A Speculative Realist
Literary Criticism:
The literary actants of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row
Submitted by 630047856 to the University of Exeter as a
dissertation towards the degree of MA in English
Literary Studies
August 2014
Dissertation (EASM023)
Candidate Number: 630047856
Abstract
The emerging philosophy of Speculative Realism can be used as the basis of a
literary criticism, which aims to provide novel insight into the behaviour of
literary actants (Form, Affect and Effect) as exemplified through a close reading
of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row (1945). This topic is largely supported by
literary scholar Eileen Joy’s “Notes towards a Speculative Realist literary
criticism” and political theorist Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter.
Firstly, the literary and physical forms of Cannery Row embody the novel’s
conceptual form with reference to how they allow access to perspectives that
move the reader beyond human interests. Secondly, human mediations act as a
kind of open interface to allow nonhuman constructs such as enchantment and
disturbance to emerge and manifest themselves as affects of a novel. Thirdly,
effects of Cannery Row’s literary actants are plotted as patterns of behaviour akin
to patterns in Chaos Theory’s principles of the Butterfly Effect, Feedback Loops,
and Fractals.
A Speculative Realist literary criticism approaches texts without the
human as its centre of focus; it concentrates on the abilities of Cannery Row’s
literary actants to affect textual and extra‐textual change, thereby drawing
attention to the agency of nonhuman actants. Such an object‐oriented literary
criticism strives to realise a community in which all actants are acknowledged
for their vitality in both human and nonhuman cooperative endeavours.
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Table of Contents
Abstract ................................................................................................................................. 2
Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 4
Chapter One: Form ......................................................................................................... 19
Literary form .............................................................................................................................19
Physical form .............................................................................................................................29
Conceptual form .......................................................................................................................37
Chapter Two: Affect ....................................................................................................... 43
Understanding Affect ..............................................................................................................43
Enchantment Affect .................................................................................................................48
Disturbance Affect ...................................................................................................................57
Chapter Three: Effect .................................................................................................... 61
Chaos Theory: The Butterfly Effect ....................................................................................61
Chaos Theory: Feedback Loops ...........................................................................................69
Chaos Theory: Fractals ...........................................................................................................72
Conclusion......................................................................................................................... 78
Appendix A ........................................................................................................................ 83
Works Cited ...................................................................................................................... 84
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Introduction
A Speculative Realist literary criticism is based on the philosophy of
Speculative Realism, an object‐oriented ontology (OOO) rejecting the privileging
of humans over nonhuman objects. Founded at a conference held by social and
critical theorist Alberto Toscano in 2007 at Goldsmith’s College, University of
London, Speculative Realism holds an empirical (evidence‐based) focus in its
belief that science can provide evidence supporting the notion of existence
outside of and anterior to human consciousness, such as the arch‐fossil, which,
with no human witness, constitutes matter prior to life on earth (Meillassoux).
Therein lies the Speculative Realist empirical argument against anthropocentric
philosophies and critical theories of deconstructionism, psychoanalysis and
humanism, which focus solely on human constructs and realities such as power
and discourse (Galloway).
Before outlining the Speculative Realist literary agency of Cannery Row,
existing work relevant to the field of a Speculative Realist literary criticism will
be discussed. The Speculative Realist decentralisation of humans is mirrored in
the work of political theorist Jane Bennett, who has built on the work of figures,
such as Gilles Deleuze, Baruch Spinoza, and Thomas Dumm, whose materialist
perspectives have led to the development of Speculative Realism. In the view
that “humans are never outside a set of relations with other modes” (Bennett
354), Bennett’s work stems from Speculative Realism in its aim to give voice to a
less human kind of materiality, but not entirely inhuman, in order to explore the
possibility that “attentiveness to (nonhuman) things and their powers can have a
laudable effect on humans” (348). Thus a Speculative Realist literary criticism
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aims to explore the possibility that the agency of literary actants (elements of
literature such as character, plot, genre) can affect change in humans.
The capacity of such literary actants lies in what Bennett refers to as the
metaphysical interaction of matter; a “thing‐power materialism” which depicts
the non‐humanity that “flows around but also through humans” (349). Therein
lies a promotion of acknowledgement and respect for the materiality of the
nonhuman thing through an articulation of the ways in which human beings and
things overlap, such as those occasions in everyday life when “the us and the it
slipslide into each other” (349). In these moments, humans encompass elements
of non‐humanity in their reliance on the things that are in fact vital players in the
world of both humans and nonhumans. Driven by this line of thought, Bennett
aims to foster greater recognition of the powers of natural and “artifactual”
(341) things, and greater awareness of the dense web of their connections with
each other and with human bodies. In Vibrant Matter (2009), Bennett applies
this intellection in consideration of creating a more cautious, intelligent
approach to ecological interventions, alluding to the environmental and political
implications that applications of Speculative Realism could have.
