Am I the only one who sorta never heard of this one? After falling in love with the American epic and life achievement that is East of Eden, I was determined to sneak in some more Steinbeck before the end of the year. My schedule not permitting (I'm neck deep in a backlog of indie-steampunk to review right now), I was however able to absorb the audio book during a long drive to the Roller Coaster Capital of the world, Cedar Point in Ohio. Turns out, it's only three discs. But the reader was phenomenal so by all means, check it out. Not everything Steinbeck writes is a massive tome of intense American anguish and despair like Grapes of Wrath or Of Mice and Men. Winter of Our Discontent is quite succinct, for example, and The Pearl is even shorter. You could probably read it in 3-5 hours, tops. The story is simple. Kino and his wife Juana have a baby in the small village of La Paz, Mexico. This is a long time ago. The baby is bit by a scorpion. They dare to take the baby to the doctor, who is of a higher social class than the poor villagers and refuses them for lack of payment. Kino's only hope is to go diving on the beach where pearls are prevalent and hope for a few big enough to be worth something. What they find instead is the "pearl of the world". The largest pearl anyone has ever seen, and before they even get back to town, everyone already knows. The doctor heals their son, but he was probably gonna be fine afterall. The real story is what to do about the pearl. The pearl dealers try to screw him over, and collectively refuse to admit its true value. In a fit of defiance and confidence, he threatens to take the pearl to the city himself to get a fair price, a strategy that embarrasses the dealers and would totally work if only the city wasn't on the other side of that mountain. No one goes to the city. But even as Juana begins to think the pearl is cursed to bring them hardship, Kino is determined. He is a man, he states repeatedly. He already knows what he's gonna buy with it. Like everyone else in town who only has to hear of the great pearl for their imaginations and greed to run wild, Kino also begins to daydream. He thinks maybe he'll get a new rifle. Steinbeck draws his inspiration from a real folk tale he learned when visiting the region in the 40's. I can't speak to the original version, or whether there is only one "real" version which Steinbeck borrowed from, but I can honestly say this story feels 100% Steinbeck anyway. His preoccupation with small town folk and their small town ways is as manifest here as any other work of his. The politics, infighting, gossiping and grasping for lazy wealth is interwoven with their complex familial dynamics and ageless lineages. Their sins are simple, small and intimate, and their virtues superficial, impotent and self-proclaimed. Steinbeck's characters are petty and small with big fantasies and epic superstitions. It's no different here. The moral of the story of the pearl seems to be one of self-defeating greed. Kino was able to get a thousand pesos for it, a small fortune in his village, but he refused because he knew it was worth many times that. Greed? He daydreams of a few simple items, a proper wedding for his wife, a baptism for their son and then an education to teach him to read, and then goes out on a limb in his optimistic imagination and hopes for that rifle for himself. The local priest presumes a large donation is in order because after all, what comes from God should go back to God. The beggars get excited because there is no one more generous than a poor man who comes into sudden wealth. The pearl dealers collude to rip him off, knowing they control the market. The arrogant doctor uses his many books as leverage against the illiterate Kino and though the child is already on the mend, scares him into utilizing his expensive services anyway. Everyone wants a piece. Then they begin to want more. Someone tries to mug Kino. Kino fights back, and accidentally murders the man in self-defense. Kino's house is burned down. His family's boat is punctured. You don't mess with a man's boat. It's like stealing their horse. Kino and Juana head to the hills. They're going to the city. But someone is tracking them in the night. Deeper and deeper into the mountains. Though I can see vestiges of an old morality play in the dangerous obsession with the pearl that seems to drive everyone crazy, Steinbeck's iteration is, in my opinion, decidedly not about greed. It's about survival. Certainly greed occurs and it is most certainly a driving motivator for those who would take advantage of Kino and do him harm. But Kino's mild optimism and sudden self-confidence are not sins born out of any greed or obsession with the pearl. They are virtues, born out of a sudden self-respect, and a newfound frustration with the village status quo and social stratification that allows certain learned men like the doctor or the priest or the pearl dealers to systemically oppress and abuse the lowly, uneducated villagers like himself. This is a story about the Euro-colonizers who have historically leveraged themselves into all the positions of power over a people they won't allow to stand up on their own and the cost of rising against that system. When one such person finally finds themselves no longer dependent upon the contrived system built to restrain them, it sparks a war of wills. The man who hunts them into the night rides a horse and carries a rifle, while two hired hands do the tracking for him on foot. This is a rich man, out for the pearl, not a poor, greedy villager. This unknown pursuer represents the upper class. The authority. The "man". The One Percent. He may or may not be someone we've already seen, such as the doctor or the pearl dealers. It doesn't matter though, they are all the same. The priest similarly leverages a European religion onto Kino, a Catholicized religion from an imperialist era that uses rules and protocols to manipulate and conform the masses. The pearl dealers are all secretly in league with the one and only true pearl dealer, an anonymous, unseen man who maintains the illusion of competition in order to maintain his supremacy over the pearl supply. And the doctor, as I already stated, uses the secret knowledge hidden in his books to hold life and death in his hands. To hold them ransom. He is not benevolent in his medical practice, but oppressive. In each way, these people represent the way power at the top uses various systemic methods to maintain itself and oppress those beneath it. Religion. Economy. Education. These are the systems any fascist or manipulative power (political, social, or otherwise) will employ to control a people group, whether the masses, a minority, a specific ethnicity, the poor in general, or whoever (usually all of them at once). These are the systems Kino fights against. These are the systems threatened by his pearl, because with such a pearl he becomes immune to their leverage. He can easily pay his way past the religious rules (a wedding and a baptism, both depicted as being previously cost prohibitive) and be free from their guilt. With the pearl he can afford all medical treatments and never be