East of Eden with Philip Bunn & Matthew H. Young

Steinbeck's East of Eden returns the Cain and Abel story twice over, tracing original sin, mimetic desire, and the fragile hope encoded in timshel across the arc of early American history. Philip Bunn and Matthew H. Young join host Nadya Williams to read Steinbeck as political theorist, moral cartographer, and reluctant humanist.

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Transcript

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Steinbeck Opens The Salinas Valley

SPEAKER_03 1:50

I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may leave, and what time the birds awaken in the summer, and what trees and seasons smelled like, how people looked and walked and smelled even. The memory of odors is very rich. I remember that the Gabylon mountains to the east of the valley were light, gay mountains full of sun and loveliness and a kind of invitation, so that you wanted to climb into their warm foothills almost as you want to climb into the lap of a beloved mother. They were beckoning mountains with a brown grass love. The Santa Lucia stood up against the sky to the west and kept the valley from the open sea. And they were dark and brooding, unfriendly and dangerous. I often found in myself a dread of the west and a love of east. Where I ever got such an idea, I cannot say, unless it could be that the morning came over the peaks of the Capilans and the night drifted back from the ridges of the Santa Lucia. It may be that the birth and death of the day had part in my feeling about the two ranges of mountains. So wrote John Steinbeck, a native of Salinas, California, in opening his novel East of Eden, published in 1952. A decade later, Steinbock would win the Nobel Prize in Literature in recognition of his contributions to American literature.

What Makes A Classic

SPEAKER_03 3:28

Welcome to Christians Reading Classics, a podcast from Mirror Orthodoxy. I am Nadia Williams, books editor at Mir Orthodoxy. And today I am delighted to talk about East of Eden with two political theorists who have spent a lot of time thinking about this political well, this novel that is not only political, but is also just a beautiful novel and a classic of American literature. So it seemed an appropriate conversation to have in the summer of America's 250th birthday. Philip Bunn is assistant professor of political science at Covenant College. He is interested in technology and what it does to us as persons and members of society and the church. So Philip, thank you for coming back.

SPEAKER_02 4:13

Yeah, thank you for having me again. I'm glad I didn't scare you off the first time.

SPEAKER_03 4:17

Absolutely not. Matthew Henry Young, also joining us, is assistant professor of political theory at Elon University. He is interested in toleration and apocalypse, mostly together, but perhaps separately as well. So Matthew, thank you for joining us.

SPEAKER_01 4:35

Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_03 4:38

So the first question I always ask people here is what is a classic?

SPEAKER_01 4:44

For me, what makes a classic is classics engage with what we what we might call the perennial questions, which are those questions that you know sort of always have their teeth in us as human beings. Now, what are the perennial questions? Um I'm partial to a list started by uh Glenn Tinder, who has this marvelous little book called Political Thinking, The Perennial Questions. And there he says the all political philosophy has to wrestle with uh two questions. First of all, the origins and nature of good and evil. And then second, he says the significance of death, whether the human being is completely extinguished by death. My undergrad mentor uh would always add, uh, what does it mean to be human? And I think maybe a fourth good perennial question is what does it mean for us to belong, to belong to a nation, a people, a community, a place, to belong to another person, to each other, to belong to a maker. And so um, that's not a non-exhaustive list, but I think classics engage with these perennial questions. And then the second part of it is it's not enough to just engage with those perennial questions. I've written things that engage with them that I don't think are going to be classics, but um to be recognized as uh by a community, you know, as um a sort of helpful interlocutor in this set of questions. And so, you know, as a Christian, the things that stand out to me as classics will be different than what may stand out to an East Asian scholar in a different tradition. You know, that we can speak of like classics in the Western tradition, classics in the sort of uniquely American tradition. Um, and so it's it's the content, but also I think the recognition uh by a community that makes something a classic.

SPEAKER_02 6:51

Yeah, Matt stole most of what I would have said, right? Uh this this idea of uh the things that are perennial, the things that are sort of always lurking in the background, the things we keep coming back to. It's what makes so many of these things we call great books in the tradition uh books that uh you can pick up today and feel like they're speaking into a context now, right? It's a very common experience that my students have that people have when they pick up something like the Iliad or or some you know Greek tragedy or something, that they they find things that that speak to them in a way that they might not have expected uh from something so old. Uh and so uh, you know, as we talked about last time I was here, right, we have this idea of, well, there are there there are the classics in the kind of capital C sense, but then we have these things we call classics or that we're sort of newly adding to this developing canon, and they're the ones that I think, uh as Matt suggested, they sort of um have this lasting influence. They speak to these questions. Uh Matt raised some good ones. I would add these questions of like, what is it that you are willing to die for is a great question that I like to ask students, uh, that I think these great books raise. And of course the corollary of that is what what are you what should you live for? Uh and I think um East of Eden speaks to that quite well um uh in a uh a series of of vignettes of um American life at the turn of the 20th century there.

