: the

promotion of commerce, which Brown argues in Hermes the Thief is the

need that was fulfilled by the Greek myth of Hermes,'^ To encourage

tourism, the townspeople of Pacific Grove commercialized the natural

event through the creation of a festival at which they sell

"butterflies made out of every conceivable material from pine cones to

platinum" (260), Moreover, Steinbeck claims that they even turned the

image of the Monarch butterfly into their totemic logo (260), an

oracular spirit that sends them tourists every year.

The community of Pacific Grove further promotes the festival by

creating a corresponding Butterfly Pageant, intended to explain the

mystery of the butterflies' annual return. The pageant, however, does

no such thing; instead, it promotes the town's sense of social values,

as exemplified by Steinbeck's description of it:

There once was a butterfly princess (sung by Miss Graves) and she wandered away and was lost. Somehow a bunch of Indians (citizens in long brown underwear) got in it. I forget how. Anyway, the loyal subjects searched and searched and at last found their princess and in their millions came to rescue her. (When they lie flat on their backs their legs are waving greetings to their queen.) It all works out very nicely, (260)

What the Butterfly Pageant propagandizes has very little to do with

the yearly return of the Monarchs, The pageant totally ignores the

butterflies' orgiastic nature as well as their shared purpose and

identity. The people of Pacific Grove completely reverse the

178

mythological significance of the butterflies' Saturnalia, Instead,

the pageant promotes the division of social classes by showing the

common masses, played by actors dressed as members of a minority race

that takes a submissive position from which to display their loyalty

to the governing elite. This is the same notion advanced by the

American system of capitalism.^3

Furthermore, this account supports Steinbeck's assertion earlier

in the novel that "we have so many beliefs we know are not true" (34;

ch. 5). It illustrates that people sometimes resort to gross displays

of chicanery in order to keep their myths alive. He maintains that

one year "the butterflies did not come, and the frantic town was

forced to print hundreds of thousands of paper butterflies in two

colors and spread them all over" (260); having learned from this

experience, its "wise city government keeps a huge supply of paper

Monarchs on hand in case tragedy should strike again" (260). This

passage reveals that their need of the festival is so great that they

are willing to sustain it through deception.

Similarly, because the inhabitants of Cannery Row believe that

the harmony of their tiny community depends on Doc's welfare, they

resort to deception to bring Suzy and Doc together and thus to prolong

their own myth. Their efforts eventually succeed, evidenced by the

fact that Suzy accepts Doc on a day characterized by a distinctly

pagan quality of regeneration:

Again it was a Sweet Thursday in the spring. The sun took a leap toward summer and loosed the furled petals of the golden poppies. Before noon you could smell the spice of blue lupines from the fields around Fort Ord.

It was a sweet day for all manner of rattlesnakes. On the parade ground a jack rabbit, crazy with spring, strolled in March Hare madness

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across the rifle range and drew joyous fire from two companies before he skidded to safety behind a sand dune. That jack rabbit's moment of grandeur cost the government eight hundred and ninety dollars and gladdened the hearts of one hell of a lot of soldiers. . . . At eleven o'clock the Monarch butterflies came boiling in from across the bay and landed in their millions on the pine trees, where they sucked the thick sweet juice and got cockeyed. (262-63; ch. 39)

Because Sweet Thursday is the last of Steinbeck's novels set in

the West, it is appropriate that it signifies fulfillment. On the

last page of the novel. Doc and Suzy literally ride off into the

sunset. It is important to note that Suzy is the one driving, which

suggests that Steinbeck's regeneration of society involves the

return to matriarchal origins, an idea that he also presents at the

end of his final novel. The Winter of Our Discontent.

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Notes

1 See Anoll 365.

2 For an understanding of Carroll's technique of embedding multiple meaning in his works, the reader is directed to Martin Gardner's extensive notes in The Annotated Alice: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass.

3 See 101-02.

* See 39-40.

5 Geoffrey of Monmouth was unquestionably one of Steinbeck's favorites authors to whom he refers in his first major work as well as one of his last. In Cup of Gold (the subtitle of which, A Life of Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer, with Occasional References to History . . . , reveals the dynamics between history and myth), Steinbeck indicates that "Merlin [was] a figment of the mad brain of Geoffrey of Monmouth" (23; ch. 1). In Travels with Charley, Steinbeck asserts that "We, as a nation, are as hungry for history as was England when Geoffrey of Monmouth concocted his History of England's Kings, many of whom he manufactured to meet a growing demand" (8O; part two). DeMott notes both of these references in Steinbeck's Reading 46, l48. See also 46-47 of the present study.

^ In this respect, Suzy resembles Elizabeth in To a God Unknown. See 85-86 for a discussion of Joseph's desire for his future bride to join symbolically with the tree-spirit.

7 The people's regard for Doc is similar to Joseph's regard for the giant oak tree in To a God Unknown, which functions as the totemic ancestral god of the Wayne clan. See 45-46.

® Hazel regards Doc in the same way that Rama regards Joseph as a man-god. See 84-85.

9 Snakes have no external organs with which to hear. Steinbeck no doubt knew this fact, either having learned it from his course in zoology at Stanford in 1923 (Benson 240) or from his long-time friendship with Ricketts. the marine biologist who is the model for the character of Doc.

1° Actually, Steinbeck establishes ecdysis as a metaphor for change in his short story "The Snake," which appeared in "a little magazine" called the Monterey Beacon in 1935 (SLL ll4) before it was published as part of The Long Valley in 1938. In the story. Steinbeck introduces Dr. Phillips, a proto-character for Doc in Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday, who owns "a little commercial laboratory on the cannery street of Monterey" (LF 69). The story focuses on an event that changes the way that Dr. Phillips views life and death. Steinbeck uses the word "dusty" to describe the eyes of the biologist's rattlesnakes as well as the eyes of his snake-like female visitor, a stranger who wants to buy a male rattlesnake and watch it

181

eat a rat. Dr. Phillips tells her that "lots of people have dreams about the terror of snakes making the kill. I think because it is a subjective rat. The person is the rat. Once you see it the whole matter is objective" (77) As she waits, "Her dark eyes seemed veiled with dust" (74). Steinbeck writes that the biologist, who kills and preserves animal life for his own living, "was shaken. He found that he was avoiding the dark eyes that didn't seem to look at anything. He felt that it was profoundly wrong to put a rat into the cage, deeply sinful; and he didn't know why. Often he had put rats in the cage when someone or other had wanted to see it. but this desire sickened him tonight" (77). This passage shows Dr. Phillips undergoing a transformation from regarding the death of an animal as an objective experience to a subjective one.

1' See 46-47, 128-29. and 131.

12 See Brown (Hermes) 38-41.

13 See 9-12.

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HSMWCaSESCESBSaECZ::?:^

CHAPTER VI

THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT: THE TALE

OF A DARK KNIGHT

The Winter of Our Discontent is Steinbeck's most explicit

literary demonstration of the dynamics between history and myth. It

differs from To a God Unknown, Cannery Row, and Sweet Thursday in that

it is set in the East, in a small Long Island village that overlooks

the Atlantic, rather than in the West, amidst California's turn-of-

the-century wilderness or alongside its hospitable Pacific coastline.

In the California novels that have been discussed in the present

study. Steinbeck follows American literature's convention of referring

to the wilderness as well as the West in general as metaphors of

potentiality--the Promised Land in which dreams are finally fulfilled.

In these earlier works, Steinbeck places various mythological elements

from the ancient past within the context of American history to

illustrate how they can regenerate a dying culture through the process

of remythologization. In contrast, he sets The Winter of Our

Discontent in the East, which, in the American literary tradition, is

a metaphor of cultural origin—the realm of the past in which dreams

are lost and forgotten.

Critics generally perceive The Winter of Our Discontent as a

story about the moral redemption of Steinbeck's protagonist. Unlike

Joseph, who kills himself at the end of To A God Unknown, Ethan Allen

Hawley aborts his plan to commit suicide in the concluding chapter of

Steinbeck's last novel. The general consensus among Steinbeck's

readers has been that Ethan's final action reflects a dramatic change

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in his character and therefore indicates that he has transcended the

corruptive forces around him. Charles J. Clancy, for example, claims

that the novel's ending is "an obvious and predetermined conclusion,"

which suggests that "Ethan may now develop into a hero" (101),

Similarly, in comparing Ethan with two of Shakespeare's most depraved

characters, Tetsumaro Hayashi maintains, "By finally refusing the

temptation, Ethan offers to purify his world, just as MacBeth and

Richard sully their world by succumbing to the temptation to undo the

serene established order of things" (115). Hayashi concludes that

Steinbeck "tries to reverse the vision of the Shakespearean play by

placing an innocent hero (Ethan) against a wicked world rather than a

wicked villain (MacBeth or Richard) against a good, but too innocuous

world" (115). Douglas L. Verdier also suggests that Steinbeck's

character denounces the corrosive influences around him. In

discussing the significance of Margie's tarot reading of Ethan, which

features the dreaded Hanged Man (a card that typically signifies

personal doom), he asserts that Ethan's "salvation comes not from the

tarot cards or even from the talisman, but from the realization that

his moral choices, freely made and for which he alone is responsible,

ultimately shape the future" (50). Moreover, John Timmerman indicates

that Steinbeck's main character "becomes a mythic archetypal pattern

of rebirth" (26l). and. in similar fashion. Howard Levant claims.

"With one stroke. Hawley's experience of wickedness becomes its

opposite" (300),

Some of these critics contend that what prevents The Winter of

Our Discontent from achieving literary success is Steinbeck's faulty

presentation of Ethan as a conventional literary hero as well as his

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inclusion of superfluous details. For example, Timmerman says. "Ethan

Hawley . . , does not seem the right character" because "he evidences

little inherent nobility, no point of moral or spiritual promise from

which to fall . . . However significant the moral revelation in the

novel, it fails to take root in character" (264); therefore, he

claims. "In no work [of Steinbeck's] is . . . the artistry more

shadowed than in The Winter of Our Discontent" (265). In similar

fashion. Hayashi asserts. "As I see it, John Steinbeck often makes

awkward Shakespearean allusions and mixes in his novel Shakespearean

courtly metaphors and symbols with others drawn from the American

commercial culture of the 1960s" (107). Moreover, Levant claims that

"The Winter of Our Discontent does not jell as a novel," calling it

"an incoherent parable" that is "petty in detail" (289).

