In Dubious Battle Read Free Page A

universal level to its most specific. The “philosophical conclusions” usually provide the directing force behind Steinbeck’s fiction; and the increasing emphasis on them is a principal reason why later works like
The MoonIs Down
and
Burning Bright
lack the emotionally compelling storytelling of
In Dubious Battle
and
The Grapes of Wrath:
more attention is paid to dwelling on statement than contriving communicative structure.
    Some critics, like Clifford Lewis, find that even in
In Dubious Battle,
Steinbeck failed to eliminate statement, though it is hard to agree that “Doc Burton’s psychological and philosophical theories nearly destroy the novel": Steinbeck was right in thinking that most readers would not linger over them but would be drawn into the whirlpool created by the downward spiraling of the steadily accelerating narrative. Steinbeck’s shaping of Burton’s comments to the strike organizer Mac, especially in Chapter 8, however, shows how the author was able to avoid a commitment to any reductivist Utopian scheme at a time when such causes were attracting many desperate converts:
    Well, you say I don’t believe in the cause. That’s like not believing in the moon. There’ve been communes before, and there will be again. But you people have an idea that if you can
establish
the thing, the job’ll be done. Nothing stops, Mac. If you were able to put an idea into effect tomorrow, it would start changing right away. Establish a commune, and the same gradual flux will continue (p. 149).
    Burton’s conclusion hits a reader with greater force than ever after the events of 1989 and 1990, when, half a century after the novel’s publication, previously inconceivable changes in the political structure of Europe exemplify the inescapable change he outlines. If anything weakens the novel, it is not Burton’s conventional theories of socio-political evolution butrather Steinbeck’s own dedication at the time he was writing to the “phalanx” theories that are expounded in his second “layer” not just by Doc, but London, Jim Nolan, and even old Joy. These are most succinctly summed up again by Doc in Chapter 8: “I want to watch these group-men, for they seem to me to be a new individual, not at all like single men. A man in a group isn’t himself at all: he’s a cell in an organism that isn’t like him any more than the cells in your body are like you” (pps. 150–51).
    Steinbeck had always been, as he wrote to a friend in 1933, “prone to the metaphysical.” After he met Joseph Campbell, the distinguished student of mythology, Steinbeck became obsessed with the theory of what he first called “phalanxes” in a letter to George Albee in 1933. He had, however, already explained the concept without using the term in a letter to his college friend Carleton Sheffield, stressing that the human race has “qualities which the individual lacks entirely,” using a questionable analogy to atoll-building coral “insects,” which retain their individual identities in an external communal construct like people living in an apartment building. Steinbeck argued that “the phalanx has emotions of which the unit man is incapable,” so that once he becomes part of “a moving phalanx, his nature changes, his habits, and his desires.”
    The problem with applying this theory to the development of the strike in
In Dubious Battle
is that even after the organizers’ oratory has impressed the disgruntled migrant workers with the need for concerted action, the agitators must continually devise further means for maintaining the group’s commitment and preventing defections. New structures transcending individuals fail to establish themselves without constant rhetorical reinforcement, suggesting that mob action is the creation of the manipulators rather than the participants.No sense of amalgamation into the group supplants individual responses. Both the strikers and the growers’ troops are motivated by