depleted, and even better, he can get his son an education so that he will never be ignorant of the secrets of their books (and thus once again, immune to their scare tactics). And if he can take the pearl to the city, he can bypass the corrupt pearl dealers, and get a fair price on the open market, and achieve economic independence. This is why he declares to his wife that he is a man, repeatedly. She cowers in the face of these systems. Hides behind superstitions that scare her into subservience. Into settling. He will not. He is a man. The pearl has awakened not his manhood, but his humanity. He is a man. A human. An equal to the humans who would suppress him. He is no longer lesser. I might be making this all up. But I'm not wrong. I know if I met Steinbeck today and suggested my non-traditional, socially conscious interpretation, he'd give me a wink and smirk and an ambiguous shrug (that coy sun of a gun). But everyone else in the world since it came out seems to think it's about greed, or obsession, or the inevitable cost of those things, or just the intertwined nature of good and evil. At least according to other commentaries and reviews I found, my take seems to be the outlier. You see, when the trackers close in on Kino and Juana and their baby while hiding in a cave, he must make one final stand in the darkness to fight them off. He sneaks up to them and defeats them, but in the commotion, the rifle that the rider had been carrying goes off. Their child is hit and killed. Kino is victorious at the same moment that he fails completely. They sulk back to the village and toss the cursed pearl into the sea. The linking of these two incidents confirms to many the inseparable nature of good and evil, or greed and consequences or something that makes the outcome seem rooted into the fabric of the cosmos, fate itself, and unavoidable. Or worse. Something that is somehow Kino's fault. How dare he defend his family and assert autonomy!? Either because of the sin of greed, or something like it, or his general overreaching beyond his station. Think about that last one for a moment. Overreaching is a sin? In this "morality play", reaching beyond your humble, impoverished station in life, is a sin that costs the life of your son. What the F*?! That's an acceptable "lesson" to be learned from this story? In Mother F*ing America?! This is taught in schools, are you F*ing kidding me? (Am I overstating it?) How dare that Kino hope to outsmart the system, he should've stayed in his place! No. That is not the final lesson of this ancient legend. I reject it. Rather, those moralized lessons are precisely the subject matter of Steinbecks' much more sophisticated social critique. It's not a morality play at all. Not a fable. Not a didactic discourse on the virtues of the quiet life. It's a full frontal assault on the flawed and systemically abusive nature of power structures and the overwhelmingly comprehensive nature of their supremacy. Resistance is futile. This is a tragedy in which the nail that stood up got hammered down and any attempt to rise beyond his status was met with harsh humiliation. Not because Kino deserved to lose his child. But strictly because he didn't. The tragedy is that he gave up, after his child died. With the pearl he gained a spirit of autonomy, independence and agency to choose his own fate and go to war with the gods. With the loss of his child, he lost that spirit once again. There is no lesson for Kino to learn, nor for us to learn vicariously through him. He is not an object lesson of how not to act. Do we read Romeo and Juliet and say to ourselves, that's why you don't fall in love, and especially not with rich girls? No we shake our fist at the silliness of social class distinctions and the pain they inflict with their silly social boundaries. We feel their pain. We suffer alongside them and we resent the forces they dared to defy. So too, with Kino, we should never look at that and say he got what he had coming, but rather empathize and feel his pain and shake our fist at the systems that would cause such pain. This is America, is it not? Pull yourselves up by the bootstraps and fight for your freedom, your independence, your liberty, not just from King George and his colonialist 18th century British Empire, but also from his religious control through the official church of England, and his financial control through international economy and a Royal merchant fleet, and educational control through their prestigious universities. This is America, we can do what we want, here, and we won't be held back! Would we read this story differently if the characters were oppressed white fishermen and trappers in Frontier America? If they were riding a wagon west before winter? If they weren't native Mexican villagers for whom we can't help but accept that yes, they should've known better than to have such "greed" for the privileges only Europeans get to have (in this case, I suppose it would be more Spanish and Catholic than British and Anglican, but same metaphorical difference). I don't know. Maybe I'm laying it on too thick. Maybe I'm projecting too much contemporary ideology onto a sixty (seventy?) year old adaptation of a village campfire tale. But what I do know is that this obvious allegory is eminently awesome. It's a simple story with infinite layers of interpretability that might read to you much more differently that it read to me. I only wish I'd read the physical text so I could underline for you some of the more specific quotes I noticed which informed my take on it. But I did notice them, many times, certain details, certain descriptors, which drew unexpected attention to the imbalanced power dynamic at play between the native villagers and the dominant European culture they lived under. Perhaps I'll read it again. Then again, perhaps my take on it isn't so original afterall and literary types have long since noticed and documented this interpretation and I just didn't stumble across it online. Oh well. Either way. Read it for yourself and let me know what stood out to you. Or listen to Hector Elizando read it in audiobook form. He has a truly great voice with just a slight touch of southwest flavor in his inflections. Geez, I better wrap this up, before I surpass the word count of the story itself. Conclusion: Of course it's 5 stars. The Pearl is a short, simple, yet sophisticated morality play inspired by a real oral tradition and crafted by Steinbeck into a powerhouse of social criticism and tragedy. Truly intense, suspenseful, frustrating, dramatic and eventually heartbreaking. I don't care if you already read it in high school. Read it as a real Man, or a real Woman, with the full faculties of adulthood and life experience at your disposal. You're welcome. Don't Forget to Like and Subscribe! And Check Out Some of My Other Reviews! East of Eden by Steinbeck Islands in the Stream by Hemingway Breakfast of Champions by Vonnegut
1 Comment
Ryan
10/21/2018 09:28:22 pm
Sorry I didn't find this review sooner. For what it's worth, I one-hundred percent agree with your interpretation. Now I'm going to go pour myself some whiskey.
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