Alec Gilmore

Probably not! But The Grapes of Wrath demonstrates a clear grasp of the story of the Exodus, if not the Exile, and East of Eden shows that he was well aware of Jewish rabbis and Jewish thinking and not averse to digging deep to find out what he wanted to know, like the meaning of timshol. That he knew Wheeler Robinson, however, or indeed that Wheeler Robinson knew him, is highly unlikely — yet there is evidence that they were addressing similar issues and tensions, one in the community of Israel 3000 years ago and the other in the community of California in the 1930s, and the purpose of this paper is to examine their responses to see if either can speak positively (or indeed negatively) to the other.

Since readers of this Journal are likely to be more familiar with Steinbeck than with Robinson we will begin with Robinson and his colleagues, keeping Steinbeck in the shadows, partly to allow him the privilege of intruding on our consciousness where he chooses and partly in the hope that we may then see him more clearly when we bring him out into the light.  

Background

H Wheeler Robinson (1872-1945) was an Oxford academic who spent his working life as Principal of Regents Park College, studying the Old Testament and training Baptist ministers (1920-42). In the 1930s, just about the time Steinbeck was wrestling with the problem of community in The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and with the role of the individual in that community in In Dubious Battle (1936), Robinson[1] was developing his theory of ‘corporate personality’ in the Old Testament.

The theory was not entirely new,[2] has never been without its critics,[3] and the jury is still out as to whether it has anything positive to offer, but whatever the verdict there is no doubt that on a straight reading of the Bible the issues which led Robinson to his theory are still clearly discernible, even if their origins are uncertain and his conclusions questionable. For that reason alone his work merits our attention and similarities to Steinbeck’s make it appropriate to discuss them here.   

Robinson's prime concern was an understanding of Israelite community and there are three principle issues. First, the distinction between the individual and the community (sometimes referred to as between ‘the one and the many’[4]), covering mainly individual rights and community responsibilities. Second, the fluidity of thought between them, where words slide effortlessly between individual and community interpretations so that either it is not clear which is being referred to or the person speaking or writing seems to feel no need, or has no conscious desire, to make the distinction. Third, the force, passion or effectiveness of the community (group, mob or phalanx) as distinct from, and as of a different order from, the sum of its parts.

The Individual and the Community

When Robinson and his colleagues read the Old Testament they observed that references to the Israelite community never referred only to those who were present at the time, nor indeed only to people. Theirs was a world in which ‘community’ extended backwards to embrace ancestors and forwards to include generations yet unborn. It also included possessions and land,[5] and the land could be both 'earth' and the particular geographical territory which Yahweh had given them when they arrived in Canaan. Altogether it offered a picture of an Israelite as a psychical whole, with an extension of personality through family, property, the tribe and tribal possessions, or the nation and national inheritance.[6]

‘Community’ was not ‘an abstract unity’ created out of a ‘mass of individuals.’ Community was the real entity, where unity was prior to diversity and the community prior to the individual; individuals had their origin in it, belonged to it and derived their identity from it,[7] and to Robinson appeared to have a group consciousness unparalleled in contemporary understanding . 

Such an understanding was probably never part of the legal structure,[8] but does seem to have been a matter of holiness and kinship solidarity.[9] The Achan story (Joshua 7), for example, demonstrates how individual offences against God seem to have involved the whole community in guilt, how sins carried out even in secret could have strong public consequences and how a whole community was liable to bear the burden of that guilt and suffer divine anger until an individual offender was singled out, thus affording a  much more fluid or flexible understanding of the individual and the community than that with which we are familiar today.[10] And if in this case the link seems negative, in that the whole community was involved with the offender in his offence and until wrong was put right everyone was implicated in his misdemeanour, there was also a positive side where an individual did something good or special, like winning a battle against the enemy or acting on behalf of the community as priest or king in the cult,[11] from which the whole community then benefited.

 

Readers familiar with Steinbeck may already have seen him peeping out of the bushes, in that some of the similarities are obvious. Others may still be looking for him. Some may even wonder whether he there at all.

