The Pearl Read online

  Juana is also the mother of Kino's most prized possession, his son, Coyotito. Kino says that his wish in finding the pearl and recognizing its value is that Coyotito be educated, that he become a savior figure to lead his village out of the abject poverty in which it exists. For most of the novella, Kino is so filled with this urgent hope that he does not hear Juana's counsel; her role becomes significant only near the end of the tragic tale, when the formative events have already occurred. Rather, Kino is led by an internal song he calls "The Song of the Family," a melody that haunts him with its sound; "this is safety, this is warmth, this is the Whole." In some respects, The Pearl is a parable of a personal journey toward that indivisible unity, or "wholeness," described by Carl Jung. Kino's dilemma over the pearl may also be read as a metaphor for his struggle to claim his unconscious self and integrate the "shadow" side, the femaleness within his male identity. He must come to see life, at least in part, as Juana does.

  Narratively, Steinbeck complicates the parable of the pearl of great price when he adds the vulnerability of the baby, first introducing the child's helplessness in the scorpion scene. No matter how attentive his parents are, no matter that both are within arm's reach of the child, they cannot prevent the insect's biting him. Once bitten, the child becomes the object of attention, an icon to test people's values. The villagers know his worth to Kino and Juana; they understand Juana's desire that he receive formal medical treatment, and they follow the young family to the house of the doctor. But when the white man refuses to treat the child, they also understand that money is his only god, and Kino obviously is poor. Later, when the doctor reverses his position and comes to Kino's hut (only to poison the child and then give him an antidote--both visits serving as the means for him to look for the pearl's possible hiding place), the community also understands that duplicity. During the night, the physician sends someone to steal the jewel. He has put the family's real jewel, their son, at risk in the process of enabling himself to profit from Kino's simple luck.

  Extending the plot to include a child, then, creates a kind of vulnerability that putting either Kino or Juana in danger would not have conveyed. The perversion of sheer innocence, and its ravishment, sets in motion a dynamic like that of medieval morality plays. Steinbeck, well read in medieval texts, created his own version of the fourteenth-century alliterative poem Pearl, an elegy by the anonymous poet for the death of his daughter before she was two years old. In this 1212-line poem, the sorrowful poet persona sees a vision of his child as the young woman she would have become. As a result of the dream or mystical experience, he plunges into a river, attempting to join his child in her blessed, heavenly state. His journey, a plunge into the dark night of the soul, leads to his awakening, and to his eventual acceptance of the child's loss. The poem closes with the poet's renunciation of his earthly pain: "Upon this hill this destiny I grasped, Prostrate in sorrow for my pearl. And afterward to God I gave it up." As the poet moves past his understandable grief for the loss of his child, he comes to realize the limits of human will and the confines of human consciousness. He places his trust in God.

  Steinbeck transfers the resonance of the medieval legend to his own Pearl and forces the reader to see that Kino's journey to safeguard the pearl becomes an allegory of spiritual struggle. In the course of protecting the precious jewel, Kino kills a man who is nameless, formless, a kind of evil in himself--and he does so without remorse. As he takes more and more evil into his own behavior, finally killing three more men as he rationalizes that he must perform these acts to guard the pearl that will improve the lot of his family, Kino endangers his own morality. The explorations of his namesake in the Baja wilderness are tame compared with Kino's exploration of the levels of human sin. In the shifting value of the pearl--from great material worth into an objectification of sheer evil--Steinbeck leads the reader to see that its eventual loss will be a necessity.

  Again, by focusing on the family dynamic, Steinbeck adds both life and complexity to his narrative. Kino is not an individual Everyman; he is husband and father as well as man. In fact, being parents complicates all decision making for both Kino and Juana: Kino justifies his wanting the money from the pearl to better his son's life; his is no selfish desire. Relinquishing the jewel consequently becomes almost impossible, for to give up the money the pearl will bring means relegating Coyotito to the kind of life he and his family have always known. But in a cyclic way, with so much hope invested in Coyotito, his vulnerability frightens both his parents. Juana insists that the doctor see him; Kino, at the farthest edge of his imagining--with the idea that his son could receive an education--begins to understand personal fear. His premonition of wrongdoing, that he has taken on something much larger than he can control, starts with that hopeful idea.