unknown 8:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:06

Philip you you say this question of like what what are you willing to live for or die for? And incidentally, that's how I encountered this book. And looking back, this is a very funny story to me. I was in high school and I was at Hillsdale, uh I was at Hillsdale College for some sort of scholarship competition. And I I think I was in their student union, um, but I was in some building that you know had a a second floor that had a cutaway to look down onto the lower floor, and I was standing there looking down into the uh lower section, and then on these beams that went across the open space, there were slips of paper with quotes on them. And I picked up a slip of paper off of there, and uh, you know what quote was printed on that slip of paper? Um, it's from chapter 13, and um and Steinbeck writes, There is a great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused. At such a time, it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for? And what must I fight against? And so I picked up that slip of paper and I I thought, you know, it was beautiful, and but it wasn't attributed. And so I took it back to the dorm room I was staying in, and later I I looked it up and discovered it was from this book, East of Eden. And so I ordered the book. And so it's it's very funny that just that question, what must I fight for? What must I fight against is the story of how I encountered this book.

SPEAKER_03 9:53

And these are good questions. And even though they're very much like first-person questions, they are relational questions. And so the idea of relationship that great books call us into relationship with people, even fictional people, and those relationships change us too.

Why Political Theorists Read Fiction

SPEAKER_03 10:13

So you are both political theorists and you love literature. And I've noticed this is kind of common lately, that it seems like political theorists spend possibly more time than just about any other academic discipline right now reading classic literature. Can you tell me more about how and why this happened?

SPEAKER_02 10:34

Um, uh yeah, I'll speak to that a little bit because I it's something I've spent a lot of time thinking about. Because I've taught a couple different times at a couple different institutions, uh politics and literature class, and there's some really good reviews of this. The uh there's an uh article that I highly recommend to people that I assign to students called The The Uses of Literature for Politics by Lee Trapanier in the political science reviewer a few years ago, uh, where he kind of just surveys like why, you know, when and why have political scientists, especially historians of political thought, picked up literature uh in their discipline. And he uh mentions this one anecdote that's one of my favorites, which is uh Alan Bloom and a co-author who I'm forgetting published an essay on uh Shakespeare in a political science journal. And that journal accepted a response from an English scholar that was basically saying, you know, why are these political scientists coming along and telling me what I should think about Shakespeare? They don't have a method for textual interpretation that I should take as valid in the scholarship of the English language. Like, why should I care what these guys have to say about this? And so Bloom and his co-author write a response that says, uh, among other things, that uh political philosophy is the architectonic science, uh, as we learn from uh Socrates and Plato and Aristotle. It is the thing that uh is a question of how we live together in community, and so it unites all the other disciplines in a really fundamental way. Uh, it has to do with education and literature and history and philosophy and everything else. And so my undergrad advisor, Mark Mitchell, liked to say that we political theorists like to uh shamelessly uh steal or borrow from other disciplines and abuse their methods and their sources in ways that would make them very mad, but but we get to do it because that's that's what we do. Uh so I I think um another analogy that I like to use is from Robert Redfield, an anthropologist who worked at the University of Chicago, who spoke of the unity between the uh humane sciences and the social sciences uh on the basis of the subject of both is the human person, right? He says, whether you are uh somebody who is doing philosophy like an ancient stoic, somebody who's writing a novel about a human being, or somebody like him who did like anthropological research in the Yucatan Peninsula, he says, all of us are interested in what is a human being and and what do we care about? Uh and so he says, I can go into the library at the University of Chicago, pull down stoic works, and that guy who in the in ancient Greece or Rome is is speculating about human nature and what's good for us, is doing kind of the same thing that I'm doing when I go do my field research in anthropology. What unites us all is the the human nature and our study of it. And so literature to me is like one of the most useful tools of that uh because we can come to this and not say, well, this is teaching us something that's absolutely true, capital T true. Uh it uh invites us to question what it's like to be a human being uh along with these characters in a way that I find very useful. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:07

You know, the great political theorist Montesquieu, uh, his greatest work is not the spirit of the laws, but it's the Persian letters. And the Persian letters are a sort of travel fiction that where several Persian noblemen uh travel through 18th century France and they write letters. Um uh they write letters uh to friends at home detailing their observations. And so obviously, this is a brilliant like literary device to examine a culture from the outside. But um one of the there's a moment in the Persian letters where Uzbek, who's traveling, writes a letter to his friend Mirza back home, who had asked this question whether men are made happy by pleasure and by the satisfaction of the senses or by the practice of virtue. This is a critical philosophical and ethical question. And Uzbek responds by telling a story. And he tells this story about this really primitive people, the troglodytes. But um, he begins by explaining why he's going to tell a story. And Uzbek says, with truths of a certain kind, it is not enough to make them appear convincing. One must also make them felt of such a kind of moral truth. Perhaps this fragment of history will make a deeper impression on you than philosophical subtleties. And you know, it it is interesting that this story is the most vivid to me moment in the entire Persian letters. And uh so when I teach political theory in my entry to political theory class, we start by reading Antigone. Uh, we read a little bit of the Persian letters, uh, we read a short story by Ursula Legin, and it's for precisely this reason. I think with truths of a certain kind, with moral truths, it's not enough to make them appear convincing. We must also make them felt. And that's, I think, the great power of literature.

