Month: January 2004

I recently finished “Of Mice and Men” by John Steinbeck. It’s a short novel about California ranch workers in the early 1930s, but packed with good stuff right up until the very sad ending. On a purely mechanical level, Steinbeck’s capture of the workers’ dialect is amazing. They sound like real people –heck, vulgarities aside, some people on my Mom’s side of the family still talk like that. It makes me wonder if Steinbeck was really good at capturing dialects, or if he just wrote how he hears and speaks the English language.
Relatedly, I also wonder if future generations of readers will marvel at writers’ ability to capture the “l337 sp34k” and instant-message jabber of today. Will writing “sup w/ u? I just want 2 chat w/ sum1 4 awhile” someday be considered a great literary accomplishment? My irony glands get bloated just thinking about it.
Another thing about “Of Mice and Men” that struck me is the connection between it and the various social dilemmas I studied in grad school. The two main characters Lennie and George pine for a little bit of land that they can get for $600 where they can “live off the fat of the land”, replete with rabbits, chickens, and alfalfa hay. They can’t afford it themselves, yet they’re distrustful of anyone else and only enlist the aid of others when their secret slips out. The idyllic land fulfills every rancher’s unattainable dream, yet if they were to let everyone in on the deal, they would be no better off than they are now. So they build walls around themselves and shut each other out. To quote the sour and pessimistic stable hand Crooks:

I seen hundreds of men come by on the road an’ on the ranches, with their bindles on their back an’ that same damn thing in their heads . . . every damn one of ’em’s got a little piece of land in his head. An’ never a God damn one of ’em ever gets it. Just like heaven. Ever’body wants a little piece of lan’. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land.

This reminds me of The Commons Dilemma, in which many people are able to draw from a common resource. But if everyone takes his fill, the resource is depleted and nothing is left. So it’s in your best interest to limit others’ access so that you can have what you can to yourself instead of nothing at all. It’s a sad bit of human psychology (or even biological evolution, some say) that this leads to competition, alienation, and predatory attitudes by the “haves” towards the “have nots”. And apparently, sometimes the “have nots” do it to each other, too.
In the end, though, Steinbeck chose not to take this concept to literal end, relegating George and especially Lennie to a more tragic fate that buttresses this view of the world as a harsh, predatory place instead of one where people can work together to achieve happiness. Is there no happy ending for folks like these? Steinbeck seems not to think so. Even when someone like George Milton decides to saddle himself with a weakling like Lennie else in the spirit of compassion and cooperation, things seem just incapable of working out. Maybe competition really is the way to go? Yes, I think it often is, but you’ve got to have your cooperation mixed in as well.