NATURAL NARRATIVES
STEINBECK, NATURALISM, AND MYTHOLOGY
Novelist and scholar Louis Owens talks about his family history, as well as the history surrounding the famed Route 66. What strikes the reader is his family’s “peripatetic” (18) journey through the states after their tribe’s disenfranchisement. His family has clear origins stemming from Oklahoma — where they’d settled — but Owens talks about their history as one of movement across state lines, similar to that of the Joads. He comes from a family of sharecroppers and hunters. Owens touches on Steinbeck and Grapes of Wrath, calling the book “reformer naturalism” (19) and written in the form of “non-teleological thinking…describing a situation that just is” (19). Similar to the descriptions of climates, soil, dust, and crop turnover, the landscape, flora, and fauna just is; just there, outside of human control while the people around it scramble to find some semblance of authority over the land. Property lines, ownership — themes which follow the Joads around in the novel — are pale facsimiles of the naturalism in the book. The first mention of people in Grapes comes after a long, winding description of the land: “men and women huddled in their houses, and tied handkerchiefs over their noses when they went out, and wore goggles to protect their eyes” (Steinbeck 3). The turns itself over in its natural processes; dust, rain, wind, abiotic forces shaping the natural landscape given to its power. Steinbeck, with his polysyndetonic description of the land, prepares the reader for an epic and writes nature in a biblical tone. The people are synecdochic of the land and industrialism destroys that connection by turning it into a metonymic relationship:
He could not see the land as it was, he could not smell the land as it smelled; his feet did not stamp the clods or feel the warmth and power of the earth.
(Steinbeck, 35)
And in the tractor man there grows the contempt that comes only to a stranger who has little understanding and no relation. For nitrates are not the land, nor phosphates and the length of fiber in the cotton is not the land. Carbon is not a man, nor salt nor water nor calcium. He is all these, but he is much more, much more; and the land is so much more than its analysis.
(Steinbeck, 115)
The two excerpts show the physical relationship humans have to the land, and how that relationship is broken by a “tractor” which dies as soon as “the heat goes out…like the living heat that leaves a corpse” (Steinbeck 115). While working on the land, and connected to the crop, humanity shares a bond with it and is a literal part of the whole (synecdochoic). But the advent of industrialized technology brings efficiency of work which divorces the man from the land, and the land becomes an abstract thing that is worth money (metonymic).
As Owens believes, in Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck uses non-teleological thinking in creating his reformer naturalism much like how the abiotic forces that dictate the use of the land by humans. Any meaning derived from the land (and not from what the land represents), comes from human interaction. Nature stands apart from those stories we share amongst ourselves. Stories have a stabilizing effect on a community. As Owens says in his interview, a lack of a story, a narrative-whole bridging a collective group of individuals together, breaks a community into pieces until a type of “mythology” can stitch the parts back together (26). Nature, which pervaded the Native Indian legends, was the one constant that followed the migrants around. Thus, as nature provides the materials for survival, it also fed a community’s stability.
TURTLE LEGENDS
Legends of the turtle, for instance—a classic symbol in The Grapes of Wrath—often revolve around the turtle as creator and supporter of the universe. But these myths expand far beyond Native America, suggesting a global interest in the iconography. In his book "The Oxford Companion to World Mythology," David Leeming notes: "In earth-driver creation myths in Native North America, Central Asia, and elsewhere, it is animals who are sent into the primordial waters by the creator to find the material with which to create the earth. Often that creation takes place on the back of an animal such as the turtle (Leeming, 19)." The turtle as a symbolic figure has been highly revered across the globe, in places such as India, China, Japan, and the Americas.
Jay Miller offers a more specific story in his article "Why the World is on the Back of a Turtle" in which he recounts for colonist Jaspar Danckaerts' conversations with the Delaware Indians over their particular beliefs. He paraphrases:
First there was only water, then the Great Turtle gradually rose above water level and the Creator placed mud on his shell. The mud dried and the Great Tree grew in the middle of the earth. As the Tree grew towards the sky a sprout became a man, then the Great Tree bent down and in touching the earth caused a sprout to become a woman. From this man and woman all of humanity descended.
(Miller, 306)
There are many stories that share the common mytheme of the turtle as the supporter of the world. If we consider The Grapes of Wrath as one of the first environmentally-conscious novels, the turtle’s symbolic history figures heavily into its placement in Steinbeck’s work. The turtle helps convey, almost intuitively, the natural world at stake in a narrative which constantly shifts between the local (the story of the Joads) and the global (the story of the land). The dust bowl, the migration, the notion of family and of origin, all of these are heightened and clarified by the turtle’s opening presence in the book, focusing our eyes on industry’s commodification of the earth and the cosmic price we as humans pay.
SYMBOLIC RELATIONSHIPS: TURTLES AND CATS
It is interesting to consider the nature surrounding that of the turtle's final appearance. In a brief and playful encounter with a cat, we witness what could be considered a symbolic dialogue taking place before us.
The cat crept close between the men again, and its tail lay flat and its whiskers jerked now and then. The sun dropped low toward the horizon and the dusty air was red and golden. The cat reached out a gray questioning paw and touched Joad's coat. He looked around. "Hell, I forgot the turtle. I ain't gonna pack it all over hell." He unwrapped the land turtle and pushed it under the house. But in a moment it was out, headed southwest as it had been from the first. The cat leaped at it and struck at its straining head and slashed at its moving feet. The old, hard, humorous head was pulled in, and the thick tail slapped in under the shell, and when the cat grew tired of waiting for it and walked off, the turtle headed southwest again.
(Steinbeck, 44)
The cat, described throughout The Grapes of Wrath as a sly and quiet hunter (see the Cat section of Animal Field Guide for more detail), challenges the turtle (established above as a profoundly human symbol for the weight of the world). If we pay attention to the presence of cats within The Grapes of Wrath, we notice their ability to stalk quietly behind our characters, mostly out of their notice completely. The cat's role is one of hunger, and, excepting this scene, they are depicted hunting and scavenging for food successfully.
“Cats” are present in the novel with more than one understanding; Caterpillar Tractors are referred to as “‘cats” in the story. This is significant because these tractors represent the industrial force which tears the Joads, as well as many others, from their land. It is a force established and driven by greed, or a “hunger” for increasing profits. This industrious force is unquestionably assumed as helpful, and in this drive it causes unexpected damage, sneaking up behind those most vulnerable and unsuspecting. While the tractors are described in machine-like, unnatural ways, their essence and character quietly resembles the cats Steinbeck describes.
The quote above, then, carries new symbolic weight as we consider the persistence of the turtle (like the Joads), and hungry cat (industry). Though the cat gives up and the turtle heads on, we are left with the uneasy feeling that this conflict is far from over.
Interestingly, there is one character who manages to notice the cat early on:
Joad glanced around at it. “By God! Look who’s here. Somebody stayed.” He put out his hand, but the cat leaped away out of reach and sat down and licked the pads of its lifted paw. Joad looked at it, and his face was puzzled. “I know what’s the matter,” he cried. “That cat jus’ made me figger what’s wrong."
(Steinbeck, 43)
If we are to assume somebody like Tom Joad can spot a cat that wishes to remain hidden, yet Tom Joad himself eventually disappears, the stakes behind these symbolic relationships rise even higher. Who's to say what the ultimate conclusion is behind these stylized details? It is likely Steinbeck intended for these symbolic tensions to play out in front of us without any guaranteed resolution.