Cue the Darth Vader music...

Welcome to a special Summer Session of Closely Reading, where we’re slowly reading John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath along with companion reads, all summer long. You’re welcome to join us any time. Paid subscribers will be invited to a live video chat with me at the end of the session, in August. Full schedule available here.

Dear reader,

Today, we’re taking a sustained look at chapters 19-21 of The Grapes of Wrath along with entries 36-51 in Steinbeck’s journal, Working Days.

If you’re just joining us, you have plenty of time to catch up with the previous week’s guides:

→ Chapter 1
→ Chapters 2-7
→ Chapters 8-13
→ Chapters 14-18
→ Bonus post (paid subscribers only!)

As a reminder: you can read any edition or copy of the novel (used, new, audio, digital). Here are my recommended editions —

→ The Grapes of Wrath (Be aware: this edition has deckled edges!)
→ The Grapes of Wrath (Penguin Classic: this edition has normal page edges!)
→ Working Days

Reading this book feels like watching Andor

My husband and I have been rewatching Star Wars, in order, with all the miniseries plugged into the storyline. Right now, we’re just 3 episodes into the first season of Andor, which I highly highly highlyyyyyyyy recommend. It’s by far my favorite piece of the Star Wars galaxy, with the film it precedes, Rogue One, being one of my top favorite action films of all time.

As we started back in on season 1, episode 1 of Andor for the second time together, I was ready with notebook and pen in hand. This time, I want to watch the series through the lens of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and pay attention to the markers of working class fiction, more broadly. Steinbeck has a way of opening my eyes more fully to patterns — and Grapes is full of patterns we see before, during, and after its time.

Andor, the Star Wars miniseries made-up of two short seasons, takes place 14 years after Anakin Skywalker is violently assembled into his ruined, empiric form Darth Vader, and Padmé Amidala dies, leaving twins, Luke and Leia, to be raised on opposite sides of the galaxy. (If that has spoiled anything for you, I’m really sorry.)

In this 14-year space, the Empire (*cue John Willams’ The Imperial March) has not yet assumed total power. Andor explores the empire’s nascent forms, its expansion and finally its ambitious rise…and I couldn’t help but laugh while taking my notes, as I noticed that the world of Andor opens on the very same story we find in chapters 19-21 of Grapes.1

Much in the same way Steinbeck explores the rack and ruin of the struggling agrarian class in the United States and zeroes in on a criminal’s return to home, only to be forced on a long migration… Andor starts with Cassian Andor, a black market adventurer with vague history in the Imperial Prison System, who returns home only to be forced on a long migration.

Both stories are about the growth of the empire across a galaxy, as it crushes everyone in its path.

In fact, I may just need to do a whole additional series on parallels between the two stories, because Cassian Andor is serving major Tom Joad energy in season 1!

Anaphoric rhythms of history

Taken together, chapters 19 and 20 provide perhaps the most overt and aggressive connection between the “macro” and the “micro” that we’ve see thus far.

Chapter 19 lays bare the ideology and architecture of imperialist thinking — the logic of capitalism and its ever-gnawing hunger for power. I felt I was reading paragraphs of Foucault, not Steinbeck, as the sound philosophical thinking and historicization of industrial phenomena rolled across the pages. And yet, Steinbeck used the language of scripture to weave his tale, such as when he writes “And it came about that owners no longer worked on their farms,” which echoes Biblical and religious phrases: “And it came to pass.”

Not for nothing, Steinbeck starts almost every paragraph in chapter 19 with the word “And.” Starting with paragraph 5, I counted 16 times he starts a sentence with the word “And,” as a way of stitching together the history, creating a litany of connections and a constellation of logical patterns. It’s a powerfully repetitive way to relay history, and is indeed reminiscent of religious texts — and historical tracts, too.

In the realm of literary criticism, we call this type of repetition anaphora. Poets use anaphora, which is the repeating of the same word or phrase at the start of every line or sentence, to create rhythm, emphasize key ideas, and also to generate readerly feeling.

→ Learn how Ginsberg, Whitman, MLK Jr., Obama, and others all use anaphora.

As you know from reading Steinbeck’s diary, he was extremely keyed into his desire to evoke specific readerly feelings through his writing in this novel. Here, we see him deploy a poetic technique, anaphora, to exquisite effect.

The rhythm is that of a history being clearly lain down before us, for our understanding. The repetition builds — there’s more? There’s even more?

It creates a kind of mind trick, that when you think you’ve reached the end of the horrible ways this logic unfolds and hurts people…there is always one more layer. And one more thing. And one more way. And one more connection.

Cause, and effect. Action, and consequence.

Pages upon pages laying down the systemic dehumanization of the working class in America — and the scorpion tail that turns back around and dehumanizes the very owners and wealthy; everyone is divorced from the land, from true desire, from family, from the ability to create meaningful consequence from their own actions.

(And if you’ve had Star Wars music playing as you’ve read: do you notice that Williams uses anaphoric melody? Especially in Across the Stars, the same plaintive refrain repeats — from clarinet, to flute, to violin, to French horn — from wind to string to brass, growing in intensity with every repetition. Repeating the same key harmonies on repeat, building with intensity each time, creating for Star Wars viewers, perhaps, the same layers of history and understanding, that patterns evolve and repeat themselves, that it can be beautiful and it can be overwhelming. It can grow and swell, and these patterns can become the whole of everything.

How to resist? When to rebel?

Forty tents and no work

As the Joads camp among their fellow migrants, they learn the only work opportunities are seasonal — requiring them to stay in an eternal pattern of migration, which will never give them stability or opportunity to “settle down” or to become owners of land, ever again.

I got choked up when Rosasharn realized Connie had left her; sighed when Ma had to snap her back into helping the camp. The kids play drunk in the willows; Uncle John can’t live with himself; Casey sacrifices himself for Tom. I care so deeply about this group of people and yet, I know nothing good awaits them.

The difference is that, now, 300 pages into the novel, they’ve started to consciously reckon with the fact they know nothing good awaits them, too.

The faces of the starving children. The cops with a quota to hit on arrests. The homegrown militia, willing to kill to protect their government-run camp with hot water in the pipes.

The end of chapter 21 is a great foreboding.

Like the dust-addled skies in the opening of the novel, there is a dangerous horizon ahead — foggy and uncertain, but 100% manufactured by imperial pursuits.

Get closer to the story

Try these exercises to get even closer to your favorite scenes and passages this week.

1. Review your notes. Open your copy of the novel to any of the chapters we’ve read so far. Review your annotations, look at your notes and what you’ve underlined. Check-in with yourself. What themes are you consciously tracking? Which ones emerge from your annotations that you haven’t named yet?

2. Transcribe a scene. When I have writer’s block, my favorite way to get unstuck is to grab a favorite novel off the shelf and simply copy a paragraph down, word for word, into my notebook. Watching the language flow onto the page is like a kind of…Goo Gone for your brain. It loosens up the sticky bits; makes it simpler to clean up your intentions and get back to writing.

3. Annotate something new. This week, when you sit down to watch a TV show at night or when you turn on an album in the morning, when you click to an article online or when you watch a favorite YouTube channel…annotate it. Even if just inside your head. Take a few notes on it. How is it constructed? What made you choose it? What do you like about it? Where does it grab, or lose, your interest?

See you in the comments…

Let’s talk about this week’s chapters! If you’ve given any of my recommended exercises a chance, I’d love to hear about it. My DMs are always open!

📖 See all my annotations from this week in a special bonus issue

Later today, a special paid-only issue of this week’s guide will drop, featuring photos of all of my notes from this week’s reading, plus all of my annotations in chapter 20.