I just finished reading Cannery Row, and feel that, rather than summing up the book as a whole, it may be better to discuss my favorite of its chapters, chapter 17.
I) Truth
This chapter more than anything else Steinbeck has written (except maybe "Log From The Sea of Cortez") demonstrates his ideas about non-teleological truth. The narrator recounts Doc's previous search for truth, then Doc, on a collecting expedition, picks up a hitchhiker, who reprimands him for drinking and driving. Doc promptly casts the hitchhiker out of his car, threatening violence. Immediately thereafter, Doc orders the beer milkshake, which he has been contemplating since early in the chapter. "Well here is was and what the hell," thinks Doc, and then, as the chapter reaches its climax. Doc drinks the beer milkshake, and realizes that it tastes "just like stale beer and milk."
The milkshake has, at this point, become a sort of Holy Grail stand-in, yet Doc's triumph in finding it is preceded by a moment of bad faith with the hitchhiker, and followed by a lie ("I've been drinking it for seventeen years"). This Grail is clearly not some powerful image of purity as much as it is a thing for the sake of the thing.
It is this kind of truth that Steinbeck is after: things are what they are. It is a philosophy that has a lot of resonance with both Zen Buddhism and biology, and though I am neither a Buddhist nor a biologist, I like this kind of truth, partially as a result of this book's warmhearted, funny, deeply sad and touching portrait non-teleology.
II) My Beer Milkshakes
In my first post on "Cannery Row", I linked to a piece I wrote for the Williams-Mystic student literary magazine about my experience making a beer milkshake there, but that is not the only beer milkshake I have made.
My good friend Jesse Albanese, maybe after having read "Cannery Row," or maybe just having heard about it from me, was curious about the beer milkshake. Ben and Nathan were also there, and so we made a second beer milkshake. There are a few ways to explain why that beer milkshake was not nearly as satisfying as the first beer milkshake. It could have been that the higher quality of the ingredients paradoxically lessened the quality of the milkshake. It could have been that, having just had dinner, we were not hungry for it. I suspect, though, that it was because a second beer milkshake is an impossibility; that the value of the beer milkshake is in the experience of fearing it and accepting it. Once that experience has been had, it cannot be re-had.
III) Conclusion
Having had tangible impact on my real-life actions is something that few books can claim on me, and so, between the beer milkshake(s) and the reading at Cannery Row, this book's position on my list of ur-texts is indisputable.
3 comments:
I think of the beer milkshake in "Cannery Row" not so much as "a thing in itself," in a sort of passive Zen sense, as much as an active sign of resignation. Doc contemplates ordering the beer milkshake for the whole chapter, yet when he finally does, he finds himself disappointed by its taste and texture. He has actively sought it out, to fill some desire within him, yet in the end, he finds it just a bitter facsimile of what he imagined it to be. I think this fits with Steinbeck's vision of California as a sort of "doomed Promised Land" (see also: "East of Eden"), where working fellows' lives do not live up to their expectations. Doc accepts the beer milkshake as it is, sure, but I think he does so with a sort of bitter aftertaste in his mouth, with the knowledge that it wasn't quite what he had hoped it would be, just like the lives of most of the characters living in Cannery Row.
Hence why it's so poetic when Doc notes that he's been drinking it for seventeen years. Just like life on Cannery Row, which seems disappointing at first, but is not so bad when you abandon your expectations of it being something grander. Steinbeck's life philosophy, summed up in one milkshake.
Oh, and by the way: you haven't had a real beer milkshake until you've had one made with Guinness. It's the only way to go.
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