  Kino's older brother, Juan Tomas, is another important addition to Steinbeck's reworking of the original legend. The reactions of Juan Tomas support Kino's almost inarticulate recognition of what is happening to him, giving the reader a way to verify that Kino's understanding is accurate. Because Steinbeck's setting for The Pearl is almost dreamlike, and certainly unspecific as to geographic location, to provide this confirming voice is necessary: This is a community, a set of people, a family; and yet for all the strength of their unity, they cannot stave off the evil that haunts Kino once he possesses the pearl. Juan Tomas as the older brother has a wider understanding: He knows that Kino has been cheated, but he also knows that they have all been cheated, through history. His is the voice of reason, the voice of continuity, and the voice of caution. Early in the novella he warns Kino that he has no model for what he is attempting--and he concludes that such ambition must be wrong, for no one else has attempted such an act.

  Despite this warning, however, Juan Tomas is loyal to Kino; and Steinbeck is careful to set the inner circle of family and friends against the broader, suspect community. People in the inner circle want Kino to succeed, even though their imaginations are stunned with the thought of his undertaking. They serve as a Greek chorus to echo, and reify, Kino's thoughts. They literally follow him to see what he is going to do next, and their presence (and the muffled echo of their words as they explain to those farther away what is happening) serves as validation. In form, then, as well as in the undercurrent of doom that pervades The Pearl, Steinbeck creates the effects of the Greek tragedies he admired.

  Linguistically, however, he abjured the stately and restrained language of Euripides and Sophocles. Yet in shaping voices for his Mexican speakers, he created a dignified speech that resonates with pain. Steinbeck had a difficult task in capturing a non-English-speaking culture in his own language, yet the chief movement in the narrative occurs in the dialogue, in the voiced interchanges among the Mexican characters. Kino must ask to see the doctor. When he is refused, and his paltry eight seed pearls are handed back through the fence to accompany the lie that the doctor is out, he gives up any attempt to speak and relies on force as he bashes his hand against the wrought-iron fence that closes against him. When he asks the pearl dealer for more money, his hesitant speech again cripples him--but Steinbeck makes it clear that no matter what his eloquence, the dealers' coalition would have kept the price low. In the moving scenes between Kino and Juana, few words are used, even though those scenes are decisive points in the narrative.

  To replace verbal meaning, Steinbeck creates a technique suitable for a film script but unexpected in a written text: He uses music both to express mood and to replace dialogue. His "Song of the Family," a positive and encouraging sound, is set against the "Song of Evil" or the "Song of the Pearl." What happens in the struggles among the refrains anticipates the narrative conflicts. Steinbeck uses these musical motifs to suggest the complexity of Kino's decisions, as in his description of the "Song of the Family" underlying the "Song of Danger," when Kino is ready to take on the three trackers after he has hidden Juana and Coyotito in the cave. His slow descent into the morass of evil, naked so that his white clothing does not give him away, i
s surely a metaphor for the person going to meet the test of his life, for his soul, alone.

  As Steinbeck forces the reader to listen for something other than language in The Pearl, he moves back toward an earlier culture of oral communication instead of written. (Jackson Benson notes that Steinbeck was reading folktales in Spanish as he began writing The Pearl, evidently looking for a tonal base that would allow him the resonance of that language without leaving the English his readers expected.) His use of the parable form was another means of insisting that Kino's story was archetypal, common to all human interaction. Steinbeck often used literary forms in ironic ways: Here, the parable that instructs non-believers in what they must do to enter the kingdom of heaven takes on a kind of sly cynicism as it becomes a vehicle to picture a corrupt and murderous culture. The morality inscribed in The Pearl is a reverse kind of instruction: Kino has done nothing wrong except fail to recognize evil when it appears (in the object of the beautiful pearl). He can live as pure a life as he knows, but nothing will bring sanity back into his existence except getting rid of the object of beauty. His community cannot help him; neither can he help himself, unaware and unsuspecting as he is. The irony of Steinbeck's pearl narrative is that no god appears to save Kino, his child, or his family. He must save himself--and he can do that only by reconciling the female with the male, only by listening to Juana.

