Grapes Guide.pdf - Minnesota Opera

These structural techniques for integrating the two parts of The Grapes of Wrath are greatly implemented by a masterful
command of prose style. In his novels after To a God Unknown, Steinbeck had demonstrated the variety of prose styles
that he could weld into the very meaning of a novel—prose styles as different as those of Tortilla Flat and In Dubious
Battle. In The Grapes of Wrath there is such a number of strategically employed prose styles that the novel almost
amounts to a tour de force. No Steinbeck novel begins so auspiciously:
To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.
The plows crossed and recrossed the rivulet marks. The last rains lifted the corn quickly and scattered weed colonies and grass
along the sides of the roads so that the gray country and the dark red country began to disappear under a green cover. In the
last part of May the sky grew pale and the clouds that had hung in high puffs for so long in the spring were dissipated. The sun
flared down on the growing corn day after day until a line of brown spread along the edge of each green bayonet. The clouds
appeared, and went away, and in a while they did not try any more. The weeds grew darker green to protect themselves, and
they did not spread any more. The surface of the earth crusted, a thin hard crust, and as the sky became pale, so the earth
became pale, pink, in the red country and white in the gray country.
This opening paragraph is as carefully worked out as an overture to an opera. The themes of red, gray, green, and earth
are announced and given parallel developments: red to pink, gray to white, green to brown, and ploughed earth to thin
hard crust. The pervading structural rhythm of each sentence is echoed in the paragraph as a whole, a paragraph
promising a story of epic sweep and dignity.
The extent to which this style is indebted to the Old Testament can be strikingly demonstrated by arranging a similar
passage from the novel according to phrases, in the manner of the Bates Bible, leaving the punctuation intact:
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 chomp 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.
The parallel grammatical structure of parallel meanings, the simplicity of diction, the balance, the concrete details, the
summary sentences, the reiterations – all are here. Note also the organization: four phrases for the tractor, eight for the
horse, four again for the tractor. Except for the terms of machinery, the passage might be one of the Psalms.
It is this echo – more, this pedal point – evident even in the most obviously “directed” passages of the interchapters,
which supports their often simple philosophy, imbuing them with a dignity which their content alone could not sustain.
The style gives them their authority:
Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along
the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down
into the earth.
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 children dying
of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange.
appendix a
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