Anse

Booth writes in his book about Intellectual writing. “We have, or can be made to have, strong intellectual curiosity about “the facts.” For Qualitative, he says: “a strong desire to see any pattern or form completed.”  Then he says about Practical. “We have, or can be made to have, a strong desire for the success or failure of those we love or hate” (Booth 123).

I believe that Faulkner relies on these interests to help develop desires in the reader. Anse for example is a character that is easy to hate. He is a very selfish person, but he would want us to believe that he is a saint.

Addie Bundren has been sick for a while, lying in bed waiting to die. Her last wish is that she be buried in Jefferson. Anse intends to honor her wish by taking her to Jefferson, but he has ulterior motives. Addie has not been for dead 10 minutes, and he says. “Gods will be done,” he says. “Now I can get them teeth.” (52) At this point it is hard to see if this is really Anse’s motives because, Darl, who is not even home when Addie dies, narrates the chapter.

 Anse begins to talk to Darl and Cash about respect for their mom, who is dead and lying in a coffin. “I says I got some regard for what folks says about my flesh and blood even if you haven’t, even if I have raised such a durn passel of boys, and when you fixes it so folks can say such about you, it’s a reflection on your ma” (105-106) He, talks like he is being respectful and concerned about how people see him, but right after this he says again. “But now I can get them teeth.” Anse is not concerned about paying his wife respect; his ulterior motive is his own interest.

In the last chapter, Cash gives us more desire to hate Anse. Right after they have buried Addie, Cash tells us. “It’s Cash and Jewel and Vardaman and Dewey Dell, “ pa says, kind of hangdog and proud too, with his teeth and all, even if he wouldn’t look at us. “Meet Mrs. Bundren,” he says” (261). They have not even made it back home, they just buried Addie, and Anse has a new set of teeth and a new wife.

Throughout the book we read of Anse selfish acts, and as we see this pattern continue, our hate for him grows, tell we learn the truth of his journey to Jefferson was his teeth and marriage.

Mysteriousness

Ma takes Ruthie, Winfield, and Rose of Sharon to a barn to keep warm and that is where they find the dying man and a little boy concerned about his father’s well-being. Ma tells him repeatedly to hush when the boy would cry about his dad not making it. The little boy mentioned he had busted into a store window and stole bread to give to his father, but his father could not keep it down and at that point his father was weaker than before.

Ma throughout the novel has always been concerned for others. In any way she can help out she definitely will. In one of the Hoovervilles she shared the little that she had of her stew not only with her family but also with fifteen little ones who surrounded her as she cooked. The generosity and kindness comes from Ma understanding what it is to have nothing and also the experiences she has had with people treating her like she was less than dirt.

In the last scene of The Grapes of Wrath Rose of Sharon smiled “mysteriously” once she gives the dying man milk from her breast. Steinbeck used the undramatized narrator technique as he ends the book to help the reader develop his or her own opinion of whether Rose of Sharon went through a dynamic change or a relative change. I believe it was a dynamic change because Rose of Sharon has been through a lot. She was on the road for weeks in a crammed up truck, witnessed the family dog get run over, her grandmother and grandfather died on this same road trip, her husband, after making life plans with her, decides to abandon her (like a coward) and not mention to anyone that he left, and throughout all of this she ends up losing her baby. When the dying man is there in the barn almost lifeless the mysteriousness begins. Rose of Sharon who throughout the novel has been all about her own personal advancement is willing to help a dying man without anyone forcing her to do so. A positive change has come over her and Ma is proud of her for it. Rose of Sharon has done something that is bigger than herself and is becoming like Tom and Jim Casy, a piece of the whole shebang.

Symbolism of the dog to the farmers

I agree with Booth's analysis of direct commentary. When used in the right way and at the right time, direct commentary can be extremely helpful to the novel. The direct commentary in Chapter 13 when the Joad's dog is brutally murdered by a car is a perfect example. The two symbols in this paragraph are the dog and the car.

The dog represents all of the small farmers across the country.They are carefree people who work hard for a living and are minding their own business. The car represents the "man" and the machines that are taking away the farmers livelihood.

The dog's innocence represents to the innocence of the farmers as they continued on with their lives. The cold, mechanical car that is speeding down Route 66 represent the emotionless acts of the "man."  When the car initially hits the dog, is equivalent to when the family is originally told that they will have to leave their homes and no longer have a job. The slow death of the poor animal is equivalent to when the families have to leave and are forced to find jobs somewhere where none exist. The lack of jobs leads to slow deaths of the farmer and his family. During this time, many of people were dying from starvation, a very slow and painful death. The dog did not die on contact with the machine, the animal suffered greatly before his death, just like the farmer does as he watches his children and wife go hungry. The suffering of the dog is mirrored twice in the suffering of the family and in the farmer.The final death of the dog is inevitable and it is hopeless. That is how the farmer feels, hopeless.

This commentary of comparing the suffering dog to the suffering families helps you feel more for the families. A lot of people have had at least one dog that they have liked, or they see dogs as helpless and in need of protection. By making the dog the symbol of the farmers, Steinbeck helps to transfer those feelings of love or protect to the families that are suffering as much as the dog was.