An obvious similarity is the attachment to the land and the wider community. What matters most in The Grapes of Wrath is not that the land is impoverished and dying but that the community is breaking under the strain. Like the ancient Israelites, the Oakies were always more than the people, dispossessed and making their way along Highway 66. Their ancestors and progeny, the basics of birth, marriage and death, their basic customs and mores, including their rituals and patriarchal structure, were all part of what they understood by community, and the earth they lived on, while the land[12] they farmed, far from being simply somewhere to live,[13] was what united this community with all previous communities who had lived there and with all those who would live there in the future. That is why Muley, who is so closely related to his territory that he cannot leave it[14], stays behind, and Grandpa, who at first refuses to leave, dies soon afterwards.

Another is the importance of kinship solidarity over legality. When a community is broken up and dispossessed, as were the Oakies, legality counts for little. Legally, the community ceases to exist. All that remains is a collection of families and individuals on the road of life — slaves in a wilderness! Yet the sense of responsibility and community care, far from dying, actually grows through the experience. A new group consciousness is created. Constructive care in roadside camps gives rise to new rules restricting freedom, relating to privacy, sanitation and boy-girl relationships. Damage wrought by a few threatens the rest and must be dealt with. But at the same time isolated families become part of the whole, someone sacrifices a blanket for a shivering child, and the anxiety of the parents of another child who is sick becomes a suffering shared by all. In due course, even Ma Joad acknowledges that the limits of love and care go beyond the immediate group[15] as Rose O'Sharon offers her milk to a dying man, and lest anyone should miss it, Tom and Casy verbalise it as Tom grapples with Casy’s notion that having lost his own soul ‘he foun' he jus’ got a little piece of a great big soul’ and they talk together of a new community where individuals see themselves as part of a greater whole. So the family which set out with a clear view of themselves as ‘different’ (and separate) come to appreciate through the experience what it means to be part of a greater whole[16] — the beginnings of a move ‘from “I” to “we”.’

Less obvious perhaps is the identity of a community with nature but it is certainly there. Joseph Wayne patting the earth opens up a whole novel concerned with the wholeness of nature, respect for the earth and man's involvement with it, and Casy who not only found 'a little piece of a great big soul' but went on to identify himself with the hills.

More problematical perhaps, and where some readers may find it difficult to see Steinbeck at all, is when it comes to the respective values of the one and the many, the individual and the community. Which is prior? Individual or Community?

In The Grapes of Wrath, for example, was he with his tenant farmer when he says 'If a man owns a little property that property is him', presumably raising doubts about collectivism in the form of banks, etc, or was he committed to some form of collectivism, even with its tractors and machinery, banks and institutions, provided it is not 'my land' but 'our land'? In general, his sympathies seem to be with the Oakies whose community was being destroyed, but then again in In Dubious Battle it is unclear whether his sympathies are with the collective Unions or the highly individual Californian farmers whose problems arising from the loss of personal independence he had already acknowledged in 'Dissonant Symphony’.[17]

Kiernan[18] acknowledges this ambivalence when he suggests that man’s primary struggle for Steinbeck was between his ‘individual’ and ‘group’ characters (represented by the Californian farmers and the Union leaders), with man doomed to sacrifice his individuality to the pressures of the group. Another view[19] is that far from participation in a group negating one's individuality Steinbeck believed it was difficult to see how man could have individuality apart from the group in which he functioned, only violating his integrity when he forfeits his individuality.

The debate will no doubt continue but perhaps the best summing up of Steinbeck's approach to the one and the many is to be found in his words in a newspaper article where he says, 'I believe that man is a double thing — a group animal and at the same time an individual . . . and he cannot successfully be the second until he has fulfilled the first.'[20]

To Kennedy[21] the ambivalence suggests that for Steinbeck life only finds its fulfilment in the group and never in the individual, but cites two comments to suggest that the line between the individual and the community is not so much wavy as blurred to the point where it is not easy to know where one ends and the other begins. One is Rama's comment in To a God Unknown, that 'man is not a man, unless he is all men'; the other is Doc's comment to Mac in In Dubious Battle, that 'You might be an expression of group-man . . . like an eye-cell, drawing your force from group man . . .'.  What we have here, says Kennedy, is more than an assertion of the solidarity of the human race; it is saying that in the last analysis man has no individual identity and the human person does not exist as a separate creation distinct from all others.[22] Collectivity is primary, the individual virtually nothing. But the suggestion that 'it is not easy to know where one ends and the other begins' suggests a fluidity of thought to which we must now turn.

