Abstract
The aim of this paper is to reassess John Steinbeck’s presence and significance within American modernism by advancing a myth-critical reading of his early novel “To a God Unknown” (1933). Considering the interplay between this novel and the precedent literary tradition and other contextual aspects that might have influenced Steinbeck’s text, this study explores Steinbeck’s often disregarded novel as an eloquent demonstration of the malleability of myths characteristic of Anglo-American modernism. Taking myth-ritualism—the most prominent approach to myth at the time—as a critical prism to reappraise Steinbeck’s own reshaping of modernist aesthetics, this article examines recurrent frustrated and misguided ritual patterns along with the rewriting of flouted mythical motifs as a series of aesthetic choices that give shape and meaning to a state of stagnation common to the post-war American literary landscapes, but now exacerbated as it has finally spread, as a plague of perverse remythologization, to the Eden of the West.
Highlights
Most of John Steinbeck’s major works, such as The Pastures of Heaven (1932), The Grapes of Wrath (1939), or East of Eden (1952), give account of a remarkably well-known use of traditional myths that refuses to take for granted any sense of truth that might be imbued in those myths—what Pugh defines as a “sense of
As one of the earliest novels published by John Steinbeck, To a God Unknown—
Giving account of the Zeitgeist of the depression years, To a God Unknown is the story of the western frontier laid waste
Summary
Most of John Steinbeck’s major works, such as The Pastures of Heaven (1932), The Grapes of Wrath (1939), or East of Eden (1952), give account of a remarkably well-known use of traditional myths that refuses to take for granted any sense of truth that might be imbued in those myths—what Pugh defines as a “sense of ‘naturalness’ that corresponds to the version of reality promoted by accepted myths and masterplots” (Pugh 2006: 74). This article reassesses Steinbeck’s To a God Unknown as a “mystical tragedy” (French 1975: 179), “[a] product of the pervasive mentality of the Waste Land years of the 1920’s” (170) that represents the story of “[an] America turned wasteland in the Depression era” (Post 1993: 8). On this basis, this essay will precisely probe into the mythical mechanisms that configure this particular image of an American wasteland.
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