Way back when, Steinbeck was mandatory reading: Of Mice and Men, Cannery Row, The Grapes of Wrath — all miserable books, hated by everyone in our class because the novels were so saturated with hopelessness, despair, and outright cruelty. “Oh,” but the teachers said, “it’s about the triumph of the human spirit over adversity.” These “educators” said this with fatuous, raptured looks, spewing back to us what they had been indoctrinated to believe concerning these works and others which, likewise, visited the nightmares of misery, cruelty, and despair. We hated reading them, despised the terrible, depressing “realism” of their message, were devastated, even divested, of all hope or any belief in human goodness. Oh yes, the triumph of the human spirit despite every and all adversity.
What happened? A bunch of us, revolted by the depressing misery, rebelled. We refused to read the books, and our parents stood by us, going all the way to the school board, demanding that we be allowed to substitute books we chose to read — wholesome, even hopeful and happy books. And we won, but only because our parents backed our battle.
No one argues the worth of Steinbeck’s novels. No one considers them less than salient — pertinent, powerful presentations of the plight of man (and woman) in adversity caused by the cruelty and greed of man (and woman). Perhaps Steinbeck hoped to change the world…and did to some measure. His audience was, after all, the perpetrators and their wives. Remember, in 1930s and 40s, the folks who had the luxury to afford to buy Steinbeck’s books and the leisure to read them, never mind the literacy level to comprehend them, were the wealthy upper classes. These were the very people who gained from the exploitation of the unwashed masses. These were them who needed to hear Steinbeck’s message crying blood from story pages…not that it changed their perspectives in any fundamental and meaningful way. Life and cruelty, greed and exploitation continued, as they do today, in the U.S. and all over the world. But the subjects of Steinbeck’s works did find empowerment when some brave souls tried to commit change in human nature by organizing labor and forming representational organizations. They tried, but mostly failed, as is evidenced in the corruption and the exploitation of and by the very organizations that rose as defenders of the rights of these same strangled masses, organizations led by their own members risen through “the ranks.” It is the nature of man to exploit, after all, and, honestly, many of the strangled masses are the most vicious members of the human race.
Today we have books and movies which “celebrate the triumph of the human spirit despite every and all adversity. These works fervently dwell, not in a message delivered with Steinbeck’s knock-out punch of fictionalized exposé, but rather by acknowledging man’s nature as a cruel exploiter, then celebrating human triumph in adversity, despite adversity. The message? No matter what misery, pain, suffering, malady, and torture is perpetrated upon it, still the human spirit can survive. This is fiction which revels in placing its protagonists in such dire straits as to bring shudders even to the most inured of audiences — especially those — the focus not so much upon deliverance and especially not that which decries the perpetration of these evils, but, rather, that which accepts as expected and usual these vicious, exploitative acts. Then, if the victim chooses, this fiction demonstrates, despite all hopelessness and misery, a human can survive. …Puts me in mind of some spawn of Hitler’s legacy carrying out experiments to see just how long and how much a living being can survive any and all manner of the most horrific tortures that can be conceived, holding up the whimpering, bloodied living carcass, saying, “See? No matter what barbarism we can inflict, it can survive.”
But would you want to?
This sort of ugliness belongs, not in fiction, but in nonfiction exposé — works designed to stir an uprising against barbarism, works designed to make a difference, to change the nature of man’s actions to fellow man and fellow living creature.
Fiction, whether delivered in a movie or a book, needs to stop perpetrating the malady by demonstrating it as an acceptable status quo, of something we must face, acknowledge, and accept as norm. Rather, fiction should make us believe that human nature can be better, that the cruel and vicious, the malicious and barbaric, is not the norm and status quo. Fiction should never inure us to the predation and deprivation. It should, in fact, soften us, not harden us, so that, when we come upon the unkind acts of human hands and vicious minds, we move, outraged and in righteousness, to stop it.
Recently:
- Moving is Tough on Writing Novels
- Move complete & back online…when the DSL doesn’t falter
- Offline for a week.
- The ‘I’ Proposition
- No, I didn’t get eaten by my novel.
- Scott Heim reads We Disappear at last reading at Chelsea
- Hunger in the World
- What a Beta Reader Can & Cannot Do
- A Gift for Eternity Finds a Home
- Today’s Giggle: SE vs Employee, the Benefits — Not.
You must be logged in to post a comment.