One of the ways in which the Speculative Realist attention to materiality
through empirical‐based evidence can be carried out in practice within the field
of literary criticism is to consider the form of the novel (Chapter One) from a
materialist perspective. Philosophers and political activists Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, argue for a view of the novel as an
autopoeitic machine; one that abstracts from its environment and has the
capacity to transform, like a computer (Deleuze and Guattari). Novels and
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computers are both (currently, and excluding eBooks and cloud computing)
objects that embody similar concepts of depth in that they are comprised of
actants, which exist in another world, within the novel or computer. In these
other worlds, another story unfolds in which the actants (literary actants can be
considered computational data from an autopoeitic perspective) react to, and
with, each other, and to human mediations, as active, doing things. Viewing the
form of the novel as an autopoeitic machine is the foundation for the practical
applications of Speculative Realism to literary criticism.
Bennett’s The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001) illustrates an application of
this kind of materialist thought in discussing the abilities of a novel’s
independent literary actants to affect change in its reader (Chapter Two), just as
a computer can affect change in its user. The Enchantment of Modern Life delves
into the possibility that the affective force of those moments where “the us and
the it” (4) overlap might be “deployed to propel ethical generosity” (4) through a
cultivation of enchantment. She refers to the affect of enchantment as a
surprising encounter, “a meeting with something that you did not expect and are
not fully prepared to engage” (5). She argues that one can find this surprised
state in a pleasurable feeling of being charmed by a novel, which requires being
disrupted from one’s default “sensory‐psychic‐intellectual disposition” (5), one’s
everyday state of emotional being. The overall enchantment affect is a mood of
“fullness, plenitude, or liveliness,…a fleeting return to childlike excitement about
life” (5). Bennett suggests that this feeling arises when the stimulant of the
enchantment is so extraordinary that it reminds us of nothing else, so we are not
distracted by association and thus remain lost within the source of enchantment
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in a state of childlike wonder. Here Bennett introduces the idea that literary
actants have the capacity to transform a reader’s state of mind in the extra‐
textual world.
However, Bennett limits her argument by excluding the cultivation of other
affects such as disturbance, or disruption, which are explored in literary scholar
Sinnae Ngai’s Ugly Feelings (2005). Ngai suggests that ugly feelings are the lesser
“negative” (22) emotions that are experienced on a daily basis, those that are
tolerable but uncomfortable, such as “envy, irritation, anxiety and paranoia” (22).
As Bennett’s work on enchantment argues that the novel has the capacity to
affect such change in the emotional state of the reader, it could be argued that
Ngai’s “negative” feelings can also arise through interactions with fiction. If the
state of enchantment is a result of an unexpected encounter for which one is not
prepared, then disturbance, for example, could also arise as a result of an
encounter with a surprising element of the fiction. In this light, Ngai brings the
notion of literary affect towards the Speculative Realist idea of agential actants
within a novel by acknowledging their potential to influence the extra‐textual
world, thereby bringing affect in literary theory and Speculative Realism
together.
The acknowledgement of the capacities of nonhuman actants in Bennett’s
work on vibrant materialism and literary enchantment, and Ngai’s discussion of
negative emotions, demonstrates the fundamental argument of a literary
criticism based on the acknowledgement of nonhuman actant agency. With a
recognition of the ways in which literary actants affect, this dissertation uses
literary scholar and critic Eileen Joy thoughts to introduce the idea of a
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Speculative Realist literary criticism, given in her lecture at The Public School in
New York (2011), ‘Notes Towards a Speculative Realist Literary Criticism’. Joy
proposes a series of questions relative to what a post‐human “close reading” of
literature might look like under the cross‐disciplinary influence of movements
such as Speculative Realism, object‐oriented ontologies and vibrant materialism
(Bennett).
Joy calls for a reflection upon critical questions that embrace the absence
of the human and focus absolutely on the behaviour of the actants within the text.
She suggests a treatment of a text as a gathering body of things in which genre‐
things, plot‐things and character‐things, to name a few, all play with each other
in the depth of a text. Treating literary characters not from a psychoanalytical
perspective but, for example, as mathematical compressions of the human is
important, as is seeing literary texts as having propulsions of their own, as
actants on the same ontological footing as everything else.
Joy argues for recognition of these perspectives in the current stance of
much literary criticism today as founded on human‐ethicist principles;
hermeneutics, the science of interpretation, is deeply Humanist. Therefore, Joy
seeks a non‐projective, non‐hermeneutic criticism that would multiply and
thicken a text’s sentient, bottomless reality of potential meaning to veer literary
criticism in an object‐oriented direction. This could better be described as “a
commentary that seeks to open and not close a text’s possible “signatures”” (Joy).
While hermeneutics attempt to get at a text’s “secrets,” as it were (to decipher
the text, unlock its meaning(s), deconstruct it, etc.), commentary seeks to write
around the text, extend its writing/meaning, and maybe also unfold its implicit
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dimensionality. Joy subscribes to the idea that every literary text is unfinished in
some way, partially incoherent, and also mechanistic (propulsive/ongoing).
Criticism, then, based on Speculative Realism, becomes a process of simply
continuing to write the text, or to follow its signatures by continuing to “sign” it.
