1010 steinbeck, John
tion are recast as deviant, while seemingly unorthodox
approaches to happiness are celebrated and shown as
ultimately more worthwhile.
Sarah Perrault
ScIence and tecHnoLoGy in Cannery Row
Three themes relating to science and nature run
through Cannery Row, and by the end, the three
merge and overlap. The first and most obvious
representative of science is Doc, the marine biolo-
gist whom John Steinbeck modeled on the real-life
biologist Ed Ricketts. In Cannery Row, Doc stands
for science, but a particular kind of science, not the
laboratory-bound, detached science of physics or the
profitable science of the era’s burgeoning military-
industrial alliance. Doc’s scientific work is driven as
much by curiosity as by the need to make a living,
and as much by his yearning for knowledge as by
his belief in the practical importance of scientific
research. This yearning, for example, prompts him to
try a beer milkshake simply because, having heard of
one, he cannot be content until he has answered cer-
tain questions about it: “Would it [the beer] curdle
the milk? Would you add sugar? . . . Once the thing
got into your head you couldn’t forget it.”
Doc “loved true things.” In his collecting, he
can find what is true about a species, and through
Doc’s eyes readers see the marine landscape around
Monterey in a knowledgeable and celebratory way.
The Great Tide Pool where Doc goes collecting is
“a fabulous place” at high tide:
But when the tide goes out the little water
world becomes quiet and lovely. The sea is
very clear and the bottom becomes fantastic
with hurrying, fighting, feeding, breeding
animals. Crabs rush from frond to frond of
the waving algae. Starfish squat over mussels
and limpets, attach their million little suckers
and then slowly lift with incredible power
until the prey is broken from the rock. And
then the starfish stomach comes out and
envelops its food.This awareness carries over, even when Doc is not
present, in Steinbeck’s familiar accounts of the natu-
ral history of the Monterey area, from his list of the
flowered weeds in a vacant lot to a description of the
underground behavior of a gopher.
Interestingly, Steinbeck extends this loving,
detailed descriptiveness to human-made objects,
technological marvels such as the Model T Ford,
to make up the second major scientific and tech-
nological theme of the book, a celebration of the
mechanical. One character, the gifted mechanic
Gay, is even compared to St. Francis of Assisi: “. . .
the St. Francis of all things that turn and twist and
explode, the St. Francis of coils and armatures and
gears. And if at some time all the heaps of jalop-
ies, cut-down Dusenbergs, Buicks, De Sotos and
Plymouths, American Austins and Isotta-Fraschinis
praise God in a great chorus—it will be largely due
to Gay and his brotherhood.” Another character,
Sam, collects old mechanical parts like Doc collects
marine animals, and he even gives Doc as a birthday
present “one of his finest pieces—the connecting rod
and piston from a 1916 Chalmers.”
Ultimately, this blurring of distinctions between
the natural and technological realms extends as
well to the human, Steinbeck’s third area of natu-
ralistic focus. That he sees the human characters in
the same scientific light as the natural life around
Monterey is made clear in his preamble to the book.
Steinbeck compares writing about people to col-
lecting sea life, among which are some creatures “so
delicate that they are almost impossible to capture
whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You
must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto
a knife blade and then lift them gently into your
bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the
way to write this book.”
This analogy of the human to the nonhuman
appears in phrases and allusions throughout the text,
as when Steinbeck comments that Doc, going to
sleep on a collecting expedition, “didn’t need a clock.
He had been working in a tidal pattern so long that
he could feel a tide change in his sleep.” Likewise,
the parties that Mack and the boys throw for Doc
come under Steinbeck’s literary-scientific lens as a
kind of natural phenomenon. “Nobody has studied
the physiology of a dying party,” Steinbeck tells us
of the first bash, and later, writing about the second,
he comments again that “The nature of parties has
been imperfectly studied.”