East of Eden Revisited
Apr. 6th, 2022 03:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakI had something of a minority experience for people my age and younger with this in that I read the book first and saw the James Dean movie years later, on tv, and felt very much let down by it. I mean, sure, I could see why it made James Dean a star, but it only covered the last fourth of the book, and even there considerable departed from the characterisations, not to mention it left out my favourite character, Lee the Chinese-American, and the key debate between hiim, Adam Trask and Samuel Hamilton that presents the core of the book and sets up the ending entirely. This said: though I had liked the (700 plus pages) novel, I didn't love it, which means I haven't read it again since my teenage years.
Now, last year, an eight part audio adaption (in German, though American musician Stephanie Niles was hired to do the music and write a new song for each of the parts in addition to the one she already wrote inspired by East of Eden, Kate in the Haze of Rum, was produced for radio and now released on CD, which I've just finished listening to. It is superbly done - incidentally, for viewers of the Netflix show Dark, Maja Schöne who played Hannah in that show plays East of Eden's main villain and most important female character, Cathy/Kate/Catherine here - , does adapt the entire book, and reminded me how Steinbeck's story manages to be compelling yet also something that doesn't invite rereading (or in this case, relistening) until years have passed. And yes, it also reminded me of how much of a huge simplification and ironing out anything complicated the movie was, even taking into account it only adapted a small part of the book.
The book is an ensemble saga across several generations, framed by the life time of one of the main characters, Adam Trask - it essentially starts with his birth and ends with his death. Note that I say "one of the main characters", not "the main character", because while Adam is pretty important and his life is the red thread guiding the reader/listener through the story, he's often not the pov, and he's also usually, though not always, passive and reacting, while other characters' actions propel the story forward. In a way, he's like Dickens' David Copperfield, who once the childhood part of the story is over retreats into the position of observer more often than not. If you've osmosed anything about East of Eden, it's that it's a modern replay of the Cain and Abel story, and that's true twice over, though again, it's more complicated than that. The Cain and Abel tale plays itself out twice, with Adam and his brother Charles (three guesses as to who is who), and with Adam's sons, Caleb and Aron. Except, of course, since Adam obviously survives, there is no literal fratricide going on. Not to mention that despite what snappy summaries might tell you, "fratrernal rivalry" isn't a description that I think fits either generational C & A replay, at least not how I'd define it, because rivalry implies two parties striving for the same goal, conscious competition. In both generations, however, this striving is entirely one sided. Charles and Caleb yearn to be the best loved son of their respective fathers, but the two As, Adam and Aron, don't feel the same. Adam doesn't love his father, Cyrus, at all. (Unsurprisingly: Cyrus is an abusive jerk, a horror to his wives, the first of whom committed suicide, who also manages to be an inspired con man.) Whether Aron loves anyone or just thinks he does is up for debate, but at any rate he's incredibly uncomfortable with Adam's fussiness and plans for his future and can't wait to get away from him even before the climactic catastrophe.
What this story does have is unrequited love in several variations, only one of which is romantic, and a very few requited examples, and long term damage across the generations. It says something about just how messed up the Trasks are that the Charles and Adam fraternal relationship, which includes Charles beating Adam nearly to death once in a frenzy of jealousy when they're teenagers, as well as Adam reacting to a non-violent disagreement they have by vanishing for years when they're adults, is probably the closest thing to a mutually affectionate family relationship they have in their generation. But at the same time, the novel is anything but relentlessly grim. Partly because the subplot about the Hamilton clan, Steinbeck's own relations, is mostly upbeat and presents a breathtakingly normal family in contrast, but also because the ability of the human species to do better in bad circumstances is pretty much central.
Now, in terms of female characters, this is not a book ahead of its time. There are a few in minor supporting roles, but only two of actual importance to the story, and the second one doesn't show up until very late, in the last fourth. While or main female character is introduced by the narrator as a soulless monster from the cradle onwards. Said villainess is Cathy, who as opposed to the Trask boys comes from loving parents and whose evilness is thus completely due to nature, not nurture. Cathy figures out how to manipulate the other sex before she hits puberty, drives a teacher to suicide when she's fourteen, murders both her parents and stages her own death at age 17 and starts a career as a prostitute specializing in S/M, which will eventually culminate in her taking over a brothel by first insinuating herself into the affections of the previous Madame and then assassinating her slowly by poison. In between, she miscalculates at one point which results in her getting beaten up by a pimp, at which point she needs someone to nurse and protect her for a while, which is how she ends up with Adam Trask, who has no idea about her past. The fascinating thing is that Cathy is actually pretty honest with Adam once they're married. She tells him point blank she doesn't want to move to California, and that she'll leave him as soon as her (unwanted) pregnancy is over. He just doesn't listen. In the notes the audio adaption, the (female) adapter/producer says she struggled with this one dimensionality, but then the actress playing Cathy, Maja Schöne, asked why Mephistopheles shouldn't be a woman for a change, and the adapter also concluded that the novel doesn't stop exploring Cathy and while she does not have a redemption arc (anything but!), her story is as thoroughly told as anyone else's. In terms of biblical characters, Cathy is never Eve, she's the Serpent. (And described with a lot of snake similes.)