In order to do this, the reader must let go of what s/he needs the text to be for
her/himself, and move closer to what the text is for itself, thereby allowing a
novel to remain a fiction within which the actants interact with each other, not
just with the reader, to produce new actants, which all have potential affectivity,
and therefore the potential to create new meanings.
A criticism of Joy’s lecture by literary professor Levi Bryant (who coined the
term OOO) disentangles the metaphors of literary critical strategies that strive to
close or open the text. Bryant explains that the central premise of what Joy calls
Humanist criticism, “which is nearly all existing criticism today” (Bryant), is that
texts are primarily vehicles or “carriers of meaning”. As a consequence, meaning
is something that is before the text in either the temporal or the transcendental
sense. Meaning is that which is prior to the text such that the text is but a carrier
of meaning. Like a crypt that hides what lies within it, the text is thus something
to be decrypted, deciphered, so as to discover its meaning. If this is necessary,
then it must be because there is strife between the materiality of the text,
its inscription in paper and other mediums, and the meaning of the text. Meaning
is always withdrawn from the surface of the text on paper, while it is the
inscription on paper, in the most literal sense, which presents itself to the reader.
If there is strife, in this framework, within the work between meaning and the
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text, then this is because there is always a surfeit of potential meaning in the
text.
Therefore, as a Speculative Realist literary criticism opens the text by
embracing its infinite potential meanings, it goes further than the current
Humanist literary criticism, which strives to close the text by seeking a
conclusive “answer” to the text. The various strategies of Humanist criticism –
hermeneutic, biographical, historical, new historicist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, etc.
(Culler) – can all be seen as strategies for closing texts, for reducing the signal to
noise ratio by fixing meaning behind the entropic play of the text in its polysemy.
What the Humanist criticism strives for is a crystallization of the fixation of the
text. However this approach does not embrace the entirety of the text in that it
ignores those potential meanings of the text that are only available if the text is
left open to explore the relationships between literary actants themselves, as
well as the relationship between those actants and the reader.
Now with an understanding of the caveats of other criticisms, the advantages
of a Speculative Realist approach and the extent to which it differs from other
approaches in its initial premise can be seen. It focuses not on the meaningfulness
of the text, but on the materiality of the text. The text is something; it is an entity
that circulates throughout the world. And, like our bodies or objects that
circulate throughout the world, “texts have the capacity to affect other bodies”
(Bryant). Criticism is a product of the affectivity of the text, therefore it comes
after the text, as a result of the text. In this sense, the question is no longer a
consideration of what the text means with the aim of closing the text, but rather
is the question of what the text builds, since the text creates criticisms that build
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on the contents of the text. Therefore, criticisms that are seen as that which is
created by the text, as that which builds on the text, render the text radically
open, as “the building power of any entity is infinite” (Bryant 265).
With a view of the novel’s form (Chapter One) as an autopoeitic machine, a
focus on understanding the behaviour of literary actants within the textual world,
and the affectivity of those actants on the extra‐textual world (Chapter Two),
mathematical and scientific based approaches to literary criticism can be
included in the discussion of a Speculative Realist literary criticism to detect the
behavioural patterns that emerge between literary actants (Chapter Three). This
is validated is the shared empirical‐based foundations of Speculative Realism
and mathematical disciplines.
One example of an empirical/mathematical‐based approach to literary
criticism is scholar and critic Franco Morretti’s concept of “distant reading”. It
reflects an autopoeitic approach to novels not by studying particular texts, but by
aggregating and analysing massive amounts of data through his Lit Lab by
treating characters as mathematical compressions of the human. This
approaches literary problems by scientific means: hypothesis testing,
computational modelling, and quantitative data analysis.
Computer programs recognize literary elements such as genre, for example,
by using grammatical and semantic signals, word frequency or other relevant
signposts. Although humans can also determine genre, the point of interest lies
in the fact that computers do so via identification of different features.
Computers recognize gothic literature, for example, based on the greater
frequency of words like “the”, whereas people recognize gothic literature based
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on “castles, revenants…and the greater frequency of words like tremble and ruin”
(Moretti 9). This suggests that genres “possess distinctive features at every
possible scale of analysis” (152). Moreover, such a distinction implies that there
are formal aspects of literature that people cannot detect unaided (Schulz),
evoking Bennett’s focus on the moments in which people and things overlap with
a human dependency on nonhuman actants. Therein lies an argument
purporting that the potential results of collaboration between humans and
nonhumans may be greater than either’s potential alone, supporting an
argument for the agency of nonhuman actants. The details of this study will be
explained in greater detail in regards to the physical form of the novel in Chapter
One, and provides significant introduction for the further applications of
scientific approaches to literature discussed in Chapter Three.
In a development from another field of science, literary scholar Yasser
Khamees Ragab Aman is another proponent of integrating scientific methods
with literary criticism by taking into account the applicability of Chaos Theory in
the humanities based on a similarity between theory, post‐modernism, and
systems studied by social fiction and science. Chaos theory is a field of study in
mathematics that investigates the behaviour of nonlinear dynamic systems,
which are difficult to predict or control, like turbulence, weather, or the stock
market (Goldberger).
