Authors: John Steinbeck
The emotionally driving force of the narrative, however, distracts readers from what many of them, agreeing with Mac, would probably see as Burton’s “high-falutin’ ideas,” while the novel goes on about its own business, which Steinbeck manages masterfully through structure. In later works, however, his proclivity for shaky speculations like the phalanx theory was to cause serious problems, including charges that he was soft on the fascists in
The Moon Is Down,
though even in that work his underlying point is that the enslaved phalanxes manipulated by fanatical leaders will at length be defeated by enlightened individuals motivated by self-preservation and independence.
Under the pressure of his own experiences on the home front and briefly observing the battlefront during World War II, he gradually replaced emphasis upon the disastrous results of phalanx behavior as the “condition” shaping his fiction with a vision of redemption by a magnanimous and caring secular hero who achieves self-fulfillment, best embodied in the all-loving Doc of
Cannery Row.
It is likely, however, that
Steinbeck could not have attained the rapport he did with international audiences during his greatest period without the inspiration he derived from a theory that enabled him to deal dispassionately with the horrors of mob behavior as a curable aberration, although he would frequently have to face charges of sentimentality from the more cynically minded.
The shakiness of both the group-psychological theory that influenced Steinbeck during the period and the philosophical conclusions that he reached suggests that—despite his disappointment—most readers responded to the “surface story,” trusting the tale rather than the teller. It is indeed this surface story that is the source of the novel’s power, although the nature of this story has often been overlooked by those who agree with James Woodress’s view that
In Dubious Battle
is “perhaps the best strike novel ever written.” The problem of interpretation begins with identifying the “dubious battle” of the title. Steinbeck prefaces the novel with a quotation from Milton’s
Paradise Lost,
in which the term is used to describe Satan’s revolt against God. The reference to Milton has led to a continuing outcropping of often contradictory explications that seek to point out analogies between the war in heaven and the strike in California and particularly between characters in the human and cosmic conflicts.
Much speculation of this sort has proved not just pointless but misleading in interpreting the novel because the only real similarity between the battles is that both are
dubious
not in the sense that the outcomes are in doubt but that they are unnecessary and unjustified. There is never any doubt about the outcome of either battle: the forces of God and the growers are overwhelming. What is pointed out, as shall be subsequently examined in more detail, is that there is no justification for either; what is in doubt is not who will win but why the
opponents should ever have come to blows. When we look at this question, we see that there are no further exact parallels between the struggles. Steinbeck is not presuming to write a modern epic analogous to Milton’s but to borrow a memorable phrase for a title. Milton’s purpose was to justify the ways of God to man by showing the futility of resistance to His divine plan—the struggle with its foredoomed conclusion is over who will rule the creation. The struggle in Steinbeck’s novel is over how the profits from cultivating the fruits of the earth shall be shared by the participants in the process—an “outcropping” of some underlying “condition” that, as Steinbeck specified in the letter quoted at the beginning of this discussion, did not interest him. What
was
the “condition” that concerned him and inspired the novel?
This key question about the novel has not been answered or even identified by Yale critic Harold Bloom, who in his introduction to a collection of essays about Steinbeck in his extensive series of “Modern Critical Views” writes that
In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men,
and
The Grapes of Wrath
constitute Steinbeck’s best work. He goes on to push James Woodress’s point about
In Dubious Battle
as a strike novel further than Woodress intended by pronouncing that it is “now quite certainly a period piece… of more interest to social historians than to literary critics"; but Bloom, the famed de-bunker of misreadings, may be misreading himself when he brands the novel “social realism” rather than “honest fantasy,” as the author preferred to call it.
