Fiction and Existence

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We talked a lot about the ethical dimension of Steinbeck's enterprise: is it right for him to write about people with whom he has nothing in common, who belong to a different social class, when he didn't have to work, but instead had plenty of time to write? Was his success ethical, and was he using the conditions of others in order to be successful? To that I want to answer that in describing the condition of migrants, he becomes their voice, and I would say that it is his role, as an intellectual, to identify with the oppressed and to speak for them. It is his role, to portray, even through fiction (what isn't fiction?) the reality of a people, whether his people or not.This he does with his story of the Joads, and more importantly with the “inter-chapters that generalize this family history as a nation's tragedy,” (Warren French, John Steinbeck: Overview.) In this sense, these inter-chapters are just as efficient, perhaps even more efficient than the story of the Joads with whom not all can identify. Or perhaps I was just more receptive to those chapters...

In any case, the question of the fiction, I think, is in no way an obstacle to the either the people or the validity of the novel as depicting a reality, on the contrary, I think the fictive aspect is essential in the common consciousness of a people and in affirming their conditions. In this sense, the people, the migrants, the oppressed, those who have no power in decision making, those who have no power in making history but rather endure it, they are the ones who can live through fiction, through novels, through story-telling and tales, their condition and their story are transposed in the novel which gives them another existence, an existence in the abstract, in the imaginary of all those who read the novel, and slowly become part of the reader's consciousness. The oppressed gain a legitimate existence through words, just as Shahrazade in the 1001 Nights who lives through story-telling; and their existence becomes inevitably reckognized by others. In addition to affirming their existence through words, the novel also creates a common culture, a common consciousness to which all migrants can identify. Steinbeck in a way, seems to emphasise the importance and the role of the of story-telling by describing it as a kind of sancticity as he writes, “The story tellers, gathering attention into their tales, spoke in great rhythms, spoke in great words because the tales were great.”