what I'm doing now #26
reading The Grapes of Wrath
I am surprised and pleased to find that this classic – published almost exactly eightyseven years ago, in April of 1939 – is written in experimental style. Steinbeck writes chapters in completely different modes. Most the longer chapters he writes in conventional style, but he interleaves these with shorter chapters that abandon the main narrative to explore the greater context of the novel. These smaller chapters are somewhat abstract and often they are
narrated throughhow to narrate transparently
I read half of The Executioner’s Song – Norman Mailer’s gargantuan, Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction novel about Gary Gilmore – and figured I could put it down and move on. I knew how the story would end and had read enough of the book to appreciate Mailer as a writer. And yet, despite my skepticism of
the value of finishing books, a few months on I found myself drawn back in. And in my second session with the book I noticed a technique that Mailer uses throughout it.
I don’t know if the technique has a name. A good name might be transparent narrator. Its purpose is to convey a character’s point of view without quoting them or otherwise indicating that you are speaking for them.
Here’s a passage from Mailer’s book, concerning Tamera, a cub reporter who began working on Gary’s story before it became world-famous:
Tamera had gone to work at 5 A.M. and spent six hours Xeroxing Gary’s letters. She knew some of the reporters were raising their eyebrows at how she protected the stuff, but Tamera didn’t want anyone reading over her shoulder, and making the sort of cynical nonchalant comments newspaper people could make. Still, nobody seemed that excited.
In fact, at the Friday afternoon meeting, the Executive Editor said, “I don’t think we’re interested in love letters.” Just brushed it off like that.
The narrator gives us a sense of Tamera’s personality and attitude towards the situation without quoting her or breaking the third person narrative. The narrator is not pretending to be Tamera, and yet we hear her through him, most clearly in the brief sentences that punctuate both paragraphs:
Still, nobody seemed that excited.
Just brushed it off like that.
These phrases are said by the narrator in Tamera’s voice. We feel like she is telling us her part of the story over a cup of coffee.
Mailer achieves this effect by embedding many little phrases along the away. Notice the casualness of this phrase:
reporters were raising their eyebrows at how she protected the stuff
The stuff, in particular.
Notice the casualness here too:
the sort of cynical nonchalant comments newspaper people could make
Newspaper people.
These are consistent, subtle choices that change how the reader perceives the story. This technique is crucial to keeping Mailer’s 1,000+ page book fresh. If the whole thing was written from his perspective, it would be much harder to get through. Instead, he narrates transparently, allowing us to hear the story from the perspective of the many people who lived it.
disembodied or multibodied voices. They deal not with particular people but with the socioeconomic tides engulfing whole classes of people, including the novel’s characters. It’s like Steinbeck wrote a novel and then went back to the beginning to weave through it a thread of commentary and imagery to reinforce and reflect the themes of the original book. From this secondary layer I’ve
reproducedhow to use books #2
Reading books feels like a good use of time. Any day feels more substantial if I’ve spent time with an interesting book in my hands, working the stream of symbols through my brain. Finishing a chapter gives me a sturdy feeling of satisfaction.
I love engaging with a work and puzzling over it. But I get restless if before long I don’t produce something as well. I suppose this dual appetite is why I love programming. I make sense of abstractions encoded in pixels on a screen and manipulate them to effect some new meaning in response. A new feature, an improvement, a fix. My satisfaction with a day’s work seems to depend on producing something or at least progressing in producing something.
From the books I read I want also to produce something. For years now I’ve been experimenting with ways of transforming reading into writing. Reviews force me to speak about entire books and thus make it difficult to write how I like to write. I like to write in wholes, even if they’re small. One coherent point is enough, even if it can be countered by another. (In fact, I like the idea of countering myself over time, writing in dialectic and thus refining my ideas.)
Some of my least favorite pieces on this site are ones dedicated to entire books. But then, one of my favorites – how normal people think – uses Sally Rooney’s Normal People as its foundation. Often while reading I encounter something I want to talk about but I don’t have time or patience or the idea I need to transform it into original writing.
Recently, I’ve been experimenting with a new method. I type out an excerpt from a book and let it be the principal thing in the piece. I put myself in the role of curator and commentator while I wait for the right idea to come so I can produce an original piece that relates to what I’ve read. In the meantime, I collect bits, tag them, give them a name, and offer any good sentences I can muster.
thoughtprovoking excerpts in
what is alienation? #2what is alienation? #2
Here is an excerpt from chapter five of The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. In it, Steinbeck describes tenant farmers being visited by the “owners of the land…or more often [spokesmen] for the owners.” The owners arrive in “closed cars” and remain in them while they “talk out of the windows” to the tenants “[squatting] on their hams” beside the cars.
Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold. And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshiped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling. If a bank or a finance company owned the land, the owner man said, the Bank–or the Company–needs–wants–insists–must have–as though the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling, which had ensnared them. These last would take no responsibility for the banks or the companies because they were men and slaves, while the banks were machines and masters all at the same time. Some of the owner men were a little proud to be slaves to such cold and powerful masters. The owner men sat in the cars and explained. You know the land is poor. You’ve scrabbled at it long enough, God knows…You know the land’s getting poorer. You know what cotton does to the land; robs it, sucks all the blood out of it.
