John Steinbeck's Spatial Imagination in "The Grapes of Wrath": A Critical Essay
Author(s): George Henderson
Source: California History, Vol. 68, No. 4, Envisioning California (Winter, 1989/1990), pp. 210
-223
Published by: California Historical Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25158539
Accessed: 12/01/2010 15:13
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=chs.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
California Historical Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to California
History.
http://www.jstor.org
NQp*
4v^ \\\
\\a
^mMsI^^Ib1Sh~1Hk^ j^li^^^^B
Dust-Bowl refugee migrant workers picking cotton in California during the 1930s. This
illustration and others in this article are by the great American artist Thomas Hart Benton,
from the Limited Editions Club edition of TTzeGrapes 0/Wnrtfc (1940). Courtesy The Limited
Editions Club and the Steinbeck Research Center, San Jose State University
210 CALIFORNIA HISTORY
III. Literary California
John
Steinbeck's
The
Grapes
A CRITICAL
of
in
Imagination
Spatial
Wrath:
ESSAY
by George Henderson
Introduction:
as Social Action.
Representation
ran "Harvest
Gypsies,"
commissioned
articles,
by
News
winter of 1937-38 was especially wet in the
San Joaquin Valley. Steady and heavy rains
saturated the San Joaquin flood plain, partic
The
ularly
in cotton-growing
Madera
County.
ruary of that winter John Steinbeck wrote
agent Elizabeth Otis:
In Feb
to his
Imust go over into the interior valleys. There are
families starving to death over
about five thousand
there, not just hungry but actually
starving. The
is trying to feed them and get medical
government
to them with the fascist group of utilities
attention
and banks and huge growers sabotaging
the thing
all along the line and yelling for a balanced budget.
In one tent there are twenty people
quarantined
are to have
for smallpox
and two of the women
I've tied into the thing
babies in that tent this week.
on
from the first and Imust knock these murderers
the heads. Do you know what
they're afraid of?
They think that if these people are allowed to live
in camps with proper sanitary facilities,
they will
organize and that is the bugbear of the large land
owner and the corporation
farmer. The states and
counties will give them nothing
because
they are
But the crops of any part of this state
outsiders.
could not be harvested
without
these outsiders.
I'm pretty mad about it. No word of this outside
because when Ihave finished my job the jolly old
associated
(Steinbeck
farmers will
and Wallsten,
be
after my
scalp
again
For several years Steinbeck had been eyeing the
situation
"interior
rial writer (see St. Pierre, 79-81 for excerpts). In
those brief pieces a reader could find most of the
major themes about California agriculture that
Steinbeck would later chronicle in The Grapes of
Wrath in 1939.
Shortly after "Harvest Gypsies" was printed,
Steinbeck's Of Mice andMen and In Dubious Battle
appeared
in the bookstores.
of migrant
in the
workers
agricultural
In
1936
San
The
October
Francisco
valleys."
Battle was
In Dubious
selected by the Book of theMonth Club, and within
a month one hundred thousand copies had been
purchased.
Both
novels
concerned
costs
the social
and unique social formations that Steinbeck attri
buted to the system of corporate agriculture in the
valley (St. Pierre, 81). Thus, by the time Steinbeck
began
The Grapes
ofWrath,
his vision
was
keen
and
his hand well practiced.
The new novel began
to take on a spectacular
life
of its own. Six months
after publication,
two
when
hundred
thousand
copies had been sold, Common
a book sells like
wealth magazine
noted
that "when
causes
it
and
when
comment
and contro
the
that,
a
this
it
book
cultural
becomes
has,
versy
phenom
enon
of important
dimensions.
and
The
literary
critical industry of the country is not really geared
to handle it" (quoted in St. Pierre, 98-101). The critic
lamented the lack of attention to the book's literary
merit.
Most
readers
or not California
158).
a series of Steinbeck's
the paper's
chief edito
only wanted
for example,
(see Kappel,
Kern County). Too much
bad,
had
WINTER 1989/90 211
been
to know
whether
resembled Steinbeck's depiction
geared
on
the novel's
ban
in
criticism, both good and
to assessing
the
factual
content and background of The Grapes of Wrath.
Only in later years did the "pattern of criticism"
turn to an assessment
of the novel's
to
relationship
themes, such as biblical allegory and the "Wagons
the late thirties anyone who cared could
During
have
the general
corroborated
Administration
and Resettlement
induced
labor surplus,
the migrant
vigilantism
tance
if not
events,
the
Hoovervilles
details, provided by Steinbeck?the
camps,
crop specialization
grower
by region,
trek from the Dust Bowl states, the
and the relief work, and the impor
of cotton
as
the new
One of the devices by which
though
many
contemporary
California's
agricultural
production
ago:
thirty years
out that "most of the
Burke has pointed
Kenneth
is to say their
characters derive their role, which
to the
their
from
personality,
purely
relationship
But what he takes to be a serious
basic situation."
is actually one of the book's
weakness
greatest
(Lisca, "The Grapes ofWrath as Fic
accomplishments
tion,"
a
migrant
736).
The Grapes ofWrath was indeed relentlessy didac
apparently
upon
over
observation
the two writers did not collaborate. Al
did, they did not need to refer to the novel in order
to understand the historical reliance of much of
infused
with
process. This point seems to lie behind Peter Lisca's
and convincing
In broadly
prose, Mc
supported
a mirror
text for Steinbeck's
wrote
Williams
novel,
readers
Steinbeck
content was
to saturate
this thematic
an
with
of the
his readers' minds
understanding
to
that
seemed
formative
processes
genetic,
push
as to make
in such a way
the story along
every
character
action part of an enveloping
and every
his work
The release of The Grapes ofWrath could not have
been better timed in relation to the publication
of Carey McWilliams' Factories in the Field (1939).
although
landless
inversion.
crop.
speculative
in a rootless,
authority
class. The point, then, is that Steinbeck registered
the duality of history and nature in terms of a social
idiom.
West"
to vest moral
dared
but by ensuring
tic, even formulaic,
ers
the
involved
processes
grasped
as the above quote would
situation,"
that
the read
the
"basic
(or
have it) Stein
labor class. Yet The Grapes ofWrath did fulfill a role
beck could then suggest how different orders of
as a
experience
of
virtue
attachment
text.
and social realist
interpretive
regionalist
as a document
stands
of social change.