Aman’s case for the application of Chaos Theory to literature supports Joy’s
and Bennett’s ideas about things‐in‐themselves and the bottomless reality of a
text in his argument that “chaos lies at the heart of nothingness felt by the for‐
itself”, whereas order is the “appearance the for‐itself seeks, the achievement it
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tries to realize” (Aman 2). In his paper on “Chaos Theory and Literature from an
Existentialist Perspective”, Aman relates aspects of Chaos Theory to three
literary works, which represent three different literatures and cultures, namely
French, English, and Arabic. Through a comparative textual interpretation of
Sartre's Nausea, Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, and Al Hakim's The People of the
Cave, Aman's analysis suggests that despite cultural differences, the literature
examined, as “primary representation of culture” (1), shows significant
similarities, suggesting that the principles and processes of order and chaos are
universal systemic characteristics pertinent to the human and nonhuman worlds.
Support for Aman’s ideas come from post‐modern literary critic N. Katherine
Hayles, who’s work (discussed in Chapter Three) argues for the importance of
taking into consideration the relationship between Chaos Theory and literature
through a consideration of the involvement of feedback loops.
In support of uniting literature and Chaos Theory is literary critic Patrick
Brady, who focuses on the network of relations between actants/things in
literature in specific relation to principles of Chaos Theory, including
Unpredictability, the Butterfly Effect, Feedback Loops and Fractals (which will be
fully explained and discussed in relation to specific examples in Chapter Three).
His essay “Chaos Theory, Control Theory, and Literary Theory” considers the
basic principles of Chaos Theory and Control Theory to verify their applicability
and utility to the humanities, particularly to literary theory and criticism. In one
example, Brady considers the way in which French novelist Marcel Proust’s
novel, A la récherche du temps perdu, provides several variations on various
aspects of Chaos Theory, arguing that the opening passage reflects psychological
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confusion, or chaos, with an underlying principle of order, namely in the single
unifying point of view of the narrator, demonstrating that patterns of Chaos
Theory can be found beneath the surface of literature.
Morretti, Aman, and Brady’s approaches to literary criticism harness
mathematical and scientific thought, thereby strengthening their rational and
critical foundations, and providing examples of how literary criticism could focus
on literary actants from a more scientific perspective. These foundations within
the field of literary criticism could give rise to a Speculative Realist literary
criticism by concentrating on the behaviour of things‐in‐themselves (actants)
within the novel through an attention to components firstly in their own right on
a meticulously scientific level, and secondly, how such literary components affect
the reader. On a literary level, this is an exercise in reversing the human self‐
reflexive tendency, thereby decentralising the human as the point of focus in
literature. The result of this is to make a reader aware that they are not
necessarily the focal point of a text; there is a tendency to read texts with the
belief that the story is written for the reader, and about the reader. But the
purpose of a Speculative Realist literary criticism is to expose more about a text
by delving ever deeper into it, to open and continue it, to approach it as a
gathering body of things that all have the potential to act, rather than as a set of
characters that await psychoanalysis from a more powerful human.
This approach brings to light a way of reading that thickens the number of
things that count as being alive and loveable rather than seeking for a singular
interpretation. It embraces interest by way of allowing “the feeling of wanting to
know” (Oxford English Dictionary) to cultivate; it magnifies human capacities of
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interest, just as it expands the text’s capacity to evoke interest through its ever‐
growing field of potential meaning. To deliver this, a non‐hermeneutic criticism
is necessary (Joy) in order to open a text’s possible signatures rather than halting
thought at a singular conclusion. Through this mode of textual interpretation, a
deeper fiction could be created through a literary analysis of fiction in which the
objects of a text all interact, and that in turn creates more eventualities to be
developed and explored. An application of Chaos Theory to literature, the key
word being theory, does exactly that; it is simply another fiction, another
possibility, a theoretical interpretation derived from the original text, in which
the literary actants can be represented diagrammatically, as functions, as data
with affectivity.
Although this approach to literary criticism decentralizes the human
reader, it is important to note that it should not be seen as an anti‐human
approach to reality, or to literature. Rather it can be seen as a kind of new
humanism with the human still at its heart. Traditionally, a Humanist is a reader
who believes that reading and reflection upon texts enriches human lives, and
emphasises the value and agency of humans. So this object‐oriented‐approach, as
a new kind of humanism, celebrates the creativity of humanity in that humans
are endowed with imagination (Joy), and are therefore able to imagine and
create worlds derived from worlds of fiction rather than trying to narrow things
down to one meaning. At the heart of this criticism is also the consideration of
humanitarian implications that could arise from including nonhuman actants in
the reality that humans interact with, such as Bennett’s notions of an all‐
inclusive political ecology. Therefore, this approach aims to explore the way in
which the Humanist today could be a vector for receiving the signals of a
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complicated sentience that comes from, and dwells in, many different locations
in order to amplify the human’s affiliation with fictional characters, with objects.
