Lately I have re-read a few classics among them Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. I read it in high school (then in Swedish, now in English) - I liked it then and I really liked it now. There is this heavy burden laid on us from the first line to the last. There is something very Swedish about the way he describes the struggle of the working class families - Moberg & Co comes in mind.
There is something special with Steinbeck's language which doesn't really makes it into translations. Dialect of course (he writes a lot in dialect) but smaller things well, there is something very poetic about it - just listen to the title of the book Grapes of Wrath - as opposed to the Swedish translation Vredens druvor, which isn't a bad translation but it doesn't have the audible anger that the English translation does. The title,by the way, is supposed to be an allusion to Revelations 14:18-20. Makes sense - there is something very biblical about the "wrath" type of anger. Also there is something apocalyptic about the all the natural phenomena that makes the old land inhabitable and the struggles that people are having against quite monstrous forces.
I was especially very moved of the way in which Steinbeck uses images to describe a situation, which is specific but also goes so much further. In his theatre theory Berthold Brecht has this idea of the "Gestus". Elin Diamond (Feminist and Brecht scholar) describes is as being "the moment in performance that make visible the contradictory actions of the text, the theatre apparatus and contemporary social struggle". Now this is specific to theatre (much because of the special effect of live performance) but I think there are several ways in which Steinbecks images works in a similar fashion. Gestus can be a word, an act or a tableau in which social attitudes are exposed - something that is the central issue to the play/book / everything summed up in one images, but also reflects on society in a specific historical situation (Breach was very politically engaged).
The last scene of Grapes of Wrath is depicted just as if it was a tableau, a still life, a painting. Rose-of-Sharon (who was pregnant through out the book, and gives birth to a stillborn baby) is like a grotesque Madonna. She should have been the symbol of regeneration, of hope of future - but something is terribly wrong in Steinbeck's picture. Rather than holding a baby in her arms she is breastfeeding a grown up man, a stranger that they just met and who is dying of starvation.
I think that this scene works precisely as a Gestus. Much of the essence of the book can be seen in this picture of the grotesque Madonna. Because of the disturbed social situation, regeneration is impossible in the traditional sense - the old society is dead. There is no place for the working class, no future, and no direct link between the old and the new. The relation between the "mother" and the receiver of her milk is grotesque, unnatural and out of place. The society in which these people are trying to get along, is constantly throwing them out, making them act in way they never would have done during their old life. The society is shaping them into the grotesque, hence alien and impossible to include.
Yet there is a little bit of hope. In the this most of extreme situation where they have lost everything that they had (car, family members, clothes, home, everything material) Rose-of-Sharon is willing and weirdly and unnatural, but still able to help a starving stranger. There is something both moving and disgusting with this image, but most of all is it aggravating and raising wrath.
I also lately reread an other of my favorites from high school - Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse. However I would strongly discourage anyone else to do the same. It just doesn't do it any longer. I find it a highly annoying and just barely finished it.
Bottom line - Steinbeck is still great, Hesse is gravely overrated
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