Steinbeck and the Environment: Interdisciplinary Approaches

6. Natural Wisdom

SIX Natural Wisdom: Steinbeck's Men of Nature as Prophets and Peacemakers Marilyn Chandler McEntyre Steinbeck's prophets, men of broad understanding and acceptance, draw their vision from the natural world. Jim Casy, a lapsed preacher and wise counselor to the Joad family, finds new faith in love ofnature and renewed purpose through his involvement with the people ofthe earth. At the center ofCannery Row is Doc, marine biologist, whose holistic vision and compassionate attention to human needs are similarly drawn from close observation ofhis environment and nature. Through anonteleological acceptance of what is, both the rigorous scientist and the intuitive preacher recognize the interconnectedness ofcreation. Steinbeck's indebtedness to the American transcendentalists, particularly Emerson and Whitman, has been noted frequently.l That relationship lies partly in his way of looking upon the natural world as a source of knowledge, a text to replace or expand upon Scripture, which teaches those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. For Steinbeck, as for his predecessors, the wise man was above all else defined by his discerning relationship to the natural world, allowing it to inform his understanding of human relations and enterprises. In several of Steinbeck's novels we encounter variations on the type of the wise man-a character whose self-knowledge, compassion for human frailty, and sharp intuitions come from close association with the natural world. Two of the most notable of these are Casy, the preacher in The Grapes of Wrath, and Doc in Cannery Row. Both are solitaries who take frequent "flights into the wilderness" but who live among people who rely upon them for guidance. Both understand themselves and others with an insight that at times seems prophetic, and indeed in the motley circles they frequent they 114 McEntyre are accorded special status as counselors and wise men. Both are more educated than those around them, but each in his way has rejected the institutional forms and frameworks that endowed him with professional credentials and lives as a maverick of sorts, moving easily among circles of people to none of which he belongs. Both are explicitly linked with images of Jesus, though neither is conventionally religious. Both are "nonteleological thinkers" in the sense in which Steinbeck claimed that he himself viewed the world: not in terms of defined purposes, but with what he called "is thinking "-acceptance without second-guessing of the divine plan.2 For each, the source of wisdom and virtue appears to lie in communion with nature. And each, communing with nature, assumes the status and role of prophet in his community. Indeed it might be said that in these characters Steinbeck is working out a definition of prophecy and the importance of the prophet in modern life, not as one who calls for specific acts of repentance and return to a covenantal tradition, but as one who sees into the heart of nature and speaks forth what lesson it teaches. In doing so he, in effect, issues a warning call to turn away from those forms of civilized life that remove us from what Robinson Jeffers, Steinbeck's contemporary and fellow Californian, called "the great humaneness at the heart of things." And like Jeffers, he writes as one who is himself a visionary trying to find a language for the ultimate interconnectedness of all creation as a means for understanding what as humans we must do. Steinbeck's most explicit articulation of this vision is given in Sea ofCortez, where he describes "nonteleological thinking" as a way of understanding the natural and thence the social world independent of the causal relations and presumed purposes we so readily posit to satisfy our need for comprehensible meaning. Freeman Champney sums up nonteleological thinking as "a mixture of philosophical relativism , the rigorous refusal of the scientist to be dogmatic about hypotheses, and a sort of moral fatalism" (Robert Murray Davis 1972, 30). Steinbeck himself explains, "Nonteleological thinking concerns itself primarily not with what should be, or could be, or might be, but rather with what actually 'is'-attempting at most to answer the already sufficiently difficult questions what or how, instead of why" (SOC 135). To think in such a way entails a kind of humility related to Jeffers's Prophets and Peacemakers 115 idea of "unhumanism"-a rejection of the myopic anthropocentrism that distorts our understanding of the functioning of whole systems, the large patterns of evolution, the nature of...