The squatters nodded–they knew, God knew. If they could only rotate the crops they might pump blood back into the land.
Well, it’s too late. And the owner men explained the workings and the thinkings of the monster that was stronger than they were. A man can hold land if he can just eat and pay taxes; he can do that.
Yes, he can do that until his crops fail one day and he has to borrow money from the bank.
But–you see, a bank or a company can’t do that, because those creatures don’t breathe air, don’t eat side-meat. They breathe profits; they eat the interest on money. If they don’t get it, they die the way you die without air, without side-meat. It is a sad thing, but it is so. It is just so.
The squatting men raised their eyes to understand. Can’t we just hang on? Maybe the next year will be a good year. God knows how much cotton next year. And with all the wars–God knows what price cotton will bring. Don’t they make explosives out of cotton? And uniforms? Get enough wars and cotton’ll hit the ceiling. Next year, maybe. They looked up questioningly.
We can’t depend on it. The bank–the monster has to have profits all the time. It can’t wait. It’ll die. No, taxes go on. When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can’t stay one size.
A few sentences later:
The squatting men looked down again. What do you want us to do? We can’t take less share of the crop–we’re half starved now. The kids are hungry all the time. We got no clothes, torn an’ ragged. If all the neighbors weren’t the same, we’d be ashamed to go to meeting.
And at last the owner men came to the point. The tenant system won’t work any more. One man on a tractor can take the place of twelve or fourteen families. Pay him a wage and take all the crop. We have to do it. We don’t like to do it. But the monster’s sick. Something’s happened to the monster.
But you’ll kill the land with cotton.
We know. We’ve got to take cotton quick before the land dies. Then we’ll sell the land. Lots of families in the East would like to own a piece of land.
The tenant men looked up alarmed. But what’ll happen to us? How’ll we eat?
You’ll have to get off the land. The plows’ll go through the dooryard.
And now the squatting men stood up angrily. Grampa took up the land, and he had to kill the Indians and drive them away. And Pa was born here, and he killed weeds and snakes. Then a bad year came and he had to borrow a little money. An’ we was born here. There in the door–our children born here. And Pa had to borrow money. The bank owned the land then, but we stayed and we got a little bit of what we raised.
We know that–all that. It’s not us, it’s the bank. A bank isn’t like a man. Or an owner with fifty thousand acres, he isn’t like a man either. That’s the monster.
Sure, cried the tenant men, but it’s our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it’s no good, it’s still ours. That’s what makes it ours–being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.
We’re sorry. It’s not us. It’s the monster. The bank isn’t like a man.
Yes, but the bank is only made of men.
No, you’re wrong there–quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.
The tenant cried, Grampa killed Indians, Pa killed snakes for the land. Maybe we can kill banks–they’re worse than Indians and snakes. Maybe we got to fight to keep our land, like Pa and Grampa did…We’ll get our guns, like Grampa when the Indians came. What then?
Well–first the sheriff, and then the troops. You’ll be stealing if you try to stay, you’ll be murderers if you kill to stay. The monster isn’t men, but it can make men do what it wants.
and
#3what is alienation? #3
The houses were left vacant on the land, and the land was vacant because of this. Only the tractor sheds of corrugated iron, silver and gleaming, were alive; and they were alive with metal and gasoline and oil, the disks of the plows shining. The tractors had lights shining, for there is no day and night for a tractor and the disks turn the earth in the darkness and they glitter in the daylight. And when a horse stops work and goes into the barn there is a life and a vitality left, there is a breathing and a warmth, and the feet shift on the straw, and the jaws champ on the hay, and the ears and the eyes are alive. There is a warmth of life in the barn, and the heat and smell of life. But when the motor of a tractor stops, it is as dead as the ore it came from. The heat goes out of it like the living heat that leaves a corpse. Then the corrugated iron doors are closed and the tractor man drives home to town, perhaps twenty miles away, and he need not come back for weeks or months, for the tractor is dead. And this is easy and efficient. So easy that the wonder goes out of work, so efficient that the wonder goes out of land and the working of it, and with the wonder the deep understanding and the relation. 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 of these, but he is much more, much more; and the land is so much more than its analysis. The man who is more than his chemistry, walking on the earth, turning his plow point for a stone, dropping his handles to slide over an outcropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch; that man who is more than his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis. But the machine man, driving a dead tractor on land he does not know and love, understands only chemistry; and he is contemptuous of the land and of himself. When the corrugated iron doors are shut, he goes home, and his home is not the land.
Thus is the corrupting nature of resource extraction. As it hollows out the land, so it does us. It is a process of breaching wholeness in the land, in ourselves, and in the ancient relationship between the two.
But there’s more here. Steinbeck portrays not just the uprooting of a humble, integrated life but the sowing of seeds of discord. Not only are people set apart from their land and from themselves as sufficient providers of their own livelihood, from dignity and selfrespect, they are set apart from their fellow man. The new habitat is one amenable to suspicion and distrust of self and another. Steinbeck’s writing invites reflection: how deeply do they run, the roots of modern rage?
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