The Devil Gets His Due, page 26
But finally—and essentially—the novel which Albert Camus believed to be the greatest of Faulkner’s fictions belongs to the most disreputable and unredeemable pop genre of all, being pornography, as the dictionary defines that pejorative term, “a portrayal of erotic behavior designed to cause sexual excitement.” Though there are many such portrayals in Faulkner’s work of “erotic behavior,” including such kinky subvarieties as pedophilia, necrophilia, incest and bestiality, Sanctuary was the only one of his books which its intended publisher refused at first to publish, presumably as too “dirty.” Yet it is in some ways the softest of soft porn—avoiding not only what were then still considered “dirty” words, but explicit descriptions in any words of the sex act itself. The brutal violation of Temple, for instance, is rendered solely in terms of her fantasies, climaxing in her hallucination of turning into a boy—popping a teeny-tiny penis; though, of course, that male organ is called by none of its grosser street names.
Nonetheless, however soft, Sanctuary is sadomasochistic porn in the tradition of the divine Marquis’s Justine and Juliette, ambiguously and disturbingly blurring the distinction between murder and desire, violence and passion, thanatos and eros. Its central image of love therefore (after all, insofar as he can, Popeye loves Temple, and in her way Temple loves him) is rape. But rape, however abhorrent in fact, is an image of true archetypal resonance, which has provided a mythic erotic center for a large number of works which have pleased many and pleased long. These include not just banned books like de Sade’s, but many classics and longtime family favorites ranging from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa to Gone with the Wind, the Tarzan series (in which everyone she encounters attempts to rape Jane) and those currently popular Women’s Romances, whose beautiful protagonists not infrequently end up marrying the balefully attractive males who began by ravishing them.
All such stories represent, in any case, latter-day avatars of the ancient archetype of the donna fuggita, the Pursued Woman: a primordial image which, no matter how the actual relations of the sex may change, persists in the deep unconscious of us all. Faulkner, however, ironizes and at the same time heightens the titillation implicit in that archetype by making his rapist impotent, which is to say, not-quite-male, and portraying his intended victim as not-quite-female. Not only do both of Temple Drake’s names hint at her androgynous nature, but the sexual role she plays is finally mythically “masculine.” Beginning by running always in the wrong direction or not fast enough to foil those who pursue her in lust, then ceasing to run at all—she ends by becoming the sexual aggressor, the pursuer rather than the pursued. So at least she seems, in her last sexual encounter with Red, in which—as Faulkner describes it—“she sprang like a bow, hurling herself upon him, her mouth gaped and ugly like that of a dying fish as she writhed her loins against him”; and we seem to be there watching, at once fascinated and repelled.
“Watching” is the operative word; since Sanctuary, like all true pornography, is essentially voyeuristic in its appeal. When reading it, that is to say, we do not typically identify with its erotically active characters, rapist or raped; but with the Peeping Tom author, who compels us to keep our eye glued to the key hole, ashamed but unable to withdraw—as the author himself seems to have been in the first place. Certainly, Faulkner confessed as much in his shamefaced public apology for his novel; suggesting, to me at least, that pornography only really works for us when at some level we feel that the pleasure it provides us with is disreputable; or in any event are uncomfortably aware that others, whom we otherwise respect, consider it so—some indeed wanting to ban or burn it.
But Faulkner made such guilt-ridden voyeurism the subject as well as the mode of apprehending the novel, in which from start to finish someone seems always to be watching someone else watching him or her. Think of Popeye and Benbow staring at each other for two hours across the spring at Frenchman’s Bend; or Benbow once more watching in one mirror Little Belle watching him in a reflecting other. The climax of such reflexive voyeurism, however, comes in Faulkner’s rendering of the scene in which Popeye slobbers over the bed in which Temple and Red copulate at his command. That scene is represented not directly, but as reported by a black maid who has watched Popeye watching; thus putting us as readers in the position of voyeurs at a fourth remove—watching the author watching her watching them. It is this which makes Sanctuary unique: the first (and as far as I know, the only) piece of metapornography for which I have, for reasons I hope I have made clear, long been ashamed to confess my inordinate fondness; and which therefore, I believe, no one who reads it properly can ever be proud of liking.
