The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
John Steinbeck · The Grapes of Wrath · a novel in thirty chapters, published by the Viking Press, New York, in April 1939 · scored on the novel as published in 1939, in Steinbeck’s English, the only version there is · read from knowledge; no text in hand, and only short phrases whose words are certain are quoted
Mode
Social novel lifted to epic and scripture: the narrative of one family set in alternation with general chapters in a collective, choric voice
Mythos
Exodus: bondage to the bank, the wilderness and the desert, a promised land of plenty forbidden to those who reach it, a people formed on the road; a preacher who loses the call and finds the one soul
Phase
From the dust and the eviction in Oklahoma, along Highway 66 and across the desert, to the Hooverville, the government camp, the peach ranch, the boxcar, the flood and the barn
Presentation
Prose narrative in thirty chapters in three movements by setting; the Joad chapters alternate with shorter chapters in which no Joad is named and the land, the banks, the road and the growers speak
Register
Oklahoma speech in the Joad chapters; in the general chapters the patter of the used car dealer and the hamburger stand beside the cadence of the King James Bible
Scale
Three generations of one family; the land and its weather; wages, labour and the market; the bank, the corporation and the state; the westward movement reversed; a faith lost and found
Governing Proposition
A family of Oklahoma tenant farmers, the Joads, is driven off its land by a bank that no one owns and a tractor that a neighbour drives, and goes west on Highway 66 to a California that has plenty and will not let them have it. The wager of the book is that a mechanism with no agent can be made visible by setting a single family beside chapters that speak for all of them at once, and that the family, as it is broken, can learn to say “we” where it said “I”.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book opens on the weather. The last rains come to Oklahoma and do not cut “the scarred earth”, and the dust covers the corn. The men squat by the ruined fields, and the women watch their faces to see whether they will break. No Joad is named. The first chapter is the land, and the people on it are anyone’s.
In chapter 3 a turtle crosses the road. A truck flips it, and it goes on, carrying a wild oat seed with it. The chapter is a small thing, and the whole book is in it: a creature on a road, struck by a machine, carrying the seed of what comes after. The family’s truck, later, is the same creature.
Steinbeck published the novel with the Viking Press in New York in April 1939, in thirty chapters. The title is taken from Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1861), a choice Steinbeck credited to his wife Carol. The unit here is the novel as published in 1939, in his English; there is no other version to choose between. It falls in three movements by setting: Oklahoma and the eviction, chapters 1 to 11; the road west, 12 to 18; California, 19 to 30.
Movement II
In chapter 5 the owner men come to the tenants, and no one is to blame. The bank is “the monster”, which no man made and no man can stop: “The bank is something more than men”. The tractor that clears the tenants off is driven by a neighbour, paid three dollars a day. The book’s disclosure is here, in a chapter in which no Joad appears: dispossession without an agent.
The Joads are in the chapters between. The family is three generations, and its structure begins to shift at once: Pa, who should lead, will lose his authority to Ma. Jim Casy, a preacher who has lost the call, goes with them. They buy a Hudson Super-Six and cut it down to a truck, for the road west. The general chapters say what is happening to all of them; the Joad chapters say what it is to be one of them.
Chapter 7 is the used car lot, given in the dealer’s own patter; chapter 9 is the barter for the household goods, the things a family has lived with sold for nothing. These are the general chapters at their most exact, and they speak in the voice of the trade as well as of the prophet. The same law holds them that holds the end of the book: what a person is worth when the market has finished with them.
Movement III
Chapter 12 is Highway 66, given as a litany, and the road becomes the form of the middle movement. Chapter 14 names the book’s argument: the move from “I lost my land” to “we lost our land”, and the owners’ fear of that move above all else. In chapter 15 there are a waitress and the candy; the scene is lovely and engineered, and the sentiment, here and in the dog killed on the road, is laid on where the material already holds it.
Casy is the preacher who has gone into his own wilderness and come back with no gospel but the “one big soul” of which every man is a part. He has the initials, and the forty days, and the scaffold shows. His idea sits beside another that Steinbeck took from his talks with Ed Ricketts, a biologist’s view of men as a group with a life of its own, and how the two meet is one of the questions the book has kept open.
