HEADS ON
THE ROAD: JOHN STEINBECK
by
Raluca Tanasescu
“A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you
control it.” – John Steinbeck
In 1768, Laurence Sterne gave a very thorough classification of
travelers in his A Sentimental Journey
Through France and Italy:
“…the whole circle of travellers may be
reduced to the following heads: Idle Travellers, Inquisitive Travellers,
Lying Travellers, Proud Travellers,
Vain Travellers, Splenetic Travellers.
Then follow: The Travellers of Necessity, The
Delinquent and Felonious Traveller, The Unfortunate
and Innocent Traveller, The Simple Traveller, And last of all (if you please) The Sentimental Traveller…” (Sterne, 40-41).
The traveler is thus a head,
which means that travel is very much related to our mind and soul. More than
one hundred fifty years later, Romanian novelist Garabet
Ibrăileanu,
was talking about other types of travelers, in his novel Adela—the book traveler and the erotic traveler. Literary critic
Antonio Patras relates the two journeys to the evolution stages of the male
character towards his own personalism. (Patras, 177)
However, although tourism in the Old World began as an imitation of the
epic and was given more impetus by the Baconian
notion that travel educates modern tourism in America was actively promoted by
the conditions of the twentieth-century train and boat travel, but emerging
from journeys by car.
The American tourist became the icon of mass tourism of the post-war
age—a tourism, which was commonly perceived as exogenous to “real” life,
lacking in depth and seriousness, and unworthy of serious intellectual or
scientific concern. In his highly influential book, Dean MacCannell
suggests that it was mass tourism that led to the custom of travel as a search
for “authenticity,” which ironically made contemporary travelers do the same
things while touring. In this context, instead of aligning himself with the
anti-establishment writers like Jack Kerouac or Paul Bowles, or to the
representatives of the emerging New Journalism, who rebelled against any
homogenized form of experience, Steinbeck left on a journey in which his final
outcome was to know better the country that was experiencing mass tourism,
consumerism, pollution, and sameness.
Interestingly enough, the period 1945-1960 predates the dates commonly
given for the beginning of post-modernity (Harvey, 1991; Katz and Kirby, 1991).
Despite this, there are many common threads between the world of the post-war
counterculture and the characteristics of postmodernism. The lack of faith in
established ‘truths’ and traditions, including those associated with space and
place, is strikingly similar to the refusal of authority in post-modern
culture. Steinbeck’s nonfiction does not qualify as postmodern, nor does it
belong to the post-war counterculture. Sherril’s
contention is that post-war
American narratives of domestic travel, novels with road plots and
non-fictional journeys roughly in the Travels
With Charley tradition, constitute a reappearance
and significant transformation of the old literary form of the picaresque
narrative (Goluboff, 213). Steinbeck’s travel
narrative collides strikingly with the narrative of the Beats or of the New
Journalists – his travel is autobiographical, his vision focuses away from
himself. Travels with Charley is a
combination of picaresque adventure and highway narrative set in modern times
and initiated by an individual who simply wants to ‘kill’ the monster, to
conquer his land by getting to know it better. At the middle of the century, he
establishes a new direction in travel writing which will be continued by
writers likes William Least Heat-Moon, by environmentalists or nature travel
writers like John McPhee and Peter Matthiessen or by the more recent authors of digital
communities on travel.
Steinbeck’s picaresque quest takes the form of travel and never ceases.
At the same time, the urge to travel levels the periods of his life, while the
reason why he does it clearly differentiates him from his Beat fellows, whose
inner and outer worlds would very often collide:
“When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I
was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years
describe me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I
was assured that greater age would clam my fever and now that I am fifty-eight
perhaps senility would do the job. Nothing has worked. […] I fear the disease
is incurable.” (Steinbeck, 1)
He does not run away from anything, neither does he protest against in
economy, politics, and economies, or migratory patterns, on the contrary, he
accepts and tries to understand them, while also incorporating them into his
writing; however traveling means liberation and a sense of freedom. His journey
is a quest, yet it is very carefully planned in advance; however, he finds that
“we do not take a trip; a trip takes us” (Steinbeck, 2). The technicalities of his
journey are predictable and dealt with in advance, but he knows that no two journeys are
alike. Moreover, the journey does not take him away from the world, neither
does it portray a world of exiles, but its purpose is integration, wholeness,
and meaning.