The novel
more
can be asked
of it.
Nonetheless,
to turn to a
itmight
be interesting
For example,
problem of the human condition that Steinbeck
apparently set up in The Grapes ofWrath. One of
was
concerns
to repre
fundamental
Steinbeck's
to
families
sent the migration
of white midwestern
as part of that recurrent
condi
human
California
itself
condition
that the human
tion, while
arguing
and
social
is shaped
historical
contingencies.
by
He asked what relationship
the laws of nature had
nature
does not tran
to human-made
situations:
nor does
scend or determine
super
history
history,
accounts
I think,
for the
This
sede nature.
idea,
charac
of some of Steinbeck's
immortal
qualities
ters. At the same time, only the historical
moment,
could reveal
of social relationships,
the intervention
what might be enduringly
will
to survive?to
humanize
true: Ma Joad's heroic
the natural
survival
threat.
by economic
only manifested
in a tran
belief
ultimate
and Casy's
Tom Joad's
was
out only
hammered
human
scendent
family
instinct?was
by virtue of their ability to gauge
just how
far
the local situation.
had penetrated
relations
power
and
at
demoralized
Steinbeck's
elevating
adeptness
to
of
level
the
beaten
history
epochal
migrants
social relations
and inverting
makers,
by phrasing
specifically
themes,
local questions
fueled
his detractors,
in terms of grandiose
who
would
not have
and contained
others
by
represented
for example,
the overarching
causes;
a wholesomeness
to land represented
of body and spirit.What
also
is inherently geographical
turns
tuting,
out to be inherently
social, both consti
is
and constitutive
of, the same processes.lt
from social and geographical
relationships
that
rather than from an individual
radiates,
meaning
or action.
character
were
with
In this way
small details
charged
out
and
representing
larger processes.
bearing
This seems
a
like just the sort of thing befitting
philosophical
argument
of naturalism.
But
it
should not be forgotten that itwas the modernization
forms
and its attendant
of agricultural
production
of consciousness
that, Steinbeck
brought
argued,
in particular
that aspect
this state of affairs;
about
of modernization
change
technological
whereby
into contact
loosens
boundaries,
formerly
brings
for a seem
and allows
discrete
things and persons,
ingly small event to be nested
more
significant.
The
particular
inside something
importance
of the
modernizing process as detailed by Steinbeck was
that it foreshadowed
(the power
representation
to grasp cognitively the rending and reshuffling
itself as a precursor
social bonds)
of traditional
for the
dilemma
to social action. A fundamental
of their own daily
the inappropriateness
Joads was
to an interpretation
of the
and practices
thought
was
new
order. Nowhere
and economic
political
212 CALIFORNIA HISTORY
this
contradiction
more
evident
than
in the end
less bickering over the value of talking over their
problems. Steinbeck himself took on the problem
as the
re
of representation
insofar
interchapters
as
a
narrated
the story
form of documentation.
became
Moreover,
representation
by the end of
the novel
both a narrative
and a form of
strategy
social action.
these general
I want
to explore
Taking
points,
a
how
kind
of
they conferred
imagina
particular
to Steinbeck's
tive process
of
the
The
Grapes
writing
This
orchestrated
the geo
of Wrath.
imagination
sites and the situation
of characters
de
graphical
in the novel,
the particular
social processes
picted
as
across
space, which
they unfolded
only people
in
the
could have
process
swept up
modernizing
understood.
Grapes ofWrath cannot be understood
The
unless
the characters
are
seen
fully
to develop
relationship to the places through which
in
they
that they also reconstituted,
if only
to be a gen
This approach
is meant
momentarily.
one and not
an argu
eral, illuminating
necessarily
ment
to be sustained
for each character.
Rather,
the interpretative
in the
action
addresses
approach
as a
a
novel
Tom
Since
carries
Joad
totality.
large
moved?places
proportion of the thematic load of the novel from
such a perspective, the bulk of my discussion will
focus on him.
in geographical
Steinbeck's
terms,
thesis,
primary
was
on
that you cannot understand
is going
what
inside California
unless
is occurring
you know what
outside.
out by the novel's
This notion was borne
concern
with mapping
the Joads'
overwhelming
across the western
states. Given
the fam
migration
a
farm in Califor
ily's goal of obtaining
family-size
that the Joads never
nia, it could be argued
really
were
where
The migration
got
upon
they
going.
which
has no conclusion
in the
they embarked
novel other than an ironic symmetry
between
begin
and
The
in
charted
ning
literary
"map"
ending.
The Grapes ofWrath was finally not just a geographic
product,
important,
but was
then,
laden with
It is
social meaning.
to move
the line of questioning
away from how the Joads got from one place to the
and by which
toward how meaning
next,
routes,
is produced,
and
disseminated
with
controlled,
to
we
social
and
space. Also,
regard
workaday
need
to a
to discover where
general
theory
society. Specifically,
Steinbeck
geographic
of place
Steinbeck
formation
I would
sat in regard
in
capitalist
like to show how
demonstrated
his awareness
of social/
as
the
outcome
medium
and
the
space
of certain processes: the division of labor along
class and gender lines; the territorial demands of
capitalist agribusiness; and family and community
space for their own produc
and private
These
fulfillment.
tion, reproduction,
were
the
conditioned
modern
era,
processes,
by
to appropriate
needs
to bear on the Joads' travails as they
brought
encountered
the wider
social world
and it, in turn,
or resisted
received
their arrival.
In a sense my outlook
as too
be criticized
may
economistic.
state at the onset
Let me
that I am
some
familiar with
of the common
cultural
and
ideological idioms of Steinbeck's work, including
themyth of the garden, the family farm as a reformist
ideal,
and
of women
the closeness
to nature.
While
Steinbeck appeared to have left these myths intact,
and indeed to have relied upon them, he dismantled
others of a specific local and regional character: the
innocence
of California's
agricultural
family
farm as a basic
unit
the
bounty,
myth of an egalitarian frontier in theWest,
of democracy.
and the
of
Instead
treating each of the above concepts explicitly, Iwill
simply let them inform my thinking, drawing on
as necessary
or
appropriate.
