215 영어영문학연구 제40권 제4호 (2014) 겨울 215－234 The Connotation of Collecting and Rent Shown in Steinbeck’s Monterey Triumvirate: Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, and Sweet Thursday Geongeun Lee (Chosun University) Lee, Geongeun. “The Connotation of Collecting and Rent Shown in Steinbeck’s Monterey Triumvirate: Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, and Sweet Thursday.” Studies in English Language & Literature. 40.4 (2014): 215-234. In these days of capitalist fetishism, Steinbeck’s Monterey triumvirate (Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, and Sweet Thursday) is well known as a prominent satire of the traditional capitalism, and for showing the writer’s realistic naturalism and moral optimism. Although the novels are blamed for too many anecdotes and oversimplification, they have given us gentle and unadorned moral lessons and pleasure. Paying attention to that fact that the characters of the triumvirate are particularly absorbed in collecting and rent, this paper aims to compare and analyze the connotation of the concepts in the text, and to illuminate Steinbeck’s view of justice by treating American dream and its paradox, and by using historical facts, and Hanna Arendt’s and Richard Dawkins’s idea. (Chosun University) Key Words: John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday, Monterey Novels I. Introduction At the end of the film1 of Death of a Salesman, Linda talks to her dead man, “I made the last payment on the house (or rent) today. We are free. We are free.” And Charley, Willy’s best friend, says, “He’s a man way out 1 referred to Death of a Salesman. Umbrella Entertainment, 2001. 216 Geongeun Lee there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. A salesman is got to dream.” He compares a salesman with a heroic, courageous sailor with nothing to guide him and the only mission that he can and must make a living. Lacking confidence in his image as a salesman and getting into a disused talking machine, Willy still went out and tried his best, because he had to collect money for the rent of his house. In other words, his job as a salesman forced him to follow it rather than he should have done the job for himself, nevertheless, he believed this American Dream would make him richer some day. These kinds of paradoxes of American Dream of Arthur Miller’s are shown with the same theme of rent and collecting in Steinbeck’s many fictions and non-fictions. Steinbeck’s Monterey triumvirate—Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, and Sweet Thursday—is imbued with the statements and the situations that apparently contradict themselves and yet might be true. The triumvirate might be called a comedy and tragedy, a sad and happy story, an illegitimate and moral story, and a series about the poor in money and the rich in heart. Roughly speaking, this duality continued from 1935 to 1954 for the three novels whether Steinbeck intended to do so or not. In short, the characters of the triumvirate are obsessed with rent and collecting, and the considerable part of it is described in the concepts of rent and collecting. In this paper, collecting means the activity itself, whether the objects of collecting are money, specimen, frogs, wine, or any other belongings. And the concepts of rent and collecting are used in the duality of affirmative and negative meaning, suggesting that capitalism can also be interpreted in the same way. Especially, his poor characters who live under the control of capitalism and its paradox are the main objects that the writer loved most. For example, Steinbeck was very glad to get Commonwealth Club award in 1935, but wanted his book, Tortilla Flat to be the winner. Steinbeck The Connotation of Collecting and Rent Shown in Steinbeck’s Monterey Triumvirate 217 seemed to be trying to point out that “in the complexity of modern life, simple pleasures like freedom and friendship are often overlooked in favor of luxury and comfort” (Parini 202). In this perspective, Steinbeck praises his bums of Cannery Row outspokenly like this: Mack and the boys are the Beauties, the Virtues, the Graces. In the world ruled by tigers with ulcers rutted by strictured bulls, scavenged by blind jackals, Mack and the boys dine delicately with the tigers, fondle the frantic heifers, and wrap up the crumbs to feed the sea gulls of Cannery Row. What can it profit a man to gain the whole world and to come to his property with a gastric ulcer, a blown prostate, and bifocals? Mack and the boys avoid the trap, walk around the poison, step over the noose while generation of trapped, poisoned, and trussed-up men scream at them and call them