(I would add that the repeated emphasis on Cathy's almost childlike figure and small breasts - as an adult woman - makes the way (almost) every male keeps falling for her way more creepy in terms of the men than what Steinbeck probably intended.)
Where the novel does surprise you in terms of progressiveness is how it treats and how it uses Lee, probably its most sympathetic character, who combines smarts and empathy (proving these are anything but mutually exclusive qualities). We meet Lee as a Chinese(-American) servant hired by Adam Trask shortly after Adam and Cathy moved to California. The novel's second most intelligent and empathic character, Samuel Hamilton, quickly deduces that Lee's Pigdin English can't be real, and in their first genuine conversation Lee tells him that yes, he went to university and studies philosophy in his spare time, but he's found that unless he performs the Asian stereotype, people literally do not listen to him and take in what he says. It's Lee who does most of the raising of the twins after Cathy's departure leaves Adam in a ten years hole of depression, and Lee who in the central scene of the novel, when he, Adam and Samuel Hamilton debate the story of Cain and Abel from the bible, hones in on the different possible translation of the Hebrew term "timshel" in what God tells Cain. (That a theo-linguistic discussion is written in a rivetting way and turns out to be the turning point of the novel, making the final scene incomprehensible without it, is one reason why this novel, flaws and all, is great for me.) Lee has had as hard a life as any other character - and his birthstory is incredibly gruesome - but he became a compassionate, wise human being who proves a lie to the cliché that the "bad" characters are more interesting than the good ones. He gets as much narrative space as Charles or Samuel Hamilton and more than the twins or Abra, so you can imagine that his complete absence in the movie put teenage me in a sulk right then and there.
Speaking of theological discussions: one of the many characterisation differences between the film and the novel (and thus also the audio) is that movie!Adam is very religious - complete with prayers at the table and all - , and the implication is that part of his wife's leaving him and his distance to Cal is because of that. Book!Adam is so little religious is that he doesn't have a bible at home and the only reason why he, Samuel Hamilton and Lee can look up the Cain and Abel story is that Hamilton tooik a bible with him when visiting the Trask farm. Book!Adam is ethical, most of the time, but his rejection of Cal's present in the climactic scene hails directly from his sense of guilt over his own position in the WWI recruiting and the money being in his eyes the result of war profiteering, and religion was at no point the reason for his marriage not working out. The reason for that were a) Cathy didn't love him, she needed a bolthole for a while, never intended to stay once that use was over, and didn't, and b) In-love-Adam only saw what he wanted to see and heard what he wanted to hear right up to the point where she shot him for trying to keep her from leaving him. This is a repeated faling of his - he also sees Aron, who looks a lot like Cathy, the way he wants to see him - but has nothing to do with religion of moral disapproval. When he finally has his first honest conversation with Cathy years later, he's disillusioned, but not about the sex-for-money part of her existence - about her need to destroy people. Adam, who as a young man was forced into the army by his father and despite disliking the army remained there as a way to stay away from his father, and who spent several years afterwards as an unemployed hobo travelling through the country, isn't a particularly good parent (did I mention Lee does most of the actual kid raising during his decade of depression?), but he's very much not Disapproving Conservative Dad Who Only Loves One Of His Sons which is what the film offers.
Cal, otoh, also isn't the film's Blameless Woobie whose fears of his own capacity for evil are clearly utterly unfounded. I mean, of the two Cain figures in the story, Charles is definitely the darker one - not only is he physically violent as a teenager to the point where but for Adam's lucky escape he would have murdered his brother, he's also later, when his relationship with Adam is far more peaceful and he is very much invested in keeping his brother with him, still unable to resist the opportunity to commit one more "that'll show him action -, while Cal's symbolic fratricide is something that's not preceeded by years of similar outbursts. But Cal does have a manipulative streak a mile wide and as a child repeatedly uses this ability to make himself feel superior to his brother. While the behavior of both Charles and Cal is triggered by their awareness their respective fathers prefer their brothers and the corresponding sense of not being loved, or not as much, Cal - being raised by compassionate, sensible Lee, not Cyrus the abusive jerk - has the capacity to build positive relationships with people not Trasks, which Charles does not. (He loves his father and his brother, much as he also resents him, but that's it.) But Cal's questioning himself and his wish to be good would not have the same emotional resonance if he were unable to be other than good except for the one climactic action. Not to mention that by making Adam that much colder towards Cal and removing Lee from the characters, the film positions Abra as the first person to offer Cal any type of affection, and again, that's not the case in the book or audio. Not to mention that Abra and Aron break up for reasons unrelated to Cal in the novel, whereas the film gives Aron the obligatory "stay away from her!" scene and introduces a romantic rivalry that does not exist in the book. Like I said: everything is simplified and or altered.