I think, structured
the meanings
of the
Steinbeck,
in
were
which
the
book's
characters
situated
places
on two levels.
took on meaning
First, each place
them
through its dynamic relationship with an opposite
kind of
either real or imagined.
the
Second,
place,
interaction
of these polarities
or over
transformed
turned
social relations.
can two
How
"interact"?
Contradictions
places
the processes
of the division
of labor, capi
among
talist agribusiness,
and small social units
arise as
each asserts
its territorial
demands
for space?
to its very
critical
continuation?and
the
brings
a
novel's
re
and
characters
into
dialectical
places
lationship. With
acting
places
the notion of dialectically
in mind,
Iwould,
sets of oppositions which typify
the primary
among
These oppositions
settings
constitute
then,
posit
inter
three
the relationships
in The Grapes
ofWrath.
major
literary devices
through which Steinbeck represented the processes
of the creation of
space. The three
social/geographic
sets of oppositions
are:
1. The tension
between
is
power
places where
centered?or
of socially
represented?and
places
marginal
2.
activity for peripheralized
The
contradiction
between
people;
California
as a
visible, knowable, Edenic landscape and the Joads'
invisibility and ignorance within it;
3. The conflict between
divergent modes of
transforming
habitats.
WINTER 1989/90 213
nature
and
producing
humane
fy>
p.-. **>^^^^^^^^
'^SIISnH^H^^B
'?^S^?^^^^^HHf
n^^^l
California
growers'
ofmigrant
expl?ltation
in the1930s
was
laborers
mac*epossibleby support
I' E^^lK^^W^il^^^H^^^^^filBBB
I: .AxV%^^WMll^P^B^P^^9il9
L*W^J&Sr ^^^SPJrlP^il^MSi
Mf
iilKm
^K^h^^Sl^</P^Hi9
HtaflMH
^HH&BBPi?Ea^^HB|
l#y^t vCH^mP^^^^#^^1HHI^B
Bfctttp^^ig
HP^^fj/
LimitedEditionsClub
V^V^^HH
^
Jn
^rompublic authorities. In
^s lustrationfromthe
editionof TTie
Grapes
ofWrath
^^^r^^B^R
J^
HsSbdJHMfslHL'""*
Portraysa state policeman
?9^91
HHH^^SW^IK^
^^^SBLJVmH
^^^^^HflV^HB^x^N^B^iB^^H^
^^^^^^^H
JHH&MBflPSMb'-W?^
^^^^^^^^^^^^HH^^Kjj^Hp^^&UH
^^^^^^^HHH^^SS^H^^RL
SflP^P
^^^^^^^^H^H^^vJljR^
^^^^^^|Hi^^^^^H^pPJ^^|y^Q
^^^^^^HN^^^^^HR^bHP
t^P^Hi
^^^^^l^B^^^^^MEsM^^HL^J^MI
Places ofCentralized Power andMarginalized Activity.
The
of power
geography
and
disenfranchise
ment is relatively straightforward in The Grapes
is drawn
of Wrath. A primary distinction
towns
between
and
banks,
on
hand.
The
damental
implication,
antagonists
the one
which
the fun
comprised
was
in Steinbeck's
book,
that finance capital, fixed in places
and
the entrenched
and
hand,
camps on the other
Routes 66/99 and the migrant
urban
settlement
both hostile to the "independent"
(the banks),
pattern
were
and dispossessed
rural smallholder
and migrant
worker.
Oklahoma
on small
to foreclose
banks extended
their domain
or mid-size
towns
California
resisted
farms, while
the onslaught
were
of the displaced migrants. Migrant
thus pushed
from two directions:
from
their
homelands
and away
from the
away
small-town
of
the
farmers
and
merchants.
sanctuary
and
town-dwellers
alike
Bankers,
farmers,
big
families
feared that the Joads would
find a place inwhich
to
lenged
and
^a^n8theJoac*
familytruck.
Thepolicewereassisting
Tulare
Countyfarmers
by
"scabs"through
convoying
setupbystriking
picket
fieldworkers.Courtesy
The
LMtedEditions
Clubandthe
Steinbeck
Research
San
Center,
JoseStateUniversity
rivaled
the exclusive
claims
to authen
ticity held by the historically validated, pre-existing
in which
moral
and
pattern,
authority
were
in fixed centers,
vested
either
power
political
towns or farms. Steinbeck
reversed
and
this notion
settlement
a vision of moral purity and impending
political power as they were taking shape on the
outlined
road:
The cars of the migrant
people crawled out of the
side roads onto the great cross-country
highway,
and they took the migrant way to the West.
In the
to
scuttled
like
westward:
the
daylight
they
bugs
and as the dark caught them, they clustered
like
. . . Thus
it
bugs near to shelter and to water
might be that one family camped near a spring, and
another camped
for the spring and for company,
and a third because
two families had pioneered
the
the sun went
place and found it good. And when
families and twenty cars
down,
twenty
perhaps
were
there.
into power,
whereas
up
belong.
Fixity translated
was
rootedness
the best assurance
of continued
disenfranchisement.
From
this point,
Steinbeck
wrote what might
be called a drama of settlement.
in the
The settlement
drama has two dimensions
a reinvention
In one, Steinbeck
novel.
of
imagined
a natural,
formed
the
organic
society
exigencies
by
a strange
In the evening
the
thing happened:
one
families
became
the
children
twenty
family,
.
were
the children of all ...
es
that make a world,
Every night relationships
torn down
the world
tablished; and every morning
like a circus . . . gradually
the technique
of build
worlds
became
their
Then
leaders
ing
technique.
then laws were made,
then codes came
emerged,
. .
into being
.(p. 264-5).
Roadside."