It is certainly a mistake to presume that the lasting merits of the novel rest in its depiction of a strike typical of the
1930s. One reason that conservative critics may not have been as outraged by this novel as by the romantic metaphysics of
The Grapes of Wrath
is that
In Dubious Battle
acknowledges the power of the Establishment that they supported. The novel can be read as a warning to those foolish enough to challenge the status quo. As has been pointed out, there is never any doubt about the outcome of this strike. Mac, the principal organizer, admits from the beginning that the situation is hopelessly stacked against the strikers because the growers are unusually well organized and have commanding resources at their disposal. Labor’s supporters could find little comfort in this novel that offers nothing of the “we shall overcome” tone of the “proletarian fiction” of the period, like Robert Cantwell’s
The Land of Plenty,
Albert Halper’s “Scab!” or Clara Weatherwax’s
Marching, Marching.
*
Yet Steinbeck is not “merely the recording consciousness” that he sought to be. Although he avoids authorial intrusions like some interchapters
of The Grapes of Wrath,
there are limits to the objective comprehensiveness of the narrative. We do not get to see all contenders from all points of view. The growers are represented on the scene only by the unctuous Mr. Bolter, who attempts to carry an olive branch into the enemy camp in Chapter 13. Bolter’s spiel suggests that there are factions and disagreements among the growers, as there are shown to be in the community; but readers learn of these only in his biased presentation. In order to maintain the point of view that shapes the novel, Steinbeck necessarily narrows
his focus and avoids panoramic views of the battleground and battlers.
The book is dated only if one reads it as simply portraying what the author calls an “outcropping,” a situation in a particular time and place that is of fossilized interest to social historians. But what Steinbeck’s remarks about “honest fantasy” should help us see is that the novel is not rigorously documented social history but a work of art—a creative response to a “condition” that devalues and stifles self-fulfillment. He is interested in this specific scene not for its timely peculiarities but as a recurrence of conditions that have fomented disaster constantly throughout history and even in the myths of prehistory (hence the appropriation of Milton’s phrase).
But if this novel is not primarily the story of a dubious confrontation set against the wasteland background of the Depression of the 1930s; not a profound meditation on the differences between human beings operating as individuals or as group-creatures; not a confrontation between sympathetic individuals (like Doc Burton and the strike leaders) about quotidian realities continuing to evolve when intellectual abstractions tend toward petrifaction; nor an earthbound analogy to Milton’s
Paradise Lost,
what indeed is it about? What exactly is the “battle” of central concern? What is “dubious” about it? And who is involved “in” it?
An answer worth pondering arises from the encompassing structure of the narrative that is so obvious that it is usually overlooked. From the curt, defeatist opening sentence, “At last it was evening,” to the false rhetoric of the uncompleted final exclamation, “He didn’t want nothing for himself—,” the focus is relentlessly on Jim Nolan as he moves from the oncoming darkness of twilight San Jose to a faceless darkness in the bloody fields where he rots with the fallen fruits. Jim
is scarcely ever out of the reader’s sight during the last nine days of, his life as he moves inexorably from the only lighted office in a decaying building where he is recruited for the Party to the “almost complete darkness of the woods” where he is lured by trickery to die for the Cause. This night journey is illuminated not by a searchlight cutting through the heart of darkness to provide a panoramic montage of horrors, but rather by a vivid spotlight that follows a single figure on a constantly accelerating journey to disaster, against a background of flames that assault the skies from the deplorable destruction of houses and barns, emblems of the “civilization” of those who created them.
At the center of every scene is Jim Nolan and, most important, what he sees and learns and suffers. Preserving this intense focus is the reason why there are no scenes of the growers’ councils to which he could not be privy: we see them, as we see everything and everyone else, only as Nolan does. Years earlier, when Steinbeck was writing one of his finest works,
The Red Pony,
in 1930, he described in a letter to George Albee his creative process: “The whole thing is as simply told as though it came out of [Jody Tiflin’s] mind although there is no going into the boy’s mind. It is an attempt to make the reader create the boy’s mind for himself.”
Writing
In Dubious Battle,
Steinbeck was employing the same process in creating an older youth who was going through the same kind of formative experiences. It is important to note that the effort in both examples is not to lead readers to identify with the boy—as many do with Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger’s
The Catcher in the Rye,
for example, or Dean Moriarity in Jack Kerouac’s
On the Road
—but to observe his behavior as one might an actual acquaintance’s and learn from
it. A secret of Steinbeck’s technique in his greatest work is his ability to avoid telling readers what they should feel and to make them participate in discovering the characters’ feelings by collaborating with the author in creating them. He sought—as he often argued—to promote understanding through his work, not to provide sentimental self-gratification.