  His wife speaks wisely throughout the narrative when she tells him repeatedly that the pearl is evil and would destroy them, but it remains for Kino to learn to live with tragedy before he can hear her. (Steinbeck shows Juana's broad philosophical base when he remarks that she draws on a "combination of prayer and magic, her Hail Marys and her ancient intercession.") As the book ends, Kino's offering her the pearl so that she can throw it away is his apology for his obtuseness, his sinful error in failing to understand that greed can corrupt the soul. Her refusing the jewel so that he can empower himself by casting it into the sea is Juana's means of allowing Kino to reclaim some part of his badly damaged manhood. This interplay between husband and wife suggests that their marriage will survive the death of their child, but Steinbeck has also created such a poignant tenor of mourning that few readers expect either Kino or Juana to recover their earlier happiness.

  The metaphoric qualities of The Pearl convey much of its meaning. For some readers, the bleak ending of the novella is despairing--and disspiriting. For others, responsive to Steinbeck's musical motifs and the obvious harmony in the resolve of Juana and Kino to get rid of the pearl, the ending is a relief, a release, as the couple attempt to go back to their earlier life. Steinbeck suggests that Kino has learned to accept defeat, and his attitude toward the tragic death of Coyotito is the appropriate one of ineradicable grief for the loss of a human being, rather than the anger at his own loss of his male heir.

  Steinbeck has also made it clear that losing the pearl is inevitable: Power accrues to those who already have it. Neither Kino nor his family nor his community have any chance of hanging on to the prize fortune has accidentally given them. Understanding that they are fortunate to have their lives, given the rapacity of most human beings (even, or particularly, the doctor), Kino and Juana are reconciled to live their poor lives with gratefulness. It is less a happy ending than it is a stoically resolved one.

  The narrative that Steinbeck thought he would write was subtly changed in his telling. His recent biographer Jackson Benson sees The Pearl as a reflection of the synthesis taking place within Steinbeck. His ongoing scientific studies provided the ideas that "would form a bridge from his early work, poetic and visionary, to the so-called sociological works of the middle period, from In Dubious Battle to The Pearl." Benson calls attention to the discrepancy in nomenclature: These works are literature, not sociology. But in them Steinbeck's concern for the real lives of characters that might exist dominates his portraiture. His personal sympathy for the down-and-out of society--whether in the States or in Mexico--led him to draw their circumstances vividly. Steinbeck's fiction provides convincing details, so that the reader believes in the characters' dilemmas.

  In the weeks he spent in 1944 getting ready to write The Pearl, Steinbeck found "the little book" more difficult to complete than he had expected. To a friend, he wrote that he had visited the "beautiful" ruins of Mitla and Monte Alban near Oaxaca, as well as San Miguel Allende, commenting on the strangeness of his impressions and his sense that he was experiencing a personal rebirth. After he had finished Cannery Row, and Gwyn had given birth to their son, Thom, he was able to begin work on The Pearl in earnest. Once the family was settled down and living together, Steinbeck felt that his life was once more whole, and Gwyn then helped write the theme music from what he described as "ancient Indian music long preceding the Conquest."

  Working on The Pearl was an unusual process, one that absorbed much of Steinbeck's energies. He commented about its being so experimental that he feared it would fail; in a letter to friends, he called the story "folklore" and noted that he had tried "to give it that set-aside, raised-up feeling that all folk stories have." Once The Pearl was finished, in late January of 1945, he wrote with his usual modesty, "It's a brutal story but with flashes of beauty I think."

