Grapes Guide.pdf - Minnesota Opera

These passages are not complex philosophy, but they may well be profound. The Biblical resonance which gives them
power is used discreetly, is never employed on the trivial and particular, and its recurrence has a cumulative effect.
There are many other distinct prose styles in the interchapters of The Grapes of Wrath, and each is just as functional in
its place. There is, for example, the harsh, staccato prose of chapter 7, which is devoted to the sale of used cars:
Cadillacs, La Salles, Buicks, Plymouths, Packards, Chevies, Fords, Pontiacs. Row on row, headlights glinting in the afternoon sun.
Good Used Cars.
Soften ’em up, Joe. Jesus, I wisht I had a thousand jalopies! Get ‘ em ready to deal, an’ I’ ll close ‘em.
Goin’ to California? Here’s jus’ what you need. Looks shot, but they’ a thousan’s of miles in her.
Lined up side by side. Good Used Cars. Bargains. Clean, runs good.
A good contrast to this hectic prose is offered by Chapter 9, which presents the loss and despair of people forced to
abandon their household goods. Here the style itself takes on a dazed resignation:
The women sat among the doomed things, turning them over and looking past them and back. This book. My father had it. He
liked a book. Pilgrim’s Progress. Used to read it. Got his name on it. And his pipe — still smells rank. And this picture – an angel.
I looked at that before the fust three come — didn’t seem to do much good. Think we could get this china dog in? Aunt Sadie
brought it from the St. Louis Fair. See? Wrote right on it. No, I guess not. Here’s a letter my brother wrote the day before he
died. Here’s an old time hat. These feathers — never got to use them. No, there isn’t room.
At times, as in the description of a folk dance in chapter 23, the prose style becomes a veritable chameleon:
Look at that Texas boy, long legs loose, taps four times for ever’ damn step. Never see a boy swing aroun’ like that. Look at him
swing that Cherokee girl, red in her cheeks and her toe points out. Look at her pant, look at her heave. Think she’s tired? Think
she’s winded? Well, she ain’t. Texas boy got his hair in his eyes, mouth’s wide open, can’t get air, but he pats four times for
ever’ darn step, an’ he’ ll keep a-goin’ with the Cherokee girl.
No other American novel has succeeded in forging and making instrumental so many prose styles.
The number of such passages which could be cited is almost endless. Those cited thus far suggest a number of influences
– the Bible, Dos Passes’ “Newsreel” technique, folk idiom, Walt Whitman, Hemingway, and perhaps Carl Sandburg’s
The People. Yes, although the latter’s diction is much more strident than that of The Grapes of Wrath. Another influence
on this prose is certainly the narrative style of Pare Lorentz in his scripts for the motion pictures The Plow that Broke the
Plains and The River. Steinbeck had met Lorentz and discussed this style with him, listening to recordings of Lorentz’
radio drama Ecce Homo! 23 Lorentz too had made use of the Old Testament, but the influence on him of Whitman and
Sandburg was perhaps stronger, as the following passage from The River makes clear:
Down the Missouri three thousand miles from the Rockies;
Down the Ohio a thousand miles from the Alleghenies;
Down the Arkansas fifteen hundred miles from the Great Divide;
Down the Red, a thousand miles from Texas;
Down the great Valley, twenty five hundred miles from Minnesota,
Carrying every rivulet and brook, creek and rill,
Carrying all the rivers that run down two-thirds the continent —
The Mississippi runs to the Gulf. 24
The debt of Steinbeck’s intercalary chapter on Highway 66 to this kind of writing is obvious: “Clarksville and Ozark
and Van Buren and Fort Smith on 64, and there’s an end of Arkansas. And all the roads into Oklahoma City, 66 down
from Tulsa, 270 up from McAlester. 81 from Wichita Falls south, from Enid north. Edmond, McLoud, Purcell. 66 out
of Oklahoma City; El Reno and Clinton, going west on 66. Hydro, Elk City….” But Steinbeck demonstrates a much
greater range than Lorentz, and was capable of much greater variety; only in this chapter did he resort to the easy device
of cataloguing America. And in this chapter the catalogue is functional, representing the more detailed progress the
Joads are making.
appendix a
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