SPEAKER_03 15:14

Yeah. Well, and Steinbeck definitely makes really powerful truths felt in this novel. Uh, which um I'm grateful for you guys for prompting me to read it because I read Grapes of Wrath in high school, because you know, everybody does, but I'd never read East of Eden. And it is uh I appreciated a lot it a lot more than I appreciated Grapes of Wrath in high school, although that may be simply being a high schooler.

Who Steinbeck Was As A Writer

SPEAKER_03 15:41

So let's turn to Steinbeck. What do we need to know about him as we approach his work?

SPEAKER_02 15:49

I I would say uh Matt might have uh a more thorough understanding of his sort of biography and and everything. I I don't know too much about Steinbeck actually as a person. Uh I'd love to learn more. I did visit the uh Steinbeck Museum in Salinas uh when I was at a conference in Monterey, uh and it was a wonderful experience. You know, learned some stuff there. Uh he seems like a wildly interesting person doing war correspondence and some other things that are um really compelling. But the thing that most matters to me about my appreciation of East of Eden is Steinbeck's own estimation of it in the corpus of his work, where he says, um, I'm loosely summarizing what he said, but it basically everything about his writing craft, everything he'd learned as a human being, led to this book. And so I also did not enjoy Grapes of Wrath. I don't particularly care for Meissen Men or the Pearl or, you know, all the other things that we could assign in high school. I just don't, I just maybe again, maybe it's a fault of mine, um, but I think this is really something different than those. So if you if you are somebody who has read Grapes of Wrath and you didn't find it compelling, if you've read other Steinbeck and you didn't find it compelling, don't let that put you off of this, is what I would say. Because Steinbeck himself would say this is something categorically different than the other things that he wrote. This is uh a a real, I call it like a lightning in the bottle kind of situation where you can read all his other stuff and you're like, yeah, you know, he's a fine writer. I'm not really tracking with it. And then you hit this, and for some reason, this book tends to just suck people in in a way that I think his other works don't.

SPEAKER_01 17:08

I want to think about the context just a little bit. And I think both a temporal context and a geographical context. And um, you know, I was thinking the other day, actually. I recently traveled to uh Palo Alto for a conference, and I'm there in in um uh, you know, at basically at the head of this valley and or uh very nearby. And at the same time that they're thinking, you know, great frustrations um I might have with California and this sort of its politics and the government of the place. I I was walking around and and on this you know fabulously beautiful day and realizing that that's 300 days of the year there. And that um it would be really it would be really hard to show up in the Salinas Valley and not think that you've encountered something of the promised land, right? And um I think there's a tension there between uh you know, in some ways, California is California is America in a very interesting way, I think, and particularly in like early 20th century California. And um, you know, it it intrigued or I was recognizing that my favorite poet is Robinson Jeffers, and probably my favorite novelist is John Steinbeck, and they were both living just a few miles apart in in the same time period. They knew each other, and they both are wrestling with these sets of big questions about good and evil, about uh what we're capable of, and um really what we're capable of both for good and for evil. And um, we see this in the early 20th century, you know, this is this is America and like in Jefferson, I mean in Jeffers' phrase, you know, thickening into empire. Um, but it's also it's this moment of great optimism, but also maybe reel it realizing that there is a sort of nasty side to this, and that our optimism is also based on um on horrible things and on you know brute political power and violence, and that these things live together in us. And um, I think that's something that runs throughout Steinbeck's work and particularly through this work, that um he really just holds up this question of like, what are we capable of? What is within us, and what can we make of what's within us? I'm very partial. There's this line by James Baldwin about American history, where he says, American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it. And that's something of the spirit of this book, both I think about America and a moment in America, but also about us, that Steinbeck is telling you like, as human beings, we are both better than we can hope for, and yet worse than we can imagine. And both of these sides of us, you know, um both Adam and Kathy are in us. And um there's both uh a saint and a rogue inside both of us. And I think that's um maybe it's the geographic context, is the history, uh, is the time um they're he's writing in. But I think Steinbeck gives us a particularly clear window into that.