no-goods, come-to-bad-ends, blots-on-the-town, thieves, rascals, bums.2 (CR 18) We label the misfits of capitalism born losers. They are called “bankrupts, deadbeats, broken men, down-and-outers, bad risks, good-for-nothings, no-accounts, third-raters, flunkies, little-men, loafers, small fries, small potatoes, old fogies, goners, flops, has-beens, never-do-wells, nobodies, forgotten men” (qtd. in Sandage 6). And folks often invent slangs to make sense of their economic crisis, and busted merchants were yowling that they were “flat broke, dead broke, up a tree, hand to mouth, hard up, hard pushed, or hard run. They were obliged to face the music, go through the mill, wind up, peter out, flunk out, flat out, fizzle out, or go to smash” (Ibd. 25). Steinbeck observed and described not only this dark side of capitalism, but also the poor people’s small dreams in the triumvirate. And the hope is filled mainly by the mode of collecting. For example, in Cannery Row, 11 chapters out of 32 show 2 John Steinbeck. Cannery Row. Penguin, 1994. (CR. hereafter) 218 Geongeun Lee Mack and the boys’ expedition of collecting for frogs, and the retry for Doc’s party by collecting treats. Even after about 60 years have passed since the last of the Monterey triumvirate, Sweet Thursday, was written, the tendencies of American dream and its paradox are still with us, and we believe that we might be richer and better with our efforts and luck despite all the failure and frustration. And we can observe that the time gaps of Tortilla Flat (1935), Cannery Row (1945), and Sweet Thursday (1954) are so huge that they inevitably have a historical change in the attitude to the concepts of rent and collecting for a metonym of American capitalism. Briefly speaking, the first novel is about the simple life before capitalism, and the second one is about the more complex life after capitalism, and the third one misses the first life after mature capitalism. In short, the connotation of rent and collecting Steinbeck might intend is “justice”, which means that we should not forget our simplicity before materialism, love downtrodden people as an extended familism while respecting our civilization called capitalism. This paper aims to compare and analyze the concepts of rent and collecting based on the text of the Monterey Triumvirate along the historical change for nineteen years, and to illuminate Steinbeck’s view of justice by treating the topic of rent and collecting with American Dream and its paradox. II. The Connotation of Rent in Monterey Triumvirate The collapse of the manorial system in England caused lords to select between transferring their land to the owners of means of production, who are eager to valorize the sum of value they have appropriated by buying The Connotation of Collecting and Rent Shown in Steinbeck’s Monterey Triumvirate 219 the labor power, and hiring free workers for their land, who are content just with the freedom to sell their labor. As time went, the two groups were divided into haves and not-haves. Especially, the laborers did not become the only means of production, because a new means of production called capital got into landlords, and bankers. As previously stated, the feudalism laid some of the foundations necessary for the development of mercantilism, a precursor to capitalism. It means “there are always winners and losers, characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market” (Degen 12). Considering the historical background of capitalism, rent is judged to be another indebtedness to debtors and the fall into capitalist fetishism to creditors, which is the main reason of Danny’s queer activities resulting in his death at the end of Tortilla Flat and Mack and the boys’ worries through the stories of Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. This connotation of rent begins from Tortilla Flat’s beginning part. Danny returns home after serving World War Ⅰ, and finds that his grandfather has bequeathed two houses. Rather he has felt like resorting to his own instincts about how to do it by drinking wine, window breaking, and going into jail, and getting out of the jail to buy wine with a jailor. During this childish spree, he meets Pilon in the woods, and says about the inheritance of two houses: “Pilon noticed that the worry of property was settling on Danny’s face. No more in life would that face be free of care”3 (TF 12). Indeed, Danny realizes quickly that the ownership of the houses means the confinement of his past simple and careless life, and he cannot help saying this: “‘Pilon,’ he said sadly, ‘I wish you owned it and I could come to live with you.’ . ‘I am getting in debt to him’ Pilon thought 3 John Steinbeck.