To understand Steinbeck’s writing, especially Grapes of Wrath (1939), Sea
of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research
(1941), or Travels with Charley, In
Search of America (1957), it is vital to understand his background, the
country in which he grew up and which he wrote about. “More perhaps than any
other contemporary American writer, except William Faulkner, his writing has
grown out of a special region […] that contains such polar extremes as the hard
materialism of Salinas and the bohemianism of the Peninsula.”, says Freeman Champney in his review of Steinbeck’s travels (Champney, 347). Indeed, the author was born in and heavily
influenced by the Western culture in Central California (
His background and life do not qualify him as a picaresque hero, a
roguish guy from a low social class—Steinbeck was not an intellectual, but a
quite typical middle-class American with an extraordinary unique gift for
writing, as well as a spokesman for an usually inarticulate majority, maybe the
last representative American to speak with an authentic voice rather than one
processed by image-making media. He was not living by his wits in a corrupt
society—at the beginning of the book, he describes his
life as being quite comfortable: a cottage on the hill, a loving wife, a
twenty-two-foot cabin boat called Fayre Eleyne. Nor is he an anti-hero—on the contrary, he sets out
on a journey which is meant to make him get closer to his land, his nation, and
his nation’s values, in a period in which the quest for authenticity was an
endeavor for alienated outsiders—“This monster of a land, this mightiest of
nations, this spawn of the future turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm
me.” (Steinbeck, 209) Zelinsky (1973) described
mobility as one of the four defining characteristics of ‘American’ character
and how this characteristic was reflected in a landscape of highways and strip
developments. However, in a decade in which the Beat mobility meant resistance
to the ‘establishment’, Steinbeck embarks on a neo-transcendentalist journey
towards self-fulfillment, which is, however, an option only for those
privileged by at least a modicum of economic and social security.
“Thus I discovered I did not know my own country. I, an American writer,
writing about
Unlike many traveler drivers, who leave behind them the suffocating
city, either grimy and industrial or bourgeois and restrictive, to seek a truer
self, free and independent, amidst the simplicity or the grandeur of nature and
of those who live closer to nature, in 1960, Steinbeck did not choose a
comfortable and/or unworthy ride, but one which could help him hear the accents
of various people in various parts of the country so that his writing could
improve. He decided in midlife that he needed to reacquaint himself with his
country, so he got into a camper with his dog, Charley, and spent many months
traveling throughout the
We have established so far that Steinbeck does not drive the highway to
sameness. But he does travel the highways built by the changes in technology,
at the same time musing about their ineffectiveness and aggressiveness:
“From the beginning of my journey, I had avoided the great high-speed
slashes of concrete and tar called “thruways” or “super-highways.” […] I sought
out U.S. 90, a wide gash of super-highway, multiple-lane carrier of the
nation’s goods. […] Instructions screamed at me from the road once: “Do not
stop! No stopping. Mountain speed.” Trucks as long as
freighters went roaring by, delivering a wind like the blow of a fist. […] When
we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be
possible to drive from
His road trip makes use of the most modern gadgets and devices: he
outfitted Rocinante, the “three-quarter-ton pickup
truck equipped with miniature ship’s cabin” as a sort of land yacht and set off
from his home in Sag Harbor, N.Y., with his French poodle, Charley, to drive
cross-country. He is mindful of Rocinante’s
materiality, of the stultifying labor involved in its manufacture and of the
intrinsic worth and essential dignity of its technology:
“…a fast, comfortable vehicle, mounting a camper top—a little house with
double bed, a four-burner stove, a heater, refrigerator and lights operating on
butane, a chemical toilet, closet space, windows screened against
insects—exactly what I wanted.” (Steinbeck 7)
He chooses the name on purpose and makes a direct allusion to
Cervantes’s novel—“I named it Rocinante, which you
will remember was the name of Don Quixote’s horse ” (Steinbeck, 7), but does not display it on
the side of the camper, as it “would cause curiosity and inquiry in some
places.” (Steinbeck 7) He takes again
distance from the Beat writers, whose cars would display day-glow paint or
graffiti – he does not want to elude the boundaries of mainstream culture, nor
does he want to penetrate people’s consciousness, but to make
Steinbeck does not leave alone, which breaks the convention according to
which travel writers journey in solitude. But he doesn’t look for a human
companion, like many of the Beatniks, because “two or more people disturb the
ecologic complex of an area. I had to go alone and I had to be self-contained,
a kind of casual turtle carrying his house on the back.” (Steinbeck 6) He sets out in search of
He would stay at campgrounds and reconnect himself with the country by talking
