Summer vacation has been going on for a while now (I think it's like half over) and I figured it was about time to get started on summer reading. I chose Tortilla Flat for two reasons (1) I already had a copy in my possession and (2) it looked short and I had other things to read. So without further ado...
The first seventh:
As the preface repeatedly mentions, this book is a story book in the same vein as Robin Hood and King Arthur, and even in the first few pages, it is very apparent that Tortilla Flat is very different than other Steinbeck novels. The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, and East of Eden, all were very realistic books with simple and direct narration. Even though Tortilla Flat shares the same California back drop as his other books, and even features the same social outsiders for its cast of characters, the plot and narration are littered with medieval allusions. The medieval influence is most apparent in the characters’ dialogue, through which strings of “thee”s and “thine”s are scattered. To even further enhance the legendary atmosphere, I am reading Tortilla Flat in a compilation of John Steinbeck’s shorter novels. To call the book a tome is the best way to describe it. It is large and leather-bound. The pages are bigger than a standard book’s and the text is laid out in a double column format. Plus, each chapter is headed with a little quote describing the action such as “How the poison of possessions wrought with Pilon, and how Evil temporarily triumphed in him.” The only other book that I have seen this in is Robin Hood. These typographical nuances really add to the atmosphere of the book and enhance the experience. I am very excited to see where the story is going to go.
The novel Tortilla Flat is concerned with the residents of the community of Tortilla Flat, a small hillside community outside of the larger Monterey. According to the Preface, the residents of Tortilla Flat are a certain offshoot of humanity known as paisanos. They are a race that claims Spanish, Indian, Mexican, and various Caucasian ancestries. They are a hardy group of people, and the Preface suggests that they are untouched by commercialism, which, if you have ever read Steinbeck before, will recognize as a little flag saying that these people are going to be the noble heroes of the novel. This also means that these people will probably be poor, shun hard work, and have a questionable moral code that Steinbeck will attempt to show is a simpler and more humane alternative to our modern commercial society’s idea of good. Now that I am two sevenths of the way through the novel, I can confirm my prior assumption. Pasisano’s are poor, they hardly ever work and never work a full day, most don’t even live in houses, thievery is widespread, and sex is practically a tradable commodity, and yet, they still seem so kind and good and dare I say, noble. As the Preface stated, Tortilla Flat is supposed to be a legend worthy to stand beside that of Arthur and Robin Hood. When you look at the character’s motives, there is nothing sinister behind their sins. It is not that they don’t acknowledge their actions as sinful, they do. It is just that that knowledge does not bother them. They have their own reasons, and they are all devoid of that single worst sin for Steinbeck: selfishness. If they steal some wine, they share it with their friends. Really, and now that I remember, Robin Hood was a thief and an outlaw, too.
I am having a hard time understanding Pilon. In the last few chapters, it seems like Pilon has usurped Danny’s position as the novel’s protagonist. While Danny is a kind, but plain character, Pilon has a little more edge. Even though it can be argued that Danny’s inheritance triggered the events of the novel, inheriting the two houses was a passive act on Danny’s part. In other words, he didn’t really do anything. The houses just came to him. However, Pilon seems to be instigating most of the action in the book. It is his half schemes that brought Jesus Maria, Pablo and the Pirate into Danny’s house; though, Pilon wouldn’t use the word “scheme.” Through a series of mental acrobatics, Pilon employs a double think turning his selfish manipulations into charitable acts. The big irony here, for me anyway, is that even though he sets out to manipulate people, he actually ends up helping them. The best example of this so far is the episode with Pirate. Unlike in previous chapters, Pilon does not see something he wants and then justify his attempt to steal it. I half believe that Pilon sincerely wanted to help Pirate, but considering the rest of the book, I would have to assume that his prime motivation was selfish. At the best of times, Pilon’s motives, even to himself, are ambiguous. Despite his intentions, there is no denying that Pilon bettered Pirate’s life. I don’t understand Pilon. I don’t understand why he does the things he does, but if no one gets hurt and some people actually come out better because of it, does it really matter what Pilon was intending to do? Personally, I would say hell yes it does, but in the novel I don’t think it really matters. Reading the book, I get the idea that evil is something external to Tortilla Flat. Knowing Steinbeck, this is because Tortilla Flat is a refuge of simplicity as compared to the evils of the modern world. In the novel, Pilon’s actions aren’t bad because he is not corrupted by the modern world, so nothing negative can result from his actions.