Mind you: novel and audio do stake the emotional odds in Cal's favor, because Aron is possibly the least sympathetic character in a story that includes his mother the female Voldemort. He's self righteous (which none of the other "good" characters are), priggish, and crucially lacks kindness. I mean, Abel character No.1, Adam, has his share of flaws, and not just after he becomes a father. But one early key character scenes for Adam is when he, as a child, gives his stepmother - the only person nice to him in the Trask household - anonymous little presents to cheer her up a little. They work as intended, only she believes they come from her son, Charles, and that Charles pretends not to know about them because of Dad. When Adam realizes this, he doesn't correct her error, because in an awful life with Cyrus the jerk, this idea is pretty much the one thing his stepmother has. There is no corresponding scene where Aron does something selfless for another character, not as a child and not as a teen, and his wish for a virtuous life thus makes him more a character in the tradition of St. John in Jane Eyre - with morals but no heart. It's therefore difficult to feel for him in the big showdown, as opposed to feeling the temptation to borrow a phrase from Chicago and hum "he had it coming". Still: what he had coming was the reveal, not the fallout, and certainly Aron would have been capable of becoming a more empathic, humbler person in a different future.
Which fits with the central theme, the geeky discussion about what exactly God tells Cain in Genesis: "Sin is crouching at the door, but you shall overcome it." Or: "you must overcome it". Or, which is Lee's translation of "timshel" - "you may overcome it. This, argues Lee, is what makes the story: not a guarantee or a command or a promise, but a choice only the individual human being can make. And the novel making the case for this is why I consider it still worth reading.
Now, last year, an eight part audio adaption (in German, though American musician Stephanie Niles was hired to do the music and write a new song for each of the parts in addition to the one she already wrote inspired by East of Eden, Kate in the Haze of Rum, was produced for radio and now released on CD, which I've just finished listening to. It is superbly done - incidentally, for viewers of the Netflix show Dark, Maja Schöne who played Hannah in that show plays East of Eden's main villain and most important female character, Cathy/Kate/Catherine here - , does adapt the entire book, and reminded me how Steinbeck's story manages to be compelling yet also something that doesn't invite rereading (or in this case, relistening) until years have passed. And yes, it also reminded me of how much of a huge simplification and ironing out anything complicated the movie was, even taking into account it only adapted a small part of the book.
The book is an ensemble saga across several generations, framed by the life time of one of the main characters, Adam Trask - it essentially starts with his birth and ends with his death. Note that I say "one of the main characters", not "the main character", because while Adam is pretty important and his life is the red thread guiding the reader/listener through the story, he's often not the pov, and he's also usually, though not always, passive and reacting, while other characters' actions propel the story forward. In a way, he's like Dickens' David Copperfield, who once the childhood part of the story is over retreats into the position of observer more often than not. If you've osmosed anything about East of Eden, it's that it's a modern replay of the Cain and Abel story, and that's true twice over, though again, it's more complicated than that. The Cain and Abel tale plays itself out twice, with Adam and his brother Charles (three guesses as to who is who), and with Adam's sons, Caleb and Aron. Except, of course, since Adam obviously survives, there is no literal fratricide going on. Not to mention that despite what snappy summaries might tell you, "fratrernal rivalry" isn't a description that I think fits either generational C & A replay, at least not how I'd define it, because rivalry implies two parties striving for the same goal, conscious competition. In both generations, however, this striving is entirely one sided. Charles and Caleb yearn to be the best loved son of their respective fathers, but the two As, Adam and Aron, don't feel the same. Adam doesn't love his father, Cyrus, at all. (Unsurprisingly: Cyrus is an abusive jerk, a horror to his wives, the first of whom committed suicide, who also manages to be an inspired con man.) Whether Aron loves anyone or just thinks he does is up for debate, but at any rate he's incredibly uncomfortable with Adam's fussiness and plans for his future and can't wait to get away from him even before the climactic catastrophe.
