"Cannery Row"
by John Steinbeck, Chapter 2
A beautiful
but potentially confusing chapter, presented here in full. (See
also the annotated version.)
The
word is a symbol and a delight which sucks up men and scenes,
trees, plants, factories, and Pekinese. Then the Thing becomes
the Word and back to Thing again, but warped and woven into a
fantastic pattern. The Word sucks up Cannery Row, digests it and
spews it out, and the Row has taken the shimmer of the green world
and the sky-reflecting seas. Lee Chong is more than a Chinese
grocer. He must be. Perhaps he is evil balanced and held suspended
by goodan Asiatic planet held to its orbit by the pull of
Lao Tze and held away from Lao Tze by the centrifugality of abacus
and cash registerLee Chong suspended, spinning, whirling
among groceries and ghosts. A hard man with a can of beansa
soft man with the bones of his grandfather. For Lee Chong dug
into the grave on China Point and found the yellow bones, the
skull with grey ropy hair still sticking to it. And Lee carefully
packed the bones, femurs, and tibias really straight, skull in
the middle, with pelvis and clavicle surrounding it and ribs curving
on either side. Then Lee Chong sent his boxed and brittle grandfather
over the western sea to lie at last in ground made holy by his
ancestors.
Mack and the boys,
too, spinning in their orbits. They are the Virtues, the Graces,
the Beauties of the hurried mangled craziness of Monterey and
the cosmic Monterey where men in fear and hunger destroy their
stomachs in the fight to secure certain food, where men hungering
for love destroy everything lovable about them. Mack and the boys
are the Beauties, the Virtues, the Graces. In the world ruled
by tigers with ulcers, rutted by strictured bulls, scavenged by
blind jackals, Mack and the boys dine delicately with the tigers,
fondle the frantic heifers, and wrap up the crumbs to feed the
sea-gulls of Cannery Row. What can it profit a man to gain the
whole world and to come to his property with a gastric ulcer,
a blown prostate, and bifocals? Mack and the boys avoid the trap,
walk around the poison, step over the noose while a generation
of trapped, poisoned, and trussed-up men scream at them and call
them no-goods, come-to-bad-ends, blots-on-the-town, thieves, rascals,
bums. Our Father who art in nature, who has given the gift of
survival to the coyote, the common brown rat, the English sparrow,
the house-fly and the moth, must have a great and overwhelming
love for no-goods and blots-on-the-town and bums, and Mack and
the boys. Virtues and graces and laziness and zest. Our Father
who art in nature.
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Row Sweet
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Row Sweet
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