  The process of filming the work dragged on through the summer of 1945, but in 1947 and 1948, it became the first Mexican-made film to be commercially distributed in the States. The Pearl was published in 1947 to coincide with the film's release, though it had earlier appeared as The Pearl of the World in the December 1945 issue of The Woman's Home Companion. The reaction to Steinbeck's nativity story--with Kino, Juana, and Coyotito as his Holy Family--was unimpressive. Although some critics today consider it one of his best postwar accomplishments, it was often dismissed when it was reviewed at all as too slight an effort to warrant serious criticism. Louis Owens speaks to that body of what he calls "contradictory criticism" of The Pearl, ranging from calling the novella "defective" to a "triumph." In contrast, readers of the 1990s came to appreciate the work's broadly based sympathies, its rare understanding of otherness, its insistence on a man's achieving his own psychological health, and its eloquent lyricism that remains in the reader's eye and ear as if it were almost a visualization of Kino and Juana's travail.

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  Benson, Jackson J., ed. The Short Novels of John Steinbeck. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990.

  --. The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer. New York: Viking, 1984.

  Britch, Carroll, and Cliff Lewis. "Shadow of The Indian in the Fiction of John Steinbeck." In Rediscovering Steinbeck: Revisionist Views of His Art, Politics, and Intellect, ed. Cliff Lewis and Carroll Britch. Lewiston, Va.: Edwin Mellen, 1989, pp. 125-154.

  Davis, Robert Murray, ed. Steinbeck: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972.

  DeMott, Robert J. Steinbeck's Reading. New York: Garland, 1984.

  Fontenrose, Joseph. "Sea of Cortez." In Davis, Steinbeck: A Collection of Critical Essays, pp. 122-134.

  Garza, Rodolfo O. de la, et. al., eds. The Mexican American Experience: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985.

  Gladstein, Mimi Reisel. The Indestructible Woman in Faulkner, Hemingway, and Steinbeck. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1986.

  Hayashi, Tetsumaro, ed. John Steinbeck, The Years of Greatness, 1936-1939. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993.

  Hughes, R. S.John Steinbeck: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1989.

  Jung, Carl G. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, ed. Sir Herbert Read, et. al. 2nd ed., vol. 9 [1] of The Collected Works ofC. G. Jung (New York: Bollingen Foundation, Inc., 1975).

  Kiernan, Thomas. The Intricate Music: A Biography of John Steinbeck. Boston: Little, Brown, 1979.

  Lisca, Peter. The Wide World of John Steinbeck. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1958; rpt. New York: Gordian Press, 1981.

  Millichap, Joseph R. Steinbeck and Film. New
York: Frederick Ungar, 1983.

  Morris, Harry. "The Pearl: Realism and Allegory." In Davis, Steinbeck: A Collection of Critical Essays, pp. 149-162.

  Owens, Louis. John Steinbeck's Re-Vision of America, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985.

  Simmonds, Roy S. "Steinbeck's The Pearl: Legend, Film, Novel." In Benson, The Short Novels of John Steinbeck, pp. 173-184.

  --. "Steinbeck's The Pearl: A Preliminary Textual Study." Steinbeck Quarterly 22 (Winter-Spring, 1989), pp. 16-34.

  St. Pierre, Brian. John Steinbeck, the California Years. San Francisco, Calif: Chronicle Books, 1983.

  Steinbeck, Elaine, and Robert Wallsten, eds. Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, New York: Viking, 1975.

  Steinbeck, John. Cannery Row. New York: Viking, 1945.

  --. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Viking, 1939.

  --. "My Short Novels." In Benson, The Short Novels of John Steinbeck, pp. 15-17.

  --. The Pearl. New York: Viking, 1947.

  --. with Edward F. Ricketts. Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research. New York: Viking, 1941.