On Reading The Grapes of Wrath by Susan Shillinglaw (review)

“an urgent book”: The Grapes of Wrath for the Twenty-first Century

For several years in freshmen composition and literature classes, I assigned Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren’s classic text How to Read a Book as a required reference, guide, and touchstone. This book follows from the premise that “listening is learning from a teacher who is present—a living teacher—while reading is learning from one who is absent” (14). Adler and Van Doren discuss the “art of reading” and “levels of meaning”—elementary, inspectional, analytical, and syntopical (examining two or more books on the same subject). And they suggest approaches to categories of books ranging from the imaginative, to the mathematical, to the philosophical, and more. Thus Adler and Van Doren breathe life into the activity of reading. More recently, Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why expands the question of how to read to include why read at all—concluding that one reads because “it more than enlarges life” (28). Such texts guide us to new insights, providing both practical and philosophical guidelines for the activity of reading, its enjoyment, and the enlightenment it affords.

Susan Shillinglaw’s On Reading The Grapes of Wrath enters into the discussion of how to read and why, focusing for the most part on a single text. She goes beyond the how and why questions, however, to address the what question, thereby defining Steinbeck’s novel not only as a documentary of an era, but also as an ecological tome, a philosophical treatise, and more. The how question and the why question meld, for the one is concerned with making connections—between past and present, between America and the world, between humans and the planet they inhabit—and the other considers the reader’s response to these connections. Shillinglaw describes these interconnections:

The Joad family plight as well as the generalized migrant woe revealed in the interchapters fold into even larger stories, both national and international: dispossession, power, land use, the interconnections of humans and other species, the suffering of many who cannot tell their own story.

(xiii)

The why question is a bit more subtle, involving the reader’s response to Steinbeck’s own authorial presence in the novel as he calls for an empathic response. “We come back to this book,” Shillinglaw writes, “because Steinbeck asks us to open our hearts” (xiii, emphasis added). That is, the author, though absent, is a felt presence—with Steinbeck himself teaching and guiding not only a reader’s intellect and understanding, but also demanding an empathic response that will open the heart to the world’s dispossessed and suffering. Like Adler and Van Doren, Shillinglaw thus addresses the question of how to read Grapes—by making meaningful connections, by seeing the world as a whole. Like Bloom, she, too, addresses the question of why read this novel at all—because it invokes an empathic response and calls for reader participation. Perhaps, by implication, Grapes calls for initiation of change for the better, for its subject matter is most grave, encompassing what Wordsworth describes as “man’s inhumanity to man,” but here expanded by Shillinglaw’s ecological “warp” to include “human’s inhumanity to the planet” that provides them sustenance.

Shillinglaw’s On Reading The Grapes of Wrath, then, examines the influence of Steinbeck’s best friend, marine biologist Edward F. Ricketts, on the writing of Grapes, structuring the discussion in chapters that roughly alternate between the narrative story of the Joads and its Great Depression context. She discusses the multiple levels of this novel—“surface clarity,” “associations,” histories,” “universal symbols,” “emergence”—in sync with Ricketts’s “‘four approaches’” to ecology and a fifth approach that he labels, more mystically, as “breaking through,” an interpretation of the Jungian discussion of an “emergent psychic function.” By observing ecology as “the science of relationships” (Ricketts’s definition), both biologist and writer try to create “whole pictures . . . to consider the parts, each in its place, and as related...