[In the following essay, Ditsky describes The Grapes of Wrath as “a romantic epic of the U.S. highway.”]

It can be argued that the American road provides the major theme of our national literature. Broaden the consideration to include the road's literary counterparts—the river and the sea—and the point acquires further strength. Four decades after its creation, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath begs recognition as the sort of book it really is: a classic of undiminished power that is fundamentally a romantic epic of the U.S. highway. Misguided assumptions stemming from the critical attitudes of the Thirties have kept this book from being seen for what it has always been—a volume in the service of mankind, of course, but not one with a sense of specific doctrinal mission, a philosophical axe to grind.

Naturalist, sentimentalist, non-teleologist—a succession of terms such as these has been used to describe, and thus to dismiss, the author of The Grapes of Wrath. As the work of a new generation of Steinbeck critics has shown (I am thinking especially of Richard Astro and Robert DeMott), the thinking of this humblest of writers cannot so easily be encapsuled in a single descriptive noun; and as the recent publication of the man's own commentary on his creative processes (Journal of a Novel and the Life in Letters) has helped us to see, it has always been particularly absurd to attempt to limit Steinbeck to some especial and singular intention, such as those of the social engineer or documentary journalist. The glass brogan simply will not fit.

Instead, The Grapes of Wrath gives us an artistic rendering of a specific historical situation in which an acutely local observation of pertinent detail is raised to universal relevance through a process of patent stylization. The Joads are a deliberate cross-section of types and attitudes, and were they not managed with a skill beyond the capacities of simple naturalism they might resolve themselves into the stuff of mobile soap-opera, a sort of Airport'39. Though they constitute “the people,” they are capable of being mean-spirited and small-minded; their poverty does not of itself ennoble them. Their speech articulates a human progress upward: as Oklahomans, they represent the final thrust of the westering spirit, now once again quickened in response to recent need—like a dry seed animated by a spring rain. Instead of being, as Edmund Wilson mistakenly thought them, beings arbitrarily limited to the status of animals, they are embodiments of what began as animal, perhaps, but used its capacity for evolutionary upward striving to assert its right to something higher. The real parallel to The Grapes of Wrath, to use recent filmic enterprises as sources of examples, is not so much the nostalgic moment of holistic communion that takes place in Bonnie and Clyde (through superficially Steinbeckian resonances) as, rather, the reach of humanity after a more intelligent existence one finds in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Joads are less simply colorful than they are an archetypical cross-section of America; and as diverse types en route to Canaan on a ramshackle narrenschiff-on-wheels, they represent the renewing of the frontier spirit—the taking-onward of the necessary adventure of the country by the citizens of its last-settled “contiguous” state, individuals in whom such energies represent much more than vestigial tourist myths.

Thus the Joads, much like the book's Elmer Hader dustjacket illustration itself, are a cross between post-office-mural substance and grainy documentary. If they are posed on the edge of the promised land, they are not about to get there simply through linear geographical movement. In fact, when their own infant Moses is set adrift later in the novel, the baby is already dead. This California is “nice country. But she was stole a long time ago,” the Joads are warned as they enter the state. The irony of the expected Eden land is one that is central to Steinbeck's purposes, animating such an early work as The Pastures of Heaven as much as the late East of Eden, and appearing prominently in other works as well. Much as he is thematically committed to the union of man and landscape, John Steinbeck is consistent in underscoring the vanity of mere human wishing: the Joads will have to learn to find their Canaan in their inner selves, or not at all. In wedding the road motif to the notion of the disappointment of the American dream, Steinbeck chose a mighty theme with which to write a mighty book.

