It is Fall of 1952, Dwight D. Eisenhower has just become president of the United States with Nixon as his running mate, the Korean War has not yet ended, and John Steinbeck publishes East of Eden. The Salinas valley is a rich agricultural area, “America’s Salad Bowl,” and most of my memories are of travels to Monterey, 101 to 156 to 1 (so I didn’t have to drive over the Santa Cruz Mountains.) It is sad that I read very little Steinbeck while so close to his hometown.
East of Eden takes place between the turn of the 20th century and the end of WWI. It is rumored that Steinbeck considered this novel to be his greatest work and the title, after several attempts, is drawn from the biblical story of Cain and Abel.
And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.
Genesis 4, 16.
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Several things have come to mind as issues worth discussing as I made my way through to the end of Book One. We’ll have to wait and see how they hold up over the telling.
Perhaps foremost in my mind is the way in/by which our narrator (who finally unmasks him/herself toward the end of Chapter 5, page 41 in my edition) bounces around in time and space. It struck me that the opening of the book, less the disclaimers about what the narrator knows and how he/she knows it, was not unlike reading the beginning of Michner novel: describing the lay of the land and how it came into being over time. And from that point on, were one to try to determine a chronology, significant effort would be necessary to place each story element “in time.”
As for the gender of the narrator: I am willing to apply Lanser’s Rule and assign the gender as that of the author so that until we know more about the narrator (assuming we ever will) we can call it “him.”
Among the other items/issues worth our poking at is, as you have already noted, the relation to biblical stories. Even were a reader to avoid all of the para/peritextual information on and inside the covers and in the secondary, critical texts, that reader could not fail to see the biblical connections, particularly the relations of fathers and sons (Abraham and Isaac?), mothers and sons (Eve and the boys), and brothers (Cain and Able, Isaac and Esau; probably more the former due to the “mark of Cain” that Charles receives). I have noticed that sisters and women in general get short schrift, so far, except of course Cathy who is clearly one of the drivers of the overarching story.
Of the vignettes presented, one that I have found more interesting than most was Cyrus’ lecture to Adam on soldiering. My interest was piqued by Cyrus’ harping on the idea of “the soldier,” in part, because of an essay my brother Peter wrote recently. Writing a submittal to a competition for a military journal, Peter has challenged the current practice in the Army of referring to soldiers as “warriors.” He provides a convincing argument that the warrior ethos is antithetical to the idea of “the soldier” and that it is doing those who have served a great disservice: warriors are undisciplined, in-it-for-themselves killers while soldiers serve the populace/republic in a defensive capacity. Cyrus’ lecture touches on a number of the same points Peter makes but from another, different angle.
And this leads to another interesting topic suggested to me by another reader who has claimed that this book is one of the best he has ever read: that is, the notion of false valor in contrast and in conflict with real valor. The examples can be teased from the story should we want to continue to pull that thread.
That women are portrayed as child bearing, dinner making, house cleaners also supports the biblical slant of this story but I plan to take care not to find a correlation in verse at every dramatic event. Or do you mean they are given short shrift because they agreed to the marriage in the first place? If not a complete misogynist, Cyrus has at least gone out of his way to find wives that won’t challenge him. Anyway, Charles has found a suitable workaround at the inn.
I am perplexed with Cyrus. Almost immediately I recognized a character trait that I find displeasing in many people — that of falsifying their history to gain stature — but the way he went about it invites some understanding and forgiveness. He was injured badly in his short soldiering career. He didn’t rewrite his history with malicious intent: he read and educated himself about the events of the war and (paraphrasing) began to believe that he actually participated. One could almost like him.
Yes, I am willing to concede that the narrator is male. (Couldn’t Steinbeck easily have said, “I am the son of Mollie”, instead of “Mollie is my mother”?) Lanser’s Rule or not, the women would be portrayed as more intelligent if the narrator were female.
I concur that, in general, with a female narrator the women could/would be portrayed with more sympathy; that may well be a more accurate rule than Lanser’s, though I am sure she considered that when deciding how assign the gender of a narrator–if, in fact, they have or deserve to have one.
In referring to the women as getting short schrift I was not considering directly the apparent mysogeny in the narrative (or the narrator’s voice, for that matter, though that is less apparent); rather, I was referring to their not being as clearly, cleanly characterized as the men in the story/stories. There is merit in the parallel you draw to the role of women in the biblical stories, as well as in your decision to not seek out parallels at the verse level; I suspect they are not there were one to go looking, though some intrepid cherry-picker could undoubtedly find them. For me, the parallels are best exemplified in the themes swirling in the story, those I pointed out above.
I agree with the sympathy with which you are treating Cyrus. I did not find him unlikable. I have known too many like him who have manufactured memories from hazy recollections and the good bits of stories they have heard others tell. This is another pointer to our old nemesis: the (un)reliable narrator. Cyrus may have started his yarn spinning to improve his apparent character and position but, as you say, he made it a point of learning and character development and he eventually applied that learning to what he saw as good. The different takes on Cyrus by Charles and Adam are interesting from this perspective: Charles being as much as shattered by the documented truth, Adam seeing beyond the surface “truth” to the deeper sense of what his father had become.
And, I suspect, this is but one more manifestation of the difference between them (others being their inability to live under the same roof for long, the brutal beatings Charles gave Adam, the presents they gave Cyrus) that will drive the story.
A strong woman is finally introduced: Cathy Trask. When I finished the last scene at the end of Book One, I tried to think of a more despicable and evil female character. (The wicked witch of the west? Nurse Ratched? The Borg Queen?) Does Cathy Trask exude some pheromone to which Charles is immune but renders all other men stupid? Reading her introductory arc was like watching a train wreck in slow motion. I loved it and can’t wait for the next explosion.