Looking Back After 50 Years
When The Grapes of Wrath was first published on the eve of World War II, it was acclaimed (or at least so it then seemed) by all men of good will. Only pious hypocrites and reactionary yahoos demurred: labeling it “vulgar,” “obscene,” “false” and “un-American,” even as its more extravagant admirers were hailing it as a uniquely American masterpiece, worthy of being ranked with Moby Dick and Leaves of Grass. Ironically enough, it is this hyperbolic assessment which continues to appear as a jacket blurb on its latest editions. I say ironically because more recently the critical consensus has drastically changed. Indeed, when—after the passage of twenty-five years—Steinbeck was belatedly given the Nobel Prize for Literature, most reputable critics greeted the news with derision and scorn. Typical of the response was that of Arthur Mizener who deplored the granting “of this most distinguished prize to a writer whose real but limited talent is watered down by tenth-rate philosophizing.” Moreover, even after another quarter of a century, as distinguished a critic as Harold Bloom agreed, writing that “because he inevitably falls into bathos, lacks invention and is clearly incapable of creating characters with real inwardness,” Steinbeck is clearly not one of the “inescapable novelists” of America, like Faulkner and Hemingway, Ralph Ellison and Thomas Pynchon.
But why, I feel impelled to ask, has Steinbeck’s reputation thus declined—so swiftly, indeed, that by 1962, as Mizener was able to contend with few to say him nay, “most serious readers” had long since “ceased reading him.” Surely this state of affairs cannot be, despite what an ever-diminishing number of hardcore fans—chiefly Californians—argue, because a conspiracy of “Eastern intellectuals” caused The Grapes of Wrath to disappear from the required reading lists in the majority of university courses in American literature all up and down our land: lists on which, it is worth noting, other provincial authors, Western, Mid-Western and Southern, continue to appear. To understand the unique reasons for Steinbeck’s precipitous decline, we must begin in quite another way, by trying to understand the unique reasons for his initial success.
There now seems little doubt that The Grapes of Wrath was originally over-prized because it seemed to embody so perfectly the mood and sensibility, the anti-puritanical morality, the leftist politics—and especially the apocalyptic vision of the thirties. To be sure, that morality, politics and vision were not shared even in that age by most ordinary Americans—certainly not by most blue collar workers or (hard as Steinbeck tries to persuade us of this) the dispossessed sharecroppers of the Dust Bowl. The vision did, however, possess the minds and hearts of some intellectuals and would-be intellectuals in the metropolitan East and Midwest, who controlled the review sections of mass-circulation newspapers and influential magazines. It was they who hailed Steinbeck not just as a consummate artist but one on the “right side”—i.e., one who was a prophet of the coming of socialism.
To make him seem an artist on the level of Melville or Whitman, they had to ignore all in him that was maudlin, sentimental and overblown, which was not easy. But it was even harder to make him seem an unequivocal advocate of a collectivist society as defined by the Communists, fellow-travelers and sympathizers, who at that point claimed to speak for the artists and intellectuals of America. They had to simplify his profoundly ambiguous (not to say hopelessly contradictory) politics; ignoring, for instance, his eccentric biologism, his stubborn individualism, his irrational fear of mechanization, indeed, of modernism and industrialism in general. But especially disconcerting was his essentially reactionary agrarianism—projected in the Joads’ dream of living happily ever after in a snug little cottage on their very own little plot of fertile land.
