The Artistic Merit of Working-Class Fiction

Abstract

The Artistic Merit of Working-Class Fiction Daniel M. Mendoza (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution John Steinbeck’s classic work, The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is likely the most aggressive of the working-class novels that is closest to our contemporary period. To discuss The Grapes of Wrath in today’s hyper-imperial America seems so much like an offense, not because the novel is anti-capitalist, but because it is anti-government: the novel strives toward a time before man was a servant of either capitalist or communist governments. Despite its philosophical nature and its constant borrowing of Ecclesiastes, Steinbeck’s most memorable work is at heart a working-class novel. John Dos Passos’s American novels come to mind, but, as each generation passes, his works become more products of their time rather than universal. Today, Steinbeck’s most read novel is likely to appear in a history class than a contemporary literature class. But the novel should be regarded as a high artistic point in American literature. Sure, The Grapes of Wrath is an admirable working-class novel because of its didactic nature. But it’s also a literary novel because, like Moby-Dick (1851), it reaches beyond didacticism towards the aesthetic. There is a certain richness in the novel that is impossible to ignore: For man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments. This you may say of man—when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. In this passage and many of the other inter-chapters in The Grapes of Wrath we are assured that Emerson is Steinbeck’s immediate influence. But the aesthetic complexity of the way man is described also reaches further to anticipate much of what great American fiction is about: man’s tragic conflict with the universe. In this passage Steinbeck also anticipates characters as varied as Death of a Salesman’s (1949) Willy Loman and Henry Miller’s fictionalized-self, as well as contemporary working-class characters like Eric Miles Williamson’s T-Bird Murphy and Joseph D. Haske’s Buck Metzger. The Grapes of Wrath is not simply a didactic novel. To read Steinbeck’s novel as strictly a social one is to deny its place in literary history. Even more so, it is to deny the potential of the working-class as a theme worthy of artistic merit. To ignore novels like Steinbeck’s and those that were inspired by it is to neglect a number of valuable working-class novels carving out a place for themselves in innovative, contemporary American fiction. There are writers, at this very moment, who are publishing books discussing the ghettoes and white-trash neighborhoods of our country with a narrative style that challenges traditional realism—the go-to narrative style of working-class fiction. These writers borrow heavily from their postmodern predecessors, all the while maintaining an eye on the social-political obligations of the novel, as it is understood in America. As a critic who is Mexican-American I often think about my own culture’s place in American fiction, acknowledging that most writers of my skin color will be relegated to the “literary short bus” as Williamson had once observed in an essay on the working-class. In all honesty, it’s one that I have to agree with. I don’t think there are very many writers of color that deserve to be in the literary canon. Could Sandra Cisneros have ever written a book as didactic and aesthetic as The Grapes of Wrath? I don’t think so. I’m picky when it comes to deciding if something is worth keeping on my bookshelf; I’m constantly rereading the classics—not my contemporaries—to see if a newly celebrated work of fiction is truly great. Unfortunately, the one major contemporary Mexican-American fiction writer worth reading is one that is underappreciated. Since the early seventies, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, a writer from the Texas Rio Grande Valley, has...