If it is absurd to reduce the Joads to the stature of the singleminded instinctual directioning of the famous land turtle to which our attention is pointed early on, it is equally foolish to impute to them a heroism they cannot sustain—so rudimentary is the stage at which their group consciousness resides. The heroism which pervades The Grapes of Wrath attaches less to individuals than to westering Americans as a corporate entity, and it is that enormous and powerful new Being-acoming that will possess the Homeric strength some readers have sensed in the novel. Steinbeck has not imparted a ridiculously exaggerated stature to his Joads, as some have mistakenly concluded; rather, he has employed the interchapter technique to relate their plight to that of tens of thousands of others in a similar bind. In so doing, he has created a sense of Mass-Man on the move that is impressive to behold—real Potemkin stuff! The more-or-less realistic depiction of the Joads themselves, creating in many readers an expectation of a traditionally naturalistic denouement, is deliberately contrasted with the poeticized narration of the interchapters, and it is there that the epic stature lies. Steinbeck's waning fascination with the group-man is already undercut, in The Grapes of Wrath, by the fact of audience: this book is not a call to revolutionary action, but a clear warning to middle-class readers of what will come into existence—of what rough beast will slouch towards birth—if the just demands of the displaced Okies for humane treatment are ignored much longer.

That is why the immediate controversy over the book's accuracy of documentary representation—a “critical” debate some examples of which were once collected in book form by Warren French—is in quick retrospect so laughable, and why arguments as to the book's continued relevance to the plight of Cesar Chavez's farm workers today are critical red herrings: The Grapes of Wrath incorporates a social cause; it does not espouse one directly. In epitomizing a critical decade of American history that was already ending—its values permanently altered, or even vanished—Steinbeck created an enduring fiction that never concerned itself with the petty realities of Californian booster-pride. (Had he wanted to establish a socio-political syllogism, he might well have ended his book with the happy hiatus in the government camp, with its angelic overseer—the “Tom” of the novel's dedication—dressed in white.) The Grapes of Wrath is an episodic novel about a family's education, a bildungsroman in the collective sense.

None of which is to deny Steinbeck's very real sympathies, acquired first-hand as they were, with the dispossessed Okies; but it is rather to deny the charge of sentimentality with which Steinbeck's writing is so often taxed, and to deny it on the basis of the evidence of the book itself. Its careful structure, its wonderful mixing of voices and tones and points-of-view, all operate to distance the reader from any possible wallow of emotional involvement. In this quasi-Brechtian sense the book is “epic,” and its very real distance from the reader's ordinary sense of time and space helps establish for it a genuinely romantic quality. Moreover, if its initial focus is on the collective, on Mass-Man, its finer deliberations are on the existential coming-to-be of the individual. The source of the novel's title, the “Old Plantation Melody” Battle Hymn of the Republic with its Julia Ward Howe lyrics (included at Steinbeck's request as the endpapers of the first edition) is arguably as much about the single seizure of freedom as it is about group militancy of purpose. Craftsmanship of language is what makes this ambitious mixture work, and it is seldom craftsmanship of language that distinguishes the major works of American naturalism. The Grapes of Wrath is clearly something else.

It would be clear, once enough serious consideration were expended, that there is no book in the canon of American literature to which The Grapes of Wrath bears such a structural resemblance as Moby Dick. (To make this obvious comparison implies no inflating of claims as to the later book's greatness; but the fact of withstanding such a pairing does imply something about the staying power of Steinbeck's novel.) In the immensity of its novelistic architecture, Moby Dick interrupts its plot with vast digressions on a variety of thematically or symbolically related topics, and inflates the importance of a single whaling voyage by means of verbal daring and rhetorical exaggeration. If Steinbeck's novel does much the same thing, then we are at least made aware of the scope of his ambitions as a writer.

If Melville's cadences are not only Shakespearean and Miltonic, but Biblical as well, Steinbeck's are primarily Biblical, but with the same mélange of Old and New Testament values that Melville uses. The power of Ahab's rant, given differing authorial intentions, is of a kind with Jim Casy's clear echoes of Christ and Old Testament prophets; and in both books, there are a number of interchapters present to slow down the action and swell the book's significance. But just as Moby Dick is hardly just a novel “about” whaling, so too The Grapes of Wrath is not about Route 66 and poverty, or about Christ and the art of truck maintenance. This is, I repeat, no attempt to create a new importance for Steinbeck's book, but rather to place it in its proper literary perspective, so that we may see that a set piece of Dos Passos-like, pure-Thirties naming-of-parts—the chapter, for instance, on used-car salesmanship—is, more accurately, a verbal rhapsody of material pertinence. The sheer pressure of quantities—quantities denied—moves the Steinbeck novel towards the epic romance. But whereas the Melville book possesses tragic resonance because of the isolated world its characters are forced to inhabit, The Grapes of Wrath, on account of its communal dimensionality, can be argued to have achieved a genuinely comic ending.

