The Gospel According to Steinbeck
Reflections on freedom, desire, autonomy, and character inspired by John Steinbeck's East of Eden
You think you know things until someone brings you an irresistibly eloquent argument that leaves you confused like a child again. It’s refreshing, although apprehensive, having to rethink life and death, good and evil, from the beginning. I've always believed that you need a few fibres of humility in your body for certain books to have the proper effect. After all, reading invites us to submit our consciousness to another's consciousness, causing the ego to temporarily surrender in the name of an experience that, ideally, will be rewarding. That's why George Eliot was so insistent on the fact that literature is the best instrument for promoting sympathy between people: ‘Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellowmen beyond the bounds of our personal lot.’1
One of the rarest and most riveting privileges in life is finding a piece of art that changes you as a person. I have a few artistic milestones, and it's been a while since a book has shaken my beliefs – then I read East of Eden. The novel was the January pick of the book club I’m in, which was great since it’s the kind of book that needs to be discussed, such as War & Peace and Paradise Lost. I took my time reading those 600 pages – about a month and a half – and let Steibeck’s words sink in.
The cyclical family curse that is East of Eden promotes a reflection on destiny and/or predestination: how much are we responsible for our past and future? How much agency are we allowed within the circumstances we find ourselves in? In short, how much freedom to make choices do we really have? And what makes those choices considered good or bad — is our character defined by our choices, or are our choices made from character? As you can see, each of these questions could inspire an entire book of philosophy, with a thousand pages of considerations and hypotheses without arriving at an answer because, ultimately, there is no single answer to the ‘psycho-theological’ questions of humanity.
The novel tells the story of two families, the Trasks and the Hamiltons, farmers in the dry Salinas Valley, California, at the beginning of the 20th century. I want to focus on Adam Trask and his sons Cal and Aaron, and then on Samuel Hamilton (a new favourite literary character). Steinbeck uses his characters as devices (most of the time) to illustrate a sort of ‘moral fable’ – as bad as this sounds, the book is miraculously fantastic. I usually don’t like it when an author has an explicit moral agenda – write an essay then! – but in this case, it worked, maybe because the novel’s Problem is so unsolvable (therefore irresistible) or maybe because the story is simply that good even though it’s allegorical.
Adam is, from the beginning, a passive man and naive to the point of complete stupidity. I never understood what he really wanted; to me he seemed like a man blinded by his incapability of accepting reality – so he resigned from life, let people beat him down and gave up before the fight. He doesn’t seem to have the energy that comes from desire, which makes him strangely ‘unalive’, a ghost haunting his abandoned Eden. His inertia eroded his family and his sons paid the price. Cal and Aaron are as different as Adam and his brother Charles were: one troubled by anger and desperate to be loved, the other calm due to absent-mindedness and self-absorption – Steinbeck uses this repetition to study the questions I mentioned earlier about destiny, agency and character.
The philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher posed a famous ‘hermeneutic problem’ in which he recognised a paradox in our cognisant process: ‘One must already know a man in order to understand what he says, and yet one first becomes acquainted with him by what he says.’2 Since his field is hermeneutics, he focuses on discourse. But suppose we change what a man says to what a man does, then we have the problem explored by Steinbeck concerning the determination between character and action: is our character defined by our choices, or are our choices made from character?
In the novel, Adam is usually deceived by his own judgement because, for instance, he thinks he knows Cathy and therefore understands what she says and does, instead of trying to ‘get acquainted’ with her by her speech and acts: more than once she told Adam she didn’t want to live in California with him and would leave eventually, but since he only saw in her what he wanted to see, he dismissed her confession as anxiety or nonsense, because it didn’t fit with his assumption of her.
