Note: This Ekphrastic discusses 'East of Eden'. I'm using it to explore things I've been thinking about and don't think it will spoil much — but the choice to read on is yours. Don't say I haven't warned you.
I sped through the last pages of East of Eden on Saturday, after a delirious night running 'orientation' for new Mountaineering Club members with Prezi and Freefall.
Caleb Trask is one of my favourite literary figures yet. He is a paragon of fullness.
As Lee remarks to Abra, Cal is 'crammed full to the top with every good thing and every bad thing.' The magic of Steinbeck's writing is how he shifts our sympathy from the metaphorical Abel to the metaphorical Cain as we descend the Trask generations. The first Cain, Charles, is mostly a forlorn character, forgivable at best because in his rashness and loneliness he lacks the acute self-awareness of Cathy that makes evil inexcusable. And so naturally the reader favours Adam, the first Abel. Yet despite his blind and unconditional love for Cathy, Adam never seems to love life, either in Connecticut or the Salinas Valley. His countenance is forever associated in my mind with pallor and malaise, a sort of dreaminess that mixes love with confusion and through which Steinbeck conveys more myth and allegory than spirit and triumph. I find it difficult to champion Adam. Daniel, who first recommended me the book, told me that Adam, Charles, and Cathy serve primarily literary interests; it is through the Hamiltons that believable characters find their life. I agree, and I'll wager this is intentional.
East of Eden pivots around Adam as a foil for the other characters. Cathy's inhumanity, Charles' angst, Samuel's bouts of wisdom and tussle with greatness, Cal's struggle for love and forgiveness, Lee's flourishing into the guiding moral compass of the latter chapters — Adam's greatness lies in the extreme solubility of his love, a universal potion through which Steinbeck can expound his epic face-off between good and evil. But by himself I think Adam is almost insignificant — his love is so pure and all-encompassing that it fails to leave a ripple upon this world. He cannot commit evil and does not fathom it, and in that sense he is adrift in the world, devoid of agency and impulse. Because his understanding and forgiveness permeate all, the strength of his character only lies when encountering vice (here promptly he has the capacity to pardon any sin). His role is largely passive, and he isn't too interesting to me as a character.
Then Steinbeck introduces Aron (the new Abel) and Cal (the new Cain). At first glance, it seems to be the old Adam-Charles trope again. It is Aron who wins over strangers at their first glance, Aron who is benign and straightforward, Aron who finds himself a sweetheart. But gradually the seams of Aron's world burst apart. It is Cal who must protect him. As the children grow up, it becomes clear that Aron never does; he lives in his own platonic world, so preoccupied with perfection that he gives off the same sort of languidness as Adam. Aron is good, but I am not sure he has really touched the lives of the other characters. Indeed, it's unclear whether Aron has truly loved. As Adam towards Cyrus, Aron feels greater reverence than affection towards his father. When Adam's lettuce business fails, Aron remains resentful and struggles to forgive; and neither does he appear to love Abra for who she is. Aron's idealism, like Adam, blinds him from the marrow of life. He understands neither failure nor sin, and this frigid rigidity detracts from the humanity of his love.
Cal burrows through the marrow of life with frightening ferocity. His insistence on truth leads to a tainted life of yearning and imperfection, through an understanding of which he struggles to reconcile his flaws with those he loves — and out of all the characters in the book he probably has the greatest capacity for love. It is this redeeming capability that finally allows the reader to empathise with the metaphorical Cain (and in fact I guess Cal is really a mix of both Cain and Abel). Paradoxically, it is his imperfect life that seems to take us closer to the sincere and the good — because surely, any undertaking towards Eden from its east must first stem from affirming the veracity of our lived experience.
Towards the end of the book, Lee tells Abra, "now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good." It is in this sense that Steinbeck's work is a celebration of its namesake: the warm, lucid, emotional world with its myriad sins and soulful yearning and love and forgiveness can only thrive East of Eden. It may be a postlapsarian world, but within it is Cal, and the reassurance that it is not a sin to love life for what it is.