Today as I was reading Tortilla Flat, someone asked me what it was about. I started to respond only to blurt out a few awkward sentence starters. I fumbled around trying to think of a nice simple way to summarize the plot. I tried to explain about the house, that Danny inherited it and how all of his friends moved in with him, but that sounds much more like the premise of a sitcom rather than a novel’s plot. There hadn’t been much of an evolving plot and the little character change there was seemed to belong more to the background of the book. I realized that Tortilla Flat really was like a sitcom in its early episodes. The first chapter reminded me of the pilot episodes of my favorite television shows. The characters were introduced, they went through an odd set of circumstances that created a quirky bond and would establish the premise that the story would be based upon. Thinking about it now, you can almost read the Preface as a short, show business blurb that Steinbeck wrote trying to sell his show. It does not touch on plot elements but simply explains that the story is going to be a modern legend akin to Arthur and Robin Hood. Even the way the rest of the book is set up is similar to a sitcom. Each chapter is practically a self-contained melodrama and can be summarized very simply. One character already a member of Danny’s house is looking for some wine or money for himself or Danny, meets another character who can get money or wine, and is then forced into some outlandish situations, which result in the other character becoming the newest member of Danny’s house. The story is not a long and grand epic like its literary ancestors. It is sort of a series of mini-epics. Individual chapters do not contain plot development that carries on into latter chapters, so each one bite sized and is even capable of being read in about half an hour. It is a book that you can pick up and read in your spare time, get immediate gratification, ignore it for a few days and pick it up again next time you’re bored. So, to answer my friend, I described it to her as Friends and Robin Hood and Of Mice and Men mixed together, which I think is a pretty good description.
Tortilla Flat is not a long book, but for some reason, I’ve been reading it for three weeks and am only half done. When you are only reading for twenty minutes every few days, it becomes hard to follow the plot. By now, the characters are a mishmash of cookie-cut personalities in my head. I find myself thinking about the events of the book in terms of generic scenarios with descriptive qualities slapped onto them. It has become obvious to me that in order to finish this book, I need to compile a list of the characters. First there is Danny, he owns the houses. Then there is Pilon. He is sneaky, but sometimes is overcome by his good nature. Pablo was the third member of the houses, but I can’t really describe him. All I remember is that he spent the war in jail, and I bet that he likes wine. Jesus Maria is the religious one. Then there is Big Joe Portagee, who is big and bland. Finally, there is Pirate and his dogs. Most of the chapters so far have dealt with Pilon. Joe Portagee got a chapter when he fell in love with the old lady. Jesus Maria took center stage for a while when he brought back the corporal, and Pirate got the chapter when he bought the candlestick. I think that sufficiently sorts the plot, so mission accomplished.