Similarly, he thinks he knows his sons and understands their actions, instead of paying attention to what they actually do and why they do it. Whereas Samuel Hamilton is the wisest character because he can read people well by what they truly are. He accepts reality by being unprejudiced (in the literal sense) that’s why he understands others and Adam doesn’t. The first time Samuel met Lee, Adam’s Chinese cook, he noticed something disingenuous in Lee’s ‘pidgin’ speech and addressed it, to which Lee replies later:
‘That’s why I’m talking to you. You are one of the rare people who can separate your observation from your preconception. You see what is, where most people see what they expect.’
The memorable scene that changed some beliefs I had was the one in which Samuel, Adam and Lee discussed ‘the glory of the choice’ (I delve deeper into this concept in the essay linked below), which is the idea that every individual has the power of self-determination due to the blessing of free-will. Still, theologically speaking, that doesn’t mean we can choose not to sin, because that’s part of human nature, it only means that there’s no predestination or inescapable/inherent quality in character. So in this sense, our choices define our character, not the events that happen to us. It’s like Sartre said: we are condemned to be free. When Cal has a conscience crisis propelled by a fear of being ‘born evil’, Lee tells him that he is not a prisoner of his heritage – only Cal can decide what he is or will be: he has the power to choose to be good.
For most of my life, I was sceptical of this idea because I thought it was too absolute and individualistic – and perhaps it really is, there will always be exceptions – but now I suspect I was just afraid of it being true, because then I would have no one else to blame for my troubles. Taking full responsibility for our life is one of the hardest things we have to do as we grow older, and to soften the blow we try to delegate part of the ‘blame’ to another being, even better if that being is an all-powerful God who created us, put us on earth, and allowed misfortunes to happen. I wonder if this feeling would still exist in the Western collective imagination if we didn’t have the Christian idea of God as The Father, which implies we are perpetually his helpless children who must be taken care of.
The ways of sin are curious. I guess if a man had to shuck off everything he had, inside and out, he’d manage to hide a few little sins somewhere for his own discomfort. They’re the last things we’ll give up. (East of Eden, p. 169)
As I’ve been studying Paradise Lost for over a month, I cannot help but make connections between it and everything else I read. A major theme in Milton’s poem is Theodicy, an explanation of why a perfectly good, almighty, and all-knowing God permits evil. The term, coined by German philosopher Leibniz, literally means ‘justifying God’ (something Milton proposes to do at the beginning of the poem). In East of Eden, the characters battle with themselves to conciliate freedom and providence, and particularly to understand why God rejected Cain. This rejection, in Steinbeck’s reimagination, is an allegory to all the ‘injustices’ done to us when we are absolutely (even haughtily) sure we didn’t deserve it. Imagine that Cain had little self-knowledge, and with his borderline-arrogant offering, he subconsciously tried to buy God’s love. Naturally, God knows the intention behind the offering, and the lesson is that this is what really matters, not the offering itself.
Now see how tricky it gets: our choices define us and we are free to make them because there is no predestination, but it’s not exactly what we do that amounts to character, but why we chose to do it; and you can only know a man when you understand why he does what he does, yet for you to understand him you have to know him first, through a judgement of his actions. This paradox is impossible to solve, which is frustrating, yet a good kind of frustration since it gave me new ideas about life, and such reflection was only possible because of Steinbeck.
I might sound as if I’m complicating the obvious, but that’s what literature and philosophy are for: to defamiliarise the world so we can properly perceive it, freshly and from a new angle. As Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky said:
If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been. And art exists so that one may recover the sensation of life [...] The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.3
Thus, what Steinbeck did was defamiliarise an incredibly well-known story (Cain and Abel’s), so we could ‘rethink’ something important that was overlooked due to its ‘presumed knowledge’ quality. In a way, that’s also what Milton did with Paradise Lost by reimagining the Christian mythology to fulfil a didactic, moral, and aesthetic purpose; Dostoyevsky did the same with Brothers Karamazov’s Grand Inquisitor segment, Bulgakov in Master and Margarita with Jesus and Pilate, and many more examples that are not restricted to the Bible, such as Greek myths retellings. These works have breathed new life into timeworn mythologies that, being so deeply engraved in our ‘collective unconscious’, have become overlooked.