SPEAKER_02 21:05

Could I add just one more thing really quickly about if this is just about the sort of what should we know about Steinbeck? One of the things I really like about this novel, I think one thing that makes it a candidate for the great American novel, is this is the period of American literature where the uh author and the narrator sort of uh unite and become the same person, and we're seeing these sort of autobiographical novels develop, and that's what this is. It's a little confusing at times because John Steinbeck himself is the narrator and a character in the story. His mother, Olive Hamilton, is in the book, he's in the book, his grandfather is actually Sam Hamilton, but Sam Hamilton is a character in the book that's larger than life, that is uh his his biography has changed, the date of his death has changed. So he's taken actual figures from his life and his own history and turned them into almost archetypes that I think makes this really wonderful. Um, we'll we'll talk about, I'm sure, the characters here, but characters in this book are often um archetypal and some of them are are flat in a way that you know, the similar way that Dosievski. Or um or Dickens uses flat characters. Like this is a person who symbolizes something, and their development is not the point. It's what they stand for in the story. And Steinbecker does that really well by weaving his own history in California, in the valley, with his own family into this the story. So the Hamilton family is real, they're sort of blown up, the Trash family is mostly fictional. And so it's just it's a wonderful interweaving of all of these things of his own life and the time, the context that Matt was talking about that emerges into this. Like I just think, again, just this lightning in a bottle kind of uh great, great work.

Characters And The Cain And Abel Pattern

SPEAKER_03 22:32

So let's get into the characters. Introduce us to kind of the main cast, uh, what they stand for, who they are, and what especially first-time readers should pay attention to.

SPEAKER_02 22:43

I mean, I I think if you know anything about the book at all, you probably know it's it's a sort of retelling of the Cain and Abel story, but it's a kind of twice-done retelling of the story. There's almost a question of, well, what if the first murder uh was was thwarted? What if what if uh Cain did not kill Abel and then Abel went on and had sons? Uh, how would that memory of that incident sort of reflect into history? And so you have um really the the main two families at play here, the Trask family and the Hamilton family, the Hamilton family, Steinbeck's own family that he he comes out of, the the Trask family, uh Adam, the main character, obviously very laden with symbolism there with his name and his own children. Uh, but he gets to go on and marry and have sons, but his wife is this uh kind of archetypal evil character, and the twins that she births are retell uh his own life, his own story, and the Cain and Abel narrative. Uh, and so we get to see Cal and Aaron, uh, his sons, uh, and their growth as young men and and how they both sort of interact with the world and wrestle with their own destiny when they learn the truth about their mother. How do they deal with uh uh what is destiny, what does my blood have to do with who who I am? So you have the Hamilton family, the Trask family, and within them all of these other characters. We could name dozens of them, but I'll I'll let Matt go off and tell you which ones he thinks are most important.

SPEAKER_01 23:58

Well, I think it is interesting, like you said, Philip, that the story is twice told. And I guess we're doing spoilers, um, but um, you know, uh Adam's brother, Caleb, attempts to kill him and and he survives. And so, right, there's this immediate question like, what if what if Cain goes to Abel in the field and um and beats him senseless but doesn't kill him? Um and um I think one thing Steinbeck maybe sort of suggests to us is that if that happened historically, you're going to have another canonate. Like this isn't a single moment of temptation for human beings. Um, but you know, if Eve resists the serpent the first time, the serpent's gonna come back and maybe it'll be another Eve. But um, I think Steinbeck has this sense like that's inescapable. And so you see um Adam marries and um and has children, and um his children wrestle with the same competition. Uh one thing that you know is maybe worth really thinking about or dwelling on, um, and I think my first read through, I sort of missed this, but um, you know, it's it's suggested um that um uh it suggested that Aaron and Cal are um are the progeny of Caleb, not of Adam, or at least one of them might be. Um it's not clear whether they're both uh you know, what whether one is is Adam's son and one is Cal's son or uh Caleb's son, or whether one is uh or whether they're both Caleb's sons. But um there's something there about the sort of the concept of descent and like how does Adam's sin come to each of us? Um and uh that that's probably worth digging into.

SPEAKER_03 26:12

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Place As Character In The Novel

SPEAKER_03 26:55

Uh, what do you think about the setting? Because my impression, at least as a first-time reader, was that the setting of this novel uh was essentially a character as well.

SPEAKER_02 27:05

Yeah, I mean, I I think Steinbeck said uh in one interview or letter, I'm forgetting which, that um he intended this novel to be uh sort of a record for his own children and and uh whoever comes afterwards, of like his own experience of the Salinas Valley, like what it uh looked like, tasted like, smelled like, he really wanted to make it uh the the background in a way that felt tangible. And I I tell people there are some novels that um well, I've been there now, so I can't say this exactly, but there are some novels that almost make you nostalgic for a place you've never been, uh, which is a kind of weird experience. I had this experience when I read uh Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy. Like I haven't spent a ton of time in the American Southwest, but you can't read that without coming away with just this like kind of deep awe at what the American Southwest and Mexico must be like. Um and I think it's the same way here, right? Especially just the very first chapter. I think this is why this novel sucks people in. Just the description of the valley, the kind of people who inhabit it, the characteristics of the changing cycles of the weather. There's that wonderful uh line uh about that you know they had lean years and dry years, and then they had wet years, and it never failed that when they uh in the wet years they forgot the dry years, and vice versa. That like he he really like puts you in the mindset of somebody who's in this place that's feast and famine, uh abundance and want, and um, it really from the outset just just shaped how you experience the rest of the book. Some of it takes place out in New England, right? And then they travel out to the valley, but that's the place where it's all centered. So I I totally uh yeah, as a as a I would treat it as a character or um at the very least, like something that is um it ought to always be in your mind. Uh, you should always be uh seeing and smelling uh the the the the way this valley is behind all the the story elements, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:47