Yesterday, while I was visiting my uncle in Cincinnati, I found out that he had illustrated a version of Tortilla Flat. He is an artist, and I had known that he had illustrated a few books before, but I never knew that one of them was a book that I was reading. Well, I got a hold of some of the illustrations and I uploaded them to Photobucket so that I could share them for one of my blogposts as well as recap some of the more humorous side stories in the book. This first one( http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m79/nickstan4d/tf023-bk.jpg ) shows the main characters Danny, Pilon, Pablo and Jesus Maria sitting around lazily in the morning. If you have read the book, you know that every morning inevitably leads to this. The next one ( http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m79/nickstan4d/tf012-bk.jpg ) is a picture of Sweets with her electric sweeper. In the book, Danny had bought Sweets a sweeper even though she had no electricity to run it with. Sweets became the envy of all the ladies in town and became very attached to Danny, so much so that his friends had to steal the sweeper back. This ( http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m79/nickstan4d/tf012-bk.jpg )is a nice illustration of one of the, in my opinion, funnier stories in the book. Big Joe had gotten caught in the rain and had received shelter from an old maid. She was over come with Joe’s masculine charms and tried to seduce him, but Joe was too stupid to notice and kept falling asleep. Here ( http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m79/nickstan4d/tf018-bk.jpg )is Pilon stealing Big Joe’s pants for reasons that I don’t really remember. This one ( http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m79/nickstan4d/tf020-bk.jpg )is a picture of my favorite story in the novel. It is the culmination of the Pirate’s thousand day labor when he is going to church to see the candlestick he bought for St. Francis. Between all of the paisanos, they had enough good clothes for one outfit and in the picture you can see the Pirate wearing it. Finally, there is this picture ( http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m79/nickstan4d/tf019-bk.jpg ) of Big Joe walking in with two gallons of wine after stealing from the Pirate’s sack. He is promptly beaten into remorse and in the picture you can see the look of horror on his face when he realizes that he has been caught.
The ownership of property and all of the luxuries it brings are naturally restrictive to the freedoms of the paisanos, and in the end, the cumulative weight of the responsibility built up in Danny. He lost all enthusiasm in life, but an explosion of activity followed his period of brooding. The simple things that Danny had valued most in his life, how sleeping outdoors was better than any bed and how stolen food always tasted better than store bought food, the very essence of simplicity and the basis of paisano lifestyle had become impossible because of his house. He burst out and ravenously devoured all sweets of paisano life. So much living took a physical toll on Danny, and even more pronounced than the physical strain was the psychological oppression of the unshakable feeling that his life meant nothing and that all was vanity. However, Danny went out big. His final party became legendary, and exalted Danny beyond mortal men. In those last hours Danny lived to live. He reinforced his existence through the sheer acting of existing to his fullest. Desperately, frantically, he tried to tear away his mortality, to transcend the inevitable end that he saw coming. Like my all time favorite character ever, Captain Ahab, Danny sought to spit in the face of the universe and through his defiance say that he was something and meant something. His struggle with the opponent resulted in his destruction, and through his own destruction he forever sealed his own fate. It might have been suicide, but it was not the kind of suicide that the paisanos spoke about earlier. Danny did not act out of depression or self-pity. It was a noble act, almost a sacrifice. Danny had realized that even though his life was slipping away from him, it was spilling out into the lives of so many others. I think that this is part of the wine motif and has tie ins with a Jesus Christ analogy. Danny was a wine provider. He shared wine, people brought wine to him and he passed it along. So, finally, his suicide takes on tones of ambiguity. It was an act of defiance, but it was also a freely given sacrifice. It was a final explosion of living, but also the beginning of an everlasting sort of mortality on Tortilla Flat. Finally, possibly the biggest irony of all was the house itself. The house originally exalted Danny above the paisanos, but it also brought him together with all of this friends. The house stripped Danny of his paisano passions, but it also was the host of the biggest paisano celebration ever. The burning of the house was a symbolic necessity. It was the physical medium that had united them around their spiritual center of Danny. The house, devoid of Danny, seemed like a corpse. The paisanos had been unable to attend Danny’s funeral, which the book describes in tones to suggest that it was immoral and bogus, i.e. not fitting of who Danny truly was. The burning of the house was the final ritual for the paisanos. It was a way of honoring Danny and protecting his legacy. Danny’s suicide was largely to eternally cement himself into reality. As long as the house remained standing, Danny’s actions were incomplete. The burning of the house put a cap on the legend. It was the last standing testimony to Danny’s life, and by destroying it, Danny’s life became legend.
Didn't the passage of background information say that Antigone was a victim of Creon's hubris? Some of you are suggesting that Antigone is the tragic hero. Thoughts on that.
