Grapes Guide.pdf - Minnesota Opera

of the camp manager, claims. The greatest practical realization of community in the novel is the government camp at
Weedpatch, especially the dance. Despite the strong forces against them the people foil attempts to instigate a fight
which will give the corrupt police the power to break up the camp. It is important, therefore, that during the dance the
religious fanatics are seen as separate: “In front of their tents the Jesus-lovers sat and watched, their faces hard and
contemptuous. They did not speak to one another, they watched for sin, and their faces condemned the whole
proceeding.”
Back at the other end of the scale, we see anticommunity forces at work also on the biological level of sheer survival. It
is not greed or hatred or even ignorance that makes Willy drive one of the destroying tractors: “I got two little kids,”
he says. “I got a wife an’ my wife’s mother. Them people got to eat. Fust an’ on’y thing I got to think about is my own
folks.” But Muley notes what is behind the bluster: “Seems like he’s shamed, so he gets mad.” Mr. Thomas, the owner
of a small orchard who is pressured by the Farmers Association to lower his wages, is also doing what he is ashamed of
in order to survive, and he too speaks “irritably” and becomes gruff. Near the end of the novel, Ma Joad sees through
the glib gibes of the pathetic little clerk in the expensive company store: “Doin’ a dirty thing like this. Shames ya, don’t
it? Got to act flip, hugh?” Whether or not the used-car salesmen overcharging for their jalopies also feel shame we do
not learn. But clearly these people, as well as many others in the novel, are working against community because of the
need for individual survival. Perhaps that is one of the significances of those calm little descriptions of predatory activity
in nature which are found throughout the novel. Immediately preceding the car salesmen, for example, we have this:
“gradually the skittering life of the ground, of holes and burrows, of the brush, began again; the gophers moved, and
the rabbits crept to green things, the mice scampered over clods, and the winged hunters moved soundlessly overhead.”
Sometimes the instinct of mere survival shades into selfishness and greed, as when the large owners squeeze out the little
people and pay far lower wages than they can afford. It is interesting of Steinbeck’s method that selfishness as an
anticommunity drive, absolutely apart from any necessity for survival, receives its barest treatment in an episode
involving the Joads themselves, the children. At the government camp, Ruthie breaks into a peaceful, established
croquet game, unwilling to wait her turn. Insisting, “I wanta play now,” she wrestles a mallet from a player. The actions
of the other children are interesting. Under the guidance of the supervisor, they simply abandon the game to her,
refusing community so to speak, leaving her alone and ridiculous on the court until she runs away in tears.
A third anticommunity force is the result of still another step beyond mere survival – the creation of a system, a
machine, a monster, Which seems to have a life of its own. Steinbeck presents it in a hypothetical choric dialogue:
We’re sorry. It’s not us. It’s the monster. The bank isn’t like a man.
Yes, but the bank is only made of men.
No, you’re wrong there — quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in the bank hates
what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it,
but they can’t control it.
But a monster need not be a bank. It may be “an owner wit!” “fifty-thousand acres,” or it may be the entire economic
structure itself which works against community: “Men who can graft the trees and made the seed fertile and big can
find no way to let the hungry people eat their produce. Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a
system whereby their fruits may be eaten… the works of the roots of the vines, of the trees must be destroyed to keep
up the price.… Arid coroners must fill in the certificates – died of malnutrition – because the food must rot, must be
forced to rot.”
In the light of certain cliches about the social message in Steinbeck’s supposedly “revolutionary” novel, it is interesting
that these concepts of the “monster” and of a backward religion are only two of several anticommunity forces, and that
the rest lie not in social structures but in man’s own nature or individuality, as with the forces toward survival and
selfishness discussed above and the forces of suspicion and ignorance. It is distrust that makes the transport company
place a “No Riders” sign on the windshield of its trucks. It is a suspiciousness learned in jail that makes Tom, before
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