Right, and it's inescapable how this lovely geographic setting that um Steinbeck writes about so lovingly, you know, is is contrasted with the fact that um that the towns are these like muddy, marshy places full of whorehouses, right? And um that one of the one of the best characters in in the novel, Lee, is an immigrant who's sort of taken from his home, who is um brilliant and yet treated poorly by everyone, um, but Adam, um you know, who's looked down on. And um, so you you do see, again, like both beauty and nastiness. And I think that's in so many ways the contrast, and even the contrast between you know, Sam Hamilton is this um larger than life, better than life, like archetypally good man, and he is farming, you know, rock and dirt. And um, and meanwhile, Adam is in the valley on this unbelievably rich um land that he's laying fallow. And uh so I just think throughout um you see these contrasts, and Steinbeck is trying to make you see these contrasts.

Desire Violence And The Politics Of Evil

SPEAKER_03 30:22

So is this political? And in what way, if so?

SPEAKER_02 30:28

Yes, of course. Because everything is no, uh that's a controversial thing to say that that everything is political or that the personal is political or whatever. But uh I like to tell students um and and and friends I recommend the book to, um, it would behoove you to read another book first, which or really any of Renee Girard's books, but especially I see Satan fall like lightning, uh, which I take as kind of an interpretive guide to this book. It's all about the origin of desire and violence as being mimetic, as being imitative. Yeah, uh that we we primarily come to want and and desire and then struggle over and fight over and kill over things that other people want. And we see this very, very purely in the relationship between uh Cal and Aaron, where uh Cal has this kind of self-awareness of uh he he anything that Aaron wants or enjoys, uh anything he delights in, any love that he receives, he wants to kind of poison it, but it's because he wants that. But then eventually that wanting becomes poisoned itself and he does he forgets that he wants it. He just wants to deprive him of having it, right? There's there's this um imitative or or mimetic element there. So I I think um Girard's interpretation of basically all of human history uh is that all conflict, all violence comes from this tendency of humans to develop these uh mimetic desires and then come to conflict over them. And I think we see this played out twice uh over in this story between first Adam and uh and his brother, and then in Cal and Aaron. Um and and yeah, so I I would I call this like the most deeply political text I can imagine in the same way that like Antigone is political, right? In the same way that that these Greek tragedies have um politics in the background, the conflict between um duty and and justice and and intersecting duties and things like this. It's it's it's all there, it's all it's all steeped with it. Um so I think it could be fairly read as a very political text, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:23

Right. Are we good or evil? What's our inclination? There's probably no more obviously political question than that. And then, like Philip said so uh sort of eloquently, you know, what are the origins of our arguments, of our fights, of our conflict, of our violence, of murder? And I think um, you know, the the this goes back just a little bit, but um there's this one there's this one moment where Adam is talking about his sons. I think um no, it it's uh Lee, I think, is saying this. Yeah, Lee is talking to Samuel and describing um uh describing Aaron and Cal. And Lee says, I find myself defending him to myself about Cal. He says he's fighting for his life, and his brother doesn't have to fight. And so back to the question of dissent, you know, um it's possible that Aaron is Adam's son, and Cal is Charles' son. And um, you know, at one point as they're sort of discussing the story of Cain and Abel, uh, one of them suggests that we're all descended from Cain. Oh, obviously, like Steinbeck's knowledge of Genesis is kind of um a big picture. Um, he misses a lot of details. Adam and Eve have other children, but um but there's this sort of um question like, well, why doesn't Aaron seem to have to fight? Um is he the one of us who hasn't plumbed the black pond within um the black water that's in our soul? And um and then right at the end, it's no accident, I think, for what Steinbeck is trying to suggest about the human condition that um cow is the survivor. Cal is the one who has who goes and lives on. Um and so if there are going to be trasks, they're going to be descended from Cal.

SPEAKER_03 34:49

That's powerful.

America At A Turning Point

SPEAKER_03 34:51

And here we are talking about this the summer of America 250th. So, what in particular do you think we can get from this now? Um what might Steinbeck want us to get from this?