The present study agrees with these critics who claim that Ethan

is ineffectual as a literary hero. However, in contrast to the reason

that they give for Ethan's shortcomings (i.e., that his character

development is the work of a flawed artist), it maintains that

Steinbeck intended Ethan to be regarded as an unredeemable figure

rather than as a clerk who breaks into heroism.^ This unconventional

view of Steinbeck's protagonist is based on the careful examination of

a number of details that other scholars fail to consider fully or

dismiss as aberrant or insignificant in terms of the novel's overall

design. The evaluation of these details takes into consideration

their historical and mythological contexts; in doing so, the present

study demonstrates how Steinbeck breaks the pattern on which modern

Western culture is based: Christian redemption.

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Like To a God Unknown, The Winter of Our Discontent presents

America as a metaphorical wasteland; moreover, it is an indictment of

a generation that has continued to disregard the warnings cried out by

a twentieth-century American Cassandra from the midst of a wilderness

devoid of what his main character calls "unchanging rules of conduct,

of courtesy, of honesty, yes. even of energy" (191; ch. 11). Owens

regards Steinbeck's 1957 novella. The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A

Fabrication, as the thematic forerunner of The Winter of Our

Discontent. He characterizes the earlier literary work as an attempt,

albeit unsuccessful, to awaken America from its state of moral

slumber:

That the rather too gentle jeremiad of this novella was insufficient for Steinbeck himself is suggested by the fact that from Pippin he would go on to The Winter of Our Discontent, a final, much darker and more explicitly American attempt to awaken his countrymen to the dangers of self-delusion and moral decay. ("Winter" 24-25)

Steinbeck's last novel is indeed a dark, sermonizing tale. It

illustrates "the disintegration of a man" (290; ch. 20) who represents

the conscience of his nation. Steinbeck clearly establishes his aim

to portray the declension of America in his most moralistic epigraph:

"Readers seeking to identify people and places here described would do

better to inspect their own communities and search their own hearts,

for this book is about a large part of America today" (vii).

As pointed out at the beginning of the present chapter. The

Winter of Our Discontent is set in the East. Therefore, it differs

from all of Steinbeck's other novels that depict America, which either

take place solely in the West or settle there after a westward

migration. In addition to his incorporation of the geographic East,

186

whose conventional literary association with the loss of the past

contrasts the West's association with the hope of the future,

Steinbeck's choice of temporal setting indicates his intention to

explore America's cultural origin, a dark past in which history and

myth are indistinguishable from one another. The events in

Steinbeck's final novel take place between the morning of Good Friday

and sometime before the morning twilight of July 6th, just before the

July 7th election that marks "the sound-off" of the plan to build the

New Baytown municipal airfield, as Ethan reveals (129; ch. 7).

According to Kevin M. McCarthy, "the time of the action around Easter

and Independence Day is a parody of the religious and patriotic images

of both festivals" (210), It is important to note that McCarthy

refers to Easter instead of Good Friday because this exemplifies the

general view among Steinbeck's critics that The Winter of Our

Discontent is a story about resurrection rather than resignation.

McCarthy's observation appears as an afterthought to his discussion of

Steinbeck's references to witchcraft and his use of various folklore

motifs in the novel; therefore, he fails to explore how "The new Ethan

Allen Hawley goes along with the national follies and uses them when

he can" (77; ch. 5).

The present study maintains that it is highly significant that

The Winter of Our Discontent begins in anticipation of Christ's

resurrection and ends in anticipation of an economic venture that

promises to renovate the obsolescent whaling community of New Baytown

into a modern community teeming with material prosperity. Good Friday

is. to use Ethan's words, "a dreadful holiday—dreadful" (32; ch. 1).

According to the Christian calendar, it is the grimmest day of all

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because it recalls the crucifixion and death of Christ.^ Good Friday

precedes Easter Sunday, which the church recognizes as the holiest of

holy days because it celebrates Christ's triumphant return to life.

Throughout Christendom, Easter signifies a major step in the

fulfillment of God's covenant with humanity through the resurrection

of a crucified god who promises to transform earth into paradise as

part of his future Second Coming, Therefore, the brief interval

between Christ's death on Good Friday and his restoration to life on

Easter morning is a period of spiritual twilight, in which the moral

standard of Western history is suspended out of time. Similarly, in

American history, the period between the adoption of the Declaration

of Independence on July 4. 1776, and the ratification of the

Constitution in I788 is a time of political twilight, in which America

awaited its coming into being as an independent nation. Thus the

Fourth of July and Good Friday both commemorate periods of transition

that precede the establishment or re-establishment of order. By

setting the action of The Winter of Our Discontent between two

holidays that signify states of spiritual and political twilight,

Steinbeck emphasizes the connection between religion and politics in

the founding of America—that is to say, the relationship between

anticipating Revelation and Revolution.

In order to understand the significance of Steinbeck's references

to American history in The Winter of Our Discontent, it is important

to remember that America's forefathers looked upon their freedom from

British rule as a defining moment in God's design for all of

humankind. According to Bernard Bailyn in The Ideological Origins of

the American Revolution, the social and theological ideas of early New

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England Puritanism played a significant role in shaping the ideology

that led to the American Revolution. The views of the Puritans, which

were propagated among themselves through sermons and disseminated to

others through religious tracts, promoted the belief "that the

colonization of British America had been an event designed by the hand

of God to satisfy his ultimate aims" (32). Over the course of time,

it transformed into the belief that America's independence from

England was a necessary step in actualizing the divine plan for

humanity.

In The American Jeremiad, Bercovitch claims, "The Revolution was

the movement linking the two quintessential moments in the story of

America—the twin legends of the Country's founding fathers--the Great

Migration and the War of Independence" (132). Following the pattern

established by the Puritan founders, who applied biblical typology to

their colonization of the New World, Revolutionary leaders promoted

the cause for America's political freedom from British dominance as

"the harvest of Puritanism" (132). According to Bercovitch, they

perceived that America's independence would fulfill "the divine will"

(134)—in other words, that it would bring about the millennium of

Christian order that John prophesies in the Book of Revelation,

Chapter 20, Bercovitch points out that Christian orations given on

the Fourth of July typically "invoke the legend of the fathers" (154),

Moreover, these national orations follow the pattern of Christian

redemption. On Easter Sunday, the sermons of America's clergy retell

the legend of Christ's crucifixion and proclaim that the Son of God

has risen from the grave; similarly, on July Fourth, they proclaim, as

did William Evans Arthur on July 4, I85O. in Covington, Kentucky, that

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America "has risen so rapidly from bondage to sovereignty, from

poverty to opulence, from obscurity to fame" (151). Bercovitch points

out that an essential characteristic of these national speeches is

that they expound "material achievement at great length" (I5I).

Therefore, they reinforce the Puritan notion that wealth is the

worldly manifestation of spiritual redemption,

Steinbeck suggests in The Winter of Our Discontent that the

pursuit of crass materialism, fostered by this Puritan notion, has

made America into "a dishonest thing" (I9O; ch. 11), Evidence that it

is a nation in moral decline is the contemporary abandonment of these

sacred holidays, Ethan observes, for instance, that the inhabitants

of New Baytown try to escape from society on these opportunistic days:

"a lot of people had gone away for the Easter weekend. That and the

Fourth of July and Labor Day are the biggest holidays. People go away

even when they don't want to" (62; ch. 4). The fact that many of them

desert the church on the most important day of the Christian year

brings to mind Spengler's assertion in The Decline of the West that

"the essence of every Civilization is irreligion--the two words are

synonymous" (I85), He claims, in fact, "It is this extinction of

living inner religiousness, which gradually tells upon even the most

insignificant element in a man's being, that becomes phenomenal in the

historic world-picture at the turn from Culture to Civilization"

(185).

Ethan's mention of the Easter exodus is also reminiscent of

Steinbeck's depiction of the crumbling church in To a God Unknown. It

is important to note, however, that what motivates the people to

abandon Christianity is essentially different in these two works. In

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the earlier novel, the villagers of Nuestra Seftora reject the religion

introduced by Spanish conquerors of the New World and seek out the

primordial nature gods of their native ancestors; in the later novel,

however, the citizens of New Baytown seek only conspicuous consumption

of things, for, as Ethan notes, the bank vault is the contemporary

"holy of holies" and money, "the sacrament" (221; ch. 13). Further

evidence that money has become the religion of Steinbeck's America in

the mid-twentieth century is the behavior of people on traditionally

religious days. Steinbeck depicts Good Friday in New Baytown as a day

on which "[t]he big glass doors of the bank folded open and a river of

people dipped in for money and brought the money to Marullo's and took

away the fancy foods Easter calls for" (23). On this morning, Joey

Morphy, the "bank-teller" whose habit it is to divulge information

about banking practices each morning in the alley that separates Mr.

Baker's bank from Marullo's grocery store, predicts that it will be a

day on which "everybody and his dog [are] cashing checks" (11; ch. 1).

Moreover, Ethan's own behavior on Good Friday indicates that the

consumption of goods has taken the place of religion. The grocery

store in which he is employed as a clerk is a "twilight place" (13).

On this day, Ethan regards it as a sanctuary, illuminated by "a

diffused cathedral light like that of Chartres" and filled with "organ

pipes of canned tomatoes, the chapels of mustard and olives, the

hundred oval tombs of sardines" (l4). The next morning, he is also

busy with "[w]hole flocks of crates to open" in preparation of the

last minute run on groceries (6l; ch. 4—emphasis added), further

suggesting that sales mean salvation in contemporary America.

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As Easter has lost its meaning to the people of New Baytown, so

has the Fourth of July. Steinbeck's depiction of a lack of

patriotism—one's individual contribution to the welfare of the

community as a whole—is another indication that society has fallen

into decadence, Mr, Baker the Banker tells Ethan, "Nothing happens

over Fourth of July weekend" (208; ch, 12), His statement implies

that the pursuit of individual happiness has destroyed the American

sense of communitarianism and its national identity. Steinbeck's

novel therefore reflects Spengler's view of Western culture. In The

Decline of the West, Spengler asserts that a culture must have "a

strong feeling of 'we' that forges the inward unity of its most

significant of all major associations; underlying the nation there is

an Idea" (267). Steinbeck's last novel suggests that America is

driven solely by Apollonian individuation, which manifests itself as

liberal capitalism. Contemporary society, Steinbeck suggests, has no

interest in "we"—that is to say, the Dionysian collective. It has no

all-embracing "Idea"--no common vision to unite it. Therefore, The

Winter of Our Discontent fulfills Steinbeck's omen in To a God Unknown

that America will become a wasteland unless it can reinvent itself

through remythologization. It suggests, moreover, that it is too late

for his generation to break the pattern of decline.

