6 - Proustian Peristalsis: Parties Before, During and After

Summary

The nature of parties has been imperfectly studied. It is, however, generally understood that a party has a pathology, that it is a kind of an individual and that it is likely to be a very perverse individual. And it is also generally understood that a party hardly ever goes the way it is planned or intended. This last, of course, excludes those dismal slave parties whipped and controlled and dominated, given by ogreish professional hostesses. These are not parties at all but acts and demonstrations, about as spontaneous as peristalsis and as interesting as its end product.

(John Steinbeck, Cannery Row)

The reader might wonder whether John Steinbeck's amusing statement on ‘the nature of parties’ applies exclusively to the novel in which it appears, or whether it has a broader applicability. Cannery Row (1945), set in Monterey, California, during the Great Depression, is a concatenation of short scenes tied together by two parties – one which takes place about halfway through the book, and which is disastrous in its results, and a second one, which is planned as an act of atonement for the first one. A group of unemployed or underemployed men usually referred to as ‘The Boys’ by the narrator decide to throw a party for one of the book's main characters, a marine biologist called Doc, who has been good to them over the years. The first party's origin has an ethical dimension.