Near the end of Tortilla Flat, Steinbeck equips his writing with a voice brimming with excitement and anticipation. During the great preparation for Danny’s surprise party, the town of Monterey is electrified. As his friends work hard in the squid yard to earn money to buy wine for the party, the news is spread around. Neighbors begin to watch Danny on his porch, and the moment he gloomily stands up and walks away, they are assaulting his house with decorations.
“Why, they hardly waited until he was out of sight. Oh, the twisting and stringing of green and yellow and red crepe paper! Oh, the candles shaved, and the shavings thrown on the floor! Oh, the mad children who skated the wax in evenly!
Food appeared. Basins of rice, pots of steaming chicken, dumplings to startle you! And the wine came, gallons of gallons of it. Martinez dug up a keg of potato whisky from his manure pile and carried it to Danny’s house.” (190)
Steinbeck uses repetition, placing “Oh” at the beginning of three consecutive sentences to create a dramatic effect. Also, an exclamation point is placed at the end of each sentence in the same manner. Phrases such as “thrown on the floor” and “the mad children” give a chaotic vibe to the situation. In the second paragraph, dumplings are personified. They “startle you”. Dumplings don’t startle me, and I doubt they ever will. In fact they’re quite tasty and un-startling, so Steinbeck is also using a reversal effect. The last sentence is the best. You know it’s going to be a smashing party when your neighbor goes to his manure pile to dig up a bottle of alcohol.
Oprah: So in this novel of yours, what kind of voice exactly are you using. What do you want your readers to hear?
Steinbeck: Well, I wanted to show how people are good-natured at heart you know. Anything really that seems mean or evil is usually just a misconception. So to do this I had to keep a positive voice throughout the book. I rarely allowed the characters to get genuinely mad at each other, especially without putting reason behind it.
O: There’s this passage about them fighting, oh let me find it real quick. Here. You write about a party, the last party, in fact, at the end of the novel when the main character Danny dies. You write, “Sometime a historian may write a cold, dry, fungus-like history of The Party. He may refer to the moment when Danny defied and attacked the whole party, men, women, and children, with a table-leg…But I say, and the people of Tortilla Flat would say, ‘To hell with it. That Danny was a man for you! ” (194). Is this what you’re talking about?
S: Yes, that’s a good example. A historian who has no schema of Danny’s life and the lives of his friends together would utterly fail at describing the party. He would write in terms of evil, for example the fighting and drinking. Yet it is impossible for any reader to not feel the joy and triumph in such a climax, because I made sure to keep a clear positive voice throughout.
O: Could you tell us how you created this voice. What kind of techniques did you use?
S: Well, if you count getting the characters drunk on wine every other page…(audience laughs) Well no no, that’s actually a good example, because the wine is a very important symbol. It almost becomes a character in itself in that the characters interact with it so frequently. It becomes an idol, and item that measures content. Many of the day’s goals of the characters result in the purchase of a gallon of wine or two.
O: All right let’s keep our viewers sober (audience tries to laugh). You seem to use an almost biblical form of dialogue throughout the novel, having the main characters use words like “they, thou, art, treatest, and keepest”. Why is this?
S: Like I said before, one of my main goals in writing this book is to show that all people are truly benevolent at heart and any deed concepted as mean is a misconception. Now these characters are pretty rugged. They basically live in poverish conditions, are unemployed, and sometimes don’t have shelter. Yet the entire novel is filled with human life, stories, friendship, emotions, and love. This lovely trailer film http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vWLipA2Si4 depicts some of these everyday experiences. And one of the ways I create these aspects is by using biblical language every so often. It creates a sense of formality and significance. The characters usually use it when they are doing acts of friendship and kindness, exaggerating these deeds.
O: I see. So if you could wrap the voice used in Tortilla Flat into only a few words, what would they be?
S: Ahh—friendly, honest, true, and with a sense of everyday life. It’s really quite horrible to have to confine the book’s goals into four words. It doesn’t do it justice.
O: We know, Mr. Steinbeck, but the TV industry has limits (audience maybe laughs?). We have to wrap up now. Thanks for coming. (To audience) Make sure you all pick up a copy of Tortilla Flat the next time you’re at the bookstore. And look under your seats, everybody is going home with a gallon of wine! (Everybody stands up and cheers and hugs one another).
Steinbeck is incredible. Albeit his wonderful and genius ability to include alcohol into every scene and be still be able to make it interesting, he is incredibly good at illustrating one of his more popular themes, that is humans are good by nature and having a bad impression on somebody is usually a misconception (reminds me of Emerson). The vast majority of his designed characters embody this notion. Doc and Mac from Cannery Row are archetypes in this matter. The many natives met in The Log From the Sea of Cortez also produce a reality models. I think it is a really important theme to understand. Like Obama said, books give the reader the ability to see inside somebody else’s shoes and mitigate.
I highly support the adoption of Cannery Row. It is a great book of beauty and pain, and simply just a true picture of human life and emotions. Plus, its fairly easy to read, but nevertheless contains myriad symbols and themes that are tough to analyze in some passages. The Log is a good book in that Steinbeck can manage to write a whole chapter on the meaning of life during Easter Sunday and still put great meaning into it. My only objection for this book is that it is an extremely long haul. The plot isn’t very enticing (in fact there really isn’t even a plot), and I found myself loosing interest often. If there was another Steinbeck book that wasn’t so meaty, I feel like the summer readers would enjoy the pairing much more.