Evidence that Steinbeck wrote his last novel as an indictment of

his fellow compatriots is the fact that he sets it, unlike his other

works, in contemporary time. As pointed out by Louis K. MacKendrick,

Steinbeck wrote a particularly revealing letter to his publisher,

Pascal Covici, dated July 1. I960 (101), In it, he maintains, "The

scene I work on today falls on July 1st, I960, The date of the last

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and final scene will be July 10, I96O. I've never done that before.

I am writing not only about this time but this time to the exact day.

This is no trick" (SLL 676). Steinbeck changed his mind about the

final date of the novel, having it end appropriately in a state of

political twilight before the local election in New Baytown rather

than in the wake of it. Nonetheless, his letter dated July 1, I960,

indicates a conscious awareness of the fact that the temporal setting

of his novel runs roughly parallel with the actual time in which he is

composing it.

As noted by a number of Steinbeck's critics, the novel's title

comes from the opening line of Richard III. Moreover, Owens points

out that Steinbeck compares Shakespeare's most treacherous dissembler

with America's Richard Nixon in a letter to Adlai Stevenson, dated

June 29, i960 ("Winter" 22). In this letter, Steinbeck conveys to his

friend (who was also the Democratic candidate who opposed Eisenhower

in the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections) his utter disdain for

Republican leaders and their susceptibility to moral scandal:

"'Harding had his Teapot Dome; Eisenhower his Kishi; and Richard Nixon

. . . may profit from their example' . . . Perhaps it is an accident

that the names are the same--but the theme of Richard III will prove

prophetic" {SLL 674-75). On a postcard that Steinbeck previously sent

Stevenson on April 12, I96O, he says the following about the Vice

President, who now seeks the presidential nomination of his party:

"You know, I rather liked Nixon when he was a mug. You knew to

protect yourself in a dark alley. It's his respectability that scares

hell out of me" (665), In The Winter of Our Discontent, Steinbeck

suggests that the people of New Baytown are apathetic about the

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upcoming election in November: "Nobody," Ethan notes, "mentioned the

Democratic National Convention coming up in Los Angeles—not even

once, , . , I think mostly they were interested in what was close to

home" (285; ch. 19),

The prospects of a Nixon presidency meant the extension of the

1950s policies of the Eisenhower-Nixon Administration. According to

John Patrick Diggins in The Proud Decades: America in War and Peace,

1941-1960, the Eisenhower-Nixon era was marked by "inaction and

absence of vision" (347). "Problems," he notes, "like civil rights,

poverty and unemployment, education, health, and the environment were

not so much faced as postponed" (347). Eisenhower, for example,

"refused to endorse the Brown decision" (283), which made school

segregation unconstitutional. Moreover, Diggins asserts, "Eisenhower

preferred to live a life without examining it, and if destiny called

upon him to lead, he did not care to know where" (348). Such national

leadership, according to Diggins. motivated the eminent newspaper

columnist and liberal Democrat Walter Lippmann in I960 to write

"Anatomy of Discontent," which criticizes "a willingness of Americans

to extend their political commitments and an unwillingness to fulfill

them" (349), Diggins concludes in his analysis of the social impact

of the Eisenhower-Nixon Administration that "the world was no safer

and humankind continued to be in the coils of the nuclear peril"

(347), evidenced by the fact that a substantial number of Americans

were obsessed by the threat of global annihilation: "about 5 percent

of the population either had bomb shelters or had made structural

changes or additions to their homes to prepare for survival, and

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another 20 percent had stocked up food and emergency supplies"

(328).

The Winter of Our Discontent is a reaction to what Steinbeck

regarded as an uncertain time for national progress—a time that also

happened to be the peak of the cold war between the United States and

the Soviet Union. Therefore, it compares with To a God Unknown,

Cannery Row, and Sweet Thursday, which he also wrote in periods of

social twilight (i.e., the Depression, World War II, and postwar

transition). In all of these works, Steinbeck responds to periods of

social instability by exploring the subject of myth. A letter that he

wrote to his friend Joseph Bryan, dated September 28, 1959, reveals

his reason for evoking myth in these times of disorder:

Now, next to our own time the 15th century was the most immoral time we know. Authority was gone. The church split, the monarchy without authority and manorial order disappearing. It is my theory that Malory was deploring this by bringing back Arthur and a time when things were not so. A man must write about his own time no matter what symbols he uses. And I have not found my symbols nor my form. And there's the rub. . . . You can call it divine discontent if you want to but to me it is divine scared shitless. . . . The flame can go out, you know. It has happened. But it must be abysmal pain when it does. And faced with the great theme—what sadness. (649-50)

Soon after he wrote this letter, Steinbeck found his symbols and his

form to express the "abysmal pain" that he felt about the decay of

contemporary society, which he expressed as The Winter of Our

Discontent.

Besides alluding to Shakespeare's Richard III, the title of

Steinbeck's final novel may also have been intended to suggest the

eschatological myth of "Ragnarok," a Nordic term that Anderson points

out comes from "ragna," a variation of "regin," which means "gods,"

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and "rQkr," which means "darkened"--e.g., "Twilight of the Gods"

(4l3). According to Anderson, an era of "dissolution of nature's and

life's disharmony," "crime and terror," and "growing depravity and

strife in the world" (4l6) heralds the imminent approach of Ragnarok,

a period of time that marks "[t]he final destruction of the world"

(4l3). The most distinguishing characteristic of this time of global

twilight is the fact that it begins as an extended winter without

regeneration:

First there is a winter called Fimbul-winter, during which snow will fall from the four corners of the world; the frosts will be very severe, the winds piercing, the weather tempestuous and the sun will impart no gladness. Three such winters shall pass away without being tempered by a single summer. Three other similar winters follow, during which war and discord will spread over the whole earth. (4l6-17)

This prolonged period of wintertime precedes the "final struggle, in

which the contending powers [of chaos] mutually destroy each other" as

"the last remnant of the consumed earth sinks into the ocean" (427).

In the tradition of Nordic mythology, this is the inevitable destiny

of the world; however, its destruction makes way for the birth of a

completely new one (as opposed to its own resurrection), in which

"[t]he new race of mankind seem to possess a far nobler nature than

the former" (433).

Similarly, Steinbeck indicates in The Winter of Our Discontent

that the current time in history is marked by a sense of desperation

that is similar to that evoked by the coming of Ragnarok: "discontent

and uneasiness, guilt and a compulsion to get something--anything—

before it is all gone" (175; ch. 10). According to Ethan,

This year of I960 was a year of change, a year when secret fears come into the open, when

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discontent stops being dormant and changes gradually to anger. It wasn't only in me or in New Baytown. Presidential nominations would be coming up soon and in the air the discontent was changing to anger and with the excitement anger brings. And it wasn't only the nation, the whole world stirred with restlessness and uneasiness as discontent moved to anger tried to find an outlet in action, any action so long as it was violent— Africa, Cuba, South America, Europe, Asia, the New East, all restless as horses at the barrier. (280-81; ch. 19)

Steinbeck uses Ethan as a mouthpiece in this passage to convey the

sense of profound distress that people were experiencing throughout

the world at the time in which he wrote his final novel. The German

term for this intense feeling of world-weariness is "Weltschmerz," a

word that Ethan learned as a child from his Great-Aunt Deborah, who

pronounced it "Welsh rats" (272; ch. 17). Because Ethan's great-aunt

"was named for Deborah the Judge of Israel" (2l6; ch. 13), her

enunciation is intended, perhaps, to signify a judgment against

Eurocentricity for its part in bringing about the current state of

world affairs.

In The Winter of Our Discontent, Steinbeck portrays what he

perceives as a state of global twilight in his depiction of New

Baytown. Although it appears on a superficial level to be "a lovely

place," it is a community overcome many years ago by "[s]ickness and

the despair" (l8l; ch. 11). Like Monterey, the setting of Cannery Row

and Sweet Thursday, the home of Ethan's ancestors is a town in

decline. According to Steinbeck, New Baytown once represented a major

point of commerce on the American side of the Atlantic, being one of

the few towns on the East coast that "furnished the whale oil that

lighted the Western World" before petroleum and kerosene replaced

whale oil as major sources of energy (l8l). The decay of New Baytown,

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however, is not limited to economics. It is "a Republican town" (285;

ch. 19)—a detail included in the novel, no doubt, to reflect

Steinbeck's hostility toward the executive leadership of America in

i960. According to Ethan, the city officials and prominent

businessmen of New Baytown formulate public policy for their own

personal gain:

Judge Dorcas fixed traffic tickets for favors. It wasn't even secret. And favors call for favors. The Town Manager, who was also Budd Building Supplies, sold equipment to the township at a high price, and some of it not needed. If a new paved street went in, it usually turned out that Mr. Baker and Marullo and half a dozen other business leaders had bought up the lots before the plan was announced. These were just facts of nature, but 1 had always believed they weren't facts of my nature. (100; ch. 6)

This passage indicates that New Baytown is representative of

Steinbeck's view of contemporary America—a "gray and dangerous

country" (212; ch. 13). Moreover, it reveals that Ethan, who takes

pride in his belief that he is a "Good Man" (100), begins to doubt his

own character, much like Hawthorne's protagonist in "Young Goodman

Brown" begins to doubt the character of the people around him,

including his own wife Faith.3

Steinbeck's character awakes to the realization that he lives in

a blurred, crepuscular realm in which society regards appearance as

reality, shrewdness as integrity, and prosperity as sainthood. The

course of the novel portrays the inception and development of Ethan's

insidious plot to restore his family's social status, which involves

reclaiming its lost inheritance (i.e., Marullo's grocery store) as

well as obtaining the property of others (i.e., Taylor Meadows, the

probable site for New Baytown's future airport). In the process,

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Ethan exploits other characters in a manner that is reminiscent of his

ancestors. He claims that his forefathers "successfully combined

piracy and puritanism, which aren't so unlike when you come down to

it. Both had a dislike for opposition and both had a roving eye for

other people's property" (44; ch. 3). Ethan indicates, moreover, that

these "restless, treacherous, quarrelsome, avaricious seafaring men"

(44) acquired the status of gentlemen by disguising their piracy as

privateering, which was regarded at the time to be a very

controversial practice:

My ancestors, those highly revered ship-owners and captains, surely had commissions to raid commerce in the Revolution and again in l8l2. Very patriotic and virtuous. But to the British they were pirates, and what they took they kept. That's how the family fortune started that was lost by my father. That's where the money that makes money came from. We can be proud of it. (65; ch. 4)

As the novel unfolds, Steinbeck's character becomes increasingly aware

of the fact that he cannot escape his family's past of questionable

conduct.

