The Function of Music in John Steinbeck’s “The Pearl” and “Cannery Row”
How does Steinbeck use music as a tool of interiority?
The other day, I finished another novel of John Steinbeck’s: Cannery Row, published in 1945 — six years after the publishing of The Grapes of Wrath, eight years after Of Mice and Men and two years before The Pearl. The structure of the story took some getting used to: instead of having one or two interwoven, linear plots, it was more like a series of loosely strung vignettes whose purpose was to illustrate the mood of Cannery Row and the hard-luck people there. They, like many of Steinbeck’s characters, are poor, and do what they must to survive the challenging circumstances of just getting on.
At the somewhat-center of these vignettes is Mack, the leader of a group of drunk but good-meaning men, and Doc, who serves as the renaissance man to Cannery Row. Doc operates in a building called Western Biological where he solitarily conducts experiments, collects research specimens for other scientific organizations, listens to classical music, reads from his comparatively extensive library, and helps the locals with their general, medical necessities. For his services and his strong, trustworthy presence, the town is openly grateful to him:
“Over a period of years Doc dug himself into Cannery Row to an extent not even he suspected. He became the fountain of philosophy and science and art … Doc would listen to any kind of nonsense and change it for you to a kind of wisdom. His mind had no horizon—and his sympathy had no warp. He could talk to children, telling them very profound things so that they understood. He lived in a world of wonders, of excitement. He was concupiscent as a rabbit and gentle as hell. Everyone who knew him was indebted to him. And everyone who thought of him thought next, “I really must do something nice for Doc.” (25)
Doc is also single-handedly responsible for introducing the insulated town to outside culture. One of the only ways culture permeates the town is through Doc’s turntable, which is usually always on, and playing:
“In the laboratory the girls from Dora’s heard the Plain Songs and Gregorian music for the first time. Lee Chong listened while Li Po was read to him in English. Henri the painter heard for the first time the Book of the Dead and was so moved that he changed his medium” (25).
Like many authors, John Steinbeck has several motifs that span his bibliography. One happens to be music (beside his intense and long-winded descriptions of natural environments, and his colliding of rural labor with melancholia and death.) But besides being another narrative decoration, how does music symbolically function in Cannery Row, and what are the similarities and differences between the music in Cannery Row and the music in Steinbeck’s The Pearl?
In a previous post about John Steinbeck’s The Pearl, I briefly wrote about the function of music in Kino’s epic battle against fate. It is one of the only mechanics in the novel that communicates to the reader Kino’s internal suspicion that his new status as a “man transfigured” also designates him as a target by his community and by God.
Music in The Pearl is a largely psychological phenomenon, not an aural one — it’s Steinbeck’s diaphanization; his “staining” of Kino’s instincts. He “hears” it in times of both tranquility,
“Kino heard the little splash of the morning waves on the beach. It was very good – Kino closed his eyes again to listen to his music. Perhaps he alone did this and perhaps all of his people did it. His people had once been great makers of songs so that everything they saw or thought or did or heard became a song … In Kino’s head there was a song now, clear and soft, and if he had been able to speak of it, he would have called it the Song of the Family” (1).
and unrest,
“In his mind a new song had come, the Song of Evil, the music of the enemy, of any foe of the family, a savage, secret, dangerous melody, and underneath, the Song of the Family cried plaintively” (2).
Though the genre of music is never actually specified, it is said to be a relic from Kino’s people. Throughout the novel, the music is assigned specifically to four different compartments of Kino’s life: his family, the pearl, his enemies and evil, and the “undersea” —
“... and he heard again in his ears the lovely music of the undersea, the tone of the diffused green light of the sea bottom” (20).
As readers, the music’s function is multi-layered: it A) offers an interiority to Kino; into the psyche as a man whose destiny is straddled between prosperity and death, B) characterizes Kino as a man with a finely-tuned instinct (who, despite that instinct, is driven to half-insanity by the possibility of the pearl, and C) illustrates the important compartments of Kino’s life. To Kino, there are boundaries between good and evil, family and outsiders, and wealth and poverty — one of the conflicts in the novel is, with the introduction of the Pearl, Kino’s futile attempts to pull these things back into their boundaries when they fuse into a single complicated and confusing dilemma:
“Kino held the great pearl in his hand, and it was warm and alive in his hand. And the music of the pearl had merged with the music of the family so that one beautified the other” (12).
I think there’s also a strength in the features of the music never being described. Steinbeck seldom specifies what instruments are in Kino’s head, their timbre, or the tempo. We get very little tangible description, locking the reader out from his thoughts and giving us only what is necessary to empathize with Kino, but not quite understand him as a tortured protagonist. (We at some points, interestingly, get a description of the volume of the music in Kino’s head, despite humans not being able to increase the volume of a sound they are imagining; volume is strictly an aural sensation: “Oh, the music of evil sang loud in Kino's head now, it sang with the whine of heat and with the dry ringing of snake rattles. It was not large and overwhelming now, but secret and poisonous, and the pounding of his heart gave it undertone and rhythm” (40).)
The novel only once comes close to an instance of anybody but Kino “hearing” this music. It happens when Juana is watching Kino with apprehension, anticipating the Pearl being more trouble than it's worth:
“And as though she too could hear the Song of Evil, she fought it, singing softly the melody of the family, of the safety and warmth and wholeness of family” (29).