Have you ever read a more interesting wedding night? From now on I will just refer to Adam as the “poor bastard.”
Those were the first words out of my mind the night I finished Book One. I fought hard not to “spoil” it for you. She is indeed strong, despicable, and evil, as you say; I knew it the moment Adam said his tea tasted funny. The question is: Will the “poor bastard” have any effect on her? And, as a follow-on: What is she going to do to Charles? Because it is clear he will have NO beneficial effect on her; rather, they are going to feed off of each other to the doom of others (or, at least, that is the way it feels right now).
On to Book Two . . .
It is unfair to skip so far ahead but … who is George? When Adam is visited by Sheriff Quinn and told that Cathy/Kate has committed suicide, Adam refers to him as “George”. Just an author’s ploy to emphasize the shock?
Steinbeck has also tied us up in an alliteration with Cyrus begetting Charles and Charles (with Cathy) begetting Caleb. As with Adam and Aron, the names are conveniently alpha coded to keep the reader informed about who is a Cain and who is an Abel. Even Cathy and Abra fit this mold. When all the dust settles at the feet of these favored sons the timshel discussion will dominate.
On a lighter note: What if Adam’s dying word was, “Rosebud”?
In answer to your question, George was his attorney friend back home; the one who appended the handwritten note to the letter about his brother’s death. As for why he would call Quinn “George,” I can only speculate that it was—as you suggest—to stress the effect of the stroke. I found reading the sequence of events and the recovery quite “realistic;” though, that could be a consequence of the freight I carry.
As we have both finished the book, we might as well jump ahead to the question of “endings” as opposed to “closure.” I think it is fair to say that the book comes to an end and that we would both agree to that. A more important question is: does the narrative have closure? does our narrator close things, neatly or otherwise?
And, riffing off of your lighter note: Today, we went looking for an asian grocer to find Shao Xing (Chinese cooking wine). We found a Korean-Japanese market that was well stocked and looked much better than the first one we went wandered through. Laurie asked the woman at the counter: “Do you have Shao Xing, Chinese cooking wine?” The response was vehemently, “NO! We have no Chinese cooking; we only have Japanese.” Which was not true, as there were Indian, Thai, and Korean products in plain view.
Well, we finally found EXACTLY what we were looking for and Laurie proudly displayed it and said, “We found it! See, Chinese cooking wine!” At which point the woman said, “Oh! You meen Chinee koooking whine.”
Lee strikes yet again. He and his pidgen English run both ways, apparently.
Regarding “closure”: yes, the narrative has closure. There is a concrete story arc about family, Hamiltons and Trasks, and particularly about fathers and favored sons. There is a theoretical presentation of timshel (“thou mayest”, or free will) that drives the irony from one family plagued by jealousy without this knowledge (primarily Charles) to another that is plagued regardless of this knowledge. The final word by Adam, no matter how irritating it is to readers, connects the concrete to the abstract quite nicely. I appreciate Steinbeck’s closing device that brings focus to timshel, thus greatly increasing the role the Hamiltons played in the story.
How do you think conservapedia’s “Conservative Bible Project” will translate Genesis?
I followed the link for the CBP. It appears the section of Genesis that is of interest here (Chapter 4) has been “translated.” They use a tabular format showing the KJV then the CBP version and then any amplifying notes. I read over the CBP’s agenda; it is no different in my mind than the agendas of past translators. Every one of them (re)wrote the history of THEIR church in the manner that best suited them. I do though cautiously laud their efforts to restore some sense of the “original” (all ironic implications intended) language. There is, though, no discussion of timshel.
As for closure, I understand and to a certain extent agree with your points. I believe a sense of closure is in many ways a function of the attachment a reader makes to the different facets of the reading process (the arc of the story, the individual characters, the didactic frame) and the effects those facets have on the reader.
For example, the timshel motif: As you said, it is brought round to closure by Adam’s laboriously spoken final(?) word. But that occurs only after being introduced through “showing” (in the Caleb/Charles/Adam relations), then being further developed and (b)elaborated by “telling” (in the exegesis of the Genesis story of Cain and Abel by the Lee/Samuel/Adam panel), and then finally being (re)illustrated for the reader by the Adam/Caleb/Aron relation. In this instance, while there is closure, I cannot but feel that Steinbeck was pounding his point home with a rather large and sometimes ill-handled hammer. As if the Adam/Eve/Cain/Abel motif were not obvious from the beginning, he had to (ab)use his characters to “tell” us that this was the thrust of his rendition of the story. It was a forced closure, in my mind, with Steinbeck continuously and–unfortunately–quite obviously bending the arc of the story around to a satisfactory close. Lois Maggenti would have immediately been on the phone to the schmalz police.
On the other hand, take the story of Lee–far and away, to me, the most interesting and well developed character in the story (though that may be a reflection of my own character): there is still in me a questioning, a desire to know more about what happened to Lee. And I can walk away with that, feeling that the story goes on despite the book ending. But as I said, above, this could be nothing more than a vestigial remnant of the attachment I formed for him. I do have to admit that Lee was as (ab)used by Steinbeck as any of the other characters in making his point, if not more so. Lee can be seen as the deus ex machina device of the novel. Without Lee and his (almost too obvious) intercession (at several crucial junctures), the story would founder under the weight of its own burden of repetition.
I enjoyed the story, and the reading. I am just not certain I would label it a “best read, ever.” It is entirely possible that Grant and Fred (the two unacquainted friends making the recommendation) have that sense of the book lingering from their first reads at an impressionable age. I can see where a High School student, a young man in particular, could form that attachment by comparison to his own familial relations.