During his moral crisis, Ethan retreats to the stone foundation

of the abandoned Hawley dock, a spot that signifies the sacred origin

of his ancestors. "Big changes," he maintains, take him back to this

particular site—to what he calls "the Place" (52; ch. 3). He

withdraws into the small, seaward facing hole in the stone. From this

vantage point, he can look out across the water to "Whitsun Reef"

(49), the name of which, as pointed out by Clancy, refers to "the

feast date celebrating the arrival of the Holy Spirit" after Christ's

ascension into heaven (96).^ Steinbeck's inclusion of this detail

suggests that Ethan's "Place" on the border between land and water is

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a magical field in which the sacred and secular worlds come together.

Like the moss-covered stone in To a God Unknown, Ethan's "Place" is

reminiscent of a dolmen, a stone perforated with "soul holes" that

enabled primitive Europeans to seek comfort and guidance from the

spirits of their ancestors.5 Therefore, "the Place" signifies Ethan's

axis mundi.^

It is important to note that Ethan says, "I call whatever happens

in the Place 'taking stock'" (52). It seems very likely that

Steinbeck adopted this phrase from Spengler, who uses a variation of

it to describe "the great crisis" (37) that every culture experiences

in the course of its decline: "herein precisely lies the inward

necessity of the stock-taking doctrine . , , It confirms all that has

been sought and achieved for generations past . . . no matter what

their aim may be" (38). Thus, if Steinbeck intended the phrase

"taking stock" to allude to Spengler's "stock-taking doctrine," then

his using it to describe Ethan's soul-searching implies that Ethan's

destiny is to follow the example of his progenitors, even though he

recognizes that their conduct was morally wrong. It therefore

suggests that The Winter of Our Discontent is a tragedy that examines

what Annette Kolodny in The Lay of the Land calls the "unresolvable

conflict between America's yearning for a pastoral New World paradise

and the increasing awareness throughout American history that

violation and despoliation are an inevitable consequence of human

habitation" (7).

Ethan indicates that his ancestors include the "Vermont Aliens"

(46* ch. 3). The fact that Steinbeck names his character after a

famous figure from the Revolutionary War reflects the need of a

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bewildered generation to re-examine America's national origin in an

effort to understand its role in an increasingly troubled world. As

Diggins notes, "One of the great intellectual harvests of the forties

and fifties was the rediscovery of the colonial past. For years to

come it would remain the most fertile field in American historical

scholarship" (257). The most prominent scholar of this time was Perry

Miller, who, unlike previous American historians, stressed the

significance of religion in the nation's early development (256).

However, in contrast to Miller, who "admired Calvinism for its

intellectual richness and philosophical depth" (257), Steinbeck's

depiction of Ethan's ancestry portrays America's founders as common

criminals,

Ethan tells Joey that he "[m]ust be" related to the historical

Ethan Allen (11; ch. 1), In Ethan Allen: Frontier Hero, Charles A.

Jellison presents the legendary figure as a man of questionable

character:

Soldier, politician, publicist, land speculator, and aspiring traitor, he was truly a host in himself, who, because he refused to be dispirited or put down, left his indelible mark upon his own time and times to follow. Controversial then and now, a demigod to some and to others an unconscionable thug, he is generally conceded to have played, for fair or for foul, a dominant role in the affairs of early Vermont and the American Republic, (vii)

Allen is best remembered for his role in leading a private militia

known as the Green Mountain Boys, Aided by Benedict Arnold and his

own forces. Allen and his men raided Ft. Ticonderoga in May, 1775.

According to Allen's fantastic and overweening account of his

revolutionary adventures, entitled The Narrative of Colonel Ethan

Allen, he demanded that the British surrender the fort "in the name of

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the great Jehovah, and the Continental Congress" (8)—rhetoric that

demonstrates the inseparability of religion and government in colonial

America. Allen also claimed to have authored a treatise on deism

called Reason the Only Oracle of Man. Jellison points out that

historians, such as Zadock Thompson, maintain that the writing is

based almost completely on a manuscript written by a free-thinker

named Thomas Young (308). According to Jellison, Allen acquired the

manuscript after Young's death and later published it under his own

name without giving any credit to Young (308). It is ironic that this

work is informally known as Allen's Bible, for it gave Allen the

reputation of being an atheist. It is also ironic that Allen claimed

that it was his own work because it stresses the importance of a

system of morality based on the observation of nature and human

reasoning.

The fact that twentieth-century historians regard one of

America's Revolutionary heroes as a plagiarizer is significant for

understanding The Winter of Our Discontent because Ethan's son,

appropriately named Allen, takes credit for the writings of others.

Allen and his sister Ellen tell their father on Good Friday that they

are entering the "National I Love America Contest" (35; ch. 6). On

the Fourth of July, the officials of the essay contest will announce

the winners, who will "get to go on television" and receive "lots of

other prizes" (35). Ethan suggests that his children consult the

works of Lincoln, Webster, Clay, Thoreau, Whitman, Emerson, and Twain

for inspiration for their essays. He keeps these American figures

along with various ancestral relics and heirlooms in the attic (a

conventional symbol of the subconscious), which Steinbeck suggests has

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come to be the resting place of forgotten leaders, orators, and

authors in the twentieth century. As Ethan notes, "So many old and

lovely things are stored in the world's attic, because we don't want

them around us and we don't dare throw them out" (8O-8I; ch. 5).

Exhibiting behavior that is reminiscent of his own ancestors, Allen

plunders the pearls of historic wisdom and submits to the contest a

pirated hodgepodge of "Henry Clay . . . some Daniel Webster, some

Jefferson, and . . . a swatch from Lincoln's Second Inaugural" (306;

ch. 21).

The Hawleys learn on the Fourth of July that Allen has won,

ironically, "honorable mention" (270; ch. I8—emphasis added). Ellen,

however, deprives Allen of the opportunity to appear on television and

"to cut in on some of that loot" (82; ch. 5). Exhibiting behavior

that resembles the way that Ethan notifies the Federal Department of

Immigration and Naturalization of Marullo's illegal status by an

anonymous call, Ellen sends an anonymous postcard of the Empire State

Building to the essay officials, notifying them about Allen's

dishonorable deed. Ethan and Ellen's behavior brings to mind the fact

that, as Diggins notes, informers became America's new heroes in the

days of McCarthyism (l64). A representative of NBC comes to New

Baytown to discuss with Ethan the need to keep the matter quiet, in

light of "all the quiz troubles and Van Doren and all" (306). The

reference here is to Charles Van Doren, an assistant professor of

English at Columbia University, who, as Diggins notes, appeared on the

weekly quiz show the "64 Thousand Dollar Question" and "stood in a

glass booth seemingly wracking his brain to come up with last second

answers and walk away with a bundle of cash" until "a losing

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contestant informed the district attorney that the program was rigged"

(I9I). Diggins maintains.

Public reaction in the quiz scandals reflected the state of morality in the fifties, . , . CBS received letters recommending that he not be fired, and Columbia students held a rally to protest his dismissal. Journalists reported that many Americans they interviewed saw nothing wrong with Van Doren's conduct. He only wanted what they wanted—money and fame, in that order. (I9I)

In The Winter of Our Discontent, the representative from the essay

contest exhibits the same attitude of moral laxity. He offers a

"[s]cholarship or . , . something dignified" to reward Allen's

plagiarizing behavior in exchange for Ethan's promise of silence (307;

ch, 21),

Steinbeck obviously intended such conduct to reflect what he

deemed is the true nature of America's heroes, such as the legendary

Ethan Allen, Herman Melville, an author whom Steinbeck admired in his

later years (DeMott, SR I63), provides a literary model for Allen's

questionable character in Israel Potter: His Fifty Years in Exile, a

short novel about an American Revolutionary soldier who escapes from

the British after being taken to England as a prisoner of war.7

Chapter 22 of Israel Potter begins, "Among the episodes of the

Revolutionary War, none is stranger than that of Ethan Allen in

England; the event and the man being equally uncommon" (594),

Melville portrays Allen as an amusing opportunist. A prisoner on

public display, he alters his demeanour according to his audience.

For example, he displays bravado before an officer, referring to the

British General Sir William Howe as "that toad-hearted king's lick­

spittle of a scarlet poltroon; the vilest wriggler in God's worm-hole

below" (589). A few minutes later, however, when he is approached by

204

a minister, Allen calls himself a "meek-hearted Christian captured in

honorable war" (590). In suggesting his resemblance to Christ, Allen

maintains that if he is "hung like a thief," he will demonstrate "even

on a tree, how a Christian gentleman can die" (590). Following

Allen's exchange with the reverend, he attempts to woo "a bright

squadron of fair ladies" (590) by claiming that their eyes have "made

trebly a captive" (591). He convinces them that he is "the vowed

friend and champion of all ladies all round the world," evidenced by

the fact that the ladies send him "a bottle of good wine every day,

and clean linen once every week" for the remainder of his imprisonment

in England (591). After the ladies part company with Allen, a

prosperous farmer accosts him, inquiring about the nature of his

livelihood before the war. Allen answers, "'Why, in my younger days I

studies divinity, but at present I am a conjuror by profession"

(592)—a statement almost identical to Allen's own in The Narrative of

Colonel Ethan Allen: "'I had studied divinity, but was a conjurer by

passion'" (42).

Similarly, in The Winter of Our Discontent, Steinbeck presents

his own Ethan as a deceptive character who tricks others into

disbelieving him when he tells the truth. For example, the novel

begins with Mary Hawley waking up to see Ethan's face with "little

fingers pulling a frog mouth at her" (5). Because she perceives her

husband as a capricious jokester, she ignores remarks that reveal his

true intentions, such as "I'll rob a bank" (40; ch. 2), or, in regard

to her friend Margie, "I'm going to make love to her" (46; ch, 5),

Similarly, Mr. Baker considers Ethan as an ingenuous man bereft of his

ancestors' amoral business sense—a necessary faculty, according to

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the banker, for those wanting to succeed in the world of commerce.

Therefore, he does not fully grasp the meaning of Ethan's statement,

"Let's say I overcame my scruples" (125; ch. 7). Likewise, Alfio

Marullo is flabbergasted by the fact that Ethan refuses a five percent

kickback that the wholesale distributor Mr, Biggers offers him on

orders for the store. Because Marullo thinks of Ethan as "a good kid"

and "a good friend too" (109; ch, 6), he refuses to take Ethan at his

word when he says, "Maybe I'm waiting to steal the whole thing" (159;

ch, 9).