She comes close to “hearing” it as Kino does, but the music, still, is almost entirely a phenomenon that only Kino himself experiences. In the thirty-one instances where “music” and the thirty-seven in which “song” are written, this is the only mention of Juana half-experiencing it. Despite this, music is still an important part of the novel, not only acting as a bridge between the reader and Kino’s perception and motivations, but simultaneously as a symbol of division between Kino and his community and his family.
There’s only once in Cannery Row Steinbeck uses music as he did in The Pearl, that is, as a phenomenon of the mind and not the ears: when Doc goes to harvest octopi, he parts the seaweed and discovers the face of a dead body:
“He picked up his bucket and his jars and his crowbar and went slowly over the slippery rocks back toward the beach … And the girl’s face went ahead of him … Music sounded in Doc’s ears, a high thin piercingly sweet flute carrying a melody he could never remember, and against this, a pounding surf-like wood-wind section. The flute went up into regions beyond the hearing range and even there it carried its unbelievable melody … He sat there hearing the music while the sea crept in again over the bouldery flat. His hand tapped out the rhythm, and the terrifying flute played in his brain” (83-84).
Unlike in The Pearl, the music here is characterized with an instrument because it serves a different purpose. Instead of being a diaphanization, Steinbeck is describing something of a trauma response that burrows deep into Doc, as deep as music into the soul.
But for the most part, the music in Cannery Row takes better auditory shape than in The Pearl — this time, it’s something meant to be heard. Steinbeck mentions specific instruments and artists because music (and art, and literature) in Cannery Row has two “acts” — first, as a descriptive companion to Doc’s loneliness, but then, as a bridge between Doc and the community.
Despite Doc being an important pillar for the town of Cannery Row, he is characterized as being alone and steeped in work:
“In spite of his friendliness and his friends Doc was a lonely and a set-apart man. Mack probably noticed it more than anybody. In a group. Doc seemed always alone. When the lights were on and the curtains drawn, and the Gregorian music played on the great phonograph. Mack used to look down on the laboratory from the Palace Flop- house. He knew Doc had a girl in there, but Mack used to get a dreadful feeling of loneliness out of it. Even in the dear close contact with a girl Mack felt that Doc would be lonely. Doc was a night crawler. The lights were on in the lab all night and yet he seemed to be up in the day-time too. And the great shrouds of music came out of the lab at any time of the day or night. Sometimes when it was all dark and when it seemed that sleep had come at last, the diamond-true child voices of the Sistine Choir would come from the windows of the laboratory” (77).
His music — jazz, classical, Gregorian — is a cornerstone of his personality, and his record player is the most important instrument in his laboratory. When Mack plans a the second party for Doc (after the first one goes horribly wrong), Doc catches wind of it, and the first of his valuables he stores away from the anticipated destruction of the party are his records:
“The next day he began making his own preparations for the party. His best records he carried into the back room where they could be locked away. He moved every bit of equipment that was breakable back there too.”
Doc not only takes extreme care for the physical well-being of the people in Cannery Row, but tries his hardest to take care of his psychological and spiritual well-being also. In addition to his records, he has a vast collection of books, some of which are poetry. As a character, he represents both the facts and figures of hard science, but also introspection and sensibility. He stands out as a benevolent beacon among the population of Cannery Row who are starved for purpose, live in makeshift housing, and drink themselves into tomorrow.
At the party for Doc that concludes the novel, Doc is invited to play his music:
“Dora, sitting enthroned, said, ‘Doc, play some of that nice music. I get Christ awful sick of that juke box over home.’ Then Doc played Ardo and the Amor from an album of Monteverdi. And the guests sat quietly and their eyes were inward” (128).
At the end of the novel, music becomes more than just something meant to console Doc and remind him of his professional and intellectual distance from the town — it becomes something that tethers Doc to Cannery Row; another avenue of socialization, and another avenue of explaining who he is rather than figuring it better not to. The party concludes:
“Doc was feeling a golden pleasant sadness. The guests were silent when the music stopped. Doc brought out a book and he read in a clear, deep voice:
Even one
If I see in my soul the citron-breasted fair one
Still gold-tinted, her face like our night stars,
Drawing unto her; her body beaten about with flame,
Wounded by the flaring spear of live,
My first of all by reason of her fresh years,
This is my heart buried alive in snow
… (128)”
Doc reads “Black Marigolds”, a poem by Bilhana Kavi from the 11th century, and the party is taken aback:
“Phyllis Mae was openly weeping when he stopped and Dora herself dabbed at her eyes. Hazel was so taken by the sound of the words that he had not listened to their meaning. But a little world sadness had slipped over all of them. Everyone was remembering a lost love, everyone a call” (130).
The novel itself ends with Doc listening to music while cleaning up after the party, and just as he finished cleaning the dishes, he reads the poem again and begins to cry. Steinbeck writing Doc’s final actions in the novel as him alone and listening to records isn’t meant to be the triumph against his loneliness that we might expect — instead, it's a gentle reminder of Doc’s nature as a character. Doc doesn’t end up happier, per se, but may have a wider understanding of his orientation relative to Cannery Row. Cannery Row, too, doesn’t change much — nothing changes about the landscape or demographic of the town, nor has anything significant happened within any of the other characters, but everyone seems slightly more learned than before (which is often the way we grow as people: slow, and much slower than anyone can really account for.)
So, Steinbeck uses music very differently in both novels. In The Pearl, it’s used as a tool to illustrate the psychology of a character, and in Cannery Row, it’s used as an expression of a character's loneliness and connection with others. It’s in the dissection and differences of the interiority of these characters that we find Steinbeck’s genius as a writer and observer of the world and society.
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