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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. Tortilla Flat. Penguin, 1997. (TF. hereafter) 220 Geongeun Lee bitterly, ‘My freedom will be cut off. Soon I shall have to slave because of this Jew’s house’” (TF 12-13). This is irritable, restrictive, and difficult to Pilon, because he has to restore to the original state, or compensate for the damage if he does not pay his monthly rent, which is not familiar to him. Another topic of connotation of rent is the Malloys in Cannery Row. They were happy until they become landlords by renting out large pipes as sleeping quarters. But Mrs. Malloy begins to change as a result of the rise of their financial status, suddenly wanting to conform to social expectations, and her husband feels miserable by his wife’s crying to get possessions in their house: “But, darling – for Christ’s sake what are we going to do with curtains? We got no windows” (CR 48). However, social climbing carries its burden of conventional behavior, and they will end up gluing the drapes to the cast-iron walls of the boiler, as suggested by Mr. Malloy’s asking Mack: “You know any kind of glue that you can stick cloth to iron?” (CR 50). The concept of rent that Mrs. Malloy has in this case can be seen the status it confers on her, and it is the same case to Ramirez’s vacuum cleaner in Tortilla Flat. The last example related to rent goes interestingly to a successive story of Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday with the huge time gap of nine years from 1945 to 1954, which forms a considerable part of the two novels. The story is about the Palace Flophouse, where Mack and the boys live, and the words of palace and flophouse are similar to their condition. That is, the bums can not own a decent house with their own ability. But clever Mack convinces Lee or an owner to let them move in as guards against vandals and arsonists for five dollars a week rent, which Lee knows he will never collect. Although the duty of rent may have been always the low voice to the bums for such a long time, Mack and the boys are comfortable about the rent of the house as long as the owner is Lee Chong. But it is not the case in Sweet Thursday. The The Connotation of Collecting and Rent Shown in Steinbeck’s Monterey Triumvirate 221 grocery store is transferred to Joseph and Mary, and the tax bill will be delivered. To their eyes, the new owner may know the house belongs to him, and impose the duty of rent, plus arrears if he is clever in the sense of capitalism. The twenty eight chapters of forty of Sweet Thursday read about Mack and the boys’ worry about the rent. Steinbeck may have been aware of the mental pain of rent in his days, and it is a motive of this paper. In Chapter 28, the rigged raffle is drawn and Doc is given the Flophouse. Surprisingly, it turns out that Mack is actually the owner of the flophouse. It is revealed that Lee deeded the flophouse to Doc, and then paid ahead for ten years of taxes. The difference between levying rent and paying rent is so large that, with its classifying property, it sets on people’s mind and becomes internal malaise of the whole society. The next connotation of rent has ambivalence in that it is not only a huge debt but also a happy dream. Even though the lessees are depressed to meet the deadline of rent, they have got the dream of being a lessor. Steinbeck called this “home dream,” and wrote in his America and Americans (1966) seriously. This non-fiction shows this: The dream of home persists in a time when home is neither required nor wanted. Until very recently home was a real word, and in the English tongue it is a magic word. The ancient root word ham, from which our word ‘home’ came, meant the triangle where two rivers meet which, with a short wall, can be defended. At first the word ‘home’ meant safety, then gradually comfort. The home dream is only one of the deepest American illusions which, since they can’t be changed, function as cohesive principles to bind the nation together and make it different from all other nations. The concept of rent in this paper is not only the theme of the triumvirate, but also one of the burdens which is unavoidable in capitalist economy. In fact, modern democracy is related to this private ownership system, and industrial capitalism is said to equate to the most natural and 222 Geongeun Lee appropriate system to democracy, even though the concept of social welfare has been added into the capitalist tenet after World War I and II. But this beloved capitalism seems to have fascinated only those who are advantageous from the beginning, except for some remarkable self-made men, and it is not sure to do everything to overcome the threat to democracy for the whole. The reason is that democracy is universal in principle, but in practice it speaks to only a few, frictionless so to speak. In the meanwhile, at the opposite pole from capitalism, the fruits of democracy show its practical benefits with a soundless voice from so far away to so many poor people. Taken together, Steinbeck and his characters look upon the concept of rent in various views: primitivism like Danny’s, fetishism of commodities like Mrs. Mallory, economic burden like Mack’s, hope of well-being like the writer’s in America and Americans. In addition, this paper observes the problem of economic inequality into the matter of rent. Which is essentially right is the question of justice, and it may be judged according to the consensus of the current time or the philosophy of the individual. But Steinbeck certainly seems to see it in a humanistic context. He wrote this to Mavis McIntosh: “Far from having a hard theme running through the book (TF), one of the intents is to show that rarely does any theme in the lives of these people survive the night” (Letters 97). He seems to have said that the group like paisanos and their beauty of simplicity before capitalism can not go on with rent (as a metonym of capitalism), but also we should not lose our human superiority over capitalist fetishism, and its dictatorship. Indeed, Steinbeck began to write his well-known socialist novels right after Tortilla Flat, such as In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and kept his philosophy of endless humanism through his non-fictions and columns about social justice such as America and Americans (1966). The Connotation of Collecting and Rent Shown in Steinbeck’s Monterey Triumvirate 223