The only characters who see through Ethan's duplicity are his

childhood companion Danny and his wife's friend Margie. In contrast

to the other characters, who represent contemporary Apollonian

society. Danny and Margie perceive the world through lunar

consciousness, Danny, for example, is "the town drunk" (47; ch. 3) •

His desire to sustain a physical state of inebriation suggests that he

is a servant of Dionysus, the moon-god that Nietzsche associates with

the "mystical experience of the collective" (BT 24). Because Danny

bases his perception of things on Dionysian intuition rather than on

Apollonian reasoning, he is able to ascertain the real intent of

Ethan's offer of a thousand dollars "to pay for a cure" for his

alcoholism (132; ch. 8). Danny tells his longtime friend, "You're

betting I'll put up my meadow as collateral. And you're betting that

a thousand dollars of booze will kill me, and there you'll be with an

airport in your lap" (136). After Ethan leaves him the money, Danny

draws up a will and a deed to the property. He slips these papers

under the door of the grocery store, along with a note that says.

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"Dear Eth: This is what you want" (177; ch. 10). He then returns to

Taylor Meadows to fulfill his own prophecy.

Like Danny. Margie Young-Hunt is aware of Ethan's moral breakdown

because she. too. understands the world through lunar wisdom, which

Steinbeck suggests through a number of conventional associations.

First. "Margie" is a nickname for "Margaret," which means "a pearl"

(Carole Potter 247). As noted previously, Briffault indicates in The

Mothers that primitive societies regarded pearls as sacred objects

that come from the moon (328). In Cannery Row and "The Pearl,"

Steinbeck refers to the pearl, in its relation to twilight, as a

symbol of transition. In The Winter of Our Discontent, he uses it as

a symbol of Ethan's personal metamorphosis. The only instance in

which the word "pearl" appears in the novel is in a particularly

meaningful passage narrated by Ethan: "On Thursday, the thirtieth of

June, I awakened as usual in the black pearl light of the dawn, and

that was early now in the lap of midsummer" (2l4; ch. 13—emphasis

added). The fact that Ethan perceives the early light of a midsummer

morning as "black" echoes his earlier experience at "the Place" during

what he describes as "the false dawn" (54; ch. 3). In light of these

details, Margie signifies a "black pearl," and therefore her presence

in the novel is a prophetic indication that Ethan will never attain

the dawn of salvation.

Other details about Margie also reveal that Steinbeck associates

her with lunar consciousness. For instance, he describes her as a

nomadic "Artemis for pants" (20; ch. 1). Briffault maintains in The

Mothers that Artemis was a moon-goddess who was affiliated with

Dionysus throughout Greece (37^). Moreover, in Mythology, Hamilton

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claims that the Greeks referred to their goddess as "protectress of

dewy youth" and "huntsman-in-chief" (31). It is therefore appropriate

that Margie's last name is "Young-Hunt," a point noted by McCarthy

(199). Because Steinbeck likens Margie to a moon-goddess, it is

especially significant that he establishes her relationship with Ethan

on Good Friday, a day on which the moon supposedly eclipsed the sun

between noon and three o' clock while Christ hanged on the cross at

Calvary. After Ethan encounters Margie on the morning of Good Friday,

he alludes to this fact in noting that "a darkness fell on the world

and on him" (23).

Frazer indicates in The Golden Bough that primitive people feared

that "the sun was being extinguished" during a solar eclipse (90),

which explains why humans have typically regarded such occurrences as

harbingers of misfortune and evil. In The Winter of Our Discontent,

Steinbeck suggests that Margie's ecliptic appearance on Good Friday

announces Ethan's impending doom. In particular, it foreshadows her

tarot card reading of him, which she performs, significantly, on the

eve of Easter. Margie turns over the Hanged Man in the future

position of the Celtic Cross, a common ten-card layout used by amateur

fortune tellers^—a detail that also brings to mind the fact that

Ethan notes on July 1st that the American flag "slumped limp as a

hanged man" on the flagpole (230; ch. l4). During her reading of

Ethan. Margie claims to envision the image of a snake, which is a

symbol of evil in the Old Testament. In The Mothers, Briffault

contends that, in contrast to the patriarchal Judaic culture, the

earlier matriachal societies often used snakes to represent their

lunar gods and goddesses (309) because they regarded them as symbols

208

of immortality (306). He claims, in fact, "So intimate is this

association that it may safely be laid down that, where we find the

serpent in symbolism or worship, we may confidently expect to find a

lunar cult" (312). Furthermore. Campbell maintains, "The serpent

sheds its skin to be born again as the moon sheds its shadow to be

born again. The serpent, therefore, like the moon, is a symbol of

lunar consciousness" (TMT 20). In Steinbeck's novel, Margie--whom

Ethan notes near the end of the novel moves as "quick as a snake"

(300; ch. 21)--says that the one in her vision was "changing its skin,

part dusty and ragged and part fresh and new" (95; ch. 5). The

reference to ecdysis during Margie's tarot reading therefore

prophesies Ethan's transformation.^

Besides her affiliation with a moon-goddess and one of the more

slithery of its symbols, Margie is also associated with witchcraft.

Briffault indicates that primitive people believed that the powers of

magic and prophecy originated from the moon (298); therefore, "woman's

witchcraft is the moon's witchcraft" (306). McCarthy suggests that

Margie's name "may have come from a shortened form of the name

Margaret from Shakespeare's Richard III" because, as he observes,

"Margaret is called both a 'prophetess' (1.3-310) and a 'foul wrinkled

witch' (1.3.164); the former epithet is true of Margie Young-Hunt as

is the latter, especially when she relaxes her well-trained facial

muscles before the mirror" (199-200). He points out, moreover, that

"Margaret's prediction of what will happen to a number of people in

Shakespeare's play comes true, just as Margie's prediction of Ethan's

acquisition of wealth and power comes true" (199).

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Margie claims that her great-grandmother from Russia was

"sentenced to Alaska for witchcraft" (91; ch. 5). In this respect,

she is reminiscent of Mary Talbot, a character in Cannery Row whose

"great-great-great-great grandmother had been burned as a witch" (94;

ch. 24). Furthermore, Steinbeck indicates in Cannery Row that Mary

enjoys giving "tea parties for the neighborhood cats" (95) much like

Mack and the boys enjoy collecting cats to sell to Doc for laboratory

specimens (33; ch. 9). In The Mothers. Briffault asserts that cats,

like snakes, are common symbols of the moon (301). At the beginning

of The Winter of Our Discontent, Ethan has a strong dislike for the

gray tabby that tries to sneak into the grocery store each morning.

On Good Friday. Ethan tells the cat, "Aroint! You hear me—aroint!"

(13; ch. 1). an admonition that he later uses with Margie (172; ch.

9).'° During the course of the novel, however, Ethan's dislike for

cats lessens as he becomes increasingly more depraved. He notes that

his wife and daughter acquire cat-like qualities at night. For

instance, his sleeping wife's "breath purrs in her throat, not a

snore, a kitten's purr" (4l; ch. 3). Also, he regards his

somnambulistic daughter Ellen as "a night cat" (l4l; ch. 8). Near the

end of the novel, he "punched two holes in a can of condensed milk and

squirted it into the coffee can, propped the back door open, and put

the can in the entrance" as an offering for the gray alley cat (280;

ch. 19).

The presence of cats in The Winter of Our Discontent is

significant for another reason. Briffault points out that the Knights

Templar of the Middle Ages were accused as heretics who worshiped cats

(The Mothers 301), Steinbeck indicates that many generations of Allen

210

and Hawley men have been affiliated with the modern Knights Templar,

more commonly known as the international secret fraternity of the Free

and Accepted Masons, According to Ethan, "We been Masons since before

George Washington was Grand Master" (l49; ch. 9). Moreover, he

indicates that Mr. Baker's family has also been longtime members of

the cryptic order: "It's in his family too" (150). It is important

to note that the feather from Ethan's Knight's Templar hat has

yellowed, a detail that, on the one hand, suggests moral decay, and on

the other, suggests a recent lack of participation in the

organization; however, during the course of the novel, Ethan re­

establishes his family's affiliation, evidenced by the fact that he is

"[g]oing to see if [the feather] can be whited up" (l49—emphasis

added), which implies that his association with the Templars will

"whitewash" his own corruption. Another indication that a link exists

between Ethan's moral corruption and his renewed interest in the

Templars is the fact that, as part of his plan to rob the bank during

the Fourth of July weekend, he figures out a place where he can hide

the money: "In my Knight Templar's hatbox there was a support of

velvet-covered cardboard, the size and shape of my head. This was

already lifted free and the edges coated with contact cement so it

could be restored in an instant" (245; ch. l4).

In regard to the present discussion, it is important to note that

Masonic orders played a significant role in the political and economic

development of early American society. In 1826, however, the Masons

became involved in a controversy that led to the inception of an anti-

Masonic movement in New York, which subsequently developed into the

national Anti-Masonic party. According to Lorman Ratner in

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Antimasonry: The Crusade and the Party, "On the 11th of September in

1826 three men kidnapped a prisoner from the jail in Batavia, New

York. The victim was William Morgan, a Mason who was planning to

publish the secret rituals of that Fraternity" (1). Morgan's

disappearance brought Masonry into public scrutiny. Ratner maintains,

"Antimasons discovered that though the number of Masons in the state

was relatively small, they held most of the high judicial and

political positions in the state" (12).

Because Masons performed their secret rituals in the dark--a

detail that brings to mind Ethan's "Congress in the Dark" in The

Winter of Our Discontent (99; ch. 6)—Antimasons claimed that the

Masonic organization promoted the Devil's work "to undermine religion"

(13). That being so, the word "light" appears repeatedly in

Antimasonic literature (13). The most important of these tracts, as

pointed out by William Preston Vaughn in The Antimasonic Party in the

United States 1826-1843, was titled Light on Masonry, published in

1829 by a Baptist minister named David Bernard, who was "the first

Mason to desert the fraternity following Morgan's disappearance" (19).

The Anti-Masonic party was a response to a fear that a Masonic

conspiracy controlled the American government. In 1832, William Wirt

ran for President of the United States as the Anti-Masonic candidate

against two former Grand Masters of the Masonic Order: Andrew Jackson

and Henry Clay (I85). After Wirt's miserable defeat, the party

quickly fell into dissolution, but, as Vaughn notes, "it achieved its

major success as a social or reform movement in the nearly total,

albeit temporary, destruction of Masonry in those states where it was

an active force" (ix).