Steinbeck
of the highway
This
life along
new,
the "Great American
transitional
society
both
chal
214 CALIFORNIA HISTORY
wrote
into the situation
a sort of moral
Yet the
modernization.
ous status
in the novel.
time as it restrained.
was simply that the basic social rules, forgotten by
proposed
socially
nots. A
was
gle
overlaid
era West:
Route 66 was
anew. This
be learned
resisted
those
who were
by
the have
haves
the
against
well-placed:
and medium
for this strug
manifestation
form of social
the new
relations
spatial
on the
of
the
new,
depression
landscape
the dominant
society,
was
change
must
a circular
California
a narrow
way
the great
fantasy is
in the
to foretell a day of revolution,
passages
succeeding
unforeseen
interests
because
by large propertied
were
an "I" frame of mind,
in
still
not yet
they
into communal
liberated
consciousness.
a
The author presented
of fragmentation
pattern
portentous
regrouping
this role is transformed
on
the road.
from nemesis
toward a
The road
to necessity,
for all
its
for house
search
and
gar
came to,
they made
they
down
99. It is
Route
escape
numbers
content
to reveal
themselves
their
sym
south on "99"
(p. 384). Turning
to "66." The Joads were
the route number
on the same
but
home,
essentially
high
that used to lead to their old front door.
The Joads' Invisibility and Ignorance within a Visible,
the raising
of individualized
forms of conscious
ness to the level of class. Steinbeck
wrote
that "one
one
from the land." The
man,
[is] driven
family
. . . and bewildered."
is "alone
But
single migrant
then something
Two men meet,
"squat
happens.
on their hams
and the women
and children
lis
ten. . . ." This
Steinbeck
out,
meeting,
pointed
is the "mode"
of revolution.
T lost my
"Here
"
. . .
our
land' is changed
'We
lost
land.'
[to]
(p.
of the rural freeholder class which moved
pre-dawn
inverted
far from
social
its laws had been
because
revised
leveler,
to accommodate
lives as lived on the road. In the
new
the trucker was
the benefactor.
landscape,
was
of the new
Steinbeck
enamored
roadside
culture?the
the truckers,
the truckstops
diner,
as he ridiculed
its transgressors?the
fee
?just
cars
the
salesmen
used
campgrounds,
peddling
for ill-gotten
profits.
the reasoning
"Hooverville"
the route
Edenic
continued
in their
path
yet
it led the Joads down
den. After the Joads' scrape with the law in the first
bolic
over
at this point
in the novel, was one over
legacy,
over
historical
notion
of
the
"free"
authenticity,
land in the West.
out
culture
stretched
Migrant
into a great protective
net across
the roads of the
was
west.
No
land the democratizing
ele
longer
206). Steinbeck
consciouness,
tempting to think that Steinbeck was manipulating
The struggle towhich Steinbeck implicitly alluded,
of the settlement
for the formation of the
symbolic and cultural weight,
267-8).
The other dimension
social
logic of
road maintained
ambigu
It beckoned
at the same
essential
new
migrants'
The families, which
the
had been units of which
were a house at night, a farm by day,
boundaries
In the long hot light,
their boundaries.
changed
were
cars
in
silent
the
they
moving
slowly west
ward; but at night they integrated with any group
they found.
as
Thus they changed
their social life?changed
man
can
in the whole universe
only
change. They
were not farm men any more, but migrant men
(p.
ment. Rather, geographical mobility was
is to follow the contradictory
if history
on the
of American
borne
regeneration
society,
At
backs of its most
members.
first,
beleaguered
a "circus",
a
the new society
but it
seemed
parody,
in
Landscape.
critical juncture in the book arrived as the
Joads were astride the top of the Tehachapi
A
Mountains,
looking
over
out
the Central
Valley toward Bakersfield. They had just endured
the disappointment of Needles ("Gateway to Cali
fornia"), a funeral procession through theMojave
Desert,
and
the agricultural
inspection
at
station
Daggett:
Al jammed on the brake and stopped in the middle
of the road, and, "Jesus Christ! Look!" he said. The
the orchards,
the great flat valley, green
vineyards,
and beautiful,
the trees set in rows, and the farm
. .The distant cities, the little towns in the
houses.
on the
orchard
land, and morning
sun, golden
. . .The
in
fields
the
valley
grain
golden
morning,
and the willow
trees in rows.
lines, the eucalyptus
Pa sighed, "I never knowed
they was anything
like her."
. . .Ruthie and Winfield
scrambled down from
the car, and then they stood, silent and awestruck,
. .and Ruthie
embarrassed
before the great valley.
"It's
California"
whispered,
(p. 309-10).
This moment,
when
of California,
spectacle
novel when
the Joads
they
was
took
were
the
faced with
in the
foreshadowed
a
Nee
outside
respite
dles. Tom Joad wondered then whether the image
of California would pan out in reality: Pa said,
"Wait till we get
Tom
try then."
to California.
admonished,
You'll
"Jesus
see nice
Christ,
coun
Pa!
This here is California" (p. 278).
Moments later Tom talked with aman versed in the
subtler aspects of the California landscape. He told
Tom what
California,
WINTER 1989/90 215
to expect,
and although
he was
leaving
he encouraged
Tom to go see for himself:
"She's a nice country. But she was stole a long time
ago. You git acrost the desert an' come into the
seen
An' you never
country aroun' Bakersfield.
such purty country?all
orchards an' grapes, pur
tiest country you ever seen. An' you'll pass Ian' flat
an' fine with water thirty feet down, and that lan's
layin' fallow. But you can't have none of that Ian'.
An'
if they
That's a Lan' and Cattle Company.
don't want tawork her, she ain't gonna git worked.
You go in there an' plant you a little corn, an' you'll
go to jail!" (p. 279)
The migrants
rural paradise
had
seen
draped
of California?a
pictures
a snow
with
back
capped
ground (p. 271). In the scenes depicted
Joads
are
image.
to confront
brought
But even when
the visible
and
above the
question
landscape
that
seemed
to fit the pictorial myth, the social and economic
reality had brutal implications. The landscape, a
as
presented
spectacle,
crest of the Tehachapis,
between
contradiction
to the observer
from
the
concealed
the enveloping
the subsistence
of
potential
the soil and the monopolistic
almost masochistic
survival
"crawl,"
of the
asserted
fortitude,
their
blind,
(that evidence of the
on animal
bordering
drive?bugs
in the face
the Joads "crawl") which
flew
instinct
of everything
tion. They were
they had heard along their migra
distrustful
(p. 283).
Indeed, Uncle John foresaw the truth of their expe
in the great valley.
rience
seen any of the
particular
have been able to map out
of "words"
and
Center, San Jose State University
"talk":
II
BfetSBwylw
Yet he could not have
not
and would
features
the continuation
of their
journey from the vantage point at the pass in the
The crisis of representation
here had
Tehachapis.
two expressions.
