Love & Greatness According to John Steinbeck's East of Eden

  “Suddenly Samuel laughed. ‘In two minutes,’ he said, ‘and after a waterfall of words. Caleb and Aaron-- now you are people and you have joined the fraternity and you have the right to be damned.’”

    As the resident John Steinbeck expert on this blog (by which I mean that when I was in tenth grade I read nearly all of his books, so, yeah, I’m pretty qualified), East of Eden has long been one of my favorite books. Novels about multiple generations of the same family fascinate me, and Steinbeck’s brand of this story stands a good chance, in my opinion, of contending for the great American novel. Since the story is long and complicated, the only thing I’ll say by way of a synopsis is that this is a retelling of the story of Cain and Abel through three generations of the same family. What is perhaps most exceptional about it is that it shows the grand scope of love, death and greatness equally as well as the everydayness of living with other human beings. This is the book that, when I first read it at fourteen, taught me that great books are great because they show human experience, and not because professors and reviewers pick only the driest, most difficult books to force on the portion of the population who want to be well-read.

    I read this book every couple of years, and each time the depth of it swallows me up and spits me out at the end, usually crying, trying to figure out how something can be so moving and encompass so much without actually even telling me anything.

    Loving other people is hard. The concrete wall that every character in East of Eden eventually runs into is that no matter how much you love another person and work to show them your love, it won’t always end well. Pain, abandonment, rejection and death: Adam loves his wife blindly, and she shoots him and leaves rather than live with him and her sons. Cal, the “dark twin,” sacrifices all he can for his brother and father, bears their burdens willingly, and suffers arguably more than anyone else for his goodness, because despite his intentions, the fruit of his actions cost his father’s respect and his brother’s life.

    

    Now, probably the most well-known theme of this book is choice. There’s an oft-quoted section where Adam and his two closest friends try to puzzle out the meaning of the phrase at the end of the story of Cain and Abel, when God tells Cain that sin will crouch at the door and, depending on the translation, he must/he will rule over it. The famous timshel story, as told to Adam by his friend Lee:

    “Now, there are many millions in their sects and churches who feel the order, ‘Do thou,’ and throw their weight into obedience. And there are millions more who feel predestination in ‘Thou shalt.’ Nothing they may do can interfere with what will be. But ‘Thou mayest!’ Why, that makes a man great, that gives a man stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he still has the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win.”

    A beautiful and powerful idea, to be sure, but not one that comes to fruition in any obvious way in the course of the novel. The only man who achieves the kind of greatness that earns him fame, power and respect is Adam’s father, who turns out to be a liar and probably a thief. This is not the kind of greatness Adam and his friends are trying to get at with their study. Cal’s story is left unfinished, however, and if its trajectory is to be continued, his greatness will be a result of his choice to love despite his flaws and his failures.

    After my most recent reading, I’m left with this: We’re not promised that our best will be good enough. We’re not promised that only good will come from our efforts to love one another. What we are promised is that, when whatever is going to go wrong goes wrong, we’re left with a choice. What we choose is what defines our greatness.

-Lemon

Societal Standards and the Oppression of a Few According to Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

    As this blog’s resident Toni Morrison expert ( I use the term “expert” loosely here), I found it fitting that my first post be on a Morrison novel. I was telling Lemon earlier today that The Bluest Eye might be my favorite Morrison novel, but in all honesty, I can’t choose. Of the Morrison novels that I love and that have influenced me the most, this one is the one I have spent the least amount of time with, meaning it’s the only one I didn’t write a paper on for my undergraduate degree. However, it is the most recent Morrison novel I have read and I can’t seem to stop thinking about it. Characteristic of early Morrison, she draws on the oppressive nature of the white gaze on African-American women. Specifically, the novel’s protagonist, Pecola Breedlove, recognizes from a young age that she is treated differently, i.e. noticeably worse, than the girls in her community who are considered “beautiful.” She is subjected to horrific treatment by teachers, adults in the community, and her own family. From her experiences she concludes that these things wouldn’t have happened if she had beautiful eyes like the blue eyes of white baby dolls that seem to captivate adults and children alike. Pecola’s quest for blue eyes, for the achievement of the white standard of beauty, leads to her break from reality and, arguably, her demise. Pecola is robbed of love and childhood because of the way she looks that is deemed “ugly” by the standard set by the dominant society. Morrison, per usual, writes a fragmented (rightfully so) and captivating novel that doesn’t just elicit pity from the reader for Pecola but seeks to convict the reader, causing them to reassess their own judgments and actions that perpetuate and uphold unrealistic standards of beauty and worth.

     Again, I’m addressing this novel from the perspective of someone who puts Morrison at the top of my list for favorite authors, but I’m confident in my recommendations because her writing is tightly-crafted and she is profoundly talented in the way she addresses difficult subjects with beautiful words and a captivating narrative that is near impossible to put down. She has earned a spot in the American Literary canon and represents a voice that has often, to the disservice of our culture, gone unheard.

     Morrison of course is representing the voice of a specific marginalized group, but she is speaking to American culture as a whole. The oppression experienced by the women in her novels is a similar prejudice extended towards those who are marginalized due to their ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and nationality everyday in our nation as precedented in our history and perpetuated by a culture propelled by self-image and societal standards. I think this book is beautiful. Yes, Morrison’s books are typically characterized by haunting scenes of human mistreatment and suffering, but there is beauty in her writing and in the honesty she assigns to these scenes.

     I recently reread The Bluest Eye at a time in my life when I’ve been more fascinated than ever with the treatment of women in American culture. Beauty standards are often not thought twice about and just accepted as the level all women must live up to, despite those standards often requiring a specific genetic disposition. I’ve had numerous conversations with my roommates lately about the justification of rape and abuse of women in our culture, not to mention other cultures who face much higher statistics than we do as Americans. Frankly, I find myself in a state of constant frustration about the value and worth assigned to humans based on standards set by a few. Morrison addresses this in her novel with a layered and disconnected narrative that reveals the darkest parts of humanity. Whether you like her style of writing or not, I think a reading of this novel will cause the reader to ask difficult questions of themselves that they otherwise may not, questions we all must address.

     "Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap. She forgot lust and simple caring for. She regarded love as possessive mating, and romance as the goal of the spirit. It would be for her a well-spring from which she would draw the most destructive emotions, deceiving the lover and seeking to imprison the beloved, curtailing freedom in every way."

-Kansas