The Fluidity of Thought

The second thing Robinson noticed was the way in which the biblical text seemed to slide effortlessly from individual to community and back again, thus enabling individual lives to be merged into a group and a whole group to be merged in one individual as its representative.

At one point Robinson[23] seems to have seen this as a reflection of the indefinable unity between Yahweh and the prophet — the virtual identification of the human with the divine — not to be confused with a mystical union between man and God, because the divine and the human remain distinct, though it may often be difficult to know which is speaking.

A better illustration, however, can be found in the four Servant Songs of Isaiah[24] for it is here that the concept is most severely tested and refined and where the fluidity of thought between the individual and the community is most apparent, particularly in the fourth Song. Scholars have long agreed that these Songs can be isolated from the remainder of the text without the seams showing and when put together appear to form a whole, but there has never been agreement as to whom the prophet was referring nor even whether he was thinking of an individual or of Israel[25], though countless suggestions have been made.[26]   

Such a rich variety of possibilities may well lead the layman to the view that there is certainly some fluidity of thought here and that Robinson’s idea of corporate personality may be the best explanation[27] but further refinement is possible. Rowley, for example,[28] finds four different emphases in the four Songs. In the first we have the personification of Israel — a community. In the second we have a purified Israel with a mission to Israel as well as through Israel — still a community but not the whole community. The third refers to the suffering and the shame which the Servant will have to undergo to fulfil his mission — unclear now whether we are thinking of a collective Servant or an individual leader. In the fourth, the suffering is not incidental to the mission but the organ through which the mission is accomplished — almost certainly an individual!

Space prevents us from exploring this idea of fluidity in the New Testament but although one critic[29] expresses surprise that the idea should ever have been taken up by New Testament scholars there are those who find traces of it in phrases like 'the Son of Man'. T W Manson,[30] for example, has shown that 'Son of Man' may refer to an individual ('the man') and also to a community ('the people of the Saints of the Most High' in Daniel 7: 13). It may also mean 'the Messiah (an individual) and is the final form in a series of Old Testament concepts, including the Remnant, the Servant in Isaiah and the 'I' of the Psalms, all of which as we have seen oscillate between individual and community.[31] 

What can safely be established out of all this may be uncertain but that very uncertainty testifies to a lack of clarity and admits the possibility of a variety of interpretations of several concepts which are not exactly the same but all pointing in the same direction. To understand what Steinbeck and his contemporaries understood by community in the United States less than a century ago is not easy and Israel 3,000 years ago is a much more difficult proposition but the time has come to see what points of contact there are and what we might make of them.

 

Both Robinson's concept of corporate personality and Steinbeck's attitude to 'the one and the many' may lack sharpness and clarity but at several points they seem at least to be ploughing the same furrow. Both, for example, reflect a sense of holism, Robinson finding unity in the interdependence of life and the environment, and in a God of all the earth who is as active in the whole of creation as he is in the welfare of his people, and Steinbeck making similar assumptions in his own society.

All forms of life and their environment for Steinbeck are interdependent.[32] Just as the individual cannot be isolated from the tribe, no more can humanity be isolated from the rest of nature, including the trees, the hills and the animals; human beings are not only part of the whole but indistinguishable from it. So we have Joseph Wayne identifying closely with a tree, several of Steinbeck's characters described in animal terms,[33] and the ecological whole finding sharp expression, though not without a further fluidity of thought, when Casy says, 'There was hills, an' there was me, an' we wasn't separate any more. We was one thing.'[34]

But then just as Steinbeck could appreciate the wavy line between individual and community without necessarily negating a person's individuality, so too he could recognise the fluidity between human beings and animals whilst at the same time appreciating that human beings were distinct in that they were rational, moral and capable of suffering and dying for a concept. What they held in common and what binds them together is their involvement in, and commitment to, life.[35]

 Perhaps Steinbeck's most extreme presentation of this occurs in Burning Bright,  where the impotent Joe Saul says of the child (born to his wife by another man) 'every man is the father of every child and every child the offspring of every man.' Fluidity of thought taken to excess perhaps, but leaving us in no doubt that for Joe (and possibly for Steinbeck) the lines of demarcation are  nothing like so clear as we have often imagined.