This dissertation aims to explore a Speculative Realist literary criticism
by building on the introductory research outlined above through a consideration
of the materiality and agency of actants within John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row in
relation to the novel’s forms, affects and effects. Steinbeck has received less
critical attention than his contemporaries such as Faulkner, Hemingway and
Fitzgerald, and the criticism which does exist has read his works as “post‐
feminist, sentimental novels” (Mullaney 43) that “expose the dark underside of
the American dream” while celebrating the “great hope which underlies the
belief in human potential” (Allen 163), the key word there being ‘human’.
Cannery Row in particular has been labelled one of Steinbeck’s “most sentimental
works” as it does not even serve to “criticize an obvious social ill” such as the
mistreatment of migrant labour in The Grapes of Wrath. Cannery Row adheres to
the domestic goals of sentimental fiction in its celebration of the home, and with
the study of sentimental and domestic fiction appearing largely within feminist
discourse, the broadening field of gender studies opens up the possibilities of
reading of Steinbeck as a “feminine” writer of sentimental fiction (Mullaney 44).
However, little, if anything, has been said about this novel, as well as any
of Steinbeck’s other works, from an object‐oriented perspective. Literary critic
Warren French argues that Steinbeck’s reputation has suffered because his
novels are “easy to read” as he fuses a “lucid realistic narrative with a symbolic
statement about man’s condition”. However, in this argument, he leaves room for
an object‐oriented critique in his suggestion that these “surface narratives” are
so smoothly executed that they are not read carefully to detect “what lies
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beneath” (French 10), the object‐oriented area in the beyond that this
dissertation aims to reveal.
As a novel that has not previously been approached from a materialist
perspective, and has been deemed an allegedly simple text, a surface narrative,
Cannery Row is a relevant novel to study from a Speculative Realist perspective
in the aim of uncovering a complex depth that has been previously overlooked
due to the basic story line and lack of chronology in its structure. A Speculative
Realist approach provides the required tools to investigate the patterns and the
actant‐behaviour that lies beneath much of Steinbeck’s writing (largely
concerned with patterns of behaviour (Farrah)), which are materially
inaccessible using solely an anthropocentric criticism.
Furthermore, the main plot line and the chapters of intervening stories that
detract from its chronology support the Speculative Realist focus on actant
agency in their propensity to “ooze and crawl of their own will” (Steinbeck 387);
Steinbeck does not appear to attempt to control them. He lets them “crawl in by
themselves” (387), as the actants that they are, and allows them to play with
each other and behave as they will, as they would in their natural environment.
The Speculative Realist approach used in this dissertation draws out the
affectivity of these actants by focusing on their behaviour as things that do what
they want, thereby corresponding to Steinbeck’s approach to his own writing.
Thus, this dissertation is comprised of three chapters: Form, Affect, and Effect.
It will firstly discuss the extent to which the literary, physical and conceptual
forms of Cannery Row allow us access to perspectives that move beyond the
ideas and interests of the human. Secondly, it will consider how human
mediations as a kind of open interface allow nonhuman constructs, such as
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enchantment and disturbance, to emerge and manifest themselves as affects of
Cannery Row through a close reading that pulls out these affects. Finally, the
effects taking place within Cannery Row will be discussed through an analysis of
the novel’s reflection of principles within Chaos Theory, including the Butterfly
Effect, Feedback Loops, and Fractals, in the plot, structure and character
relationships (literary actants) within the novel.
A Speculative Realist literary criticism of this novel could result in a “new
fiction” (Joy) derived from building on the original text through the application
of scientific theory to literature, which would embody a new understanding of
the functioning of the novel. The text would transform to encompass a new
dimension involving the same actants as the original text, but would serve as a
space in which they interact with each other in ways that other criticisms do not
allow, thereby drawing out new relationships and behaviours between actants.
Thus a focus on these previously overlooked aspects of Cannery Row will
broaden the current understanding of the novel, not by supplanting those
anthropocentric functions of the novel that already exist, but by building on the
currently more Humanist understanding of the text with a focus on the
nonhuman actants within the novel.
By placing emphasis on the agency that actants have, rather than on an
anthropocentric consideration of those actants, literary criticism may use a more
object‐oriented, scientific approach by respecting the collaboration of human
and nonhuman actants in both of their endeavours. Therefore, an argument can
be made for the vitality of nonhuman actants and their propensity to create and
influence both textual and extra‐textual worlds, rendering them just as
significant and capable as humans.
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Chapter One: Form
Literary form
The literary, conceptual and physical forms of Cannery Row allow a reader
access to perspectives that move beyond the ideas and interests of the human by
drawing attention to the physicality of the novel in a consideration of the layers
and webs of connection between humans and objects. The literary form of the
novel opens up such nonhuman perspectives to the reader by providing a
structure that encourages a recognition of the agency of nonhuman actants with
all‐inclusive structural and character communities. These communities are
embodied in the structural nonlinearity of the plot line with interchapters woven
into the chapters of the main story line, and is again enhanced by the novel’s
attention to scientific and natural objects.
Much of the existing criticism of Cannery Row takes a Humanist approach
by way of focusing on what the novel reflects about the extra‐textual world.
