Do You Wanna Build a Snow-Turtle? (Or Hooptedoodle?)

A merry March the 1st to all. I hope everyone is enjoying the icy remnants of winter, or at least not slipping and falling all over the place as you attempt to go outside. I've decided to talk about hooptedoodle. What is hooptedoodle you ask? Good question. Here is the passage from "Sweet Tuesday" by Steinbeck: 

 No,” said Mack. “Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. The guy’s writing it, give him a chance to do a little hooptedoodle. Spin up some pretty words maybe, or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up in the story. So if the guy that’s writing it wants hooptedoodle, he ought to put it right at first. Then I can skip it if I want to, or maybe go back to it after I know how the story come out.”

From this small passage, I concluded that hooptedoodle is all the fancy things that writers use that readers don't need, or fluff. My first thought was of a story I began in high school. It was about something really outlandish (like a girl traveling to another dimension or something) and I had seven pages just on the girls thoughts about leaving somewhere she had always known (her dimension?) when ultimately I could have said "she missed home ferociously." Was it good writing? I think so, and so did my friends, but ultimately, it had nothing to do with the story. That is hooptedoodle. The long introductory chapters at the beginning of novels that don't make it into the movie adaptions: those are hooptedoodle. All that nice explanation on hobbits and their life is hooptedoodle in Lord of the Rings. If any of you have read the book Bitterblue by Kristen Cashore, every time Bitterblue thinks about her mother or how she feels about her love interest is hooptedoodle. It is something you read and want to skip because the story was good, but it turned into nothing but fluff-vomit (that's what I call it.). 

Obviously authors like Steinbeck have a different kind of hooptedoodle, probably conductive to their thoughts and feelings while writing the story, but ultimately not conductive to the story itself. I think Steinbeck's are his explanations of things we already understand, like Chapter 14. Thankfully, Steinbeck doesn't have too large a concentration of hooptedoodle all in one big chapter by itself, like I did, but he has it sprinkled about the novel. Is Chapter 14 a big one? Yes. Is it seven pages of unnecessary fluffiness? No. I feel like Steinbeck's hooptedoodle is what Booth was talking about in Chapter 4(?) about leaving some explanations up to the reader to figure out. Steinbeck can be very obvious at points about what he is saying, especially in the interchapters. I like that he gives the readers a chance to catch on to what he is saying, but he gets more and more obvious as the novel continues. 

How do you guys feel about hooptedoodle? Where in this novel and in other novels have you seen it and what does it do to the book as a whole?

Tom: Empty Shell?

Every chapter from Rhetoric has brought us to placing various characters into categories and stages of development. Just today, we discussed pilgrimages versus quests and which characters think one or the other. Time and time again, we get to Tom and are not really sure what to say. What is it about Tom Joad that makes him so hard to place? Even from the beginning of the novel, we are not really sure about Tom Joad. He has just gotten out of prison on parole after 4 years. His conversation with the truck driver draws us to keep our eyes on him through the story, as the narrator wants. Why, then, do we not get to see his ideals, fears, and changes as well as we see in the other characters?

There are main characters created by the author specifically to be the “empty shell” readers fit into as the story goes along, like Bella from Twilight. Could Tom Joad be the empty shell we, as readers, fit into? Obviously, there are some descriptions set up as to the kind of person Tom is, but he is relatively vague; Oakie, no regrets, fresh from prison. If this is the case, is it possible that we are supposed to develop along with Tom Joad as he goes through these hardships with his family?

In all honesty, I’m not so sure of this theory. From what I have read of “shell characters”, they usually go through little, if not zero, changes through the story to accommodate the various differences in the readers. If there are changes, normally there is not so much a clear, specific beginning state. In Twilight, (I know. bear with me) Bella does not have any sort of ideals about the Supernatural (vampires and werewolves). She is simply a “normal teenager girl.” Did Tom start out as a “average oakie” and then developed his and our thoughts on migrant workers and their lives during the 1930’s?

Grapes: A treatise?

The Grapes of Wrath is, at least in my opinion, easy to see as a novel and not a treatise. Here is the difference:

A treatise is defined as a work "formally and systematically" (according to Google) dealing with a subject. This is more along the lines of a newspaper article or essay on a subject to bring to light the underlying principles, or creating a criticism of it. In this case, The Rhetoric of Fiction is more of a treatise than The Grapes of Wrath.

A novel is defined as a work of fiction representing a character with "some degree of realism" (also Google), which by far fits much nicer with The Grapes of Wrath than a treatise. The novel, though it may have some bits of treatise in it, can be real, as if another world was created from our own.

Keeping this in mind, what characteristics does The Grapes of Wrath have of a treatise?

The Wisdom in The Grapes of Wrath

Though I have already read this book before, I feel as though there was a lot I missed the first time around. I have especially taken a liking to Jim Casey, especially when he is first introduced in Chapter 4. He has an odd sort of wisdom many people did not have back then. 

"There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do. It's all part of the same thing. And some of the things folks do is nice, and some ain't nice, but that's as far as any man got a right to say" (Steinbeck 23).

The development we can already see in the introduction of his character is amazing. Normally, in books, the author starts a character one way and develops what they will be like for the rest of the book, and though I know Steinbeck does this as well, I enjoy seeing the development that has already happened to the character. I feel like this makes Jim Casey seem more real and less created. He used to be a virtuous man to people in the typical preacher way-- trying to make better people who turn from sin, though he did not follow what he preached. We see, in the deep conversation that occurs between him and Tom Joad, that he has found a new perspective on the bigger picture of life: mankind is sinful and should not judge their own actions and make themselves hypocrites. It takes a very wise man to step off his holy status and understand his own sin. Steinbeck did this very well.

Update: Forgot to end with a question.

Is this development of Jim Casey in line with what Booth says in Chapter 2? Does Steinbeck properly disguise himself to make his description of Jim Casey realistic? Is the story telling itself?