to the locals he met along the way. Avoiding most of the tourist sights, Steinbeck sought out the mundane, funny, depressing
and beautiful corners of what he describes as “this monster land.” (Steinbeck
6) He leaves his home in
The only reference he makes about his own consciousness is when he
speaks about his need to reimmerse himself in the
materiality of American experience. He fascinated by the exterior world, by the
variety of characters he meets, most of them middle-class people, by the
dialects and differences in voiced languages. Breakfast with truckers was one
of his delights in all states. Forever on the move, truckers are the kind of
people that particularly appeal to his restless nature. But in
Unlike the picaresque novels, Steinbeck is rather a spectator than a
participant or a front-line observer. He is not a vagabond, but he has a
pre-planned itinerary, even if he doesn’t like maps:
“For weeks I had studied maps, large-scale and small, but maps are not
reality at all—they can be tyrants. I know people who are so immersed in road
maps that they never see the countryside they pass through, and others who,
having traced a route, are held to it as though held by flanged wheels to
rails.” (Steinbeck 23)
None of his books can be fully understood unless the characters are seen
to develop in relationship to the places in which they move. Travels with Charley makes no exception:
“as long as he follows the Canadian border towards the occident, Steinbeck’s
reactions are eager, and interested, but when he turns from
For Steinbeck, travel is illuminating and the perfect opportunity to
find inspiration in observation of the natural world; he also wrote frequently
about the importance of seeing. He differed from many other major writers of
his time in not spending his apprenticeship abroad, but instead living on and
writing about his native soil in
Going back to reshaping the picaresque tradition, the structure of the
book follows the same lines: the episodic, ambulatory first-person
(autobiographic) narrative concerns not a young man, but a writer in his
mid-fifties (who could be regarded as an anti-hero by literary standards), who
leaves home because of an ideal (in this case to conquer the language of his
own country) and goes through impoverished circumstances as defined by the
contemporary world (flat tires, moldy motel rooms, etc), also meeting various
ruffians and meanwhile reaching his goal in the process. Unlike his literary
picaresque forebears, he does not reciprocate any deceits he has along the way,
but remains passive at all times and only incorporates his experience learning
all the while.
Humor is yet another element that Travels
with Charley shares with the picaresque narratives. It mainly comes from
irony and from Steinbeck’s dialogues with Charley, as well as from the
descriptions he makes of himself or of his dog – Charley is almost human and he
makes “Ftt!” with his old badly grown teeth whenever
he is not satisfied. Sometimes, his travel experience is not that comfortable,
so he turns into an unrelenting and amused observer.
By getting to know America better, Steinbeck created a kind of travel
narrative that is sympathetic to the American experience, in the tradition of
his formers writings. The emerging New Journalism, a reaction, even rebellion,
to the established mass circulation press and to the culture and politics that
press represented, doubled by the attitude of the Beat writers in literature and
by the beginnings of postmodernism, was reshaping the travel narrative of the
early 20th century. In this context and on a separate note,
Steinbeck’s travel non-fiction does not express rebellion against sameness, but
a desire to become more familiar with his land, his nation, and the speech of
his people, as language stands for a writer’s authenticity. Steinbeck reshapes
the American travel writing by making use of both a contemporary kind of
narrative, that of the highway, and of the revenant tradition of the picaresque
novels.
References:
Bendixen, Alefred and Hamera, Judith, The
Benson, Jackson J., “Steinbeck and the Environment: Interdisciplinary Approaches
by Susan F. Beegel; Susan Shillinglaw;
Wesley N. Tiffney,; Elaine Steinbeck”,
Blanton, Casey, Travel Writing:
The Self and the World,
Champney, Freeman, “John Steinbeck, Californian”, The
Goluboff,
Benjamin, American Studies, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Spring 2001), pp. 212-213.
Harvey, David, The Condition of
Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Wiley-Blackwell, 1991
Katz, Cindi and Kirby, Andrew, “In the Nature
of Things: The Environment and Everyday Life”, Transactions of the
Patras, Antonio, Ibraileanu. Catre o teorie a personalitatii, Bucuresti, Cartea Romaneasca, 2007
Ridgeway, James, “The New Journalism”, American Libraries, Vol. 2, No. 6
(Jun., 1971), pp. 585-592
Sherrill,
Rowland A., Road-Book America:
Contemporary Culture and the New Picaresque, Urbana, University of Illinois
Press, 2000
Steinbeck, John, Travels
with Charley, in Search of America, Penguin, 1980
Thompson,
Francis J., “Travels with Charley, In Search
of
Zelinsky,
Wilbur, The cultural geography of the
United States, Englewood Cliffs, Prentice Hall, 1973
[1] A term coined by Casey Blanton in her comprehensive study Travel Writing: The Self and the World.