However some of these criticisms allow room for a Speculative Realist
commentary to build. Current criticisms of the novel, such as literary scholar
Robert Shuman, tend to see it as “a novel without a plot” (Shuman 1465); as
“equally arbitrary in form” (112) as the seawater in which Doc’s (the marine
biologist for whom Mack and the boys, the central character group of the novel,
plan a party) specimens are held, which has no shape except that imparted by its
container. Its literary form is comprised of a nonlinear narrative, ordered by 32
chapters, only about half of which pick up the “tenuous narrative thread” (French
156). Shuman argues that what little structure the novel does hold is provided by
the individual characters, each of whom in their own way contribute to a full
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picture of Cannery Row. The odd‐numbered chapters in the book contain its
central narrative and they are interspersed with several even‐numbered
chapters, which contain fables that present much of the novel’s philosophy.
These interchapters are “puzzling and have been interpreted in various ways”
(Shuman 1465), but focus largely, from Shuman’s anthropocentric perspective,
on human isolation and the need for people to be viewed favourably by those
with whom they are closely associated.
From a similar perspective, published editor Peter Lisca has also argued
that the nonlinear structure of Cannery Row has been critiqued as a way for
Steinbeck to keep his anti‐utopian commentary subtle while remaining
reasonably optimistic. Behind the romanticized view of the world that the fiction
of Cannery Row proposes is his dissatisfaction with the state of the real (in this
context, human) world shortly after World War II. Steinbeck served five months
abroad as a war correspondent, an experience which left him “so depressed”
(Lisca 111) that he refused even to edit his dispatches for publication of Once
There Was a War in book form, and they were not published until 1958. Lisca
purports that Cannery Row was written as a reaction toward a world whose basic
values had plunged it in turn from eleven years of severe economic depression
into the massive aggression and destruction of a world war.
It is with this post‐war depression as motivation for writing Cannery Row
that Lisca argues that the "real world" intrudes on the novel to produce a hybrid
of fantasy and reality. Although this Humanist perspective sees Cannery Row as
nothing more than a romanticised view of a real world place, this hybrid of
fantasy and reality encompasses an element of Speculative Realism in the idea of
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the “real world” intrusion on the novel. Such an amalgam reflects the Speculative
Realist propensity to allow actants to flow between “real” and fictional spaces,
thereby affecting both textual and extra‐textual worlds, highlighting the agency
of nonhuman actants that do not rely on humans to perform.
Furthermore, Lisca argues that the novel’s structure supports the view of
Cannery Row as a product of post‐war depression by suggesting that the
interchapters encompass many characters shadowed by the lingering
Depression of 1930’s America. The “murderous” (French 153) aspects of some of
these interchapters that comprise the novel’s literary form are seen among
characters such as Horace Abbeville, Frances Almones, Joye’s father, and others.
These characters always make “just a fraction less” (Steinbeck 63) than they
need, their money diminishing until these unlucky characters “just [dry] up and
[blow] away” (Lisca 121). Such financial tragedies have little effect, however, on
the novel’s more solvent literary inhabitants, as well as on the bums who “seem
to get by on their wits alone” (121), mirroring the “great disparity between the
rich and poor” during the Great Depression (Rothbard xv).
Furthermore, most of the deaths in the novel (the majority are suicides)
emerge in these intercalary pieces. French contends that in the interchapters
Steinbeck depicts characters “caught helplessly in Naturalistic tragedies” (French
156), a view that holds the interchapters as part of an ecological narrative. Some
characters, given their natural skills and intelligence, adapt successfully to their
environment, while other characters, lacking these, do not. This view leans more
towards a Speculative Realist approach in its alignment with a scientific view
(discussed in more detail in the following section on physical form) of adaptation
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in terms of physiological adjustments and responses to the environment.
However it only sees the novel as a reflection of such adaptation in the real
world, as opposed to also seeing biological/natural tendencies in the behaviour
of the literary actants themselves within the novel as creatures who adapt to
their literary environment.
Moreover, still from an anthropocentric view, these interchapters are said
to “provide [Steinbeck] with a way to capture more of Cannery Row” (Railsback
53) and paint a broad portrait without being forced to construct an artificially
enormous plot. This is reflected in Doc’s collecting techniques whereby he takes
a random sample and uses it to make generalisations about a larger population.
Railsback purports that Steinbeck uses this as a model in his introduction of
random characters through brief sketches inserted into the main plot. In this
light, Steinbeck “collects” by way of encouraging the reader to take what is there
at face value rather than using it as a platform for further development of ideas,
the latter being the view taken by Speculative Realism in its desire to build on
and open a text. On another level, Railsback’s critique agrees with an object‐
oriented criticism of the simplicity of the main plot line and the interchapters in
that both the Humanist and Materialist approach argue for their effect of
drawing attention to certain fictional actants who might otherwise, in the real
world and that of a fictional novel, be cast aside, or go unnoticed beneath a
complex and triumphant plotline.