III. The Connotation of Collecting in Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row

Cannery Row has so many activities of collecting through the text: Mack and the boys collect chairs, cots, footstools, and other niceties after occupying the Palace Flophouse, an old Chinaman collects some fish or the things in a covered wicker basket through the night, Doc collects starfish in the tidepool under the Western Laboratory, Hazel helps him collect them, Eddie collects all kinds of alcohol left in Bear Flag, Mr. and Mrs. Sam Mallory collect the pipes for their rent house, Mack and the boys collect parts of Model T truck for their frog expedition, Frankie collects beers for Doc’s party, Josh Billings’ liver is collected by a dog, in Carmel Valley a load of frogs are collected, huge taxes are collected from Dora Flood, Doc collects Beer Milk Shake on the road to La Jolla, a flag pole skater collects commercial attention for the department, the painter Henri collects girls into his boat, gopher collects his food into his perfect burrow, and Doc collects all the glasses that were not broken after his false birthday party. This section will explain the connotation of collecting shown in Monterey triumvirate by using historic evidence, Hanna Arendt’s idea, Richard Dawkins’s idea, and the contrasting attitudes of materialism between Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row though the main idea is perfectly the same. First, collecting might mean ‘destruction’ or ‘harm’, which is possible only if the society tolerates them, in other words, if one collects too much, it may mean a great loss to others. For example, Doc's collecting activities are destructive and often result in the death of many animals. This goes against Doc's generally gentle nature but it is his passion and his living. Collecting can destroy what it seeks, and it will 224 Geongeun Lee always give a result that is, at best, taken out of context, just as the starfish is taken from its tide pool. For another example of destructive property of “collecting,” the paisanos and the bums collect their things by stealing other belongings, and Gay has got his mechanic skills running with the car parts from other cars and the battery of his enemy wife. The historic evidence for supporting the above argument is the case of Monterey’s Ocean View Avenue with sixteen or so larger canneries processing the Monterey Bay sardine. “The year Cannery Row was published (1945) was the peak, when 237,000 tons of sardines were processed, which was for the demand of World War Ⅱ. But the next year the figure plummeted to 142,000 tons and, in 1947, to 31,000 tons, an 87 percent decline in two seasons. The sardines had all but disappeared and the canneries gradually ceased operating, the last closing in 1973 after canning squid for years” (CR Intro). Another part of the saddest parts of the history is that by the late 1940s the fish were not even feeding people but being used for bulk agricultural fertilizer. Steinbeck once said that Cannery Row was an attempt to recapture a world that had vanished by the time World War II ended (Michael 127). Second, collecting tends to result in interaction. Granting that this local color novel is full of quirky anecdotes and strange characters who must surely be one-of-a-kind, and seems so specific and so random that it must not have any universal applicability, the collecting of these novels reveals that it can’t help influencing others, at least as an example. In favor of the above opinion, Hannah Arendt describes that “the vita activa is human life in so far as it is actively engaged in doing something” (Arendt 22). She distinguished between three fundamental human activities, labor, work, and action. She said, “labor includes all the repeated tasks of daily life, and life is the condition of the labor. Work is the activity through which people produce durable things, and The Connotation of Collecting and Rent Shown in Steinbeck’s Monterey Triumvirate 225