The marriage of Joseph Wayne to Elizabeth is a further illustration of the tension (or fluidity) between the one and the many as they have to 'go through the pass' on their wedding night. Elizabeth (and indeed the horses) seem to find it difficult until Joseph explains that what she is fearing is not the physical mountain pass but the loss of her individuality required to create a community of two. She concedes, but not until she has pointed out that the individual is still there and from time to time that individual will always stand apart to look at the new being she has become. Joseph's explanation and Elizabeth's response are in fact an ideal statement of the married state and the tensions and fluidity that go with it. It is a reflection of much that can be found in Steinbeck and hugely to his credit that he could identify it and portray it so precisely.

We find it again on a broader canvas in both The Grapes of Wrath and in In Dubious Battle. In both stories we have a group of highly motivated individuals coming to terms with being a community, as capitalist landowners and farmers on the one hand, and homeless people and Union organisers (many of them Communists) on the other, seek to organise groups of people to the point where they can behave 'as one'. In The Grapes of Wrath,  we have a community broken up into a collection of individuals who then gradually 'found themselves' a new community. In In Dubious Battle we have individuals becoming aware of themselves as part of a group, from which at some point they will have to detach themselves to become individuals again. The result is that in The Grapes of Wrath  we have the individual becoming increasingly aware of himself as a ‘we’[36] whilst in In Dubious Battle, we have an increasing awareness of the power of ‘the group’ behaving ‘as one’.

But can the lines ever in fact be drawn clearly? Notice the ease with which they can move from the one to the other and back again, neither state being stable or final. More important, ask whether the fluidity in their mind was such a natural part of their psyche that they were not even aware of the difference or of what was going on? Robinson was, because he was dissecting something that happened 3,000 years earlier. Steinbeck was, because he sensed the tensions as he wrote about them. But the participants?

Steinbeck hints at an answer in his concept of Manself, the quality which forges the link in community to make all those scattered lonely individuals into a huge and irresistible 'we' to the point where the desire to put oneself into something and to be willing to suffer and die for it makes that human being distinctive in the universe.[37] Just where and when that change from 'I' to 'we' takes place, however, is no clearer in Manself than it is in the Servatn songs but Sylvia Cook may at least be pointing us in tht direction when she identifies it as somewhere beyond the biological, the political and the moral in 'the mystical and the transcendental',[38] and to this we must return in the next section.

Whether Steinbeck is right is not the issue. What matters is that when he observes humanity this is how he sees it. Much the same could be said of Robinson and Israel. To that extent they stand on common ground.

The Mob or Phalanx

Alongside the fluidity of thought in Robinson's understanding of corporate personality went the idea that the whole group was considered as a 'person', the isolated individual having no standing apart from the larger body.[39] This idea found favour in studies of the 'I' of the Psalms where the first person singular sometimes seems to be an individual and at other times a whole community. Is Psalm 30, for example, an individual or a whole community giving thanks for deliverance, using the first person singular because they see themselves as one person? Is the cry in Psalm 130 that of an individual or a whole community?

Scandinavian scholarship developed this further using the 'royal psalms', thought to be in honour of the king, whom they saw as the Representative of the deity (often to the point of deification), and whose blessing was seen as a channel for the divine blessing.[40] In this way, it was argued, the nation found its focus in the royal house through the reigning monarch.[41]

Psalm 89: 19-29, for example, refers not simply to David as an individual but to David and his line[42], and in Psalms 24 and 68, as the procession approaches the gates of the temple, the focus of interest is no longer on the Ark as the representative of Yahweh but on his earthly Representative, the king in the midst of his people, thus affirming that it is not only the king who has been brought through suffering to deliverance but rather the chosen people who with him form ‘a psychical whole[43]’.