One was
the inability of the Joads
were
to convey
to each other what
they
getting
into. The other expression
themselves
of the crisis
was
the very landscape
power
that lay before them. The
to represent
of the landscape,
future
events
as they would be shaped by social/power relations
and to lend predictability to the migrants'
lives,
rapidly diminished. The landscape ambiguously
revealed
and concealed
its contents.
Joads had been making
companies.
the Joads
large landowning
Still, however,
tendencies
of Needles]
[Uncle John by the riverbank outside
"... We're
ain't
we?
None
of this
there,
a-goin'
here talk gonna keep us from goin' there. When we
get there, we'll get there. When we get a job we'll
work, an' when we don't get a job we'll set on our
tail. This here talk ain't gonna do no good no way"
All
along,
the equation between
the
the
visible
and the possible,
between
reality and repre
as
sentation.
The notions
of "there"
and "here"
on a map,
or as elements
of
the
field
of
points
vision
that could be identified and reached, were
continually
obscured
because
the Joads were
lured
in the first place by the spectacle of California. Or,
-^^Ejj^^
216 CALIFORNIA HISTORY
_^^EaL*^
was
California
spectacle. What
rather,
they
as a
to them
revealed
only
in fact, was a parallel,
found,
though peripheralized, world.
The apotheosis of the peripheral world was
the
A parody
of the American
small-town
Hooverville.
ideal and a continuation
of Steinbeck's
settlement
could be found
these
settlements
squatter
myth,
town: "The rag town
outside
of every
"real"
lay
were
to
and
and
the houses
close
tents,
water;
a
weed-thatched
houses,
enclosures,
paper
great
junk pile" (p. 319-20). The "rag town" was really
nothing but the discharge point of the effluvia of
the social
"a great
order:
junk pile."
The
descrip
tion alluded to the flow of goods, but the Hoover
a
ville made
of real economic
mockery
exchange.
was
And
the
The flow of goods
uni-directional.
were
was
tents
settlement
merely
illusory?houses
and paper
constructions.
Yet it was
prehended
plot
in Hooverville
that the Joads com
the basic contradictions that drove the
forward.
followed
The migrant
camp
on
the outskirts
the "mother of invention" dictum, but
an essential
the camp was
instru
geographical
a
in
ment
labor
for concentrating
region
surplus
where one extensively
planted crop ripened all at
a broad area. In Hooverville,
Tom Joad is
a
to
old hand
about how
lectured
world-wise,
by
the gathering
enabled
of surplus workers
employ
ers to pay miserable
them men
wages.
got
"S'pose
. . . Jus' offer
kids
'em a nickel?why,
they'll kill
once
over
each other fightin' for that nickel." The men had
been lured by handbills, and "You can print a hell of
a lot of han'bills with what ya save payin' fifteen
an hour
cents
instructor.
He
for fiel' work,"
continued:
explained
Tom's
a big son-of-a-bitch
of a peach orchard I
in. Takes nine men all the year roun'." He
"Takes three thousan' men
paused
impressively.
. .
them peaches
is ripe.
for two weeks when
They
send out han'bills
all over hell. They need three
. Whole
.
thousan', an' they get six thousan'.
part
a the country's peaches.
All ripe together. When
one is picked.
ever' goddam
ya get 'em picked,
There ain't another damn thing in that part a the
country to do. An' then them owners don' want
... So
you there no more.
they kick you out, they
move you along. That's how it is" (p. 334r-5).
"They's
worked
The California
spectacle
was
revealed
as a horrific
production racket involving key combinations: a
division of labor with a painfully seasonal and
extensive
spatial underpinning,
mono-cropping,
and the short term needs
of migrant
families
individuals
to keep
together. Although
porary arrangement
the diurnal body
and
and soul
was a tem
any one Hooverville
in the migrant
Hoover
world,
to be found on the edge of every town.
villes were
Each was fragile over
were
extensive
they
time. Over geographical
and threatening.
Thus,
space
they
had their hand in a dialectical turn of events: "every
raid on a Hooverville,
every deputy swaggering
through a ragged camp put off the day a little and
cemented the inevitability of the day [when the
land will belong to the workers]" (p. 325).
Just as the Joads were
awed
and
(embar
inspired
rassed too) by the view of the landscape from atop
vision
of an ordered,
owners
world?the
the Tehachapis?a
tive, and beneficient
produc
of prop
erty, the producers of that landscape and the image
as
of California
a haven
for
the
dispossessed,
wished to keep the migrants moving. The land
scape itself was to be a fixed, closed entity, and the
was
to keep
idea of keeping
the outcasts
moving
from thinking
of them as part of the real picture.
as a
to define
the laborer merely
The point was
means
of the
of production
rather than as inheritor
one of which
rewards
of an agrarian
tradition,
to the
would
be the very privilege of belonging
landscape by being a landholder.
Steinbeck
a
attached
sciousness-historical
Ironically,
ship.
understands
the
ses of
dispossessed,
But workers
need
form
particular
land
knowledge?to
it is the great
landowner
who
that when
there are mas
lesson
will
follow.
revolution
surely
to grasp
their role in the histori
cal process. How does the worker
come
into
as
Joads
peasants
"workers"?
Wrath
of con
owner
in The Grapes of
that consciousness?
that they
know
do the
How
have become
The Joads were not ascribed any potential for
social mobility. In addition, their spatial mobility
was
almost
if not prescribed.
restricted,
thoroughly
a
into
the
self
about a real
Thus,
plunge
brought
to history and society. In spatial
ized relationship
seclusion
terms,
chose places
empowering
as
relations
Characters
was
Steinbeck
required.
carefully
a character
a renewed
and
see
to
from
which
social
point
that gave
vantage
contradictions
fraught with
must be
in a position
placed
(p. 571-2).
from which
to view their world upside down, with
order
reversed.
Invariably,
these
ginal, both in the productivity
hierarchy
of human
places
the social
were
mar
of nature and in the
habitats.