However, a Speculative Realist critique of Cannery Row purports that
although the narrative has a surface, as presumably all narratives do, there is
also a further depth ignored by current criticisms that houses a fiction derived
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from the original fiction, which lies in the physicality of and interactions between
the novel’s literary actants (physicality to be discussed in Physical Form). A
Speculative Realist approach to the interchapters of Cannery Row would not
focus on Steinbeck’s use of them to write through his state of post‐war
depression, nor would it deem them structurally weak. It rather sees them as
things that do not attempt to assert linearity over the novel, but instead “ooze
and crawl of their own will” (Steinbeck 387) as they adapt to their surroundings
as smaller pieces of a larger picture with equal importance, as outlined in the
introduction. Here it can be seen the way in which the Speculative Realist
approach aims to build on rather than supplant existing criticisms in its
acknowledgement and extension of Humanist ideas.
The literary form of the novel as comprised of small chapters with equal
significance reflects biological tendencies in its reflection of Charles Darwin’s
ecological account of The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Actions of
Worms with Observations on Their Habits (1881), an account on which Bennett
built in Vibrant Matter, and one that is a fundamental argument to the
Speculative Realist view of human dependency on nonhuman actants that is
prevalent in Steinbeck’s writing. It argues that worms (and other nonhumans)
have played an important part in making possible the endeavours of human
history. Darwin states that worms make topsoil, or “vegetable mould”, by
“digesting earthly matter” then “depositing the castings at the mouth of their
burrows, thus continually bringing to the surface a refined layer of vegetable
mould” (Bennett 95). To Darwin, this is a “marvellous reflection that the whole of
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the…mould over any…expanse has passed, and will pass again, every few years
through the bodies of worms” (Darwin 313).
In doing this, worms have indirectly made potential seedlings of all kinds,
“which makes possible an earth hospitable for humans, which makes possible
the cultural artifacts, rituals, plans and endeavours of human history” (Bennett
95). Worms also preserve the artifacts created by humans by burying every
object dropped on the surface of the land that is not liable to decay beneath their
castings. It is by these actions that worms “inaugurate human culture” by
working with people to “help preserve what people and worms together have
made” (96), thereby revealing the vitality of non‐human entities that is prevalent
in Speculative Realism and in this approach to Cannery Row. The literary form of
the novel, including the interchapters, although they are not the main story line,
make possible a textual‐world hospitable for Steinbeck’s fictional characters,
which thereby makes possible the cultural artifacts, rituals, plans and
endeavours of Cannery Row.
Bennett’s Vibrant Matter shares this objective of drawing attention to
things, people, literary creations and figures, in a way that is reflected in the
natural order of Cannery Row’s all‐inclusive community that is embodied in the
novel’s literary form. Bennett asks if and how the role of the non‐human enables
non‐human entities to be regarded as members of a public community by
comparing the differences between an ecosystem and a political system. She
engages “two theories of democracy,” (Jacques Ranciere’s Disagreement and John
Dewey’s The Public and its Problems) focusing on “their different understandings
of what a public is, how a public is formed, and what counts as a political act”
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(Bennett 95), rendering Dewey’s more inclusive than the other as he holds
essential to his argument the field of “conjoint action…[;] the agency behind the
emergence of a public” (Bennett 95). The field of conjoint action reflects Cannery
Row’s, and Speculative Realism’s, propensity to draw attention to the agency of
both human and nonhuman actants in a community, the same community
envisaged by Bennett’s all‐inclusive political ecology.
Steinbeck writes something similar to the kind of political ecology that
Darwin and Bennett offer, firstly through the structure of the novel. The literary
form of Cannery Row adapts the view of society to extend “the landscape that
humans can sense” to include the “‘abilities’ of nonhuman bodies” (Bennett 123)
through the use of interchapters with smaller yet equally “charming” (Railsback
49) stories consisting of both human and nonhuman characters. The
interchapters are actants who flow, bend, come and go, and they encourage the
reader to approach the rest of the novel in the same way. That approach also
extends and envelops all actants within the novel to adopt the same mode of
behaviour
This idea of an ecological assemblage reflected in the community of the
novel’s structural literary actants is further emphasised in the community of
character‐actants in the novel as well. Generally speaking, the characters that
make up the community of Cannery Row, behave in the same way as the animals
who make up the community of the Great Tide Pool; they live, eat, reproduce,
fight and die in their communities. This symmetry is reflected in the nonhuman
community’s tide‐pool as “a wave‐churned basin, creamy with foam, whipped by
the combers that roll in” (Steinbeck 398), and the human community of Cannery
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Row when the sardine boats come in, and “the whole street rumbles and groans
and screams and rattles” (398), demonstrating the symmetrical, natural rhythms
of community life on Cannery Row and in the Tide Pool. Regardless of whether
the actant is human or nonhuman, they follow biological, natural tendencies and
should be acknowledged in the realities in which they reside.
More specifically, the interchapters create the character community of
Cannery Row in that they most frequently include minor but erratically
enchanting characters such as the crazy French painter, Henri, and the whores at
Dora’s. The interchapters give the minor characters recognition and allow them
to be included within the depiction of the Cannery Row community as a whole.