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Steinbeck established his view of the Masons as a corruptive

force in American society long before he wrote his last novel. He

refers to the Masons as the Knights Templar in Cannery Row and Sweet

Thursday, as well as in "How Mr. Hogan Robbed a Bank," a 1954 short

story that Steinbeck revised and expanded into The Winter of Our

Discontent. In Cannery Row, his reference to the Templars appears in

Doc's prediction that Mack and the boys will refuse to acknowledge the

annual Fourth of July parade. As he tells a visiting friend.

They will know that the Mayor will ride first in an automobile with bunting streaming from the hood. Next will come Long Bob on his white horse with the flag. Then the city council, then two companies of soldiers from the Presidio, next the Elks with purple umbrellas, then the Knights Templar in white ostrich feathers and carrying swords. , , , Mack and the boys know that, , , . They've seen it all. They don't have to look again. (89: ch. 23)

The significance of the participants of the parade becomes apparent in

Doc's next statement:

The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second. (89)

This passage reveals that Steinbeck associates the Knights Templar

with the corruption of contemporary society. In Sweet Thursday, he

derides the Templars by using a part of their uniform to comprise

Hazel's ridiculous Prince Charming costume: "An Elizabethan ruff of

stiff paper was around his neck, and on his head a Knight Templar's

hat with a white ostrich plum" (193; ch, 28), Furthermore, in "How

Mr, Hogan Robbed a Bank." Steinbeck's main character hides the stolen

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money in "the big leather case that held his Knight Templar's uniform"

(61),

In The Winter of Our Discontent, Steinbeck suggests that the

modern-day Masons inherited the legacy of questionable character from

their fraternal ancestors in Europe, who also played an important role

in the development of commerce in their own time. In The Knights

Templars in England, Thomas Parker indicates that the medieval

organization

engaged in the exchange of money, the acceptance of valuables and cash for deposit and disbursement, the lending of money, the international transfer and transportation of funds, the issuance and use of credit instruments, and the trusteeship of future interests . . . most of the activities normally associated with banking. (58)

Furthermore, in The Guilt of the Templars, G. Legman et al. contend

that the principal competitors of the Templars were Italian bankers

(26), This detail is particularly significant in regard to The Winter

of Our Discontent because Ethan's boss, Alfio Marullo, is an Italian,

who is a financial competitor of Mr. Baker, the banker of New Baytown.

Steinbeck probably named Mr. Baker after George Fisher Baker, a

prominent nineteenth-century businessman who founded the First

National Bank of New York in I863 and served on the board of

directors of forty-three banks and companies during his lifetime

(Ingham 4l), In Chapter 1, Mr, Baker, warns Ethan, "Foreigners are

taking us over. Wake up. Ethan" (I8). Later, when Baker divulges the

secret plan to build an airport for New Baytown, he tells Ethan, "The

old families must stick together"; when Ethan asks if Marullo is part

of the group. Baker says, "Certainly not. He goes his own way with

his own crowd" (127; ch. 7).

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HMllE^l^^HMIHiaHJBSBDBBBeSan^^S^dBMSafiSSBBBBBaEBaaBe

In examining the historical context of Steinbeck's novel, it is

significant that, in addition to Italian competition, the medieval

Templars, "whose prosperity derived from their financing of the

Crusades," were threatened by a great scandal (Legman 23). The Bishop

and Archdeacon of London summoned the local chapter of Templars to

appear at High Mass on November l4, I309, to answer eighty-seven

charges of scurrilous behavior (301). Accusations that are

particularly meaningful for the discussion of Steinbeck's novel

include the following: item 1—"That . . . they renounc'd CHRIST";

item 12—"That they sometimes piss'd and caus'd others to piss upon

the Cross; and this they sometimes did on Good Friday"; item l4--"That

they ador'd a certain Cat that appear'd to them at that Assembly"

(thus bringing to mind the gray alley cat for which Ethan develops a

fondness^'); and item 30--"That at the Reception of Brothers . . . the

Receiver sometimes and the Person receiv'd, now and then kiss'd one

another's Mouths. Navels, bare Bellies, and in the Anus, or the Back-

Bone" (296-98),

Steinbeck makes references to all of these practices in The

Winter of Our Discontent, establishing Ethan's irreverence in a number

of verbal exchanges. For example, in the first scene of the novel,

Ethan "said hollowly, 'The dirty Romans are forming up for Calvary'";

Mary responds, 'Don't be sacrilegious'" (5). Likewise, he tells her

on Easter morning, "I have designed an Easter hat . . . A simple,

off-the-face crown of thorns in gold with real ruby droplets on the

forehead," to which Mary replies, "Ethan! . . . Suppose someone

should hear you" (112; VII), Steinbeck also alludes to the fact that

the Knights Templar were accused of desecrating the Cross on the day

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that commemorates Christ's crucifixion. On the morning of Good

Friday. Ethan encounters Mr, Baker's dog, Red Baker, which Levant

describes as "an unconcerned red setter" (293). The behavior of Red

Baker, however, is particularly revealing--much in the way that the

dogs' demeanour in "The Chrysanthemums" predicts the outcome of

Elisa's meeting with the tinker, as pointed out by Ernest W. Sullivan

II (217), On seeing Red Baker. Ethan says, "Good morning, sir. My

name is Ethan Allen Hawley, I've met you in pissing" (8; ch. 1).

Immediately following Ethan's salutation, Steinbeck writes, "Red Baker

stopped and acknowledged the greeting, with a slow sway of his plumed

tail" (8—emphasis added). Likewise, Steinbeck refers to the

accusation that the Knights Templar kissed each other as part of their

initiation rites, Ethan dreams about Danny, whose family, Steinbeck

implies, is also connected with the Templars because it is as old as

the "Hawleys or Bakers or any of the others" (48; ch. 3). In

recalling the dream, Ethan says, "I leaned near and kissed him on the

mouth and with my lips felt his dry lips all chapped and rough" (279;

ch, l8). Legman indicates that modern Masons, unlike their medieval

ancestors, refrain from kissing each other on the ass and "navel" or

"belly," which are euphemisms for "penis": "The principal sexual or

homosexual ritual surviving, or consciously derived from the Templars,

in Freemasonry in particular, is again the ritual kiss, which

apparently takes place, however, strictly on the mouth" (127),

Moreover. Ethan's choosing to wear a suit that he calls "Dorian Gray"

to Margie's dinner party is indicative of his sexual ambiguity (167;

ch, 9). for its name alludes to Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian

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inwirr^i - i l l

Gray, a novel deemed scsmdalous for its homoeroticism when it appeared

in Lippincott's Magazine in I89O,

In light of Steinbeck's early interest in Dionysian elements,

which is demonstrated in the present study as well as maintained by

David Leon Higdon in his discussion of "The Chrysanthemums."^^ it is

particularly significant to note that many historians of Masonry

contend that the Knights Templar of the Middle Ages were the

descendants of early Greek cults, particularly those affiliated with

Dionysus, as pointed out by J. N. Casavis in The Greek Origin of

Freemasonry.^^ In his study, Casavis quotes the Masonic expert J.

Ward, who asserts,

I hold that the Dionysian Artificers are the Link which completes the chain of descent connecting modern Freemasonry with the ancient mysteries and the still more ancient initiatory rites. . . . The Dionysian Artificers were a Masonic Guild with secret signs, grips and words. (l4—emphasis added by Casavis)

In support of this claim, Casavis points out that the following lyrics

were sung as part of the fraternal practice of a nineteenth-century

Masonic order in Britain:

As I at Wheeler's Lodge one night,

kept Bacchus company; For Bacchus is a Mason

bright; And of all Lodges free. (l43)

Such lyrics indicate that these Masons regarded Dionysus, also known

as Bacchus, as one of their forefathers.

The primary evidence that modern-day Masons and their medieval

ancestors are descendants of Dionysian as well as other early Greek

cults (including those of Artemis and Hermes) is the remarkable

similarity among the major symbols associated with their secret rites.

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The examination of these symbols is relevant to the present discussion

because Steinbeck incorporates a number of them in The Winter of Our

Discontent to show how Ethan succumbs to the morally corruptive

influence of the Templars. According to Casavis' study, some of these

symbols appear on a number of five-thousand-year-old artifacts that

archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans discovered in Crete in I9OO (36),

Casavis notes that a sacred altar at the site in Crete was "guarded on

each side by votive figures wearing aprons" (36), This detail brings

to mind the ritual that Ethan performs each morning when he arrives at

the grocery store, as illustrated on Good Friday:

From a drawer behind the counter by the cash register he took a clean apron and unfolded it and straightened the tapes, put it around his thin middle, brought the tapes around and back again. He reached behind his back with both hands and fumbled a bowknot.

The apron was long, halfway down his shins. He raised his right hand, cupped loosely, palm upward, and he claimed, 'Hear me oh ye canned pears, ye pickles and ye piccalilli . . . . (l4-

15)

The fact that Ethan pretends to be a priest immediately following his

contact with the apron establishes its association with religious

worship,'^

Another discovery at Crete that pertains to the present study is

the Dionysian "Double Axe," an object that survives today in the

derivative form of the Masonic "Master's Gavel," according to Casavis

(36), Moreover, he claims that the Dionysian practice of using the

Double Axe in the sacrifice of a bull is kept alive in contemporary

time by sixty Macedonian families who annually slaughter a bull as

part of their worship of Dionysus (I58). After the animal is

sacrificed, it

218

H ^

is then carved by the Anchanasternaris with the holy axe, and the raw pieces are distributed free to the celebrants who are in white attire. The axe is put away in a specially reserved place, and is to be used only the following year for the same sacrificial purpose. (158)

The holy axe of Dionysus brings to mind Ethan's account of a childhood

event that happened one Sunday when he was the cross-bearer at the

Episcopalian church of his family:

Once, in that chair stall under the lectern, a dreadful thing happened, I wore the lace and carried the cross and sang a beefy soprano. Once the bishop was officiating, a nice old man, hairless as a boiled onion, but to me glowing with rays of holiness. So it was that, stunned with inspiration, I set the cross in its socket at the end of the processional and forgot to throw the brass latch that held it in. At the reading of the second lesson I saw with horror the heavy brass cross sway and crash on that holy hairless head. The bishop went down like a pole-axed cow . . . The incident seemed to prove to me that intentions, good or bad, are not enough. There's luck or fate or something else that takes over accidents. (113; ch, 7--emphasis added)

This event foreshadows Ethan's rejection of Christianity; moreover,

his narration of it reveals his awareness that he cannot overcome his

destiny to be morally corrupt, just as Spengler maintains that the

West cannot overcome its destiny to be a culture in decline. In

contrast to his depiction of Joseph in To a God Unknown as a pattern-

breaker, Steinbeck suggests through his portrayal of Ethan that he no

longer believes it possible for his own generation to break the

pattern of decline.