7 comments:
Tortilla Flat
John Steinbeck
July 16, 2006
Summer vacation has been going on for a while now (I think it's like half over) and I figured it was about time to get started on summer reading. I chose Tortilla Flat for two reasons (1) I already had a copy in my possession and (2) it looked short and I had other things to read. So without further ado...
The first seventh:
As the preface repeatedly mentions, this book is a story book in the same vein as Robin Hood and King Arthur, and even in the first few pages, it is very apparent that Tortilla Flat is very different than other Steinbeck novels. The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, and East of Eden, all were very realistic books with simple and direct narration. Even though Tortilla Flat shares the same California back drop as his other books, and even features the same social outsiders for its cast of characters, the plot and narration are littered with medieval allusions. The medieval influence is most apparent in the characters’ dialogue, through which strings of “thee”s and “thine”s are scattered. To even further enhance the legendary atmosphere, I am reading Tortilla Flat in a compilation of John Steinbeck’s shorter novels. To call the book a tome is the best way to describe it. It is large and leather-bound. The pages are bigger than a standard book’s and the text is laid out in a double column format. Plus, each chapter is headed with a little quote describing the action such as “How the poison of possessions wrought with Pilon, and how Evil temporarily triumphed in him.” The only other book that I have seen this in is Robin Hood. These typographical nuances really add to the atmosphere of the book and enhance the experience. I am very excited to see where the story is going to go.
TORTILLA FLAT
THE SECOND SEVENTH
The novel Tortilla Flat is concerned with the residents of the community of Tortilla Flat, a small hillside community outside of the larger Monterey. According to the Preface, the residents of Tortilla Flat are a certain offshoot of humanity known as paisanos. They are a race that claims Spanish, Indian, Mexican, and various Caucasian ancestries. They are a hardy group of people, and the Preface suggests that they are untouched by commercialism, which, if you have ever read Steinbeck before, will recognize as a little flag saying that these people are going to be the noble heroes of the novel. This also means that these people will probably be poor, shun hard work, and have a questionable moral code that Steinbeck will attempt to show is a simpler and more humane alternative to our modern commercial society’s idea of good. Now that I am two sevenths of the way through the novel, I can confirm my prior assumption. Pasisano’s are poor, they hardly ever work and never work a full day, most don’t even live in houses, thievery is widespread, and sex is practically a tradable commodity, and yet, they still seem so kind and good and dare I say, noble. As the Preface stated, Tortilla Flat is supposed to be a legend worthy to stand beside that of Arthur and Robin Hood. When you look at the character’s motives, there is nothing sinister behind their sins. It is not that they don’t acknowledge their actions as sinful, they do. It is just that that knowledge does not bother them. They have their own reasons, and they are all devoid of that single worst sin for Steinbeck: selfishness. If they steal some wine, they share it with their friends. Really, and now that I remember, Robin Hood was a thief and an outlaw, too.
The Third Part of Tortilla Flat
I am having a hard time understanding Pilon. In the last few chapters, it seems like Pilon has usurped Danny’s position as the novel’s protagonist. While Danny is a kind, but plain character, Pilon has a little more edge. Even though it can be argued that Danny’s inheritance triggered the events of the novel, inheriting the two houses was a passive act on Danny’s part. In other words, he didn’t really do anything. The houses just came to him. However, Pilon seems to be instigating most of the action in the book. It is his half schemes that brought Jesus Maria, Pablo and the Pirate into Danny’s house; though, Pilon wouldn’t use the word “scheme.” Through a series of mental acrobatics, Pilon employs a double think turning his selfish manipulations into charitable acts. The big irony here, for me anyway, is that even though he sets out to manipulate people, he actually ends up helping them. The best example of this so far is the episode with Pirate. Unlike in previous chapters, Pilon does not see something he wants and then justify his attempt to steal it. I half believe that Pilon sincerely wanted to help Pirate, but considering the rest of the book, I would have to assume that his prime motivation was selfish. At the best of times, Pilon’s motives, even to himself, are ambiguous. Despite his intentions, there is no denying that Pilon bettered Pirate’s life.