SPEAKER_02 35:04

I I think uh one of the things that makes this a great novel, a candidate for maybe the the great American novel, is it's one of those texts that um I would say contains almost all of human experience. Here you find characters that reflect almost any type of person you can think of, all sorts of motivations, all sorts of lifestyles, uh, and it spans literally the entire continent from one side to the other. So we we get to see some s stuff up in small uh New England towns, and we get to see things on the West Coast. Um I I think that is very intentional on Steinbeck's part, that he's giving us uh almost a kind of Tocquevillian tour of America, and just like this is what Americans are like, and these are the things that motivate them. And and you know, here are the different characters you can expect to encounter on your on your travels and those sorts of things. Um so I I think it's it's worth revisiting because this is very much a turn of the century story, right? So it begins in the late 1800s, spills over into the 1900s. Um, we are in a new century looking to uh uh a new celebration of the founding and everything else. Um, but um uh it's it's really funny um to see like um Adam's father, for example, going uh, you know, he he builds this career off lies, and Adam, funny enough, chooses to believe them despite evidence. He he says, Well, I believe everything my father said, but his father was a Civil War veteran who had basically two weeks of of uh combat and then gets shot in the leg and then makes up uh kind of storied history. But he goes to DC uh and and gets to meet all these eminent figures, figures who are just one degree removed from founding fathers, basically, right? All these old people who knew the people who knew the people who were founding the country. Um and so Adam is very close to the founding of America and he's entering into this new century. Uh in that way, I think it's a very transitional period uh in in the book that that we can relate to in some ways, even though it's far distant from our own time. So yeah, I think all of that, just that it's kind of a uh uh a tribute to all the different varieties and types of Americans, that it that it's this very um this moment that touches so many different periods of history that is still touching our own. I think all of that makes it wildly appealing to us if we're trying to understand what is it to be an American. That's a good reason to read the book on its own.

SPEAKER_01 37:12

And not just are you spanning all these types of Americans, but you're witnessing some of these critical transitions in what it what it means to be an American, which is downstream of what America is or means. Um that like like you said, um Adam's father, his career built on lies, but connected to these powerful people who are really from early America, and um and these juxtapositions of you know Adam and Charles's experienced um fighting, um uh Adam fighting in the West, and Charles really like engaging in sort of um the uh the homestead, uh the sort of um uh small farming model, this agrarian farming life. And and then on the other end, you have you know Sam Hamilton is is a relatively early, um, not the earliest, but a relatively early uh transplant to the valley, and his son is selling automobiles. And um, and so we see like the the transition of the United States, you know, from a um from an agrarian, it's still like moving westward um uh society to a more industrialized society. We see um uh, you know, at the end of the book is sort of in the period of the first world war. This is one of the critical moments I tell my students in American political thought, where like the United States, between the Civil War and the First World War, becomes a centralized like government. Um, it's no longer a confederation or sort of loose assemblage of states. It's no longer states united. It's this thing that's united that is made up of states, um, you know, and um and so I think um he captures this moment that America is sort of wrestling with what its soul is. And I think about this too, like in this moment, you know, um that Adam and Charles's father has this career with the um uh with the uh grand army of the republic that is built on lies. And um Adam and Charles are forced to sort of make what they will of these lies. And Adam lives a lifetime, and you know, I think Lee or Sam or someone remarks that it's kind of funny that this like really good man, uh, he has his faults, but he's he's harmless. Adam lives a life maybe just off of robbery, off of his father's sin. Um are we living in some ways both off of like off of our father's lies and sins? Is that part of what Steinbeck is suggesting is part of America? I I think again he's he's trying to tell us that America and Americans can be both better than we can hope for and worse than we can imagine. And um, and that's I think one thing that brings this back to me as an American novel, uh, much like uh Moby Dick, that it holds these questions up and asks, like, what are you what are we gonna do about desire? What are we going to do about our worst impulses, our maniacal impulses? What are we going to do about our good impulses as well?

SPEAKER_03 41:15

I really appreciate

War Tragedy And What It Means

SPEAKER_03 41:17

that. These are um, again, questions we are thinking about. And there's also the shadow of World War World War II, uh, for Steinbeck himself writing this so shortly after, but also World War I that plays a role kind of towards the end of the novel. Um so it uh I was thinking as you were talking about the shadow of the Civil War um on this novel. There is that sense of um America is both um torn asunder by violence within that kind of reverberates, but also the violence throughout the world affects it as well. So it's like there's all of this, you know, violence within the family structure, like the Cain and Abel story symbolizes this, but then also there are wars. Um, what do we make of this? And how do we um how do we think about it in light of instability in our own world?

