East of Eden

The limited series East of Eden (EE) is coming to Netflix tomorrow. Rather than being yet another dreary update of a well-loved classic, this adaptation could tell us something very important about American history and culture.

The creator of the Netflix series, Zoe Kazan, has been developing it for the past six years. In my own “limited series” of blogs, I want to explore what we can learn from EE and its adaptation. Just from researching the book for this blog, I am dumbfounded by what it says about our history and our deepest conceptions of ourselves. It will be fascinating to see what Ms. Kazan makes of what I’ve uncovered, and I’ll be blogging about that extensively.

From the very first page, John Steinbeck sets the tone for EE, which he considered his greatest work. His relationship with the Salinas Valley of California, where he grew up and where the story takes place, is extraordinarily intimate.

Steinbeck recalls the valley through its smells, its people, and its seasons. He presents the eastern mountains as welcoming and sunlit, comparing their foothills to the embrace of a beloved mother. — John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952), Part I, Chapter 1, §1; summarized.

Steinbeck is full of paradoxes, but it will take some work to see why this one is so huge. Just loving boyhood memories, right? What could be wrong with that? Nothing, in itself. But in the context of this novel, it says everything.

A close reading of EE, published in 1952, reveals Steinbeck’s acute perception of the meaning and importance of land. That too seems quite innocent, or at least complimentary. Here is a mid-20th-century white man, writing in the midst of the great postwar expansion of American capitalist, technocratic, and military power, who can relate so intimately to nature and in an entirely non-instrumental way.

That could be very impressive if we didn’t soon learn about the values he imparts to this ability. In the second section of the first chapter, we are literarily assaulted with this paragraph:

Steinbeck portrays the Indigenous inhabitants as inferior, unenergetic, uninventive, and lacking culture. He disparages their food gathering, claims they did not plant, and treats their warfare with contempt. — John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952), Part I, Chapter 1, §2; summarized.

From a John Steinbeck highly regarded for his empathy for workers, Mexican Americans, and poor Oklahoma migrants—and who seems to have created a powerful Chinese American character in this book (“Lee”—another paradox, more on him in a later blog)—how can he be so utterly contemptuous of the Indigenous people who lived in the very Salinas Valley before the “greedy Spanish” who “collected souls as they did jewels,” and then the Americans, “more greedy because there were more of them”?

Well, maybe he just criticizes everybody? No, this is far different, and you know it. First, you have to read through this initial criticism of Americans because the entire great drama of EE that plays out in this 600-page epic is all about them.

They are action-oriented, claim the land, work the land, plant and grow crops, build cities, and propagate mightily. Not all white people are wonderful—the mother Cathy is portrayed as positively demonic—but they all have the right stuff. And the right stuff, as we shall see, goes very deep into our self-conception as a people, not just Steinbeck’s depiction.

Now, calling anyone “an inferior breed” is straight-up racism, but it goes far beyond that. The original inhabitants are claimed to lack all the traits that make white people so meritorious. “Without energy” is in direct contrast to the people Steinbeck most praises as “restless,” “energetic,” “questing,” “searching.” Lack of inventiveness is mirrored by Samuel Hamilton’s genius at creating contraptions in addition to his biblical-like wisdom.

To say a people have no culture? That is not only impossible, but anthropologists of Steinbeck’s day had already described a variety of rich cultures among the Indigenous who once existed in the Salinas Valley or California in general. So lazy that they would only eat what they could pick up. Hell, they couldn’t even fight in the right way.

But of all these horrible and false descriptions, the one that tells us the most is that they “planted nothing.” This is central to a very ancient myth running throughout EE that I doubt Steinbeck was even aware of, given his hyperfocus on the Cain and Abel story.

There has rarely been a colonization in the past 500 years where white settlers did not deride the Indigenous for not planting—enough, that is, since plenty of peoples did plant—and use that as a justification for taking their land, often exterminating them.

Remember this point because we will be returning to it often. It is closely related to a love of the land which so easily becomes a romanticized attraction extremely harmful to original inhabitants.

This is so compressed in the first chapter of EE that it is impossible to miss for any thoughtful person. Steinbeck’s loving depiction of the land is of an entirely different ontological nature than how the Indigenous peoples in the same place perpetually formed such rich and abiding relationships with their surroundings in nature, each other, animals, and the cosmos.

The Indigenous people did not “love” the land; they participated fully in its being and the changes over the days, nights, and seasons. They derived their lives, culture, and rich psychological lives in close association with not just the land but with all of nature.

In Steinbeck’s hands, just his short description of them shows they do not even have the right to exist. They were mostly gone by his childhood in the 1910s, having been ruthlessly eliminated from 1846–1873, which historian Benjamin Madley called a genocide.

And while Indigenous people somehow managed to survive this, they are only mentioned once more in the pages of East of Eden—as part of the “Indian wars.”