Divergent Modes of Transforming Nature and thePro
duction ofHumane Habitats.
tried to capture the historical place
Steinbeck
and time inwhich putting land into produc
tionmeant different things to different classes
of people. The primary event that set The Grapes
WINTER 1989/90 217
was
in motion
the Joads'
loss of their
of Wrath
on the prop
to a bank
homestead
that foreclosed
a fundamental
drew
distinction
erty. Steinbeck
a
a
between
to their
of
spatial proximity
people
a
land and, conversely,
spatial disjunction:
"Place
where
folks live is them
Graves]
[Muley
out lonely on the road in a
folks. They ain't whole,
car. They ain't alive no more. Them sons
piled-up
"
a-bitches killed 'em'
(p. 71).
The man
[Later, a fragment from an interchapter]
.
on the earth, turning his plow
who is . . walking
to slide
his handles
point for a stone, dropping
over an outcropping,
to eat
in
earth
the
kneeling
his lunch; that man who ismore than his elements
the land that ismore
than its analysis.
knows
But
the machine man, driving a dead tractor on land he
does not know and love, understands
only chemis
of the land and of
try; and he is contemptuous
the corrugated
iron doors are shut,
himself. When
and his home
he goes home,
is not the land (p.
158).
was very keen on
the notion
Steinbeck
establishing
on
to
that an emotional
land
relationship
depends
contact with
close physical
the soil. Because Muley
Graves did not join the Joads, he failed to recog
nize
in the experience
the opportunity
for renewal
was
to rec
of migration.
he
clever
However,
enough
means
a
in
the
and
of
survival
land
ways
ognize
over to an alien
of
system
given
wholly
agricultural
In an early scene on the old Joad home
production.
stead, Muley explained to Tom and Casy the fine
art of hiding in a land where there was supposedly
nowhere to hide (p. 77-8). Cotton had been planted
so extensively at the old farm that it likened flushing
out the fugitives to looking for a needle in a hay
stack.
To a degree,
field opposed
their
invisibility
in the
cotton
the inability of the small farmer to
on a real per
of foreclosure
pin the responsibility
a stranger
son. Each
to the other.
The
side was
as it
them
divided
modern
them,
system
brought
together.
Ultimately
landholder's
longer make
system
the small
became
farming"
The small farmer could no
a
a crop. Under
the land support
extensive mono
of modernized
production,
"tractor
nemesis.
cropping of cotton engulfed
the Joads' farm.
on the
The Reverend
Casy and young Tom stood
hill and looked down on the Joad place. The small
at one corner, and it
house was mashed
unpainted
so that it
had been pushed
off its foundations
an
at
its
blind
front
windows
angle,
slumped
at a spot of sky well above the horizon.
pointing
The fences were gone and the cotton grew in the
dooryard and up against the house, and the cotton
. .
toward the
grew close against it.
They walked
concrete well-cap, walked
through cotton plants to
get to it, and the bolls were forming on the cotton,
and the land was cultivated
(p. 54-5).
In a number
of
such
Steinbeck
passages
brought
images of two rural orders
together potent
in
The new
all
farm annihilated
large cotton
distinctions
between
various
micro
the
no door
of the Joad farm: no more
fences,
places
no clear
or
to
shed, outhouse,
yard,
path
trough.
even for
There were no places
that
"proper weeds
a
should grow under
The
trough."
"proper
phrase
seems
weeds"
like an oxymoron,
yet gets the point
across
that the old rough
and tumble homestead
was
a
of
and
natural
scheme.
part
good
It was
such a scheme
that the Joads and others
conflict.
former
dreamed of reproducing in their exile. The idea
that land should be used and occupied, rather than
left fallow,
was
stymied,
however,
by the power
of
the large landowner to let arable land remain idle:
. . .And
the
along the roads lay the temptations,
fields that could bear food.
That's owned.
That ain't our'n.
we
could get a little piece of her.
Well, maybe
little
Maybe?a
piece. Right down there?a
patch.
Jimson weed now. Christ, I could git enough pota
toes off'n that little patch to feed my whole
family!
It ain't our'n.
It got to have Jimson weeds
(p.
320-1).
to cultivate
the "secret gardens"
fail
Any attempts
the New
?unless
Deal
intervenes
Out
(p. 321).
side of Bakersfield
the federal government
estab
lished
the migrant
labor camp, Weedpatch.
is reminiscent
of both
the "secret
Weedpatch
and
the
town"
Hoovervilles.
The
gardens"
"rag
government
camp
even appeared
was
provided
momentary
respite,
idyllic. Yet in the final analysis
than a glorified
little more
not
could
the desire
support
humane
habitat:
sanitary
facility
for a permanent,
it
and
Tom walked
down the street between
the rows of
tents ... He saw that the rows were straight and
that there was no litter about the tents. The ground
. . .
of the street had been swept and sprinkled
Tom walked
He
neared
Four
Number
Sani
slowly.
tary Unit and he looked at it curiously, an unpainted
low and rough (p. 393).
building,
was
the vector
of several
important
Weedpatch
in the novel.
themes
It drew on the idea of geomet
as support
ric orderliness
and cleanliness
for the
town.
Its
moral
of
the
American
small
authority
a secure
with
resonated
and bounded
setting
a
It was
rural propriety.
from which
the
point
of the migrant
"folk" could emanate
amidst
power
the enveloping
of agribusiness.
Most
enterprise
218 CALIFORNIA HISTORY
[ t? /^ST
'
Ny|Ck'~"^****^fc.
\ l f f~ f"ftJi*vM J \ j
^Zftfa. ^^^7 JfT^^''^""
was
the overlapping
space
powerfully,
Weedpatch
of three "institutions":
the short term needs
of the
federal
relief policy,
and large
workers,
migrant
in
its
scale capitalist
For
all
agriculture.
importance
these
Weed
however,
systems
bringing
together,
a
a
Itwas
patch remained
marginal
place.
holding
area for the worker
in a place where
employment
was
scarce after the harvest.
the migrant
Inside,
was
and
thwarted
the
strong
community
attempts
a riot.
to incite
of local vigilantes
Ultimately,
itwas agribusiness
that set the rules. The
though,
to leave
like them were
forced
Joads and others
and
look for work.