Not all scholars accept the details of the argument[44] but, like Robinson, Mowinckel is one who has no doubt that for Israel the basic unit is not the individual but the community. Furthermore, the tribe is not a collection of people — rather each individual is an expression of the tribe.[45] Mowinckel also picks up a few other points already observed in Robinson. These include the notion that the tribe cannot be separated from its ancestor nor the ancestor from the tribe; that the tribe is a living corporate personality, an ‘I’ in itself, to be distinguished from personification[46] (which is something different) because ‘the whole was a greater “I”;’ that in all important situations the chief (king or deity) represents the whole and could not be replaced by anybody else; and that for individuals to exist in isolation would have been regarded as arrogance — they existed as part of the tribe.[47] This, according to Mowinckel, shows that these ancient people had an understanding of a ‘corporate personality — a representative person in the cult speaking on behalf of the congregation, whilst at the same time he is the congregation and the congregation is he himself’. Taken altogether this is 'the mystic bond' that unites society.[48]

 

Some of these issues we have already touched on but to what extent was Steinbeck aware of a similar (if different) 'mystic bond' uniting society, blurring the distinction between individual and community, and seeing all the individuals and community as a psychical whole? It is not difficult to find examples which point in the same direction.

Without relating it to the king or to the deity, take for example the idea of the individual as Representative of the whole.

Both Doc and Mac In In Dubious Battle, are in the struggle; that is, they are part of the community. But at the same time, as leader or Representative, they are outside the community, evaluating and commenting on it one moment and then very much a part of it thrusting forward with it in action the next. When Mac moves they all move, when they all act it is Mac who is on the move. One moment they gather within themselves the whole, as they assume responsibility for the whole, make decisions and issue orders; the next they are part of the whole sinking with it or sharing in the victory. The very language reflects the fluidity and Doc was obviously aware of it when he suggested that Mac might be 'an expression of group man'.[49] 

The core of the idea had shown itself earlier in the same novel when Jim was probing Mac as to how he managed to organise his men so efficiently and Mac says, 'Men always like to work together. There's a hunger in men to work together. Do you know that ten men can lift nearly twelve times as big a load as one man can? It only takes a spark to get them going.'[50] Nor is it only a matter of degree or satisfaction. In his understanding of Manself, 'the ultimate macrocosmic group', Steinbeck had recognised in the group properties different from those of its individual members, and not all of them happy ones.[51]

Steinbeck's fuller development comes in Argument of Phalanx (1955),[52] but always without losing sight of its seemier side or of the importance of the individual. His argument is that as a man is more than the sum of his cells, the whole is more than the sum of its parts, but as each cell has its individuality so each human being must retain his individuality even while becoming aware of himself as a member of a group. Once 'in', however, a person becomes capable of feats of endurance, thought or emotion not possible for an individual, but may also suffer a wildness and loss of control that is frightening in the extreme.[53]

Kiernan,[54] attributes Steinbeck's awareness of this fluidity between unit man and group man to a childhood in which he had struggled with the tension between developing his individuality and his desire not to be considered eccentric and undesirable — to be himself or to fit in and conform. Coupled with this was his anxiety about the tension he obviously felt between the way people behave as individuals and the way they behave in groups. Individuality was obviously always the more desirable — it was what enabled humans to distinguish themselves from animals — yet somehow there were times when society seemed to demand its suppression.

How far this had religious overtones for Steinbeck is debatable. There are those who believe that the issues for him were never entirely social and political but reflect more a mixture of local social conditions and American Transcendentalism; an approach to faith which defined man as the centre of the universe and believed that in order to fulfil his role he must stress his individuality whilst at the same time being altruistic and offering support to others, including the world of nature.[55] Others would say that what for the Transcendentalists was a matter of doctrine, if not dogma, was for Steinbeck a matter of humanity.

In view of his penchant for describing human beings in animal terms it is hardly surprising that the phalanx therefore emerges more as an animal (or mob) than a person, its emotions 'foreign and incomprehensible to unit man'. But then he also  believed that unit-man had a keying device which bridged the gap between the strength of the phalanx and the free, creative individual and which expressed itself as a human group realised its individual goals through collective action,[56] so adding a fresh dimension to what was self-evident in The Grapes of Wrath  with his presentation of 'westering' in The Red Pony.