‘worldliness’ (or interaction) is the condition of the work. Action is the capacity to do something new that reveals who the actor is, and that cannot be undone once it has been accomplished, and human plurality is the condition of action” (Arendt 7). The human plurality is evident in Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, and Sweet Thursday. For example, even the most seclusive China man in Cannery Row makes action to Andy with the unforgettable image that one lonely and nostalgic oriental old man is collecting something after dusk until dawn by himself all the time. That is, as Arendt said, humans are “conditioned beings” by constant cyclical movement: Each new generation replaces the previous one in a process that is indifferent to the uniqueness of individuals. Third, collecting has become modern men’s cultural trend, which Richard Dawkins calls “meme” (social and cultural gene). Following George C. Williams’s social evolution, he pursues the analogy between memes and genes. He insists that “blind natural selection makes them behave rather as if they were purposeful, and it has been convenient, as a shorthand, to refer to genes in the language of purpose” (qtd. in Dawkins 196). We say genes are trying to increase their numbers in future gene pools, and we can see their effects. He also says that it is convenient to think of genes as active agents, working purposefully for their own survival, and memes are explained in the same way. Of course in both cases the idea of purpose and the words like “selfish” and “ruthless” of genes is only a metaphor Dawkins uses. We can look for selfish or ruthless memes because there is a sense in which they must indulge in a kind of competition with each other. In Steinbeck’s triumvirate, collecting is a kind of general trend, and the characters change its position from the level of “work” to that of “labor” that Arendt argues. The last thing this paper observes about collecting is that the 226 Geongeun Lee characters of Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row show different views about materialism through collecting. Tortilla Flat generally shows the beauty of simple life without collecting rent, which is the idealism before capitalism, while Cannery Row describes the emptiness of greedy life, which is the evil during capitalism. To explain this, this paper will treat this opinion by combining the concepts of collecting and rent into “collecting rent”. First, Tortilla Flat begins with the burden of rent, which is transferred from Danny to Pilon, from Pilon to Pablo, and from Pilon and Pablo to Jesus Maria continuously. After the fire on Danny’s second house, they live together in the other left house without any contract of rent. The reason is that Danny, who is chasing Ms. Morales, realizes the existence of rent itself is the cause of his own depression, and not his friends’ carelessness. Danny and his friends talk like this after burning of his second house:

“Dogs of dogs,” Danny called them, and “thieves of decent folks’ other house,” and “spawn of cuttlefish.” . . . “How did the fire start?” . . . “Who can say what makes the good God act the way he does?” . . . “It is good to have friends,” said Danny. “How lonely it is in the world if there are no friends to sit with one and to share one’s grappa.” . . . Although no one had mentioned it, each of the four knew they were all going to live in Danny’s house. . . . Pilon sighed with pleasure. Gone was the worry of the rent; gone the responsibility of owing money. No longer was he a tenant, but a guest. In his mind he gave thanks for the burning of the other house. . . . “We shall be very happy living here.” he said. (TF 46)

As a matter of fact, Tortilla Flat does not treat the burden of rent. The hen house the Pirate sleeps with his five dogs, the jail Big Joe Portagee sleeps so many times, and the hut Teresina lives with her 9 children are where the matter of rent is not concerned even though no one might want The Connotation of Collecting and Rent Shown in Steinbeck’s Monterey Triumvirate 227 to live there. In addition, after Danny’s death, his paisano friends make fire of the left house, and do not leave any seed of rent with disintegration of the paisanos. Another example of collecting in Tortilla Flat is the Pirate’s case. He wishes to collect $200 with which he plans to buy a gold candlestick for Saint Francisco, which, he believes, will save a sick one out of his five dogs. But for the purpose of collecting, his money could give him a reasonable place to sleep at night, and food to eat heartily, but more than this, he lacks human compassion that truly will make him fulfilled. We can see this in the following:

Pilon softened his voice. “Thou hast many friends who think of thee. They do not come to see thee because thou art proud. They think it might hurt thy pride to have them see thee living in this chicken house, clothed in rags, eating garbage with thy dogs. But these friends of thine worry for fear the bad life may make thee ill.” . . . “You see, Pilon, the dogs like it here. And I like it because of them. I did not think I was a worry to my friends.” Tears came into the Pirate’s eyes (TF 54).