But the more single-minded liberals found it possible to do what they wanted by emphasizing elements in Steinbeck’s muddled thought which they found more comfortably orthodox. These elements included the belief that only a violent revolutionary uprising of the exploited classes could deliver America from poverty, injustice and the threat of war; that the mounting wrath of those classes meant that such a revolution was just around the corner; and that, in any case, capitalism was doomed—and with it, the military, the police, organized religion—ultimately, the nuclear family itself. But none of what he and his liberal admirers then foresaw, of course, has come to pass. In the United States, not only has socialism not triumphed, but the very dream of it has died for all but an ever-diminishing minority, chiefly academics with tenure, who write in a jargon comprehensible only to each other. Moreover, not the revolution which Steinbeck prophesied, but World War II, which he nowhere predicts, ended the Great Depression.
Consequently, capitalism has continued to flourish everywhere, not only in America and Western Europe but in rapidly developing countries of the once-underdeveloped Far East; and it begins to make inroads even in the Soviet Union and its satellite states. Nor has organized religion shown any signs of withering away. Rather, for some decades now, we have been witnessing the revival of traditional faiths; and the sects which prosper the best are, alas, the most puritanical, fundamentalist, fanatical and mutually intolerant. The only social change that Steinbeck foresaw that has actually occurred is the erosion of the nuclear family. Contrary to his expectations, however, it has not expanded into a communal meta-family, a family of all humankind, but has shrunk so rapidly that in my own lifetime I have seen the two-parent family with 1.7 kids replace the multi-generational household swarming with children, grandchildren and at least a grandma in attendance. And that two-parent domicile in turn begins to yield to the single parent family.
Not surprisingly, then, as the hopes and dreams of the 1930s have proved delusive (persisting only in the vestigial nostalgia of unreconstructed “liberals”), the reputations of those books whose popularity depended in large part on embodying the dreams have tended to decline. Not only The Grapes of Wrath but also John Dos Passos’s USA and James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan, novels once also considered masterworks that would live for all time, have not outlived the ideology that informed them. It should not be thought, however, that their recent devaluation is explicable in purely ideological terms. While it is true that many of the latter-day critics (including me) who have devalued those novels are committed to quite different ideologies, this commitment has not prevented us from admiring other writers of the age whose political sympathies were more like theirs than ours. Even as we have sought to exclude Steinbeck, Dos Passos and Farrell from the canon, we have done our best to replace them with writers like Nathanael West and Henry Roth, who, though overlooked or undervalued in their own time, were stauncher supporters of the Communist political line than the former. Unlike Steinbeck et al., however, the latter did not submit to the aesthetic line of the Cultural Commissars in Moscow, who had decreed that realism, “social realism,” was the only viable mode for progressive fiction in the twentieth century.
Instead, West and Roth emulated certain earlier avant-garde, experimental writers whom those Commissars had condemned as petty-bourgeois decadents. Roth, for instance, made no bones about his indebtedness to James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, and West was clearly influenced by the French Dadaists and Surrealists; both, that is to say, wrote in the tradition that we have come to call “Modernism.” Small wonder then that when the American critical establishment, which determines the rank order of our books, came in the first half of the twentieth century to judge these books by Modernist standards, it was Roth and West rather than Steinbeck, Dos Passos and Farrell whom they placed on the top of their lists. Steinbeck seemed to them particularly problematical since, though not a naïf like Farrell, he did not, like the more sophisticated Dos Passos, adopt even superficially the devices of experimental fiction.
Not only did they fault him for being an old-fashioned realist, apparently blissfully unaware of the Joycean “revolution of the word”; they condemned him, too, for his equally obsolescent optimism: his failure to seek, much less attain, the “tragic” view of human existence which they had come to regard as essential to all great art. They found him guilty, moreover, of what seemed to them the four cardinal literary sins: didacticism, sentimentality, stereotyping and melodrama. Rather than remaining remote and invisible behind his text, he consistently (they charged) leans over his readers’ shoulders to tell them exactly what he means.