Such an argument must oppose the cookiecutter reasoning of readers who maintain that Steinbeck's novel, as a book of the Thirties about poor people, must necessarily be naturalistic in intention and effect. Alas, it is difficult from the perspective of the late Seventies to see how Steinbeck could ever have been seen as a thoroughgoing naturalist. Indeed, he has far more in common with Fitzgerald than with Farrell: the handling of quantities, the references to the continental dream, the surrendering of innocencies to higher necessities (albeit higher innocencies, Emersonian purities), can all be said to betoken Fitzgerald's romanticist vision of America lost, the thrown World Series. The new community of men that The Grapes of Wrath describes aborning is one which forsakes the nuclear family in favor of the new worldly order the dollar bill proposes: though Joad after Joad succumbs to death or wanderlust, the residue of the party that set out from Oklahoma has long since developed the ability to incorporate newcomers into its fabric (while the residue of the party itself has readjusted to the greater structure all around it); though that residue acquires Jim Casy, it develops Tom, and in the end it has learned to pool resources with strangers without some apparent “head” to direct its acting-to-adjust. The most significant feature of the events of the latter part of the novel, then, is the displacement of male intellectuality by a female and instinctual recombinative ability. In so doing, Steinbeck's novel is as fundamentally subversive and cozily evil as Melville's; assumptions—and what else is naturalism but the comfort of assumptions?—are destroyed in the name of a higher sort of truth.

And it is only in a novel of romantic sweep that such sexist symbolism is truly acceptable, if only temporarily; Steinbeck's depiction of events depends greatly upon the new order's reliance on primary female strengths. I am referring not merely to Ma's famous refusal to take Pa's direction, but especially to the understanding signified by the exchange of glances between Ma and Rose of Sharon that brings about the novel's ending tableau. I have argued that this scene constitutes a confirmation of Steinbeck as epic romanticist, and that in it, the once-controversial gesture in which Rose of Sharon offers her breast to feed a starving stranger becomes an icon for the new community. The older and insipidly literalistic interpretation of this scene, with its discussions of whether or not mother's milk is actually good for adult males, is itself the token of the failure of prior criticism to come to grips with Steinbeck's achievement. The very theatricality of this final scene is, I think, the end result of Steinbeck's careful structuring pattern. By it, the world of Joad and the greater family-of-man continuity of the interchapters are brought into an identical focus, an adoptive reordering of roles and goods in which conventional terms such as “mother,” “husband,” “son,” and the like are abolished or at least changed utterly.

Can we define a classic as a book we can talk about to a literate friend without having to begin with a plot summary? If so, then The Grapes of Wrath can be presumed to be a classic. What we are most in need of is a redefinition of why the book has attained that status. If there has been a resurgence of interest in Steinbeck in recent years—a creative refocusing on such later works as The Winter of Our Discontent and on his other “big” book, East of Eden (as well as on such an earlier masterpiece as In Dubious Battle)—it is still The Grapes of Wrath that is, for most readers, synonymous with Steinbeck's artistry at its highest point of achievement. Though all the usual paraphernalia of the criticism industry are now his, including the existence of a busily active international society created in his name and possessing its own quarterly journal, it is this one-time bestseller that retains primacy of place in any consideration of his extensive output. That is as it should be: the very fact of its enduring eminence is itself a demand for the periodic re-examination of The Grapes of Wrath, as I have attempted to do here. Like the other permanent landmarks of American writing, it has re-entered the Garden and given its name to the Tree.