Title: <i>The Song of</i> The Pearl: <i>An Essay About Steinbeck's Short Novel</i>, The Pearl
Abstract: Steinbeckians beware! Save your money! This turgidly written, stylistically sloppy, editorially challenged, and inadequately researched “book” should be consulted only as an example of what not to do when writing about John Steinbeck.According to Stillwagon's bio-blurb at the occult Find Astrologer website, he is, besides being a Humanistic Astrologer with particular interest in the work of Swiss analytical psychiatrist Carl Jung, also a former industrial/corporate Training Manager and Instructional Designer, and a self-proclaimed “published Steinbeck Scholar.” His bio statement at the beginning of this little booklet states that he is a “Steinbeck/Ricketts Scholar and has many publications regarding training management and the work of John Steinbeck.” Besides this extended essay I was only able to find a couple of his other Steinbeck-related publications—one was an extremely hostile Amazon.com review of Susan Shillinglaw's Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage (2013); the other was an internet publication of an essay presentation called “Steinbeck, Ricketts, Jung” that he delivered at the Monterey Peninsula Friends of C. G. Jung in 2005. There might be a few others as well, but that was all I could determine with certainty. Whether those accomplishments qualify for notable ranking as a “Steinbeck Scholar” strikes me as questionable. (I know graduate students who have written more and better on Steinbeck who would not presume to call themselves Steinbeck Scholars, but that is another matter). Some of the URL links Stillwagon mentioned—notably his website at www.hallowquest.com and https://cm.g.doubeclick.net/push?client=ca-pub-0719799128146781 are no longer active so accurate appraisal is not possible.There is a germ of a good idea in his booklet: The Song of The Pearl functions as a metaphor or vehicle for a whole series of intangible, thematic, or narrative qualities and possibilities associated with the fated gem that protagonist Kino finds. The Great Tidepool in Cannery Row, Timshel in East of Eden, and Ethan Allen Hawley's talisman in The Winter of Our Discontent operate similarly as palimpsests, touchstones of meaning, foundations for interior questing and song-line plots. The Pearl of the World's song, Stillwagon asserts, implies “something greater than a single musical note, chord, or phrase.” It refers instead to “a streaming complex of feeling tones—a melody or song” (iv). This is a potentially useful insight but somewhat limited and if it were presented in conjunction with the parallel drama of the Song of the Family, might have led to a worthwhile discussion and exploration of Steinbeck's often neglected 1947 novella.Instead, the author devotes the bulk of his pages applying Jungian psychology, steamroller fashion, to Steinbeck's little book and he flattens it. The complex, multilevel reading experience The Pearl offers is almost entirely obliterated, as is any sense of its internal music and the cadence of Steinbeck's prose. Here is a statement that represents Stillwagon's position and gives some flavor of his prose: “Based upon my reading (and re-reading) of The Pearl. I theorize that Kino was a fairly lowly evolved Introverted Intuitive Feeling type and here's why. His reactions to the Pearl of the World as expressed to his wife were about how it would impact the future. If he were an intuitive his time reference would be spread out over the future. If he were a sensation feeling type his thoughts would have been in the immediate. The senses operate in the immediate time frame. Intuition operates in a wider time frame” (14). What?It goes on like that, page after page. In an essay supposedly about The Pearl, he quotes directly only seven lines from the third paragraph of the opening chapter of Steinbeck's book. Meantime, he quotes directly 203 lines from various Jung volumes. Some of the quoted material takes up as much as a full page and overpowers all other discourse. The effect is numbing and misleading. The reader hardly has time to breathe, and looks in vain for direct links to The Pearl. Despite its title, this is a booklet about Jung, not Steinbeck.There is no question that Jung and other symbolic/mythic thinkers such as James Fraser, Robert Graves, and Joseph Campbell were congenial to Steinbeck's thinking—scholars, biographers, and critics have known that for decades—so there is nothing new or revolutionary on that score, despite Stillwagon's posture. Clifford Lewis, Charles May, Donal Stone, and others, but especially John Timmerman, whose essay on “The Shadow and The Pearl: Jungian Patterns in The Pearl,” in Jackson Benson's anthology, The Short Novels of John Steinbeck (1990), established a high-water mark for critical evaluation of the Jungian nexus. Stillwagon states, “Steinbeck's interest in Jung was confirmed later in biographies” (1), though which sources he consulted are not documented, and the effect of his offhand comment is to diminish the importance of a very rich scholarly record. Richard Astro, one of the pioneering scholars who helped establish the Jungian connection to Ricketts and Steinbeck back in the early 1970s, is referred to anonymously as a “misguided editor” who “wrote … the Introduction to a later version of ‘The Log from The Sea of Cortez’” (30). Such is the depth of uninformed arrogance.Stillwagon's truncated discussion of the phalanx (15–16) shows no indication of being informed by other scholars who have treated that key concept or any awareness of Steinbeck's own writings that would have lent depth and nuance to his discussion. And later, throwing around Jung's psychological types like a lasso, he avers that “John Steinbeck's marine biologist friend, Edward Flanders Ricketts, was an introverted Sensing Feeling type” (25), though according to Joel Hedgpeth, in Part 2 of The Outer Shores: Breaking Through (1978), who personally knew both Ricketts and Steinbeck, “Ed tried to classify his friends according to Jung's psychological types. He considered himself to be ‘Intuition-thinking’ and John Steinbeck to be ‘Intuition-feeling.’”As with most influence studies, there is always more to the tapestry than the single thread Stillwagon weaves. The Pearl cannot be reduced to a set of mathematical categories of consciousness or uniform psychological types. That is the slippery nature of a fable or a parable. You could read Stillwagon's account and never come face to face with the dark elements that propel this Steinbeck fiction, by which I mean his portrayal of class, desire, greed, anger, and violence from which no one is exempt. Instead of addressing these experiential dimensions as part of Kino's tragic redemptive arc, we are given abstractions and clichés: “The village culture, traditions, attitudes, and more's [sic] depicted by Steinbeck in The Pearl were influence [sic] by time. Time determined the level of individual consciousness, whether we were born to serve or to be served, who we are attracted to or repulsed by, our general life path and plan. Ignoring time metrics ignores important life path indicators, opportunities, and handicaps. believe [sic] knowing what I've presented in this essay can serve to improve a Steinbeck reading experience and the appreciation of life in general” (45–46).How that is possible is beyond me, but I have gone on long enough about a topic that is not worth further attention.
Publication Year: 2020
Publication Date: 2020-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 1
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