Grapes Guide.pdf - Minnesota Opera

Appendix B
“The Dynamics of Community in The Grapes of Wrath” by Peter Lisca
The Grapes of Wrath, more than Steinbeck’s other novels, remains viable not just in drugstore racks of Bantam
paperbacks or in college survey courses but in the world of great literature, because in that novel he created a
community whose experience, although rooted firmly in the particulars of the American Depression, continues to have
relevance. Certainly one aspect of that community experience which contributes to its viability is its dimension of social
change. It is not coincidence that in the last decade, full of violent social action in so many aspects of American life, we
have found ourselves turning with new interest toward the 1930s, recognizing there an immediate political and
emotional relevance. The Grapes of Wrath moves not only along Route 66, east to west, like some delayed Wagon Wheels
adventure, but along the unmapped roads of social change, from an old concept of community based on sociological
conditions breaking up under an economic upheaval, to a new and very different sense of community formulating itself
gradually on the new social realities.
Various facets of the old community concept are solidly developed in the first quarter of the book. The novel opens with
a panoramic description of the land itself, impoverished, turning to dust and quite literally blowing away. It can no
longer sustain its people in the old way, one small plot for each family, and it is lost to the banks and holding companies
– impersonal, absentee landlords – which can utilize the land with a margin of profit by the ruthless mechanical
exploitation of large tracts. But for the old community the land was something more than a quick-money crop or
columns of profit and loss in a financial ledger, more even than the actual physical sustenance of potatoes, carrots,
melons, pigs and chickens. Nor is it fear of the unknown that keeps the community attached to the now useless land.
For these are a people with pioneer blood in their veins. The old community is further tied to the land by memories of
family history. It is Muley who speaks this most convincingly:
I’m just wanderin’ aroun’ like a damn oF graveyard ghos’.…I been goin’ aroun’ the places where stuff happened. Like there’s
a place over by our forty; in a gulley there’s a bush. Fust time I ever laid with a girl was there. Me fourteen an’ stampin’ an’
snortin’ like a buck deer, randy as a billygoat. So I went there an’ I laid down on the groun’, an’ I seen it all happen again.
An’ there’s the place down by the barn where Pa got gored to death by a bull. An’ his blood is right in the groun’, right now …
An’ I put my han’ on that groun’ where my own Pa’s blood is part of it.… An’ I seen my Pa with a hole through his ches’, an’ I
felt him shiver up against me like he done.… An’ me a little kid settin’ there.… An’ I went into the room where Joe was born. Bed
wasn’t there, but it was the room. An’ all them things is true, an’ they’re right in the place they happened. Joe came to life right
there.
Muley rambles, but his selection is not arbitrary – copulation, birth, death. And these are not just vague memories or
abstractions. In the presence of the actual bush, the actual barnyard, the same room, this essential past is relived in the
present. Muley asks, “What’d they take when they tractored the folks off the lan’? What’d they get so their ‘margin a
profit’ was safe? They got Pa dyin’ on the groun’, an’ Joe yellin’ his first breath, an’ me jerkin’ like a billygoat under a
bush in the night. What’d they get? God knows the lan’ ain’t no good.… They jus’ chopped folks in two. Place where
folks live is them folks.”
Here Muley speaks not only for himself, but for an entire community, the people in whose deserted houses at night he
can still sense the “parties an’ dancin’,” the “meetin’s an’ shoutin’ glory. They was weddin’s, all in them houses.” So
strong is his attachment that he chooses to stay with the land and its empty houses rather than move away with the rest
of his family. Grandpa Joad, too, despite his eagerness at the beginning, was not able to leave the land and had to be
given an overdose of pain-killer and carried off. When he dies, just before crossing the Oklahoma border, Casy assures
the folks that “Grampa didn’t die tonight. He died the minute you took “im off the place.… Oh, he was breathin’, but
he was dead. He was that place, an’ he knowed it.… He’s jus’ stayin’ with the lan’. He couldn’t leave it.” This is
amplified to the level of community experience in one of the interchapters, when the choric voices intone: “This land,
this red land is us; and the flood years and the dust years and the drought years are us.”
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