Indeed, no paisanos look down on him because of his strange lifestyle, and rather they just allow him to join Danny’s group, and live there with his five dogs without any concern of rent. Finally the Pirate and his friends dedicates a gold candlestick to the church. On the other hand, the main characters of Cannery Row collect their own objects for their own greed, and business: Mack and the boys’ frogs, Lee Chong’s grocery bills, Doc’s specimens, and Dora’s money for sex, etc. And the parable of the 31st chapter shows human being’s collecting pattern, and the mixed condition of rent and collecting symbolically: one beautiful gopher in the prime of his life digs a burrow and stores food in the perfect room. And there are no traps because there are no gardens 228 Geongeun Lee about. But as time goes on, he begins to be a little impatient, for no female appears. Outside he searches for his own girl, and he is wounded from fighting with an old battle-torn bull gopher. At last “he moves two blocks up the hill to a dahlia garden where they put out traps every night” (CR 181). To compare the gopher to Willy Lowman stated in the introduction, we could see naturally a paradoxical aspect of American dream. Both the two may have tried to follow the command of capitalism and American dream with diligence, thrift, saving, hope, self-help, expertise in their field, sense of duty, passion, competence, etc. But they end in a sense of emptiness. Steinbeck describes this vanity very much especially in Cannery Row of the three novels. This novel written after his tormenting experience in World War II and divorce with Gwyndolin Conger “has so many parallels to Tortilla Flat” (WW 199), but also is changed into being much more satirical and complex, which is well expressed in this:

“It has always seemed strange to me”, said Doc. “The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first, they love the product of the second.” (CR 143)

IV. The Connotation of Collecting in Sweet Thursday

Sweet Thursday is a sequel to Cannery Row, but it has much more complexity, and it is a comedy because its plot is mainly about throwing a party for Doc and Suzy, and making a couple, not criticizing the traditional society. So it does not have as much text about rent and The Connotation of Collecting and Rent Shown in Steinbeck’s Monterey Triumvirate 229 collecting for a metonym of capitalism as the previous Monterey novels. Indeed, “the plots of the two earlier novels are tenuous and the principle of structure is primarily tonal and thematic, the plot of Sweet Thursday is strong and organizes most of the material” (WW 277). In other words, Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row have resistant and satirical attitude to current capitalism and materialism, but after nineteen years, Sweet Thursday respects the traditional civilization, and also cherishes the theme of the beauty of simplicity and human plurality emphasized in the past two novels, which is the cause of Arendt’s concept of “action” as previously stated. Given this strong and optimistic theme, the topic of rent and collecting seems to easily turn to the industrious lifestyle Suzy has. When she comes into Monterey for the first time, she does not have any money, and gets into the Bear Flag (or a whorehouse) with a big heartbreak in her secret. But she does not fit the job as a prostitute, even though she is so tough. After a raffle party, where Doc and she are supposed to be engaged, she pronounces her independence and living by and for herself. And then she gets a job at the Golden Poppy, and proves to Ella that she can do an excellent job. Now she knows what her real value is and does not have to impress everyone with her honest job. She registers for a typing school, and supports herself. Turning to the topic of rent, Suzy’s boiler house is a locomotive's front end that a packing house used for the steam. After the plant shuts down, they leave a boiler in the mud next to the Bear Flag. Suzy also decorates this boiler with a curtain like Mrs. Malloy in Cannery Row, but Suzy’s will is strong enough to live alone, which can be called a good daughter of capitalism, which emphasizes self-help. But Mrs. Malloy’s is not the case, because she just wants to be dependent upon her husband, and believes rent is a good token of ascent of status to her. But Suzy’s boiler does not 230 Geongeun Lee cost her any rent, and with her confidence about this economic improvement, she races to the laboratory and tells Doc that she will go to La Jolla with him, and then he asks if she can drive because his arm is broken at the time, and she says she can do so. At this point, we can observe a very important lesson from Suzy and her boiler house. To get into the humble but free house, she has to crawl. In other words, with thrift and saving, she can collect not only money but also her confidence about herself, and her will to overcome her heartbreak and get Doc as a lover. In other words, her humbleness and bravery give her the authentic self. Another change of the attitude shown Sweet Thursday is found in Doc, Suzy’s lover. He is the owner and operator of Western Biological Laboratory. He is the only graduate of a university (Univ of Chicago), and loves science, beer, women, classical music, books, and prints. He instills wisdom, philosophy, and does medical service. He is half Christ and half satyr. His only fear is getting his head wet. The most remarkable thing in him is that he is a lonely and remote man, and so he does not have any opportunity to get his own woman. But not in Sweet Thursday. He starts to listen to the voices in his mind, that is, his authenticity like Suzy’s. It is the first time from Cannery Row days, and after this he loses his interest in his job, and does not collect species underneath rocks as much as in his earlier career. Instead, he listens to three voices: The top voice is for what he is doing mainly for his career, the lower voice is for the question he asks for his authenticity, and the lowest voice is for his subconsciousness or the reality he has got. Especially, Using the third voice of his lonesomeness to motivate the character’s mind is unprecedented in the three novels for nineteen years. This is how he listens to the three voices:

There would be three voices singing in him, all singing together. The top The Connotation of Collecting and Rent Shown in Steinbeck’s Monterey Triumvirate 231

voice of his thinking mind would sing, “What lovely little particles, neither plant nor animal but somehow both – the reservoir of all the life in the world, the base supply of food for everyone. If all of these should die, every other living thing might well die as a consequence.” The lower voice of his feeling mind would be singing, “What are you looking for, little man? Is it yourself you’re trying to identify? Are you looking for avoid big things?” And the third voice, which came from his marrow, would sing, “Lonesome! Lonesome! What good is it? Who benefits? Thought is the evasion of feeling. You’re only walling up the leaking loneliness.”4 (ST 18)

Judging from the above, It might not be wrong to see that thought means reason and feeling means sensibility. And the concept of collecting and rent belongs to reason mainly based on capitalistic thinking method. But Suzy and Doc put their own feeling (love) before reason (calculation). At least in the aspect of rent and collecting, Steinbeck adheres to this feeling-centered idea in his Monterey triumvirate. For example, in Tortilla Flat, Danny and his paisano friends live together without the concept of “rent,” and in Cannery Row, Lee Chong does not expedite a tenant’s duty to Mack and his boys, and in Sweet Thursday, Mack and his boys’ problem is resolved by Lee Chong’s and Doc’s altruistic and un-condescending feeling of male friendship. In short, the connotation of collecting in Sweet Thursday is optimistic and respectful to capitalism, and also unforgetful of Steinbeck’s original and ceaseless humanism.

V. Conclusion

The researches of Steinbeck’s fictions and nonfictions have been made mainly for primitivism, physiology, American dream, non-teleological

4 John Steinbeck. Sweet Thursday, New York: Penguin, 2008. (ST. hereafter) 232 Geongeun Lee thinking. Including these ideas, this Monterey triumvirate has the same clues of local color: the downtrodden residents, such as the paisanos, the bums, the soldiers, the whores, and the mentally challenged, and the carnival they all join earnestly. These themes are integrated in the mode of anecdotes, which have been criticised for not being true and oversimplifying. Nevertheless, the novels went into numerous editions and they were even warranted for elaborate and quite expensive editions in the 1940’s and 50’s. But more than this, rent and collecting which are remarkably shown in the novels function as a metonym of capitalism, and call authenticity in our heart. Steinbeck’s triumvirate, Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, and Sweet Thurday, developed for nineteen years to show the paradoxes and dreams of his famous hometown and real persons. And this paper selects only two concepts of rent and collecting as a useful means to show the paradoxes and dreams of the three novels. First, rent has the duplex meaning: One is the aspect of economic burden, and causes a malaise of the whole society. And the other is an energizer for a richer life including the lessee. That is, some wealthy people do not want to own their building, preferring rent for convenience. Second, the act of collecting, meaning destruction or harm if it is too much, causes the interaction between others in the name of job or vocation. As to the collection of rent, Tortilla Flat generally emphasizes the beauty of simplicity, and Cannery Row shows the vanity of capitalism, and Sweet Thursday approves capitalism affirmatively, and also keeps simplicity and human plurality. As for an example of American dream and its paradox, Willy (of Death of a Salesman) dreamed of a success as a salesman, and the independence of Howard’s company. He dreamed that his sons (i.e., Biff and Happy) would repay their father’s hardworking life with their own success. But he gladly selected a death benefit to pay installment on his washing machine, and other furniture, loan for his only house, and especially business funds for his sons. Likewise, rent and collection as a metonym of capitalism might give us the emptiness and sadness of our existence. But Steinbeck would not agree with this attitude perfectly. In Sweet Thursday, he seems to say that our capitalism should be considered a respectable and necessary system as we can see Suzy’s strong will of self-help. In addition, we should get out of the emptiness of capitalist fetishism and keep our authenticity by listening to our inner voice called subconsciousness. Lastly, the Monterey Triumvirate suggests, even with the above themes, that our lives should be true to our own personality, spirit, or character, despite external pressures which are different from ourselves, and we should not forget to love our human beings even though Lukacs’s starry sky is not visible, and Fortuna’s promise is not audible.

Works Cited

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