If the "secret garden"
failed to sustain
the myth
of yeoman
Steinbeck
independence,
experimented
or cracks,
in
with
that it is in the seams,
the notion
the agricultural
in-between
(the
landscape
places
the process,
rather
than the final outcome,
where
can be viewed),
of the appropriation
of nature
where
the self can retreat and become
empowered
contact with
nature,
through
fragmentary
though
it may be. In The Grapes of Wrath this idea was
in the context of the agricultural
expressed
produc
In this way
in a
tion process.
Steinbeck
located
specific time and place what otherwise would
an
entailed
notion.
be
He
to explain
took pains
in
and
Oklahoma
California
farming
and social control
forms of subordination
ahistorical
that modern
whole
(p. 50-1; 316-20). Steinbeck's
point, of course,
was
can be
to suggest
how
these
consequences
resisted.
In order
to understand
how
these
arguments
in the novel, we can examine
work
events
certain
as
occur
in
ditches
and
they
irrigation
hedgerows
or cracks,
?two
in the agricultural
types of seams,
seam
that represent
gaps in apparently
landscape
less power
relations.
Tom Joad,
the primary
character
of the novel,
two
in
The
experienced
baptisms
irrigation ditches.
a
was
first was performed
Tom
when
by Casy
boy
a revivalist
and Casy
His
first baptism
preacher.
did not mean
too much
to young
Tom. Its meaning
was
became
clear
when
Tom
only
re-baptized?this
time by himself?after
doing
something
out of
and a sense
conviction
In this
of social
justice.
were
Tom's
actions
less blind, more
than
scene,
was
the
result
of
the
that
he
merely
things
always
bumping
into. Tom had just discovered Casy and a
of other
In a scuffle with
labor organizers.
of vigilantes
who were
them down
tailing
a stream,
was killed. Tom
struck
down
Casy
fatally
the killer, was himself
his escape
struck, and made
up the embankment:
number
a group
He bent low and ran over the cultivated
earth;
clods slipped and rolled under his feet. Ahead he
saw the bushes
that bounded
the field, bushes
WINTER 1989/90 219
along the edges of an irrigation ditch. He slipped
through the fence, edged in among vines and black
berry bushes. And then he lay still, panting hoarsely
. . . .He
lay still on his stomach until his mind came
back. And then he crawled slowly over the edge of
. . .
the ditch. He bathed his face in the cool water.
a
The black cloud had crossed
the sky,
blob of
dark against the stars. The night was quiet again
(p. 527-8).
This
second
"baptism"
was
more
figurative
secular than the first, but Steinbeck meant
and
them to
events.
In each instance
be parallel
Tom and Casy
were
case Tom's
In
each
followed
present.
baptism
some form of violence.
The first baptism
occurred
too naive
to lend any
under
conditions
which were
to
Tom's
life.
The
marked
second, however,
meaning
into a period
his passage
of solitary
resolve
and
was emanci
moment
the
he
For
spiritual rekindling.
. . .
black cloud had crossed
the sky.
pated?"The
oc
That the baptisms
The night was quiet again."
was
in irrigation
consistent
curred
ditches
simply
with
the setting of the story. Yet their location
has
to
sites
about
of
renewal
and
say
something
spiritual
resistance
in a space of seemingly
total social control.
The
is an essential
ditch
feature
and
irrigation
in a semi-arid
instrument
of agriculture
environ
ment.
It is part and parcel of the transformation
of
and hence,
of the production
and
labor
nature,
process (one of the few jobs Tom gets is digging an
irrigation ditch). The ditch of the second baptism is
at the field's
edge,
by water-seeking
protected
as it
As much
bushes.
of the
evidence
represents
over nature,
dominant
it remains
class's mastery
its
own kind of environment,
so elemental
with water
are unsullied.
that its restorative
The
properties
unlike
the
social
and
economic
that
water,
system
not
is
to
it
selective
about
whom
it,
manipulates
gives life.
The second
and precursor
margins
environment
to resistance,
of solitary
reflection,
is the hedgerow
at the
of the cotton fields. Like the irrigation
ditches
these micro-environments
the
help build
novel's
architectural
And
symmetry.
similarly
they
see Tom's movement
from a state of partial denial
to affirmation
of his role in social change.
Twice the
reader finds Tom Joad hiding at the edges of cotton
fields. The first time iswith Muley Graves at the
Joads' old farm, when Tom and Casy follow Muley
220 CALIFORNIA HISTORY
can stay the
It turns
to a place where
night.
they
"...
to be a cave in the bank of a water-cut.
on the clean
T ain't
sand.
himself
Joad settled
no cave,' he said. Tm
gonna
gonna
sleep
sleep in
out
right here.' He rolled his coat and put it under his
head"
(p. 81-2).
Tom is in hiding despite his pride and delibera
tions to the contrary,
but he falls short of entering
Tom's
the cave as Muley
does. The scene presages
in a similar
in California:
future
exile
situation
Muley warns Tom that he will be hiding "from lots
of stuff." Tom himself dug the cave at the edge of
he was
the field when
what more
a
youth
"Lookin'
appropriate place inwhich
than California
at the edge
of a cotton
for gold"?
field.
were
at the time of
(where
they
working
comes
true:
death),
Casy's
Muley's
prediction
Al turned right on a graveled road, and the yellow
over the ground. The fruit trees
lights shuddered
were gone now, and cotton plants took their place.
They drove on for twenty miles [italics mine] through
. . . The road
a bushy creek
the cotton
paralleled
and turned over a concrete bridge and followed the
stream on the other side. And then, on the edge of
the creek the lights showed a long line of red box
and a big sign on the edge of the
cars, wheelless;
Al slowed
road said, "Cotton Pickers Wanted."
orchard
. . .
". . . Look," he [Tom] said. "It says they want
cotton pickers.
I seen that sign. Now
I been tryin'
to figger how I'm gonna
with
you, an' not
stay
make no trouble. When my face gets well, maybe
it'll be awright, but not now. Ya see them cars back
the pickers
live in them. Now maybe
there. Well,
work
there.
How
if you get work there
about
they's
an' live in one of the them cars?"
"How 'bout you?" Ma demanded.
"Well, you seen that crick, all full a brush. Well, I
could hide in that brush an' keep outa sight. An' at
to eat. I seen
night you could bring me out somepin
a culvert, little ways back. I could
maybe
sleep in
there" (p. 550-1).