Other discoveries at the excavation site in Crete correspond to

images that Steinbeck uses to indicate the mythological dimension of

The Winter of Our Discontent. Among them are "religious figures

holding snakes" (37). As Casavis points out, the snake or its

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derivative symbol, the staff, was associated with Dionysus, as well as

with his half-brother, Hermes, and his female counterpart, Artemis.

He notes, for instance, that a statue of Artemis holding two snakes in

one of her hands was discovered at the Arcadian Lycosura (38-39)—a

detail that brings to mind Margie's vision of the snake as well as her

snake-like behavior. Furthermore, Casavis maintains, "When Dionysos

threw his rod on the ground it became a snake. With the same rod,

Dionysos struck the rivers Orentes and Hydrastes, the waters receded

and he passed over them dryshod" (38). Casavis also points out that

Hermes, like Dionysus, carried a "herald's staff or Caduceus," which

survives in modern Masonry as "the rod of the Senior Warden or Master

of Ceremonies" (34), It is important to note that Steinbeck reveals

in The Winter of Our Discontent that Ethan possesses a "narwhal stick"

that belonged to his father, "old Cap'n Hawley" (55; ch. 3). In his

dream about Danny, Ethan carries this "twisted stick" of ivory (278;

ch, 19), Although Ethan has always kept this object "in the

elephant's-foot umbrella stand" (278), he takes it with him on the

last night of the novel, and Margie suggests that it is a "sacrifice"

for her (302; ch, 21),

In addition to his discussion of the similarity between Masonic

symbols and objects found at the excavation site at Crete, Casavis

maintains that modern Masons have incorporated several details from

Greek initiation rites into their own ceremonies. In Dionysian

initiations, for example, "A white sheet or sindone, an emblem of

purity and indicative of the new life of the noviate, was around his

body" (101). Similarly, contemporary Masons in Germany, Holland, and

France wear white during their lodge activities (102), This practice

220

corresponds to a story that Ethan recounts in which some of his

ancestors thought they were to be initiated into God's kingdom:

I remember a story Aunt Deborah told me long ago. Early in the last century some of my people were Cambellites, Aunt Deborah was a child then, but she remembered how the end of the world was coming at a certain time. Her parents gave everything away, everything they owned but the bed sheets. Those they put on and at the predicted time they went to the hills to meet the End of the World. Dressed in sheets, hundreds of people prayed and sang. The night came and they sang louder and danced and as it got near time there was a shooting star, she said, and everybody screamed. She could still remember the screaming. , , , Then the moment came. White-dressed men and women and children held their breaths. The moment went on and on. The children got blue in the face—and then it passed. It was done and they were cheated out of their destruction. In the dawn they crept down the hill and tried to get back the clothes they had given away, and the pots and pans and their ox and their ass. And I remember knowing how bad they must have felt. (175-76; ch. 10)

In addition to this story about his ancestors' symbolic wearing

of white sheets, Ethan also refers to "men dancing, wearing the horns

and masks of animals" (42; ch, 3) as well as to the "dark brown sueded

lambskin" cap that Danny wears in Ethan's dream (278-79; ch. 19).

These details corresponds to a practice conducted among contemporary

European Masons, who, according to Casavis, follow the ancient

Eleusian practice of initiates being "clad in the sacred skins of the

fawn" (93, 102), Casavis also claims that Masons use the expression

"riding the goat" to describe their initiation process (l46) because

satyrs were "the mythological attendants" of Dionysus (159).

Likewise, Frazer points out that one of Dionysus' names as "Kid"

(453), These details bring to mind Ethan's childhood recollection

that he and Danny "found a bust of Pan" on the Old Taylor estate and

"celebrated it for a time" (103-04; ch. 6); moreover it explains why

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Ethan, who, in a sharp voice, tells Marullo on Good Friday, "Don't

call me kid" (26; ch, 1), changes his mind the next day: "I want him

to call me 'kid,' even to think of me as 'kid'" (67; ch. 4).

Another important detail that Casavis points out is that

candidates of some early Greek cults "were presented, upon initiation,

with a white stone, as a good luck charm" (77), an object that

survives in contemporary times as the Masonic stone foundation (l44);

moreover, it corresponds to the stone foundation of the Old Hawley

dock, Whitsun ("white") Reef, as well as the most provocative image in

Steinbeck' novel: the talisman. Ethan describes this extraordinary

stone in the following passage:

I presume that every family has a magic thing, a continuity thing that inflames and comforts and inspires from generation to generation. Our was a , . . kind of mound of translucent stone . . . It was circular, four inches in diameter and an inch and a half at its rounded peak. And carved on its surface was an endless interweaving shape that seemed to move and yet went no place. It was living but had no head or tail, nor beginning or end. . , . You could see into it and yet not through it. , , , It was magic--good to see, to touch, to rub against your cheek or to caress with your fingers. (l43; ch. 8)

Todd Lieber points out that "the talisman is true to the dictionary

definition of a stone [talisman]" (263). that being "a stone, ring, or

other object engraven with figures or characters, to which are

attributed the occult powers . . , usually worn as an amulet to avert

evil from or bring fortune to the wearer , . , also medicinally used

to impart healing virtue" (OED 2005). Likewise, other critics

maintain that the unusual stone is an instrument that imparts

spiritual redemption; moreover, they assume that Ethan is the

recipient of its power. Levant suggests that it represents "things

222

becoming their opposite [sic]," such as Ethan's "experience of

wickedness" transforming into "hopefulness" at the end of the novel

(300). Tetsumaro Hayashi points out that "the talisman . . .

symbolizes 'light' and [Ethan's] only hope for the future" (113).

Similarly, Charles Clancy maintains, "It recalls Ethan to

responsibility and to life" (100). In their analyses of the stone,

these critics overlook the fact that Ethan realizes that he is no

longer its keeper.

In the same scene in which Steinbeck describes the talisman in

Chapter 8, he also indicates that Ellen will inherit the

responsibility as its guardian. Unable to sleep one night, Ethan

hears Ellen sleep walking and gets out of bed to follow her. He

watches his somnambulistic daughter go downstairs to the glass

cabinet, turn the brass key, and remove the stone, which Ethan

believes one of his sea-faring ancestors brought "from China" (l43).

Then he witnesses a mystical transformation that brings to mind the

old Chinaman's in Cannery Row:

My sleeping daughter had the magic mound in her hands, caressing it with her fingers, petting it as though it were alive. . . . The dim room seemed swarming with particles of brilliant light moving and whirling like clouds of gnats. I guess they were not really there but only prickles of weariness swimming in the fluid of my eyes, but they were very convincing. And it did seem true that a glow came from my daughter Ellen, not only from the white of her gown but from her skin as well, I could see her face and I should not have been able to in the darkened room. It seemed to me that it was not a little girl's face at all— nor was it old, but it was mature and complete and formed. , . . After a time Ellen put the talisman firmly and precisely back, , , Then she turned and walked past my chair and up the stairs. Two things I may have imagined—one, that she did not walk like a child but like a fulfilled woman, and

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second, that as she went the luminescence drained away from her. (143-44)

This scene suggests that Ellen is the one that currently possesses a

mystical affiliation with the stone. Moreover, at a later point in

the novel, Ethan suggests, "Maybe it is Ellen who will carry and pass

on whatever is immortal in me" (217; ch. 13).

Ellen indeed possesses some extraordinary qualities. Ethan says,

"I've read that in the Middle Ages pubescent girls were thought to be

susceptible to witchcraft and I'm not sure it is not so" (l4l; ch. 8).

In The Mothers, Briffault maintains, "Since it is a common notion that

such power is counteracted by childbearing, the power of witchcraft

belongs particularly to old women or to young unmarried women" (284),

The fact that Ellen is a sleepwalker is also important. Briffault

indicates that primitive cults believed that "nervous phenomena," such

as "soninambulism," are "derived from the moon" (298), Furthermore,

sleepwalking can be viewed as a twilight state of consciousness, in

which a person is dreaming in the REM state, but, unlike, with normal

dreaming, the motor controls of the brain are still turned on so that

the sleepwalker responds to and interacts with external stimuli.

Because Ellen signifies a mixture of Apollonian individuation

(evidenced by her display of sibling rivalry) and Dionysian lunar

consciousness, Steinbeck may have intended her sleepwalking to be

connected to the state of "permanent thinking" that he associates with

the "dimpsy," a term used in rustic parts of Britain to denote

"twilight."

Steinbeck explains his concept of "permanent thinking" in a

letter to Jackie Kennedy on April 20, 1964, in which he officially

declines her request to write the biography of her late husband. He

224

tells the former First Lady that the national memory of Kennedy should

be

a thing to put into the half-sleeping mind, to think of in the half-dawn when the first birds sing, and in the evening; they call it the dimpsy in Somerset. These are the times for the good and the permanent thinking which is more like musing— the garden path toward dream.

I have always been at odds with those who say that reality and dream are separate entities. They are not—they merge and separate and merge again, A monster proportion of all our experience is dream, even that we think of as reality, {SLL 799-800)

This passage is especially significant to the present study because

it reveals Steinbeck's understanding of the relationship between

reality and dream—that is to say, between history and myth. He

maintains in this letter that human consciousness is comprised of both

of these necessary elements, which are indistinguishable from one

another much of the time. Moreover, he associates "the good and the

permanent thinking," which embraces both reality and dream, with the

"dimpsy." Therefore, Steinbeck regarded twilight in the last years of

his life as a metaphor for man's greatest, wish-fulfilled state. It

signifies an Apollonian-Dionysian duality of reason and emotion, of

reality and dream, of body and soul.

On an unconscious level, Ethan attempts to break the pattern of

his moral disintegration by re-establishing his connection to the

talisman. According to Casavis, the ancient initiation into the

Mysteries of Samothrace--on completion of which the initiates received

white stones as good luck charms--was intended "to improve the

character of the candidate, to elevate his moral standards, to improve

his mind, by means of the sacred Drama enacted [of death and

resurrection], and to teach him the immortality of the soul" (75). On

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July 1st, one day before Ethan intends to rob Mr, Baker's bank, he

takes the stone out of its resting place in the glass cabinet of his

colonial ancestors and puts it in his pocket. On his way to work, he

questions this unprecedented action: "Over and under itself the

carving went, and around and over and under, a serpent with neither

head nor tail nor beginning nor ending. And I had taken it away with

me for the first time--to avert evil? To bring fortune?" (228; ch.