SPEAKER_02 42:11

Yeah, I um I'm trying to find uh a quote that I I think uh is relevant here that you know Steinbeck is writing in a time when um the kind of like existential despair is high. Uh if you go uh read the transcript of his uh Nobel Prize banquet speech, uh he's he's talking about you know nuclear anxiety, for example. So he he receives the the Nobel Prize later, uh, and so this is post-World War II 60s, and he's and he's saying, like, we've basically unleashed things that we powers that we uh uh reserved to the gods before, and now we kind of have to wrestle through literature with what it means to be human in that kind of uh age. And there's um uh an uh epigraph or an opening to uh Vonnegut's second uh autobiographical essay collection uh called uh Fatesworth Than Death, where he says, um, and I'm I'm paraphrasing because I can't find the quote right now, that um all persons living or dead are purely coincidental and should not be construed, right? So it's it's a it's a parody of this opening that uh a lot of novels have, which is you know, any resemblance to persons living or dead is is a purely coincidental. And he says, No, all persons living or dead are purely coincidental. And you almost get this feeling at times in uh East of Eden, especially with the ending, again, because since we're doing spoilers, right? Uh Aaron going off to war, uh almost surviving the war, and then dying right at the end of the conflict in a kind of futile way, right? There's no point to his death, it doesn't accomplish anything, uh, even if you think it's a a just war, a justifiable war. Nothing about Aaron's death means anything in the in the context of the story. It's something that his father and and Cal have to go back and wrestle with. Um, and so I think there's there's that, right? There's the the global violence that is so uh far removed from whatever is has been happening previous to the story in the valley, uh, that now is touching all of These lives. And that's something that Steinbeck thinks is necessary to grapple with, right? You can't you don't have happy endings for most of these characters, right? You have several characters who kill themselves and several characters who die horrible deaths, and it's a lot of tragedy. And that this is just the way that life is, and Steinbeck has to grapple with that. And some of that is domestic and some of that is international. And um, and in a time of global conflict, I think that can be uh even more relatable.

SPEAKER_03 44:23

Steinbeck has a bit of a reputation as a um depressing writer. And I certainly thought so when I read Grapes of Wrath as a high schooler. My one impression was sort of like, this is just so, I don't know, like a little much. Um, and there's a bit of the sense of that also with East of Eden. So um is there anything encouraging Steinbeck would want us to think about?

Temptation Hope And Thou Mayest

SPEAKER_01 44:51

I mean, again, not to spoil the novel, but um he is holding up this question of about what human beings are like, and throughout we have these moments where he sort of almost like recognizes like, yes, I'm telling you how bad we can be, but don't forget. Um, so one of these, this is uh in chapter 13, he says, um uh this is you know a common criticism. Uh Philip alluded to this earlier, is like people say, like, Steinbeck's characters are flat. Um, you know, what's with this like Sam Hamilton guy or or Kathy? Um, you know, I I worry that when they do this uh miniseries this fall that they're going to they're gonna try and make Kathy complicated, and Kathy's not complicated in Steinbeck's telling, right? But um, but he says it doesn't matter that Kathy was what I have called a monster. Perhaps we can't understand Kathy, but on the other hand, we are capable of many things in all directions, of great virtues and great sins. And who in his mind has not probed the black water? Maybe we all have in us a secret pond where evil and ugly things germinate and grow strong. And you know, you you read this and it makes you feel icky inside. Um uh and uh he uh sort of writes writes on about that, and um and then a little later, um in chapter 34, he he says, uh a child may ask, what is this world story about? And he says, There's only one story, really. Um, and that one story in the world says that's frightened and inspired us, is that humans are caught in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, and their avarice and cruelty. He's listing all these like bad things. And he says, and in their kindness and generosity, too, in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have, and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last. And so he's saying, like, yes, there's the black pool inside you. There's the black water, there's the secret pond of nastiness, but he never ends there. It says there's also something else in you, and um I wanna I'm gonna find it. I had it pulled up earlier. Oh, it's um Cal is talking to Lee much later in the book, and um uh Cal is talking about Kathy, and you know, Cal recognizes Kathy, and Kathy recognizes Cal. And not just in the sense of like like recognizing that they're related by blood, but recognizing that they're related by heart. And um Cal says, it's like you said about knowing people. I hate her because I know why she went away. I know because I've got her in me. And his head falls down to says he's heart, his voice is heartbroken, and Lee jumps up, and I think this moment is very similar to Sam Hamilton punching uh Adam. Um, Lee jumps up and he says, You stop that. You hear me? Don't let me catch you doing that. Of course, you may have that in you. Everybody has, but you've got the other two here. Look up, look at me. And I think this is what Steinbeck is um is saying to us. He's like, Yeah, America's got Kathy in it, but that's not the end of the story. We have the secret pond, the black water, but that's not the end of the story. We have ambition and greed and avarice, but we also have kindness and generosity. And you know, Lee's interpretation of the Canaan Abel story um hinges on this verb temshal, which he uh interprets as thou mayest. And that that's the the lesson, or that's the hope that um that Steinbeck holds up. It's like, yeah, you got Kathy, you've got cow, but original sin is not the end. Um uh our nature, our our our nastiness is not the end of the story, but thou mayest. You may do good or you may do evil. Um and you know, he says this this actually makes humankind magnificent, that we're not all nasty, but we can choose to be otherwise.

