Tortilla Flat - Criticism, Arthurian Saga, Philosophy

Criticism, Arthurian Saga, Philosophy

Tortilla Flat was an immediate hit for Steinbeck's publisher, Pascal Covici. The film rights were sold and eventually resold before the film version was ever made - in 1942. But Steinbeck discovered that many readers didn't accept the paisanos with the generosity of vision that he did. They were judged by many to be bums - colourful perhaps, eccentric, but bums nonetheless. This evaluation hurt Steinbeck. In a foreword to a 1937 Modern Library Random House edition of the book, he wrote: "..it did not occur to me that paisanos were curious or quaint, dispossessed or underdoggish. They are people whom I know and like, people who merge successfully with their habitat...good people of laughter and kindness, of honest lusts and direct eyes. If I have done them harm by telling a few of their stories I am sorry. It will never happen again." This foreword was never reprinted.

Yet criticism has remained. Philip D. Ortego, for example, wrote in 1973: "Few Mexican Americans of Monterey today see themselves in Tortilla Flat any more than their predecessors saw themselves in it thirty-four years ago." Ortego also charged that Mexican Americans do not speak as Steinbeck's characters do, either in Spanish or English. Arthur C.Pettit (Images of the Mexican American in Fiction and Film, 1980) was equally clear: "Tortilla Flat stands as the clearest example in American literature of the Mexican as jolly savage... his is the book that is most often cited as the prototypical Anglo novel about the Mexican American..the novel contains characters varying little from the most negative Mexican stereotypes." Susan Shillingshaw quoted Steinbeck critic Louis Owens as saying that Steinbeck "doesn't offer a great deal to multiculturalism. His treatment of color leaves a lot to be desired. He was a white, middle class male from Salinas. He was a product of his times." In his essay, Steinbeck's Mexican Americans, Charles Metzger largely defended the writer's views of the paisanos but observed the following: "Steinbeck's portrayal of paisanos in Tortilla Flat does not purport to do more than present one kind of Mexican-American, the paisano errant, in one place, Monterey, and at one time, just after World War I."

Steinbeck often used myths and themes or biblical stories in his novels: Cup of Gold is a retelling of the myth of Henry Morgan the pirate; Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row employ the King Arthur fables. It is well known that the first book that captured Steinbeck's youthful imagination was a juvenile version of the King Arthur stories. He was introduced to Thomas Malory's version of the Arthurian legend by Aunt Molly, his mother's bookish sister, when he visited her in the summer of 1912. Steinbeck critic Joseph Fontenrose has shown how closely Tortilla Flat parallels the Arthurian saga, uncovering the following parallels:

• Arthur inherits a kingdom and is transformed from an ordinary man to lord of the land, in a similar way as Danny inherits two houses and gains a new status in the community.
• Arthur initially has trouble with subject kings and barons who refuse to pay homage, much like Pilon and Pablo refuse to pay rent to Danny.
• Arthur gathers knights to his Round Table and gives them lands, similarly to how Danny gives his friends shelter and a place to live.
• The knights swear an oath of devotion to Arthur, which invites comparison to how Danny's friends promise to see that their benefactor will never go hungry.
• Arthur and his knights give their attention to Pelles, the maimed King, and the Grail that he holds, which is similar to the thematics of the Pirate and his hidden treasure.
• Services and symbols of the Catholic Church are also keys to both the Arthurian legend and Tortilla Flat.

In Tortilla Flat Steinbeck also expressed his philosophy of group-man. During the Depression it was difficult for a family to stay together, financially, spiritually, psychologically. Looking backwards, in Tortilla Flat, Steinbeck shows the individuals (the knights) become Danny's house (the round table) and that Danny's house is part of Tortilla Flat and that Tortilla Flat is part of greater Monterey and Monterey part of the greater world. Steinbeck was interested in the birth, survival, and ultimate death of the group, a phalanx - the I which becomes we. In his paisano round table in Tortilla Flat, he imagined the ideal birth, life and death of the phalanx. The phalanx was a biological/philosophic idea that Steinbeck and his marine biologist friend Ed Ricketts discussed throughout their relationship. Steinbeck makes use of the conception of the group as organism. The first words of the novel read: "This is the story of Danny and of Danny's friends and of Danny's house. It is a story of how these three become one thing...when you speak of Danny's house you are to understand to mean a unit of which the parts are men, from which comes sweetness and joy, philanthropy and, in the end, a mystic sorrow." The group organism is more than just the sum of its parts, and the emotions of its unit parts coalesce into a single group emotion." In his foreword to the 1937 Modern Library edition Steinbeck evoked the ecological principle that an organism will adapt to its environment: the paisanos are, he writes, " people who merge successfully with their habitat. In men this is called philosophy, and it is a fine thing."