This Side of Paradise

Extract

Many weird and outrageous accusations have been levelled at John Steinbeck, but no one has gone so far as to accuse him of being a Christian, nor do we intend to overstep this mark. But interesting light is cast on his fiction by consideration of his use of biblical themes and images. This has become a critical truism in the notorious ‘Christ-figure’ of Jim Casy in The Grapes of Wrath (1939), whether this portrayal is seen as perfection or parody. We think that a profitable and sane perspective on Steinbeck can be achieved by attention to these biblical themes, and propose to demonstrate this by a brief examination of Old Testament references only, in one early and one late novel, To a God Unknown (1933) and East of Eden (1952).

Briefly, we would claim that in To a God Unknown Steinbeck was presenting and exploring in his hero, Joseph Wayne, a powerful and strange personality who becomes a devotee of the land and of fertility, and eventually carries his devotion to his ‘God Unknown’ to crazy as well as to gigantic lengths, when he kills himself upon his ‘sacred’ rock as a sacrifice to bring rain. But it is clear from close reading of the book that Steinbeck employs a number of techniques, which have been largely ignored, to distance Joseph Wayne from the author’s or the reader’s whole-hearted admiration. The reader is constantly kept alert and suspicious of the truth of Joseph’s visions by several means: these include the exaggeration and frenzy of his approach to the land; the close parallel to Joseph of the demented Willie who ends his nightmares of a desert landscape with suicide; the loyalty and worry of his Indian friend, Juanito, who is closer to the Catholic Church and to the ancient native religion than is Joseph; the rather feeble but carefully presented figure of the priest, Father Angelo; and, most of all, the never obtruded but constantly present incomplete parallel between Joseph Wayne and the biblical patriarch, which points most clearly where Wayne moves away both from rationality and from the kind of Providential guidance vouchsafed to the biblical Joseph.