Steinbeck, John: Cannery Row

What a delight to return to Steinbeck's California, and where better than the warm, but ultimately wizzened Monterey. Cannery row is a story about a place and life therein, a place not necessarily like home, but with a familiar intimacy nontheless.

At the Western frontier of the world, in one of the gloomier sectors of America's history, is Cannery Row. No imagery can do better justice to Cannery Row than Steinbeck's own tidepool analogue. It is a tightly-packed microcosm of symbiotic relationships, where each character is as distinct as the lifeforms that populate a tidepool. Each with average characteristics, mundane outlooks and flatlined prospects. But alongside the darkness and solitude, lives beauty, life and balance. The story is about that equilibirum that keeps the community anchored and the inter-dependencies between the struggling creatures that populate the Row. How they rely on one another for life outside existence. Mack and the boys, with their bare-bones lifestyle, stripped of complexities, luxuries and constrictions, Doc with his fine-tuned life-in-statis, and the girls at the whore house with their patchwork quilt. Each esentially lacking the basic glue that binds mankind in intimate relationships, instead binding themselves to the community. Economy figures highly in the daily events, but is carefully tamed and controlled. Simplicity, the very essence of Cannery Row, dictates one input and one output. Shopping away from Lee's store (a wonder in itself, stocking all a Cannery Row inhabitant could desire) is as unfamiliar and undesirable as working in the Canneries. Instead the inhabitants rely on the tidepools.

Perhaps my favourite concept in Cannery Row is the inclusion of a series of interchapters; tiny stories lived in Cannery Row, inconsequential to the plot. These wonderful little sculptures, just momentarily, give you time to blink and see the tidepool from a different perspective. The most significant of these is the story of the gopher, and his doomed paradise - a stark outline of reality against fantasy which stimulates an empathy localised to Steinbeck's tales. The bleak acceptance that the characters have of life within their own world is quite typical of Steinbeck's work; the paralysis of the American Dream; a time when dreams had lost their currency. Though the depression was only transient, it lasted long enough that people had to build a life within it. Perhaps Cannery row is America through a macro lens. A simple story with isolated, grayscale characters brought into technicolor by basic human emotion, resulting in an blurred montage of stunted ideology. Community is a sense quite frequently alien today, perhaps due to a requirement for it that is equally diminished. Steinbeck captures a nook of history and community and lets us wade in it, just for a while. Then we slip off our waders and forget the uneventful, inconsequential life that was Cannery Row as the high tide comes and sweeps it away.