'Westering' is an old man's word for the experience he had leading a wagon train across the plains, fighting with the Indians and pressing on to the coast. It was his dream, and its fulfilment was is life. When he got to the coast it was all over. All he has been able to do about since is tell the story. But 'westering' is not so much his story, nor is it the story of the Indians or the adventures; it is the story of how all the people who were with him were possessed by the one desire to move west. That was 'westering'.

 The animal language is retained to give force to the notion (westering was 'a whole bunch of people made into one big crawling beast') but the uniquely human is retained as people find personal meaning and direction through joint participation, summed up in the phrase, 'Every man wanted something for himself, but the big beast that was all  of them wanted only westering'. Westering, says Astro,[57] has its roots in the human spirit, in the dream that makes everything possible.

So what is it? Can we not say it is that indefinable 'something' which takes over and achieves through the community something which is denied to individuals but which could never happen without them? Because there we find true fluidity, and there also is the mystic and the mystery.

Conclusion

Since our objective was to put Wheeler Robinson and Steinbeck side by side and allow them to speak for themselves 'drawing conclusions' may be left to others.

Had they met I believe Steinbeck would have warmed to Robinson as he tried to understand similar dynamics in the Israelite community, and Robinson, who saw this period in Israel's development as one which was asserting the rights of the individual over against the community, would have warmed to Steinbeck’s emphasis on the individual as something always worth fighting for. Whether either would have been happy with the other's conclusions may be a matter for further research.

Suffice it to suggest two items they might have had on their agenda and a couple of questions for us to mull over.

First, in the 1930s Robinson and his colleagues saw the history of Israel as a linear development from a sense of community to a sense of personal and individual responsibility, beginning with the eighth century prophets (Amos, Hosea, Micah, and Isaiah 40ff), formalised in the Deuteronomic Law (Deut 24: 16), developed by Jeremiah (31: 33-4) and Ezekiel (18: 2), and culminating in the personal God of the New Testament. 'Corporate personality' belonged to the transition. Steinbeck, on the other hand, saw man as ‘a double thing’ — a group animal and an individual[58] — unable to achieve the second until he had fulfilled the first. Today scholars question whether Israel was ever going in a straight line from the community to the individual and Robinson[59] indeed was careful to point out that even with the individualism of the new covenant (Jer 31: 31-34) it was still a covenant with the House of Israel. So, if they had met would Steinbeck have encouraged Robinson, to look more closely at Robinson's perceived growing emphasis on individualism in the latter half of the Old Testament and might Robinson even have fond Steinbeck’s ‘double thing’ lurking there?

Second, by the time we get to the New Testament individualism is reasserting itself strongly but might Steinbeck, with Argument of Phalanx, have encouraged Robinson (or someone) to look again at what happened on the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2: 1-21)? Pentecost is certainly 'an indefinable something', a mystic and mysterious bond which galvanised a very heterogeneous group of people into action, enabling them to do as a group what they could never do as individuals, opening up the possibility of suffering and dying for a concept, 'animals' yet more than animals, all wanting something for themselves yet only able to achieve it in community. Might Robinson then have come to see that what he found in Israel laid the foundations for Pentecost, and might what Steinbeck experienced and wrote about in California not only have provided a real life experience of what Robinson was on about but also offered some fresh clues as to what else to look for in the New Testament?

Now for the questions. First, if they had met, would Steinbeck's holism have helped Robinson to see Corporate Personality against a wider biblical background of ecology and union with nature, and would Robinson have helped Steinbeck to see what he (and certainly his critics) found something of a dilemma or an ambivalence concerning the individual and the community was perhaps because they failed fully to appreciate the integration and fluidity which Robinson found in Israel?

Second, if they had not met, could it be that Robinson was reflecting contemporary anthropology against a background of 1930s biblical scholarship and Steinbeck was reflecting his own upbringing and social awareness against a background of 1930s Transcendentalism? If so, what might be the consequences of re-examining those wider worlds from where we are today to see what we have missed, where we have wandered or plainly got it wrong, and what fresh they have to say to us?

I began with the idea that Steinbeck did not know Robinson and nothing that I have read has led me to change that view but I have no that if they had they would have had plenty to talk about.