The family falls away as it goes. Noah walks off down the Colorado and does not return. On the desert crossing by night Granma lies dead in the truck, and Ma lies beside her. The device of alternation was not new: Dos Passos had set a collective voice beside his narrative in the U.S.A. trilogy, and the strike novel, Steinbeck’s own In Dubious Battle among them, was the decade’s crowded form. What was new was the register: the social novel in the cadence of the King James Bible, at the scale of epic.
Movement IV
California has plenty and will not let them have it. Handbills call eight hundred men for three hundred jobs, and the surplus of hungry labour is manufactured so that wages fall. The Joads pass through a Hooverville and come to the Weedpatch government camp, with its dance, its committee and its toilets; the stay runs on past its point, and the book’s middle is permitted rather than compelled.
At the peach ranch the orders of the book meet in one event: the wage, the strike, the deputies, the family’s hunger and Casy’s death. His death is the turn of the last movement, and it sends Tom out.
Chapter 25 is the vintage of the valley and the destruction of its fruit. Food is spoiled to hold a price while children die of pellagra beside it, and in it comes the line that gives the book its title: “the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy”. In chapter 28 Tom says goodbye to Ma in the dark by the culvert. The farewell passed out of the book into American political speech.
Movement V
The flood comes, and falls on all the boxcars alike: the family’s fate and the general fate run together, and the two voices of the book are nearly one. Rose of Sharon’s child is born dead. Uncle John sets it in an apple box and puts it on the floodwater to go down and tell them. The basket of Moses is turned over: the child sent downstream is dead, and goes as a witness. The dust opened the book; the water closes it.
In the last chapter, in a barn, Rose of Sharon gives her breast to a starving man and smiles “mysteriously”. The record ends as a sacrament. Many readers have felt the change of key as a breach and the ending as a contrivance; read as the completion of the move from “I” to “we”, prepared by chapter 14 and by Ma’s widening of the family at every stage, it is a fulfilment, with the seam left showing.
It was the bestselling novel in the United States in 1939, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1940. In 1939 it was banned and publicly burned in Kern County, California, and it was denounced as communist and as obscene. John Ford filmed it for Twentieth Century Fox in 1940; Woody Guthrie made the ballad “Tom Joad” in the same year, and Bruce Springsteen The Ghost of Tom Joad in 1995. Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962. The book has been in print, in schools and in translation without a break since 1939.
Act III · The Twelve
The design passes the subtractive test and the execution fails it in places. The general chapters cannot go: without chapter 5, where the bank is “the monster”, chapter 7, the used car lot, and chapter 25, the destroyed fruit, the Joads are a family with bad luck rather than the instance of a mechanism, and each of the three movements is required. What could go is in the narrative: the long middle stay at the Weedpatch government camp, where the dance, the committee and the toilets run on past their point; Al’s girls and cars; Rose of Sharon’s fears for her baby, restated without development; Casy’s speeches, which say again what the general chapters have shown. Noah walks off down the Colorado, half a figure. That permitted middle holds the axis at 8.2, level with The Bottomless Well as the lowest of the twelve.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The book’s strongest claim, and a disclosure of meaning, not of mood. It makes visible a mechanism its first readers lived inside and could not see whole: that dispossession has no agent, “The bank is something more than men” (chapter 5), and the tractor driver is a neighbour paid three dollars a day; that a surplus of hungry labour is manufactured by handbills that call eight hundred men for three hundred jobs; that food is destroyed to hold a price while children die of pellagra beside it (chapter 25); that the move from “I lost my land” to “we lost our land” is the one thing the owners fear (chapter 14). These hold as truths about markets and labour beyond the Dust Bowl. Held below the summit because the book often states what it has already shown, and its people are disclosed from outside.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The book rises often and in more than one register. The opening rain that does not cut “the scarred earth” and the dust laid over the corn; the turtle of chapter 3, crossing the road, flipped by a truck, carrying a wild oat seed on; the desert crossing by night with Granma dead in the truck and Ma lying beside her; the vintage of chapter 25, where “the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy”; Tom’s farewell to Ma in the dark by the culvert; Uncle John setting the stillborn child in an apple box on the floodwater; Rose of Sharon in the barn, smiling “mysteriously”. Height and frequency are both high. Held at 8.6 because the elevations are prepared by a rhetoric that sometimes tips into exhortation, and because engineered sentiment, the dog killed on the road, the waitress and the candy of chapter 15, lowers the ceiling of the transport.