Hooptedoodle

Hooptedoodle is the extra descriptions or words in a story, but I believe it still holds value. In Sweet Tuesday, Mack says:  “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.” Booth states: “If all art is trying for the same effect-a kind of pure realization of another world or a disinterested contemplation of pure form-then obviously music (or sometimes painting, the more abstract the better) should be our model.” Hooptedoodle is the art of the writer. It isn't necessarily needed to understand the story, but it is what sets one author apart from another. Anyone can take a picture of a scene, but it is the artist that paints a different way of looking at the scene. 

Too much of it becomes overwhelming, and begins to be more for the sake of creativity than to actually tell a story. In Grapes of Wrath, the intercalary chapters were similar to the titles that Mack talks about:

Suppose there’s chapter one, chapter two, chapter three. That’s all right, as far as it goes, but I’d like to have a couple of words at the top so it tells me what the chapter’s going to be about. Sometimes maybe I want to go back, and chapter five don’t mean nothing to me. If there was just a couple of words I’d know that was the chapter I wanted to go back to.”

These chapters give the reader a chance to take a peak at theme for the next chapter. It paints the picture, and provides one with the angle used to look at the scene. I think every intercalary chapter could also be skipped, and one could still read the rest of the chapters, and be able to understand the whole story. This hooptedoodle is Steinbeck’s signature for his artwork.

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?

Hooptedoodle

I believe that when Steinbeck used the word, hooptedoodle, he was talking about the intercalary chapters in The Grapes of Wrath. These chapters are important and help to bring depth to the characters, but they are not necessarily important to understanding the story. In the intercalary chapters we get a more in-depth look of the way life was in the 30s, in a more colorful language of the land.

“The surface of the earth crusted, a thin hard crust, and as the sky became pale, so the earth became pale, pink in the red country and white in the gray country.”

Then in the narrative chapters we see how the heat is affecting the lives of the Joads. They end up having to leave Oklahoma and move to California to find work.  The intercalary chapters help the reader see the bigger picture of the times and then Steinbeck zooms in on the Joads and shows how the 1930s affected them.

The intercalary chapters also show dramatization as in chapter five.   One of the farmers says, “Three dollars a day. I got damn sick of creeping for my dinner—and not getting it. I got a wife and kids. We got to eat. Three dollars a day, and it comes every day.”  Through this dialogue the reader gets the bigger picture of how the times were tough for everyone, not just the Joads, and how some were not sticking together.

Booth writes, “We should remind ourselves that many dramatized narrators are never explicitly labeled as narrators at all. In a sense, every speech, every gesture, narrates; most works contain disguised narrators who are used to tell the audience what it needs to know, while seeming merely to act out their roles.”

It is through these hooptedoodles that Steinbeck helps the reader feel more in touch with the Joad family and all they are facing with the land and their jobs. 

Symbolism - Did Steinbeck really mean it or am I reaching?

I have, on many occasions, beat the dead horse of the men-folk "...squatted on their hams and found sticks with which to mark the dust" in chapter 5. Recently, I finally got the light-bulb from what's been itching at the back of my brain-shell every time I talked or thought about the hams and dust-drawing.

Please allow me to refer to John 8: 2-11. Everyone knows "Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone” (8:7), but what of Jesus' actions before he made this statement? As the accusers brought the woman to him and accused her of adultery, he "...bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger" (8:6). After speaking, he again "...stooped down and wrote on the ground" (8:8). There are many anecdotes and theories about what Jesus wrote in the sand, but Jeremiah (17:13) gives the explanation. Despite this, the questions around what Jesus was doing still abounds.

A little Hebrew (Moses') law; when an accused person(s) was brought before a priest, the priest would write the broken law and the names of the accused in some way that was not permanent. The dust on the floor was the usual custom. In John, the Pharisees accused the woman without witnesses (at least two were required by Moses' Law), and stood around chuntering about following the same laws they weren't following. With Jesus' "first stone" statement, he threw the actions of law back on the Pharisees which, in essence, chased them off one at a time.

Now, a few correlations. In chapter 5, The "machines" and "monsters" of banks (the law) was being explained by the owners, or the owners' men. These are the pharisees explaining what the unfeeling banks (Moses' Law?) are expecting to be done. The land is dying and needs to be fixed (are the land and farmers the accused?), and the banks have the only answer.

The men of the fields are on their hams drawing in the dust while the owners (or owners' men) are yacking about the cotton leaching the land (the accusation that the farmers killed the land because they had to resort to cotton to live in the dust?). What are the men drawing in the dust? Are they doodling or are they drawing names and laws in the dust?

The women-folk, sitting in the background seeing how it all pans out, like the locals would do if Jesus were confronted by the pharisees in this public way?

Steinbeck wrote in chapter 5, "The owner men went on leading to their point: You know the land’s getting poorer. You know what cotton does to the land; robs it, sucks all the blood out of it." Steinbeck then writes "The squatters nodded—they knew, God knew." So Jesus/the farmers squatted and drew in the sand/dust, while the owners/pharisees babble on about things they knew little about. And lastly, the squatters - "they knew, God knew" puts the farmers in the same context as Jesus.

The symbolism could be intended, or perhaps the men in Grapes squatted and drew to avoid face-to-face altercations with the owners. With the other religious metaphors and outright insanity, is this another example, or am I grasping for straws?