Heavy from the Vintage

 

In the summer of 2007, my AP literature summer reading project was to read a great piece of literature, watch the/movie version, and write a comparative essay on the two. The novel I read was The Grapes of Wrath. The essay I wrote prompted the teacher of the course to have a private conversation with me about whether I was really "ready" for the class. 

At this time, I was very early in what would be a much longer exploration into real literature. Coming off young adult novels like Harry Potter, I was reading novels like The Grapes of Wrath as though they were movies. Picturing the characters portrayed by movie actors, getting enthralled by the action of the scenes. It's why I am always revisiting the classics; my first go around was not an engagement with the words on the page, only the pictures that they painted in my head. 

This is really easy to do with Steinbeck and especially with The Grapes of Wrath in particular. He is a master at painting pictures, and it is fully on display in this novel. Characters both minor and major are practically drawn on your brain in detail, as is the landscape, and he's able to do so not with copious amounts of description but rather with the small, almost insignificant components of his subject. Entire universes of characterization in mere snippets of dialogue. If I were a playwright, I would weep with envy.

The traditional components of the plot can read like a movie. The Joad family has been uprooted by ruthless capitalists who own the land and do some finance trickery to boot them. They pack up a beat-up truck and go to California on a dream in the form of a handbill promising jobs and possibilities. When they arrive, it's exploitation and Hoovervilles.

It was Moby Dick that taught me how to engage with literature as literature, not just actions but the poetry of the motions. Ironically, my first pass at Moby Dick was in that same AP Literature class. Like Moby Dick, the plot of The Grapes of Wrath zooms in and out; we're given the Joad family as a zoom in, but the story zooms out to tell the larger story, vignettes of life from other families experiencing the same thing, maybe told through the lens of a used car salesman or a waitress at a diner. It will zoom out further into philosophical flurried ruminations on the very concepts of what it means to own land.

These are some of the most beautiful passages in the book, and even perhaps that I've ever read. These do not translate well to the movie that plays in your head when you read, which explains why I probably don't remember them. But here's an example for you:

"There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And the children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates - died of malnutrition 0 because the food must rot, must be forced to rot."

At its heart, the novel is about the breakdown of social norms caused by the exploitation of our fellow humans. A truer treatise that there is nothing natural about capitalism. Today I watch our nation's own attempts to dehumanize immigrants or Palestinians because ownership requires a permanent, exploitable underclass. I think that effort fails because of novels like The Grapes of Wrath; reading books like this is becoming increasingly important.