著者

木原 健次

出版者

日本アメリカ文学会

雑誌

アメリカ文学研究 (ISSN:03856100)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.49, pp.1-18, 2013-03-31 (Released:2017-09-29)

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John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is one of the representative American novels of the 1930s. Describing the predicament of migrant farmers challenged by the disaster of the Dust Bowl and deprived of their traditional ways of life, the novel is usually thought to epitomize the well-known images of America of the 1930s, such as the "Depression Era" or the "Red Thirties." Not only was it an age of socialist movement and labor dispute, but the 1930s also witnessed broad debates, as Eric Foner puts it, over "the redefinition of freedom" among politicians and intellectuals. These debates, inseparable from the foundation of the New Deal, were no less influential than those of the contemporary left-wingers. This paper clarifies the structure and esthetics of The Grapes of Wrath, one of the "canons" of the 1930s, by reading it against the background of the liberal discourse in the New Deal period. First, I analyze the arguments of Michael Szalay's New Deal Modernism and Sean McCann's Gumshoe America, both of which examine the literature of the 1930s in reference to the culture of liberalism. Through this analysis, I will argue the significance of the discourses on the relation between the whole and its parts, or the group and the individual, in the New Deal era. I then focus on Steinbeck's biological philosophy, integrating and epitomizing non-teleological thinking and the phalanx theory, which are reflected in both the theme and structure of the novel. The former refers to an attitude toward observing things as they are, as opposed to teleological thinking that seeks to explain things through causal nexuses. The latter theory assumes that a group is an entity different from the mere sum of its members as well as individuals being not the mere components of a group. Through interpreting Steinbeck's philosophy within the framework of the New Deal liberalism, I reveal how it is resonant with contemporary liberal discourse of the time. In conclusion, his ideas can be viewed as a response to the concerns for the New Deal governing theory. The following parts of the paper investigate The Grapes of Wrath with an emphasis on its modernist narrative structure composed of the alternating interchapters and narrative chapters. Steinbeck describes anonymous migrant farmers in the former, whereas the latter depicts the specific story of the Joads, as the exemplary migrant family. Preceding studies on the relation between the two sorts of chapters tend to see the Joads as a representative family, stressing the organic unity of the novel. Considering that the narrative chapters thoroughly portray the Joads as "real" rather than "typical" individualists, however, they can be regarded as opposed to the anonymous mass groups in the interchapters. My thesis concludes that the novel is structured over the dialectic between the value of individualism and the newly emerging significance of government, represented in the narrative chapters and interchapters, respectively. Ultimately, the ending scene functions precisely as a conclusion of the novel because it offers an imaginary unity between the opposing values of the New Deal.