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“The Technique of Building Worlds”: Exodian Nation Formation in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath 171 PUBLISHED IN 1939, The Grapes of Wrath is a creative cultural product with its roots in Steinbeck’s journalistic training, his radical worldview, and the Bible. On the one hand, the novel makes explicit the veracity of its textual representation of migrant workers during the Depression. On the other hand, like John Winthrop and William Bradford before him, Steinbeck draws on biblical typology to add resonance to a text based on historical events and to clarify the processes that change loosely knit groups of oppressed and marginalized peoples into a new nation with its own political codes. In this way Steinbeck draws together key aspects of American political tradition and its cultural roots, particularly those embedded in the Old Testament. For the Puritans immigrating to the New World, the Old Testament Exodus served as a model and a divine guarantee; once again a divinely chosen group had escaped from oppression across a body of water to a new promised land. Like the Hebrews and the Puritans before them, the Okies construct a national identity that garners authority through claims to status as a redeemer nation. While critics have paid attention to Steinbeck’s use of biblical imagery, especially in The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, his appropriation and revision of both the book of Exodus and the Mosaic prophet in the formation of a new Okie nation have yet to receive a sustained reading. This chapter addresses this lacuna by arguing that Steinbeck broadly patterns the narrative of the Oklahoma migrants on Exodus, in order to “build” a world that offers them national identity and the possibility of justice and liberty even as it reinstates national myths of CHAPTER 7 Roxanne Harde 172 Roxanne Harde manifest destiny and the redeemer nation. In tracing the ways in which Exodus influences The Grapes of Wrath, it shows how Exodus foreshadows the novel, shapes the formation of the Okie nation, and offers a model of prophecy. It concludes by tracing Exodian typology into contemporary revisions of Steinbeck’s American Exodus. “There Are No New Stories and I Wouldn’t Like Them If There Were”: Correlation and Influence Aside from the fact of an exodus and heroes who cannot find peace in the Promised Land with their people, there is little direct correlation between the details of Exodus and The Grapes of Wrath. Rather, they mainly are connected through narrative strategies and the grand sweep of their plots. The similarities between their basic narratives are clear. It is no coincidence that Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor titled their journalistic record of the Okie migration An American Exodus (1939).1 The influence of Exodus on The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is as evident as that of Genesis on Steinbeck’s East of Eden (1954), although he took liberties with both the details and the broad sweep of these narratives. At one point in The Grapes of Wrath, Ma Joad notes that her father-in-law “quoted Scripture all the time. He got it all roiled up.”2 Like Grandpa Joad, Steinbeck “roils up” biblical stories to suit his ends. “There are no new stories,” Steinbeck noted to his publisher Pascal Covici in 1939, “and I wouldn’t like them if there were.”3 The Grapes of Wrath, then, is Steinbeck’s retelling of an old story in order to comment on the national changes that he, like Lange and Taylor, was observing. The formal and stylistic aspects of Exodus echo through Steinbeck’s narrative and intercalary chapters.The Grapes of Wrath is divided into two interspersed narratives: the specifics of the Joad family’s exodus told by an omniscient narrator and the westerly migration told by a third-person prophet-narrator. Steinbeck gave the name “intercalary” to these general chapters. The term means a day or a month inserted in the calendar to harmonize it with the solar year; an intercalation is an interposition out of the ordinary course, but one meant to make things come out right. Intercalary is also defined as a refrain, those portions that hold a song together and give the whole its shape. As Steinbeck’s choice of terms suggests, the intercalary chapters, in their “we” narrative told in the rhythms of the Old Testament, are essential to understanding the book. In Exodus a group of runaway [3.145.16.90] Project MUSE (2024-04-26...

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