These are the grandiose and ambitious examples of defamiliarisation, but the common expression of this process is more akin to what Proust or Tolstoy did in their studies of everyday life, through writing techniques that make us see a madeleine or an oak tree as if for the first time. Steinbeck presented the Salinas Valley as if I had never seen mountains, flowers, rain and rivers before. In the first chapter, he created his own version of Genesis, as if preluding the fact that the reader will have to reconsider Nature as well as Man.
Throughout this family saga, we consistently see characters struggling to define themselves against or because of their past. Adam and Charles reenact the myth of Cain and Abel, with Adam going to Eden (his farm in Salinas, which he describes as such) and Charles remaining in Connecticut, in the East of Eden, where Cain is condemned to wander4. Adam eventually repeats some of his father’s mistakes, creating another Cain-Abel situation between his sons Aaron and Caleb. Still, because of Cal’s strength to create his own narrative, the cycle is broken, albeit with a bittersweet ending.
To me, this novel is the best example of how we are always retelling the same story, a testimony to the constancy of humanity's afflictions and desires. It’s the story of the fall caused by a twisted desire to be loved. It’s as if we don't know how to desire appropriately, in fact, perhaps there is no such manner and all desire is a bit vile by nature. Wanting things is undignified to the ego because it's admitting that we lack something and must submit in order to have it. Apart from submission, the other option is conquest, which always involves some form of violence, for which we may be punished and condemned.
That is why it's so difficult to disassociate guilt from desire. Cal's guilt lies in his poorly expressed desire to be loved like Aaron and accepted by his father, which is made worse by his use of violence to get what he wants. Like Charles and Cain, Cal tries to buy his father's love and it doesn't work. But because he repents and realises that this doesn't imply eternal damnation, that is, it won't necessarily define his character, he manages to free himself: ‘Thou mayest rule over sin’.
No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us. What a great burden of guilt men have! We gather our arms full of guilt as though it were precious stuff. (East of Eden, p. 269)
Samuel’s contradiction of being wise and fanciful is why he’s so compelling to me. But the most interesting thing about him is that he's the character least controlled by his desires, allowing him a kind of privileged mental clarity. I don't think Steinbeck is arguing against desires, after all, it's impossible to achieve such self-denial (Buddhists don't convince me), but I do think that through this characteristic of Samuel, he shows the reader the root of our shortcomings when we make bad choices.
Desire – and not an inherently bad character or a flawed heritage – is what stands in the way of making ‘good’ choices. Reason cannot overcome it, therefore Milton (and later Kant5) would argue that acting based on desires is not a truly free act. However, I disagree. I think there’s nothing freer than doing exactly what you desire to do since we live in a society built around Christian morality which promotes repression and abnegation. But I digress, and this digression is thanks to Steinbeck and his incredibly rich novel: all I said were thoughts I had while reading it.
This is the most rewarding literature can be, and East of Eden is a book that everyone should read at least once in their lifetime, precisely because it made me rethink my life and just in time for my quarter-life crisis (I'll be 25 soon). But as I said, it only works if you have the humility to listen, and settle for questions that will never have definitive answers. And just as conquest is the death of desire, philosophical questions by their very nature can never be answered definitively and, if they could, it would be the death of purpose. Life without desire and purpose is death in itself because we need the deliciously painful search for meaning that, in reality, we hope never to find.
George Eliot, The Natural History of German Life
Andrew Lynn, Schleiermacher, Spinoza, and Eliot: Hermeneutics and Biblical Criticism in “Adam Bede”
Viktor Shklovsky, Art as Technique
“And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.“ Genesis 4:16
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
The book club I'm in is reading this next month. I read it 1 or 2 years ago and it was a favorite of that year & I'm soooooo excited to see how the book club discusses it because you're right, it's meant to be discussed!