In Dubious Battle, Page 2

  Although Steinbeck talked several times about "levels" of interest in his writing, he was more explicit than usual about his intentions in In Dubious Battle, explaining in a letter to a friend, "It has three layers. Surface story, group-psychological structure, and philosophical conclusion arrived at, not through statement, but only through structure." He guessed that only the first would be perceived. In John Steinbeck's ReVision of America, Louis Owens provides a convenient summary of customary interpretations of Steinbeck's statement:

  The surface story is that of the strike and its ramifications, the group-psychological structure is found in the novel's study of the phalanx... the philosophical conclusions arrived at through structure [regard] man's need for commitment that reverberate [s] through all of Steinbeck's fiction both before and after.

  The novelist's achievement is not so clearcut as this summary suggests, although Owens provides a useful plan for viewing the novel from its most universal level to its most specific. The "philosophical conclusions" usually provide the directing force behind Steinbeck's fiction; and the increasing emphasis on them is a principal reason why later works like The Moon Is Down and Burning Bright lack the emotionally compelling storytelling of In Dubious Battle and The Grapes of Wrath: more attention is paid to dwelling on statement than contriving communicative structure.

  Some critics, like Clifford Lewis, find that even in In Dubious Battle, Steinbeck failed to eliminate statement, though it is hard to agree that "Doc Burton's psychological and philosophical theories nearly destroy the novel": Steinbeck was right in thinking that most readers would not linger over them but would be drawn into the whirlpool created by the downward spiraling of the steadily accelerating narrative. Steinbeck's shaping of Burton's comments to the strike organizer Mac, especially in Chapter 8, however, shows how the author was able to avoid a commitment to any reductivist Utopian scheme at a time when such causes were attracting many desperate converts:

  Well, you say I don't believe in the cause. That's like not believing in the moon. There've been communes before, and there will be again. But you people have an idea that if you can establish the thing, the job'll be done. Nothing stops, Mac. If you were able to put an idea into effect tomorrow, it would start changing right away. Establish a commune, and the same gradual flux will continue (p. 149).

  Burton's conclusion hits a reader with greater force than ever after the events of 1989 and 1990, when, half a century after the novel's publication, previously inconceivable changes in the political structure of Europe exemplify the inescapable change he outlines. If anything weakens the novel, it is not Burton's conventional theories of socio-political evolution but rather Steinbeck's own dedication at the time he was writing to the "phalanx" theories that are expounded in his second "layer" not just by Doc, but London, Jim Nolan, and even old Joy. These are most succinctly summed up again by Doc in Chapter 8: "I want to watch these group-men, for they seem to me to be a new individual, not at all like single men. A man in a group isn't himself at all: he's a cell in an organism that isn't like him any more than the cells in your body are like you" (pps. 150-51).

  Steinbeck had always been, as he wrote to a friend in 1933, "prone to the metaphysical." After he met Joseph Campbell, the distinguished student of mythology, Steinbeck became obsessed with the theory of what he first called "phalanxes" in a letter to George Albee in 1933. He had, however, already explained the concept without using the term in a letter to his college friend Carleton Sheffield, stressing that the human race has "qualities which the individual lacks entirely," using a questionable analogy to atoll-building coral "insects," which retain their individual identities in an external communal construct like people living in an apartment building. Steinbeck argued that "the phalanx has emotions of which the unit man is incapable," so that once he becomes part of "a moving phalanx, his nature changes, his habits, and his desires."

  The problem with applying this theory to the development of the strike in In Dubious Battle is that even after the organizers' oratory has impressed the disgruntled migrant workers with the need for concerted action, the agitators must continually devise further means for maintaining the group's commitment and preventing defections. New structures transcending individuals fail to establish themselves without constant rhetorical reinforcement, suggesting that mob action is the creation of the manipulators rather than the participants. No sense of amalgamation into the group supplants individual responses. Both the strikers and the growers' troops are motivated by self-interest.

  Joining the group does not alter the individual's tendencies. It only provides a cover for an individual's behaving in a manner that he would not have the nerve to initiate, a cover for relaxing his inhibitions.

  Steinbeck most lucidly presents the feelings of a member of a lynch mob in a short story dating from the same period as In Dubious Battle, originally titled "The Lonesome Vigilante." (It appears in The Long Valley as simply "The Vigilante," and it is based on an actual event that occurred in San Jose, the home town of Steinbeck's first wife, Carol.) After participating in a fatal lynching, a character named Mike is charged by his "thin, petulant wife" with having been with another woman. "By God, she was right," he thinks to himself. "That's exactly how I do feel." Violence compensates for sexual frustration.

  Steinbeck had picked up the phalanx theory from lectures he'd heard at Stanford on the writings of William Emerson Ritter, a professor of marine biology at the University of California at Berkeley. He evidently pursued Ritter's writings, for the concept of the "phalanx" utilized in In Dubious Battle is developed principally in "The Organismal Conception: Its Place in Science and Its Bearing on Philosophy," co-authored by Edna W. Barby (California Publications in Biology, 1931). Steinbeck's attraction to these ideas appears to have been in some measure based upon his inability to accept violence as a conscious manifestation of an individual's behavior. He clung to the theory that the human race is basically educable, and Ritter's speculations provided him with a means of rationalizing behavior that he could not deal with as another's deliberate choice.

  Since Steinbeck's choices were not objectively intellectual but compassionate (as critics have begun to recognize, his writings derive from a basically romantic temperament), he ran into perplexing problems when he had Doc Burton follow up his pronouncements about man's hating himself with some observations about split personalities. The dynamic characters in this novel, however--and in most of his work through The Moon Is Down--are not the troubled products of splits in their own psyches but of their differences from others, often exacerbated by social prejudices.

  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 influenc
ed 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?

  III

  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 p
romote 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.