SPEAKER_02 50:00

Yeah, uh uh obviously like that's the passage that I think sticks out to most people about this book. It's where where you get the Mum Mumford and Son song, Tim Schul, which is great. Um, I I uh have not confirmed yet, but I have an strong intuition that Steinbeck was a reader of sort of the Christian humanist tradition. Like, you can't read uh uh Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's uh oration on the dignity of man without hearing uh some echoes of that in Steinbeck. So I have to think that he was at least conversant with people conversant with that. Um I I think too, the the hope element, you you get to see um very complex interactions with grief in the novel that I think are really great. Um and my favorite of them, and I'm gonna try not to get choked up about this, it's great, but uh in chapter 23, um the the Hamilton family has realized that Sam is getting old and they're trying to sort of conspire to uh ease his passing in a way so he's not just like languishing on his farm until he dies, and they they try to make it look like, oh, all of the kids are sort of incidentally, oh hey dad, why don't you you and mom come and hang out with us, and then we'll pass you on to the next kid and the next kid, and so you don't just stay out there on the farm until you die. And at the very end of chapter 23, he tells his son Tom, who had been opposed to the plan because he didn't want to sort of grapple with his father's aging and death, that um he says he he tells him that he knows what's going on. He says, Um, uh, hold this in your dark secret place, nor tell any of your brothers and sisters, I know why I'm going, and Tom, I know where I'm going, and I'm content. Uh, and so Sam is not uh uh orthodox Christian, right? He he he wrestles with his wife over interpretation of scripture, but he has this like kind of contentment as a good man in the story that it's like, I've you know, I've I've I've run the race and and uh I know where I'm going, I know I know why this is happening, and I'm content about it. And it and when he dies, obviously people grieve over him, tons of people attend his funeral, which is almost kind of uh it's an outlandish almost how many people uh 200, I think they say, attend his funeral. Um, but but uh he's this man who's lived in mostly obscurity for for most of his life, but he has a good death, and his family deals with it relatively well. Like his his wife doesn't die of grief, his his kids mostly handle it well. There's some pretty crazy stuff that happens with a couple of his kids later, but like it's it's a really interesting example, I think, of the hope baked into this that you have somebody who can be good in the face of the evil Matt was just describing, who can encounter it, come away sort of unscathed, uh, be a good example to his children. At one point, one of the characters says he he only raised one crop, and that was his children, and it's a good crop, uh, and and and then die well. And I think that's a I find that a hopeful uh piece of the novel as well.

SPEAKER_03 52:30

These are again um ideas reminiscent of the questions you guys mentioned at the beginning of our conversation. The um, what would you live for and what would you die for? And the novel obviously wrestles with these.

The Classic We Wish We Wrote

SPEAKER_03 52:45

Well, our final question is what classic do you wish you had written and why?

SPEAKER_02 52:52

I think the first time I was on here, I may have said East of Eden. I said either that or Brothers Kermatsov, uh, because you know it's it's almost it feels an arrogant question to answer because it's like, well, when you say I wish I had written it, you almost say I I could have written it. But of course I know I I couldn't have. But I'll I mean I'll since we're talking about it, I'll just say East of Eden, where I I think I would love to get to the point in my life where Steinbeck was, where it's like basically the accumulation of the wisdom and mentorship and guidance I've gotten, the development of my craft and skill, uh in his case at novel writing, uh, the knowledge I gained from my own family history, from my life in California and then my my travels and everything else, have given me what I need to produce this, like that, and and I think I've really done it. I would love to be at a place where I could do that with something someday. And so East of Eden is what I would latch on to there. I it it's I don't think it's uncommon, but it it is kind of a funny thing to see a text that the author thinks that like this is my magnum opus, and and people almost universally regard as like, yeah, there it is, it's it's that good. Um, and and wouldn't it be nice to have the the sort of skill and experience uh to produce that and say, you know what, guys, I think this is pretty good. And everybody's like, Yeah, you know what, it is like that'd be that'd be real nice to get there.

SPEAKER_01 54:03

Yeah, I think I'm gonna answer the same way. Um and part of it is because you could say the Iliad. I I think the Iliad is flawless, but I can't imagine being Homer in any sort of sense. You know, I I I don't know, I I have no like sense of what it is like to be a blind bard 2800 years ago. And um so it as much as I appreciate the mastery, um it's hard to like uh it's hard to inhabit who Homer is. But Steinbeck is close enough to us, I think, that that I can read, read it. I've always been fascinated by the Cain and Abel story. Um I I preach occasionally and um uh and uh one of my favorite passages I've gotten to preach on is Genesis 4 and the Cain and Abel story. And um uh I think yeah, the uh I would be hard pressed to identify a novel I would have rather written than this one.

SPEAKER_03 55:13

Well, Matt, Philip, thank you both so much.

SPEAKER_01 55:17

Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 55:18

Thank you for having us.

SPEAKER_03 55:18

I appreciate it.