In Dubious Battle
is not an anatomy of a 1930s strike—which, however well executed, would be of increasingly antiquarian value—nor a metaphysical exploration of an individual’s relationship to a group that absorbed and changed him, nor an antipastoral analogy to a cosmic epic. It is, rather, a
Bildungsroman,
a term borrowed from the German, as the usual literal English equivalent, “novel of education,” is too specific and limited at times to apply to a work portraying every aspect of the maturing of a young person, including the development of a personal point of view—what might be called a philosophy of life.
This process of maturing usually takes years, but Jim Nolan is on a crash course. He has made a late start, characteristic of much American youth; and he must respond quickly to the urgent pressures upon him. When we meet him in his twilit room, he is confused and dejected, without any sense of purpose; eight days later he has developed self-confidence and discovered the latent cunning that enables him to make a bid to take command of a deteriorating situation. He has made remarkable progress, proving himself an apt and resourceful student who quickly develops leadership abilities. Steinbeck is especially concerned to create a figure who is gifted and quick-witted, but whose innate qualities have been scorned by an apathetic, self-seeking society, resentful of upstarts.
As the earlier comparison with Jody Tiflin in
The Red Pony
suggests, Jim is not the first such promising youth to figure prominently in Steinbeck’s fiction. He has much in common with the Welsh farmboy who becomes Sir Henry Morgan in
Cup of Gold,
Joseph Wayne who turns into the rain to save his people in
To a God Unknown,
Tom Joad in
The Grapes of Wrath,
and the Mexican peasant in
Viva Zapata!
who becomes in spirit a “leader of the people.” Not all such characters are wantonly destroyed. Sometimes sacrifice of the individual to some larger good is necessary, as in To a
God Unknown, The Grapes of Wrath
(in which Jim Casy’s death inspires Tom Joad), and
The Moon Is Down.
Sometimes the individual survives, as in
Cup of Gold, The Red Pony,
and
Of Mice and Men;
but the maturing process requires the loss of naive optimism.
Tortilla Flat
is a world-weary
anti-Bildungsroman,
in which Danny is doomed because he cannot mature. Tom Joad is Steinbeck’s only character to move from violently selfish immaturity to compassionate maturity without losing a naive faith or his life before the action ends.
The focal characters who do mature—even if they do not survive—in all of Steinbeck’s fiction through
The Grapes of Wrath
also pass through a pattern of experiences that resemble his own as a struggling writer. The novels are in no way specifically autobiographical, like those of his contemporary Thomas Wolfe. And Steinbeck was too secretive to wish to transform himself into a legend like Jack Kerouac, who admired Wolfe; but his early works all trace histories of characters with ambitious dreams who consider themselves unappreciated and rejected by a decadent society.
Steinbeck certainly did not share Jim Nolan’s aspirations to become a labor organizer by committing himself to some abstract cause beyond himself, but he did seek to influence
readers’ attitudes through his fiction. He shunned commitments because ultimately he believed in himself and his talent, although it was many years before he could display this self-confidence publicly. Ironically, his fiction declined in public esteem when he began to cast his alter egos in the role of savior, as in
The Wayward Bus.
The power of his early works lies in his ability to infuse his characters with dreams resembling his own in intensity, although he avoided the familiar portrayal of a young writer’s struggle for success. Through his portrayal of Jim Nolan’s self-discovery of his leadership capabilities in
In Dubious Battle,
Steinbeck is making a case for the recognition of his own talent. Although he had become a nationally known success before the novel was published, he had written it when he considered himself a failure, when he could conceive of Jim Nolan’s faceless doom as possibly his own. Small wonder at the violence of his outrage over the interference of a New York “parlor pink” who threatened to jeopardize his career just when it seemed to be taking off.