On the epistle dedicatory of John Steinbeck's East of Eden
The novel aims at an act of design that transcends the imitation of moral or natural forms.
The epistle that opens East of Eden is a letter of friendship from Steinbeck to his publisher Pascal Covici. This apparently simple letter may reveal much about the nature, form, and limitations of the novel that follows.
Steinbeck presents the novel as a response to Pascal’s that Steinbeck give him a gift. Pascal asked Steinbeck for a gift because he saw he had a skill of making:
You came upon me carving some kind of little figure out of wood and you said, “Why don’t you make something for me?”
I asked you what you wanted, and you said, “A box.”
“What for?”
“To put things in.”
“What things?”
“Whatever you have,” you said.
The novel is first presented as a form of art, like “carving figures.” But unlike carving figures, its purpose is to build a container. The primary focus of one form of art is to imitate figure or form—perhaps especially the figure or form of a particular human being or human soul. The novel at hand constitutes a second form of art, and this form of art serves the purpose of containing the sort of things that can be one’s own.
Steinbeck lists the things that he has put into this box, the things that he has:
Well, here’s your box. Nearly everything I have is in it, and it is not full. Pain and excitement are in it, and feeling good or bad and evil thoughts and good thoughts—the pleasure of design and some despair and the indescribable joy of creation.
And on top of these are all the gratitude and love I have for you.
And still the box is not full.
The inventory of ‘whatever Steinbeck has’ is peculiar. It consists of three pairs followed by a triad, followed by another pair:
Pain & excitement
Feeling good or bad
Evil thoughts & good thoughts
The pleasure of design and some despair and the indescribable joy of creation
Gratitude and love [for one’s friend]
Notes on this list:
The list ascends from mere sensations or aistheta (pain and excitement) to the sufferings of those sensations as pathe or internal movements of the soul (feeling good or bad), to the higher activities of the soul (dianoia or thought) to the highest form of the spiritual or moral virtues in the Christian or classical tradition thereof (caritas, grace or gratitude, and philia or friendship and love).
Every element of the list appears to have a valence, i.e., to concern good/bad, etc.—it is not a matter of pure contemplation or apprehension.
If it were not for the fourth element of the list—the triad concerning design, despair, and creation—the ascent would be from sensations to emotions to thoughts to art to friendship. Such an ascent would be by no means contrary to the classical structure of the souls (aistheta, pathe, dianoia, techne—as a mode of thought—philia).
The fourth element of the list disrupts this smooth ascent of pairs with an enigmatic triad.
The most conspicuous thing about this list is the presence of the triad (pleasure, despair, joy). The triad seems strange in several ways:
It is a three among twos.
While “despair” and “joy” follow the self-evident pattern of valence evident in the other three pairs, the valence of “pleasure of design” is not similarly self evident.
The structure of the triad is symmetrical—pleasure of design and joy of creation frame “some despair”, which lacks a reference point.
“Pleasure” seems out of place here. Pleasure is normally the opposite of pain, so we would expect to see it paired with pain in the first pair (instead of “excitement.” In his discussion of art (design), Steinbeck seems artificially to have elevated the proper object of pleasure from a mere apposition with pain to a state, capacity or activity that has the end of design.
If pleasure and excitement were reversed, we would have “The excitement of design and some despair and the indescribable joy of creation.” Excitement, unlike pleasure and joy, is necessarily oriented towards expectation and circumscribed by that expectation. If pleasure and excitement had been reversed, we would have a contrast between design, which merely engenders excitement, and creation, in which we find “indescribable joy.”
We can interpret the significance of the triad by imagining what it would be like if it were to force it to be a pair. Whether we had merely “despair and the indescribable joy of creation” or “despair in the excitement of design and the indescribable joy of creation” or “excitement in design and the indescribable joy of creation,” it seems that we would have a commentary on the two different kinds of making—human making by way of design, and divine making by way of creation—and that we would elevate the latter above the former.
Steinbeck suggests that human beings can find, in the action of design or making, a pleasure that is far more than an absence or palliation of pain, a pleasure that is closer to the divine joy of creation.
But the exaltation of the pleasure of human design also serves to dramatize and open up the possibility of despair. The space between the pleasure of human making and the joy of divine creation is literally measured by despair.
The epistle dedicatory to East of Eden begins with the suggestion that this novel represents a new form of an art, or at least a form of art that is an alternative to mere imitation or re-presentation of natural forms. The novel, as a form of art, does not merely imitate or re-present the natural form of the soul in all its structure and teleological orientation towards good and away from evil. The novel, unlike merely imitative art, is a kind of design that imitates divine creation, promising human beings a fulfillment of pleasure analogous to divine joy, but revealing at the same time, in how it falls short of creation, the depth of despair.