So, too (they further contended), he eschews evasive irony in favor of shameless sentimentality, thereby not only flattening out all nuances and ambiguity but also sacrificing plausibility for the sake of easy pathos. Certainly this sacrifice happens in the infamous schmaltzy scene at the roadside hamburger stand, in which an improbably soft-hearted waitress, counterman and pair of truckers conspire to get into the hands of a couple of Okie kids the candy canes they lust for but which their (poor but honest, of course) parents cannot afford. It all eventuates in a kind of soupy kindness contest, whose winners are indicated when the waitress sighs “reverently” behind their departing backs, “Truck drivers!” It is a sentiment we are expected to share, along with the implicit message that all proles are noble; leaving readers with a more complex view of human nature, rich or poor, more inclined to snigger than sigh.
Such sentimentality depends, indeed, on stock responses to the stock characters who appear everywhere in The Grapes of Wrath. Nor is it only super-numerary walk-ons who are clichés out of the common stock of the time. Even the major characters whom he most carefully delineates tend to turn into such stereotypes. The most notorious instance of this is to be found in his set piece in praise of Ma Joad. “Her hazel eyes,” Steinbeck writes, pulling out the stops, “seemed to have experienced all possible tragedy and to have surmounted pain and suffering like steps into a high calm and superhuman understanding . . . From her position as a healer, her hands had grown sure and cool and quiet; from her position as an arbiter she had become remote and faultless in judgment as a goddess . . .” Not only does the inflated Mother’s Day greeting card rhetoric of this passage have little to do with any actual mothers; it has even less to do with the complex, passionate woman who elsewhere in the text stands off her husband with a jack handle in her fist and murder in her eye. It is as if Steinbeck were somehow compelled to falsify his own vision at its truest as well as life itself.
Such reduction of multi-dimensional characters leads inevitably to simplifying the complex intermingling of good and evil in human affairs to black and white melodrama, in which all the good is portrayed as being on one side, our side, all the bad on the other, their side. In Steinbeck’s case, as is appropriate to the leftist ideology of his time, our side is, of course, that of the expropriated and exploited; while the hated other is identified with the exploiting bourgeoisie: the “shitheels,” as the roadside hamburger stand waitress inelegantly calls them, who heartlessly ride by, or over, the starving children of the poor. Such relentless travesty of the rich (only born-again Christians are more brutally caricatured) is especially ironical in the case of an author who was himself the son of a bourgeois family and who was already quite well off when he wrote The Grapes of Wrath, which to compound the irony even further, made him as close to filthy rich as any freelance writer can hope to become.
I am not, please understand, putting down Steinbeck’s novel on the grounds that it was written in bad faith. Whatever the motives of any author (and they are, in any case, finally inscrutable), a book deserves to be judged on its merits as a work of art. But I do feel obliged to point out that even read with no knowledge of Steinbeck’s own class origins or financial status, The Grapes of Wrath seems clearly motivated by a kind of guilt-ridden self-hatred, which leads him not merely to vilify his own class but also to ask his readers to condone—even admire—in the underclass, much that we, whatever our class, would otherwise find reprehensible. Examples include not only grossness, blasphemy and a contempt for literacy, but habitual drunkenness, loveless tom-catting, petty thievery and finally mindless violence, from bar-room brawling to wife-beating and murder. Not only are we expected to see the two-time murderer, Tom Joad, as the book’s hero, a man more sinned against than sinning; but to sympathize also with his alter ego, the infamous Pretty Boy Floyd, for whom Ma apologizes, saying, “He warn’t a bad boy. Jus’ got drove in a corner.”
The only fault of his beloved Okies which Steinbeck does not treat with mingled condescension and envy is their racism, their ingrained prejudice against Blacks and Indians. Disconcertingly—and more than a little implausibly—no Afro-Americans or full-blooded Native Americans actually appear in this account of a pilgrimage which begins on the edge of the Black Belt and passes through the heart of what was once known as the Indian territory, suggesting that the author himself shares to some degree the ethnocentrism of his characters. In any case, he reminds us over and over that they are all 100 percent WASPs, “real Americans” of pure pioneer stock. He refers, however, only in passing—half apologetically, as it were—to the negrophobia for which in the after years the descendants of his Okies have become notorious.