I don’t understand Pilon. I don’t understand why he does the things he does, but if no one gets hurt and some people actually come out better because of it, does it really matter what Pilon was intending to do? Personally, I would say hell yes it does, but in the novel I don’t think it really matters. Reading the book, I get the idea that evil is something external to Tortilla Flat. Knowing Steinbeck, this is because Tortilla Flat is a refuge of simplicity as compared to the evils of the modern world. In the novel, Pilon’s actions aren’t bad because he is not corrupted by the modern world, so nothing negative can result from his actions.
Part Four of My Ongoing Series on Tortilla Flat
Today as I was reading Tortilla Flat, someone asked me what it was about. I started to respond only to blurt out a few awkward sentence starters. I fumbled around trying to think of a nice simple way to summarize the plot. I tried to explain about the house, that Danny inherited it and how all of his friends moved in with him, but that sounds much more like the premise of a sitcom rather than a novel’s plot. There hadn’t been much of an evolving plot and the little character change there was seemed to belong more to the background of the book. I realized that Tortilla Flat really was like a sitcom in its early episodes. The first chapter reminded me of the pilot episodes of my favorite television shows. The characters were introduced, they went through an odd set of circumstances that created a quirky bond and would establish the premise that the story would be based upon. Thinking about it now, you can almost read the Preface as a short, show business blurb that Steinbeck wrote trying to sell his show. It does not touch on plot elements but simply explains that the story is going to be a modern legend akin to Arthur and Robin Hood. Even the way the rest of the book is set up is similar to a sitcom. Each chapter is practically a self-contained melodrama and can be summarized very simply. One character already a member of Danny’s house is looking for some wine or money for himself or Danny, meets another character who can get money or wine, and is then forced into some outlandish situations, which result in the other character becoming the newest member of Danny’s house. The story is not a long and grand epic like its literary ancestors. It is sort of a series of mini-epics. Individual chapters do not contain plot development that carries on into latter chapters, so each one bite sized and is even capable of being read in about half an hour. It is a book that you can pick up and read in your spare time, get immediate gratification, ignore it for a few days and pick it up again next time you’re bored. So, to answer my friend, I described it to her as Friends and Robin Hood and Of Mice and Men mixed together, which I think is a pretty good description.
5
Tortilla Flat is not a long book, but for some reason, I’ve been reading it for three weeks and am only half done. When you are only reading for twenty minutes every few days, it becomes hard to follow the plot. By now, the characters are a mishmash of cookie-cut personalities in my head. I find myself thinking about the events of the book in terms of generic scenarios with descriptive qualities slapped onto them. It has become obvious to me that in order to finish this book, I need to compile a list of the characters. First there is Danny, he owns the houses. Then there is Pilon. He is sneaky, but sometimes is overcome by his good nature. Pablo was the third member of the houses, but I can’t really describe him. All I remember is that he spent the war in jail, and I bet that he likes wine. Jesus Maria is the religious one. Then there is Big Joe Portagee, who is big and bland. Finally, there is Pirate and his dogs. Most of the chapters so far have dealt with Pilon. Joe Portagee got a chapter when he fell in love with the old lady. Jesus Maria took center stage for a while when he brought back the corporal, and Pirate got the chapter when he bought the candlestick. I think that sufficiently sorts the plot, so mission accomplished.