Tom was
While
secure
in the hedgerow
above
the
creek by the cotton field, he could not only reflect
on
the
recent
events,
but
represent
them
to his
mother in their fullmeaning. In his hiding place he
found his kinship to a humanity beyond the family
boundary,
and
came
into
a sense
the distincion
of overarching
social purpose. Steinbeck intimated that Tom would
follow in Casy's steps (p. 570).
By repeating the hiding pattern established earlier
in the novel, Steinbeck foreshadowed the internal
in Tom's character.
Steinbeck
seclu
change
played
sion and personal
the
geo
empowerment
against
extensive
and demoralizing
graphically
agricultural
one worker
between
and
is
another,
shown in The Grapes ofWrath to have enough cracks
to individuate
to allow certain people
themselves.
These
cracks
reflect on the contradictions
of the
unex
idea
of
the
process,
sustaining
production
as a reserve
nature
for
the
human
ploited
spirit
con
during historically
specific and dehumanizing
ditions. Thus, Tom Joad had to be alone in a particu
larkind of space, in a special relationship with nature,
before he could realize that, after all, he is part of a
social
to end up
After Tom escapes with this family from the peach
down
working conditions. The spatial reach of agribusi
ness in the thirties, which seems to have levelled
of an historical
group,
moment?before
he
could grant authority to the representational
political value of language.
The Grapes of Wrath Steinbeck
In
the values
praise
and
and
appeared
unswerving
to
pragmatism
of the migrant workers and families. Through
Tom Joad, however, who finally discovered in his
hideout that talking, thinking, and language are
tools for understanding
Steinbeck
also criticized
"common
Joad family's
discussion
and
the very
idea
of
seemed overly precious. What
the Joads needed
worthy
ments,
of the
practical
predica
the shortcomings
in which
sense,"
representation
to recognize
instead was
the value of representation
as learned
?not
in myth,
in the
but as relearned
kinds of spaces where the individual can represent
first to himself, then to others, a version of reality
closer to the truth. In order for the human family to
unite, the boundaries of the nuclear family had to
be
Ma
loosened.
Joad's
intact. She realized
land,
they
"fambly"
that, while
a bounded,
were
not
could
remain
her family had
cohesive
entity.
With
out it they were falling apart (p. 536). However,
only through their disintegration would they really
think and act beyond themselves.
we
Finally,
are
left
to wonder
how
Steinbeck
ultimately appraised the situation of the "Okie"
migrant worker. To his credit Steinbeck did not see
the migrant
class as a monolith,
ferentiated.
For example,
toward
the novel Ma
and Pa Joad have
gender-based
viewpoints.
but rather as dif
the conclusion
of
taken divergent,
Pa became
preoccupied
with looking backwards, so nostalgic for a time
when he was head of the household division of
labor that he could not participate in the present.
Ma was forward looking, acknowledging that the
land in California was, after all, better than their
Oklahoma farmland. She rose from the ashes of a
burnt-out household,
the vehicle for Steinbeck to
expose
the pitfalls
of patriarchy.
in the historical moment,
WINTER 1989/90 221
Pa remained
stuck
if not in the past itself.
Rose of Sharon, sister of Tom Joad, the leading character, in TTze
Grapes of
Wrath. One of the major themes in Steinbeck's novel was the manner in
which economic inequality and exploitation undermined
the status of
who
earned
On
"breadwinners."
self-respect
by being
were
to Steinbeck,
less ego-involved
women,
hand,
according
more
economic
in touch
with
system,
productive
spiritual
men,
the
other
in
and
the
life
giving forces of nature, and thus more adaptable to adversity. Reflecting
this
theme,
conclusion,
child,
suckled
in the
novel's
heart-rending,
enigmatic,
Rose of Sharon, who had just suffered
a
starving
strange
man
at her
breast
and
controversial
the still-birth of her
in order
to save
his
life. Courtesy The Limited Editions Club and the Steinbeck Research Center, San
Jose State University
222 CALIFORNIA HISTORY
as a woman,
to changing
situ
readily
adapted
as
a
life
"flow."
the
However,
ations,
accepting
on
are
not
to
Pa
Ma
and
based
ascribed
positions
an ahistorical
sense of masculine
and feminine.
For
both Pa's nostalgia
and Ma's philosophy
of "flow"
an histori
were occasioned
in
their
entrapment
by
Ma,
cal and geographical
flux. Itwas Ma, while
still in
attach
first experienced
Oklahoma,
nostalgic
ments.
The tragedy of the migrants'
there
situation,
so
seems
not
to
that
much
had
leave
fore,
they
who
home, but that California did not yet offer the
permanent place they thought it promised.
Steinbeck took the view that migrant workers
were
in a complex
of relations modernizing
caught
the western
that
the
features
of
states,
particular
on the forms of
their experience
also depended
consciousness
and practice
that they brought
to
and
set
that
and
rules
situations,
ideologies
by
modern
also relied in part on a laboring
capitalism
class such as the Joads represented.
I have
sug
gested
division
that Steinbeck was keenly aware that the
of
within
agricultural
production
and the family
farm, and
capitalist
agribusiness
the consciousness
of individuals
and social groups,
labor,
all had requirements that grew out of and were
projected onto contradicting geographical spaces.
The
particular
sions,
oppositional
motifs,
that I think Steinbeck used
argument,
were:
the spaces
of power
a series
of ten
to convey his
and disenfran
chisement, the ambiguity of the landscape as a
depicting and concealing agent, and the conflicting
modes
nature.
of transforming
were
These
motifs
the means
oppositional
by
which
Steinbeck
created a space for certain charac
ters to resist the oppressing
forces. The Joads were
never
power was not all
completely
marginalized;
powerful. The attempts tomake the Joads invisible
a cog in the
in the
process,
landscape,
production
sense
in some
to their redemption.
contributed
was never
nor subdued,
Nature
entirely mastered
and itwas by virtue of its transformation
class
in power
See "References"
that
beginning
George Henderson
gram in geography
WINTER 1989/90 223
restorative
gaps
were
by the
left. S
on page 262.
is a graduate student in the doctoral pro
at the University of California, Berkeley.