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. The structure is Exodus: bondage to the bank; the journey through the wilderness and the desert; a promised land of plenty that is forbidden to those who reach it; a people formed on the road. Jim Casy, with his initials and his forty days in his own wilderness, is the preacher who loses the call and finds the “one big soul”, and his death is the turn of the last movement, sending Tom out. Uncle John’s apple box inverts the basket of Moses: the child sent downstream is dead and goes as a witness. The flood closes the book as the dust opened it, and the eucharistic gesture in the barn turns the family outward to a stranger. The particular stays particular: these are Oklahomans with a Hudson Super-Six cut down to a truck. Held a tenth under the summit because the scaffold shows, and the Christ pattern in Casy is programmatic.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The turn is real and its means are inherited. The alternation of a choric, generalising voice with the narrative of particular people was already Dos Passos’s, in the Newsreels and Camera Eye of the U.S.A. trilogy, and the strike novel was a crowded form of the decade, Steinbeck’s own In Dubious Battle (1936) among them. What Steinbeck changed was register and scale: he lifted the social novel into the cadence of the King James Bible and the size of epic, made the migrants a people rather than a cause, and let the general chapters speak as the used car dealer and the hamburger stand as well as the prophet. The stake was large and was paid: the book was denounced as communist and as obscene and burned in Kern County. The departure cost what it risked, but the formal wager was placed on a path already cut, which holds the axis at 8.4.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. The alternation is the argument: the general chapters say that what befalls the Joads befalls a hundred thousand, and the Joads say that each of the hundred thousand is a family with a grandfather who will not leave his land. Remove the general chapters and it is a family saga of hard luck; remove the Joads and it is a pamphlet. The two voices draw closer as the book goes, until in the last chapters the family’s fate and the general fate run together, the flood falling on all the boxcars alike, and the closing gesture completes the move from “I” to “we” that chapter 14 names. The road is the form of the middle movement. Held under the summit because the Joad chapters, taken alone, are conventional in their making, and some general chapters are essays rather than instruments.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Eighty-seven years of reading and argument, and some questions keep yielding: whether the ending is grace or contrivance; whether Ma’s endurance is the book’s hope or its consolation; how Casy’s one big soul sits with the biological idea of the group that Steinbeck took from his talks with Ed Ricketts; whether the book is Christian, Marxist or Emersonian, and how it can be all three. But the surface is legible and largely given on a first reading; the characters are not deep enough to be returned to for themselves, and a general chapter once read is understood. Much of the continuing discussion is of the book’s politics and history rather than of depth newly found in it. Evidence of sustained re-examination is strong and of inexhaustibility moderate, and that holds the axis at 8.2, below For Whom the Bell Tolls at 8.4 and well below The Great Gatsby at 8.9.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The field is the American novel of the 1930s: Faulkner, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Wright. The intrinsic force is high: the book made the American social novel an epic and a scripture at once, and fixed the form in which a national catastrophe of displacement is told. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: John Ford’s film of 1940, which follows it closely; Woody Guthrie’s ballad “Tom Joad” (1940); Bruce Springsteen’s The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995); Tom’s farewell carried into American political speech; and the book’s standing as the reference novel of the Dust Bowl and of migrant labour, against which later fiction of displacement and farm work is read. What holds it at 8.6: its reach on the art of the novel is narrower than its public reach. Faulkner, not Steinbeck, redirected American fiction, and the book’s literary descendants are fewer than its political ones.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Eighty-seven years, on the step for seventy years to two centuries. Form: the text is whole, the novel as published in 1939, with no other version to choose between. Presence: in print, in schools and in translation without a break since 1939, among the widest of any American novel, which earns a tenth above the floor of the step. Fabric: the dialect, the topical politics of the late 1930s and the government camp chapters date the book in places, and some of its presence is the presence of a set text and of a famous film; for those the further tenth is withheld. Its central matter has long outlived the conditions that produced it and is read anew with each migration. Sales and prizes are counted here as presence, and as no more than presence.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The general chapters show a command of prose that is wide and exact: the patter of the used car lot in chapter 7, the barter for the household goods in chapter 9, the litany of Highway 66 in chapter 12, the cadence of chapter 25. The dialogue has an ear for Oklahoma speech that is mostly right and rarely condescends, and the building of the three movements is sound. Charged against it: the narrative prose is plainer and sometimes slack; the biblical cadence is used too often and goes soft by repetition; characters are made to carry speeches, Casy, Ma and Tom at the end, rather than to speak; sentiment is laid on where the material already holds it; and Connie, Noah, Al and the Wilsons are drawn in a few strokes and left there. It sits below Light in August’s 8.9 and well below The Great Gatsby’s 9.3 in sentence by sentence command.