What this story does have is unrequited love in several variations, only one of which is romantic, and a very few requited examples, and long term damage across the generations. It says something about just how messed up the Trasks are that the Charles and Adam fraternal relationship, which includes Charles beating Adam nearly to death once in a frenzy of jealousy when they're teenagers, as well as Adam reacting to a non-violent disagreement they have by vanishing for years when they're adults, is probably the closest thing to a mutually affectionate family relationship they have in their generation. But at the same time, the novel is anything but relentlessly grim. Partly because the subplot about the Hamilton clan, Steinbeck's own relations, is mostly upbeat and presents a breathtakingly normal family in contrast, but also because the ability of the human species to do better in bad circumstances is pretty much central.
Now, in terms of female characters, this is not a book ahead of its time. There are a few in minor supporting roles, but only two of actual importance to the story, and the second one doesn't show up until very late, in the last fourth. While or main female character is introduced by the narrator as a soulless monster from the cradle onwards. Said villainess is Cathy, who as opposed to the Trask boys comes from loving parents and whose evilness is thus completely due to nature, not nurture. Cathy figures out how to manipulate the other sex before she hits puberty, drives a teacher to suicide when she's fourteen, murders both her parents and stages her own death at age 17 and starts a career as a prostitute specializing in S/M, which will eventually culminate in her taking over a brothel by first insinuating herself into the affections of the previous Madame and then assassinating her slowly by poison. In between, she miscalculates at one point which results in her getting beaten up by a pimp, at which point she needs someone to nurse and protect her for a while, which is how she ends up with Adam Trask, who has no idea about her past. The fascinating thing is that Cathy is actually pretty honest with Adam once they're married. She tells him point blank she doesn't want to move to California, and that she'll leave him as soon as her (unwanted) pregnancy is over. He just doesn't listen. In the notes the audio adaption, the (female) adapter/producer says she struggled with this one dimensionality, but then the actress playing Cathy, Maja Schöne, asked why Mephistopheles shouldn't be a woman for a change, and the adapter also concluded that the novel doesn't stop exploring Cathy and while she does not have a redemption arc (anything but!), her story is as thoroughly told as anyone else's. In terms of biblical characters, Cathy is never Eve, she's the Serpent. (And described with a lot of snake similes.)
(I would add that the repeated emphasis on Cathy's almost childlike figure and small breasts - as an adult woman - makes the way (almost) every male keeps falling for her way more creepy in terms of the men than what Steinbeck probably intended.)
Where the novel does surprise you in terms of progressiveness is how it treats and how it uses Lee, probably its most sympathetic character, who combines smarts and empathy (proving these are anything but mutually exclusive qualities). We meet Lee as a Chinese(-American) servant hired by Adam Trask shortly after Adam and Cathy moved to California. The novel's second most intelligent and empathic character, Samuel Hamilton, quickly deduces that Lee's Pigdin English can't be real, and in their first genuine conversation Lee tells him that yes, he went to university and studies philosophy in his spare time, but he's found that unless he performs the Asian stereotype, people literally do not listen to him and take in what he says. It's Lee who does most of the raising of the twins after Cathy's departure leaves Adam in a ten years hole of depression, and Lee who in the central scene of the novel, when he, Adam and Samuel Hamilton debate the story of Cain and Abel from the bible, hones in on the different possible translation of the Hebrew term "timshel" in what God tells Cain. (That a theo-linguistic discussion is written in a rivetting way and turns out to be the turning point of the novel, making the final scene incomprehensible without it, is one reason why this novel, flaws and all, is great for me.) Lee has had as hard a life as any other character - and his birthstory is incredibly gruesome - but he became a compassionate, wise human being who proves a lie to the cliché that the "bad" characters are more interesting than the good ones. He gets as much narrative space as Charles or Samuel Hamilton and more than the twins or Abra, so you can imagine that his complete absence in the movie put teenage me in a sulk right then and there.
