Monstrous Ecology: John Steinbeck, Ecology, and American Cultural Politics

In the collection of essays, Steinbeck and the Environment: Interdisciplinary Approaches (1997), a range of scholars establish that Steinbeck was an environmentalist. They remain strangely uncomfortable with their assertion, however. Warren French, for instance, asks, "How green was John Steinbeck? Did he simply pay lip service to environmental preservation or did he work effectively toward mitigating ecodamage?" (282). Similarly, John H. Timmerman concedes that "Steinbeck's ethical action is the work of revelation: to make readers mindful of our despoliation of the land" but remarks that "in regard to a specific program to rectify that course, however, this ethic, at least as delineated in America and Americans, is found wanting" (312). Joel Hedgpeth seems disappointed that "Steinbeck is always apologizing for saying bad things and reassuring us that he still loves us all" (306), and Eric Gladstein and Mimi Reisel Gladstein are unhappy that Steinbeck stops short of excoriating an environmental abuse when he "does not want to brand the Japanese fishermen or Mexican officials who permitted the dragging [of the ocean floor] as criminals" in Sea of Cortez (169). Beyond simply diagnosing Steinbeck as an ecologically minded writer who did indeed waffle when it came to environmental activism, how else might Steinbeck's relationship to ecology and environmentalism be investigated?1 The most immediately obvious ways to move forward, it seems, would be to change the mode of critical inquiry from one of diagnosis to evaluation and to broaden the focus of such inquiry until it allows recognition of the complex ways in which environmentalism interacts with other key elements of Steinbeck's work. In the spirit of such a methodological shift, the purpose of this article is to investigate the ways in which the three critical concepts of environmentalism, ecology, and culture consistently interact through the mediator of monstrosity throughout Steinbeck's oeuvre. Investigating the ways that monstrosity mediates the interactions of environmentalism, ecology, and culture constitutes one way of escaping a diagnostic approach to Steinbeck's environmentalism that ultimately offers a much broader understanding of how Steinbeck viewed the workings of American mass culture, why his ecological worldviews and environmental activism stopped where they did, and exactly how high the stakes were for potential radical environmentalists in the mid-twentieth-century United States.2 Monstrosity and Monstrous Figures Near the beginning of Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962), Steinbeck writes that his purpose in traveling across the continent is "to rediscover this monster land," repeatedly using "monster" as a metaphor to represent largeness and mystery (6, 24). This simple invocation of monstrosity, however, is hardly the author's first engagement with the subject or indicative of his deep understanding of the concept. In actuality, Steinbeck's use of monstrosity reveals a rather surprising familiarity with its historicity and its deep connection to politics, in the sense of both broad state/civic governance and in the negotiation of smaller interpersonal relationships. Steinbeck engaged monstrosity, in fact, as early as 1933 in To a God Unknown, with a remarkable grasp of how monstrosity has functioned historically. A significant portion of the novel's plot is haunted by the Renaissance belief that monstrous birth defects-"children born with tails, with extra limbs, with mouths in the middle of their backs" -are caused by the wayward imaginations of expectant mothers (99).3 In addition to his recognition of its historical tradition, Steinbeck's treatment of monstrosity's politics almost perfectly demonstrates that "monsters are ... political beings" who are "chosen with deliberation to do quite specific narrative and social work," including the clear mapping of the "edge[s]" and "normal center[s]" of social groups and the strengthening of the "communal body" through "killing the monsters-in as public and showy a way as possible" (Ingebretsen, "Monster-Making" 26). …