Score: 8.5 / 10
One law governs: the land and those who work it against the abstraction that owns it, and the move from the family to the people. Take the two most distant elements, the documentary general chapter of the used car lot and the allegorical close in the barn. Both are about what a person is worth when the market has finished with them, and the ending answers the lot. The turtle of chapter 3 and the family’s truck are one creature on one road. The strain is between naturalism and allegory: the book is for the most part a record and its ending is a sacrament, and many readers have felt the change of key as a breach. It is a fulfilment, prepared by chapter 14 and by Ma’s widening of the family at every stage; but the seam shows, as does the seam between a biologist’s detached view of the group and an intimate sentiment for the family.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The orders held are many and held together. The land and its weather: dust, drought, flood. The family across three generations, its structure shifting as Pa loses authority to Ma. Labour, wages and the market. The bank, the corporation and the state: the deputies, the border inspection, the government camp, the vigilantes. History: the westward movement reversed. The sacred: Casy’s faith lost and found. These are not listed but meet in the same scenes, as at the peach ranch, where wages, the strike, the deputies, Casy’s death and the family’s hunger are one event. What the book does not hold well is consciousness: its people are seen from outside, and inward life is the order most thinly present. That keeps the axis at 8.9, among the book’s highest, and below the top.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1: eighty-seven years, the text whole, in print, in schools and in translation without a break, and among the widest presences of any American novel. Beside it The Unconcealment, The Archetypal Deep and The Encompassed at 8.9: a mechanism without an agent made visible, the bank, the handbills, the destroyed fruit; an Exodus built and load-bearing from the dust to the flood; and land, family, labour, the state and the sacred met in single scenes such as the peach ranch.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable and The Bottomless Well at 8.2. The design is compelled but the middle is permitted: the long stay at the government camp, Al’s girls and cars, Casy’s speeches repeating what the general chapters show. And the surface is legible and given on a first reading, its people seen from outside and not deep enough to be returned to for themselves. Next above them The Swerve at 8.4, where an inherited means was put to a bold and costly use.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 8.5 and The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.1, The Unconcealment at 8.9, The Archetypal Deep at 8.9 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.4 falls short by a tenth, because the alternation of a choric voice with a family’s narrative was a path Dos Passos had already cut. The Universal Minimum is met (the lowest of the eleven axes it covers are The Inevitable and The Bottomless Well at 8.2, against 7.5), and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.9. The aggregate stands below the summit in any case, and the unmet Epochal Gate would hold it there.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, a novel in thirty chapters, published by the Viking Press, New York, in April 1939. The unit is the novel as published in 1939, in Steinbeck’s English; there is no other version. The book is in copyright and no text was in hand: nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Only short phrases whose words are certain are quoted, cited by chapter where the chapter is known; everything else is paraphrased. The family, the chapter design, the three movements by setting and the principal scenes are known closely; the sentences are not known word for word. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the number of the general chapters and their share of the book, the book’s length in words, the exact wording of Casy’s last words, of Ma’s words on the people that live and of Tom’s farewell, the wording of the passage on the crime in chapter 25, the tenants’ account of how their grandfathers took the land, the order in which Guthrie’s ballad and Ford’s film were made, and the terms of the Nobel citation.