Speaking of theological discussions: one of the many characterisation differences between the film and the novel (and thus also the audio) is that movie!Adam is very religious - complete with prayers at the table and all - , and the implication is that part of his wife's leaving him and his distance to Cal is because of that. Book!Adam is so little religious is that he doesn't have a bible at home and the only reason why he, Samuel Hamilton and Lee can look up the Cain and Abel story is that Hamilton tooik a bible with him when visiting the Trask farm. Book!Adam is ethical, most of the time, but his rejection of Cal's present in the climactic scene hails directly from his sense of guilt over his own position in the WWI recruiting and the money being in his eyes the result of war profiteering, and religion was at no point the reason for his marriage not working out. The reason for that were a) Cathy didn't love him, she needed a bolthole for a while, never intended to stay once that use was over, and didn't, and b) In-love-Adam only saw what he wanted to see and heard what he wanted to hear right up to the point where she shot him for trying to keep her from leaving him. This is a repeated faling of his - he also sees Aron, who looks a lot like Cathy, the way he wants to see him - but has nothing to do with religion of moral disapproval. When he finally has his first honest conversation with Cathy years later, he's disillusioned, but not about the sex-for-money part of her existence - about her need to destroy people. Adam, who as a young man was forced into the army by his father and despite disliking the army remained there as a way to stay away from his father, and who spent several years afterwards as an unemployed hobo travelling through the country, isn't a particularly good parent (did I mention Lee does most of the actual kid raising during his decade of depression?), but he's very much not Disapproving Conservative Dad Who Only Loves One Of His Sons which is what the film offers.
Cal, otoh, also isn't the film's Blameless Woobie whose fears of his own capacity for evil are clearly utterly unfounded. I mean, of the two Cain figures in the story, Charles is definitely the darker one - not only is he physically violent as a teenager to the point where but for Adam's lucky escape he would have murdered his brother, he's also later, when his relationship with Adam is far more peaceful and he is very much invested in keeping his brother with him, still unable to resist the opportunity to commit one more "that'll show him action -, while Cal's symbolic fratricide is something that's not preceeded by years of similar outbursts. But Cal does have a manipulative streak a mile wide and as a child repeatedly uses this ability to make himself feel superior to his brother. While the behavior of both Charles and Cal is triggered by their awareness their respective fathers prefer their brothers and the corresponding sense of not being loved, or not as much, Cal - being raised by compassionate, sensible Lee, not Cyrus the abusive jerk - has the capacity to build positive relationships with people not Trasks, which Charles does not. (He loves his father and his brother, much as he also resents him, but that's it.) But Cal's questioning himself and his wish to be good would not have the same emotional resonance if he were unable to be other than good except for the one climactic action. Not to mention that by making Adam that much colder towards Cal and removing Lee from the characters, the film positions Abra as the first person to offer Cal any type of affection, and again, that's not the case in the book or audio. Not to mention that Abra and Aron break up for reasons unrelated to Cal in the novel, whereas the film gives Aron the obligatory "stay away from her!" scene and introduces a romantic rivalry that does not exist in the book. Like I said: everything is simplified and or altered.
Mind you: novel and audio do stake the emotional odds in Cal's favor, because Aron is possibly the least sympathetic character in a story that includes his mother the female Voldemort. He's self righteous (which none of the other "good" characters are), priggish, and crucially lacks kindness. I mean, Abel character No.1, Adam, has his share of flaws, and not just after he becomes a father. But one early key character scenes for Adam is when he, as a child, gives his stepmother - the only person nice to him in the Trask household - anonymous little presents to cheer her up a little. They work as intended, only she believes they come from her son, Charles, and that Charles pretends not to know about them because of Dad. When Adam realizes this, he doesn't correct her error, because in an awful life with Cyrus the jerk, this idea is pretty much the one thing his stepmother has. There is no corresponding scene where Aron does something selfless for another character, not as a child and not as a teen, and his wish for a virtuous life thus makes him more a character in the tradition of St. John in Jane Eyre - with morals but no heart. It's therefore difficult to feel for him in the big showdown, as opposed to feeling the temptation to borrow a phrase from Chicago and hum "he had it coming". Still: what he had coming was the reveal, not the fallout, and certainly Aron would have been capable of becoming a more empathic, humbler person in a different future.
Which fits with the central theme, the geeky discussion about what exactly God tells Cain in Genesis: "Sin is crouching at the door, but you shall overcome it." Or: "you must overcome it". Or, which is Lee's translation of "timshel" - "you may overcome it. This, argues Lee, is what makes the story: not a guarantee or a command or a promise, but a choice only the individual human being can make. And the novel making the case for this is why I consider it still worth reading.
no subject
Date: 2022-04-06 06:32 pm (UTC)I also read the book first: not for a class of my own in high school, but there were copies floating around the school, so I just read one on my own time. I didn't feel very much let down by the film, but it didn't do much for me.
and in their first genuine conversation Lee tells him that yes, he went to university and studies philosophy in his spare time, but he's found that unless he performs the Asian stereotype, people literally do not listen to him and take in what he says.
I had forgotten that detail and am now reminded of the character played by Philip Ahn in Something to Sing About (1937).
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2022-04-08 11:57 pm (UTC)Thank you for writing this in-depth discussion of this great work. I went to California late last year and made a pilgrimage to Salinas to the Steinbeck library/center. I have had EoE in my head ever since.
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
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