14). In this passage, Steinbeck indicates that the talisman is an

uroboros, a symbol in circular form, of a snake eating its own tail.

This same symbol exists in the present day, in simplified form, as the

mathematical symbol for infinity {OED 2204). The fact that Ethan

stores the uroboros in the glass cabinet confirms its eternal quality,

for the cabinet, Ethan claims, "had always been the holy place of the

parenti to me—Roman masks of the ancestors, or the lares and penates

back to a stone fallen from the moon" (l42). This statement reveals

the mythological context in which to examine the significance of the

stone and brings to mind Briffault's discussion of the religious

associations of stones. He claims, for example, that "the stone is

the symbol of immortality because, like the moon, it is not subjected

to decay" (325), However, because Ethan is no longer the spiritual

keeper of the talisman, his carrying it does not prevent his own

decay.

Because of his spiritual wound, Ethan resembles the keeper of the

grail. It is significant to note that Weston points out that in

Malory's version of the grail story, "Galahad is the hero" (47).

Moreover, she notes that Galahad's mother plays a critical role in the

grail quest: "His mother is the daughter of the Grail King, and

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herself the Grail-bearer , , , [who] is enabled to fulfill the

prophecy which has marked her out as the mother of the predestined

grail-winner" (47). Before Ethan leaves home to commit suicide in

"the Place," Ellen secretly places the talisman in the pocket of her

father's raincoat. When Ethan finds it, he aborts his suicide attempt

and fights against the rising tide because, as he says, "I had to get

back—had to return the talisman to its new owner" (311; ch. 22--

emphasis added). According to Eliade in Patterns of Comparative

Religion, "immersion means a dissolution of forms, a reintegration

into the formlessness of pre-existence; and emerging from the water is

a repetition of the act of creation in which form was first impressed"

(l88). Therefore, the talisman's baptism in the maternal waters of

primordium prophesies the end of a patriarchal society of dark

knights and a return to society's matriarchal origins.

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Notes

' It is significant that the main character in Steinbeck's last novel is a clerk when taking into account his statement in 1933: "The detailed accounts of the lives of clerks don't interest me much, unless, of course, the clerk breaks into heroism" (SLL 69), See also 108 (Chapter III, note 2),

2 See 157-58,

3 In Steinbeck's Reading, DeMott indicates that Steinbeck's literary agent, Elizabeth Otis, believed that Steinbeck was familiar with "some of Hawthorne's tales, but could not specify them nor could she say how important Hawthorne was to him. She felt fairly certain that his reading of Hawthorne took place in college or earlier" (151).

'» See 162-63.

5 See 63.

^ Compare Ethan's "Place" with Joseph's oak tree in To a God Unknown as an axis mundi. See 40-4l.

7 For an analysis of Melville's depiction of Ethan Allen in Israel Potter, see Samson 184-85.

^ For an explanation and diagram of the Celtic Cross, see Arthur Edward Waite's The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (299-305).

9 Ethan's ecdysic transformation resembles Doc's. See 171-72 and 181-82 (Chapter V, note 4).

° According to the Compact Oxford English Dictionary (72), the first recorded use of the word "aroint" appears in MacBeth. In that work, it is spoken by the first witch:

A sailor's wife had chestnuts in her lap. And munch'd and munch'd, and munch'd:--"Give me," quoth I: "Aroint thee, witch! the rump-fed ronyon cries,

(1.3.^-7)

Furthermore, it is significant that Ethan uses the word "aroint" on Good Friday because Frazer indicates that peasants in Central Europe choose Good Friday as a day on which to drive away witches. See Frazer 649. See also I58 of the present study.

11 See 210.

12 See 108-09 (Chapter III, notes 3-^).

13 Casavis provides a bibliography, which contains a substantial number of works that discuss the similarities between the practices of modern-day Masons and ancient Dionysian cults (202-208).

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^'* In this respect, Ethan's apron, like Elisa's garden apparel in "The Chrysanthemums," functions as a priestly vestment. See 108-09 (Chapter III, note 4).

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CHAPTER VII

CONCLUSION: STEINBECK AND HISTORY'S MYTH

To a God Unknown, Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday, and The Winter of

Our Discontent are typically excluded from scholarly listings of

Steinbeck's major works. Although most critics contend that his skill

as a writer began to decline in the 1940s, a careful examination of

the historical contexts of these novels, which take into account the

literary, social, and culture issues to which they respond, indicates

that these novels exemplify a genuine artistry that continued to

develop throughout the course of Steinbeck's career, rather than one

that culminated in his writing of The Grapes of Wrath, the work that

scholars in the field of literature are obligated by tradition to

regard as the apex of his narrative achievement. Furthermore, this

examination uncovers a literary pattern that Steinbeck incorporates in

To a God Unknown and repeats in Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday, and The

Winter of Our Discontent. Because these works are representative of

the various stages of Steinbeck's writing, the recurrence of this

artistic pattern reveals that his work as a whole is much more uniform

than has been previously claimed.

In the novels discussed in the present study, Steinbeck exposes

the breakdown of Western culture, confirming the view that Spengler,

unquestionably one of Steinbeck's most influential sources, presents

in The Decline of the West. In particular, Steinbeck shows that

America's national mythology, based primarily on the seventeenth-

century Puritans' typological notion that the vast and unspoiled New

World was God's New Canaan, no longer provides a sustaining cultural

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vision of the future. He dispels the myth that America is a

modern-day Promised Land of milk and and honey by portraying it.

instead, as a physical, socio-industrial, or spiritual wasteland in

the four novels discussed in the present study. Steinbeck's depiction

of America in this manner is not motivated by mere cynicism. In these

four works, he indicates that America can break the pattern of

Spenglerian decline by reinventing itself through a radical process of

cultural reconfiguration.

In advocating social reform, Steinbeck challenges the Puritan

beliefs that America's national destiny plays a role in God's grand

scheme for humanity and that material prosperity is physical

confirmation of divine election. To a God Unknown, Cannery Row. Sweet

Thursday, and The Winter of Our Discontent suggest that America's

economic system of liberal capitalism--a system justified and

encouraged by these Puritan beliefs during the early development of

the nation—has failed, as evidenced in the twentieth century by the

Great Depression, World War II and its socio-economic repercussions in

the postwar era, and the continuance of moral lassitude and political

corruption in the 1950s under the leadership of the Eisenhower-Nixon

administration. Therefore, Steinbeck's social rehabilitation of

America involves altering its mythological foundation. He suggests in

these works that a return to humanity's social origins, based on the

primordial understanding and reverence of nature, holds the key to the

regeneration of Western culture.

Through his depictions of a decaying society in these four

novels, Steinbeck indicates that the Apollonian sense of

individuation, which has dominated America thus far, must be tempered

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with Dionysian collectiveness. Thus he frequently evokes the image of

the Greek moon-god Dionysus to signify the sense of communitarianism

and all-embracingness that he perceives is essential for humanity's

survival in the modern world. Because Dionysus was originally

associated with female cults, Steinbeck's remythologization of the

West involves a shift from a patriarchal to a matriarchal form of

society. As Nietzsche claims in The Birth of Tragedy, "The mystical

jubilation of Dionysos . . . breaks the spell of individuation and

opens a path to the maternal womb of being" (97). Steinbeck's

emphasis on matriarchy, which he establishes in To a God Unknown,

becomes most pronounced in his later works, as exemplified in Sweet

Thursday and The Winter of Our Discontent.

Although the present discussion focuses on four of Steinbeck's

minor works, the conclusions drawn from their study apply to his

writing in general, including the works recognized to be his among his

best. Throughout his fiction, as in Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of

Wrath, Steinbeck renounces the myth that America is God's New Canaan.

He illustrates the failure of this national myth through his

presentation of characters, including George and Lennie and the Joads,

for whom the Promised Land simply does not exist. These novels, like

those examined in the present discussion, incorporate elements of

various pagan mythologies in opposition to Christianity. For

instance, in Of Mice and Men, Lennie dreams that some day he and

George will "live off the fatta the Ian'" and "tend the rabbits" (20).

Rabbits, of course, were associated with ancient pagan fertility

rites, which survive in contemporary times as part of the secular

celebration of Easter each spring.

232

X

Likewise, Steinbeck's inclusion of Chapter 3 in The Grapes of

Wrath, which concerns the arduous journey of a turtle, has baffled

critics since the novel's publication; however. Steinbeck's account of

the turtle can easily be explained by Frazer's discussion of the

significance of turtles in The Golden Bough. According to Frazer.

several primitive cultures have regarded turtles as sacred animals.

The Zufti Indians of New Mexico, for instance, often killed turtles "at

the midsummer solstice for the purpose of ensuring an abundant supply

of rain for the crops" (584). This detail from The Golden Bough adds

meaning to Steinbeck's story about a group of people who were affected

by the relentless dust bowl that plagued the south-central United

States during the years of the Great Depression. Frazer also points

out that the Moquis Indians of Arizona believed "in the transmigration

of human souls into the bodies of turtles" (584); therefore,

Steinbeck's reading of Frazer may have inspired him to forshadow the

difficult plight of the Joads in their "ancient overloaded Hudson"

(133; ch. 13) through his description of the trek of the turtle

"dragging his high-domed shell" (l4).

In 1962, Steinbeck became the sixth American to receive the Nobel

Prize for Literature. In his acceptance speech before the Swedish

Academy, the Nobel Laureate revealed what he regarded as the primary

responsibilities of the writer of literature:

He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.

Furthermore, the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit—for galantry in defeat—for courage, compassion, and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these

233

TW — -^'^ >.-.»^'»»i»«.n«>»>TTr»miwMw iiii»'ww^-*r.MMia*Ma«agggaHHWie^«min.v.».

are the bright rally-flags of hope and of emulation. (206)

The works discussed in the present study are a measure of his words.

In them, Steinbeck draws on timeless truths that transcend cultural

boundaries in an effort to show the need for contemporary social

reform to benefit the masses; therefore, these works should be

recognized as significant contributions to the ongoing dialogue among

American literary authors who take up writing about the mosaic and

often contradictory American experience in an effort to help their

fellow citizens become a people of a nobler character by understanding

their faults as a culture. Annoyed by Steinbeck's mass appeal, many

members of the literati have refused to see the artistic and social

merit of a number of his works. However, Steinbeck's vast popularity

is indicative of his keen understanding that if he wanted to bring

about a remythologization of America, he must do so through popular

culture, which cultivates the historical images that are deeply rooted

in myth.

234

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244