The Winter of Our Discontent Read Online Free PDF Page B

is dedicated to his older sister, Beth, “whose light burns clear.” Steinbeck’s women often embrace humanistic, life-giving tendencies that men sometimes ignore: Aunt Deborah’s rigid morality, for example, or Ellen’s insistent whisper of good faith, or even Margie Young-Hunt’s brutal honesty, a woman who understands Ethan better than anyone save Danny. Might it be that in establishing these writerly ties to his own family, he grounded his text in the imperiled values of his youth—what was most at risk, in his mind, in 1960s America?
    The epigraph to Steinbeck’s novel reads: “Readers seeking to identify the fictional people and places here described would do better to inspect their own communities and search their own hearts, for this book is about a large part of America today.” He throws down the gauntlet for any attentive reader: Participate in the full range of Ethan’s textual echoes, verbal antics. Listen. Take heed.

III. READING THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT : LANGUAGE AND CRITICAL RESPONSE
    “Words should be wind or water or thunder.”
(John Steinbeck, 1962)
“Any critic knows it is no longer legal to praise
John Steinbeck.”
( Newsweek , 1961)
     
A word about the book’s language. The remarkable and perplexing quality of Steinbeck’s final novel is Ethan Allen Hawley’s voice, and one is tempted to post a cautionary epigraph: “Not The Grapes of Wrath .” It’s a many-voiced narrative, with cultural references shifting, colliding, undercutting one another. If Ethan echoes Christ, Judas, Cain, Richard III, and J. Alfred Prufrock, a solitary night walker, he is also Melville’s Ishmael, basically decent, down on his luck, and an extravagantly verbal narrator who filters and combines voices and ideologies. Steinbeck ensnares the reader in Ethan’s verbal webs—his sharp intelligence and broad learning, his charm, his dangerous forays into wickedness. His speeches shift in tone and audience and intention with dizzying speed, as Ethan remembers and hears and engages the voices of the cacophonous present, the urgent past, the slick future.
    Ethan’s voice is alternately silly, sermonic, passionate, reflective. He loves puns (“the Morphy law” or wife Mary as his “holy quail”) and conversations with dogs. He taps into his unconscious at “the Place” near the sea. He channels voices from his ancestral and national past, from his morally unsteady present, from a tentatively promising future in his daughter. He sermonizes with canned peaches. Each verbal exchange is loaded with an array of social and mythical attitudes and nuances: “I’ve thought so often,” Ethan muses, “how telling changes with the nature of the listener.” In shifting moods for each auditor, Ethan forces attention to language. Technique becomes a statement of the bewildering attitudes and cultural contexts of the modern world, “a time of confusion.” Ethan’s controlling voice subverts any cultural norm or tradition he engages; he speaks extravagantly because he acts extravagantly in detaching himself from his associates and, at the same time, subverting the very notions they embrace.
    A single example. His most intimate discourse is, tellingly, his least convincing, heard in the pillow talk between Ethan and his wife on the opening page, where Ethan calls Mary by a range of sweet endearments, “Miss Mousie,” “chicken-flower,” and “ladybug.” And even as he speaks in this mincing, often wry and witty voice, he mixes in “Pilgrim talk,” religious references to Good Friday; “pirate talk,” acknowledging the ruthlessness of humanity; and, on the second page of the novel, swearwords and bitter phrases that lend testimony to his sense of personal defeat. This language keeps Mary separate. She repeatedly accuses him of catching people in “word traps” or “hiding” in his words. He lies to her about his intentions for her money. And Mary, for her part, is a bit thick: She speaks