Yesterday, while I was visiting my uncle in Cincinnati, I found out that he had illustrated a version of Tortilla Flat. He is an artist, and I had known that he had illustrated a few books before, but I never knew that one of them was a book that I was reading. Well, I got a hold of some of the illustrations and I uploaded them to Photobucket so that I could share them for one of my blogposts as well as recap some of the more humorous side stories in the book. This first one( http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m79/nickstan4d/tf023-bk.jpg ) shows the main characters Danny, Pilon, Pablo and Jesus Maria sitting around lazily in the morning. If you have read the book, you know that every morning inevitably leads to this. The next one ( http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m79/nickstan4d/tf012-bk.jpg ) is a picture of Sweets with her electric sweeper. In the book, Danny had bought Sweets a sweeper even though she had no electricity to run it with. Sweets became the envy of all the ladies in town and became very attached to Danny, so much so that his friends had to steal the sweeper back. This ( http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m79/nickstan4d/tf012-bk.jpg )is a nice illustration of one of the, in my opinion, funnier stories in the book. Big Joe had gotten caught in the rain and had received shelter from an old maid. She was over come with Joe’s masculine charms and tried to seduce him, but Joe was too stupid to notice and kept falling asleep. Here ( http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m79/nickstan4d/tf018-bk.jpg )is Pilon stealing Big Joe’s pants for reasons that I don’t really remember. This one ( http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m79/nickstan4d/tf020-bk.jpg )is a picture of my favorite story in the novel. It is the culmination of the Pirate’s thousand day labor when he is going to church to see the candlestick he bought for St. Francis. Between all of the paisanos, they had enough good clothes for one outfit and in the picture you can see the Pirate wearing it. Finally, there is this picture ( http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m79/nickstan4d/tf019-bk.jpg ) of Big Joe walking in with two gallons of wine after stealing from the Pirate’s sack. He is promptly beaten into remorse and in the picture you can see the look of horror on his face when he realizes that he has been caught.
The ownership of property and all of the luxuries it brings are naturally restrictive to the freedoms of the paisanos, and in the end, the cumulative weight of the responsibility built up in Danny. He lost all enthusiasm in life, but an explosion of activity followed his period of brooding. The simple things that Danny had valued most in his life, how sleeping outdoors was better than any bed and how stolen food always tasted better than store bought food, the very essence of simplicity and the basis of paisano lifestyle had become impossible because of his house. He burst out and ravenously devoured all sweets of paisano life. So much living took a physical toll on Danny, and even more pronounced than the physical strain was the psychological oppression of the unshakable feeling that his life meant nothing and that all was vanity. However, Danny went out big. His final party became legendary, and exalted Danny beyond mortal men. In those last hours Danny lived to live. He reinforced his existence through the sheer acting of existing to his fullest. Desperately, frantically, he tried to tear away his mortality, to transcend the inevitable end that he saw coming. Like my all time favorite character ever, Captain Ahab, Danny sought to spit in the face of the universe and through his defiance say that he was something and meant something. His struggle with the opponent resulted in his destruction, and through his own destruction he forever sealed his own fate. It might have been suicide, but it was not the kind of suicide that the paisanos spoke about earlier. Danny did not act out of depression or self-pity. It was a noble act, almost a sacrifice. Danny had realized that even though his life was slipping away from him, it was spilling out into the lives of so many others. I think that this is part of the wine motif and has tie ins with a Jesus Christ analogy. Danny was a wine provider. He shared wine, people brought wine to him and he passed it along. So, finally, his suicide takes on tones of ambiguity. It was an act of defiance, but it was also a freely given sacrifice. It was a final explosion of living, but also the beginning of an everlasting sort of mortality on Tortilla Flat. Finally, possibly the biggest irony of all was the house itself. The house originally exalted Danny above the paisanos, but it also brought him together with all of this friends. The house stripped Danny of his paisano passions, but it also was the host of the biggest paisano celebration ever. The burning of the house was a symbolic necessity. It was the physical medium that had united them around their spiritual center of Danny. The house, devoid of Danny, seemed like a corpse. The paisanos had been unable to attend Danny’s funeral, which the book describes in tones to suggest that it was immoral and bogus, i.e. not fitting of who Danny truly was. The burning of the house was the final ritual for the paisanos. It was a way of honoring Danny and protecting his legacy. Danny’s suicide was largely to eternally cement himself into reality. As long as the house remained standing, Danny’s actions were incomplete. The burning of the house put a cap on the legend. It was the last standing testimony to Danny’s life, and by destroying it, Danny’s life became legend.
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