These interchapters also acknowledge the nonhumans of the community, like the
gopher, who also struggles with love and companionship, just as humans do. The
depiction of these nonhuman and minor characters in the interchapters
demonstrates how the structural literary form of the novel works with the other
literary actants such as the characters to create such an inclusive community
wherein minor/major actants (those actants being characters and chapters) are
included within the novel, and are thus recognised within their respective
communities, the community of chapters, and the community of characters that
make up the community of Cannery Row.
This view, as drawn out from a Speculative Realist perspective, reflects
the capacity of object‐oriented ontologies to view communities, including all
human and nonhuman actants, as a whole. They acknowledge the agency of all
actants, regardless of how small, rendering the “peephole” (Steinbeck 387) from
which the characters are written akin to Bennett’s all‐inclusive political ecology.
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This is exactly what existing applications of Speculative Realism, such as
Bennett’s, aim to do, thereby drawing similarities between the use of Speculative
Realism in literary criticism and in political action, hinting at the wider
implications that a Speculative Realist literary criticism could have.
Moreover, the view of the character and literary structural communities
as natural, biological systems, that together make one system called Cannery Row,
is made possible through the novel’s attention to scientific detail. Within Cannery
Row, such scientific detail is largely embodied in Doc’s character, and reflects
Bennett’s close attention paid to science in her inclusion of Darwin in her work.
Doc is based on a close friend of Steinbeck, Edward Rickets, who was “a maverick
marine biologist immortalized in the writing of John Steinbeck” (Levy
8).
Despite being a beer‐drinking, philosophizing college dropout, Rickets was also a
pioneering marine biologist who saw creatures in an unorthodox fashion for the
contemporary period, such that his 1920’s – 40’s academic peers saw him as a
wild eccentric. At a time when most biologists studied at the single organism
level, Ricketts was obsessed with seeing marine communities as a whole, as a
network (alluding to the Moretti’s use of networks in his “distant reading” for
literary analysis). Thus with Doc as a central, scientific figure, there is a constant
underlying biological narrative that adds to the view of the communities within
the novel as all‐inclusive and natural, further mirrored in the marine
communities that Doc studies.
The view of Doc as a central figure to the understanding of this novel as a
biological community is prominently evident in the description of Doc’s
laboratory, the Western Biological. Doc, the “owner and operator” (Steinbeck
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398) of the lab, has “instruments for embalming and for injecting” (397) animals
in their “tanks” (397), then studies and preserves them with “the microscopes
and the slides and the drug cabinets,…the work benches and…the chemicals”
(397), which create an imagined smell of “formaline,…menthol, carbolic acid and
acetic acid” (398) that “ooze and flow” (399) through the cracks in Doc’s doors,
and even flow between the pages of Cannery Row, to infuse the novel with the
odour of science. The empirical foundations of this novel are further exemplified
in Doc’s marine animals from the Great Tide Pool, and the anatomically scientific
diction used to describe them, where he studies the expansion of anemones in
their predatory state as they “shoot tiny narcotic needles into the prey…while
the searing caustic digestive acids melt its body down” (399). Doc, a scientist
and consistent, stable character throughout the novel, serves as a vessel for this
scientific undertone of the literary structure of the novel to carry impact through
the text and into the extra‐textual space of the reader. From a Speculative Realist
perspective, Doc is a nonhuman actant endowed with affectivity.
Thus the relationship between the literary structure of the novel and the
literary actants encourages a view of community as all‐inclusive through the
presence of minor characters and chapters that are all given recognition
regardless of their relevance to the main plot line. This builds on existing
criticisms of the text, and on the text itself by encouraging a perspective that
moves beyond solely human interests that are evident in existing criticisms
towards a focus on the webs and networks of connections between human and
nonhuman entities.
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Physical form
The physical form of Cannery Row provides a second vehicle allowing
access to perspectives that move beyond the ideas and interests of the human.
The novel’s physicality does this through encouraging an imaginative
engagement of both reader and text, which insists that the book exists outside
the constructs of the traditional novel form by incorporating a physical
materiality within the view of the novel’s actants. Critiques on the physical form
of Cannery Row, both in its general form as a novel, and in the physicality of its
literary elements, appear to be non‐existent, presumably due to its lack of
attention received as a result of Steinbeck’s supposedly superficial narratives.
However the physical form of the general novel will be discussed from both a
Humanist and object‐oriented perspective to gauge where the Speculative
Realist approach fits with existing views on literary physicality. Before
discussing specifically how the physical form of Cannery Row encourages an
object‐oriented perspective of form, the contrastive psychoanalytical approach
to form will first be explained.
Traditional form sees the novel as a physical manifestation of human
thought, the psychoanalytical approach. This is exemplified in Brady’s
(introduced on p. 13 with reference to Chaos Theory in literature) argument
drawing a likeness between Freud’s observations on a child’s faeces and an
author’s novel. Freud claims that the child views its faeces as a substitute for the
penis, a detachable “part” of his own body that s/he can give as a gift in a kind of
surrogate autocastration (Brady 75). Brady suggests that on the contrary, the
faeces represents not the penis (which symbolizes sex), but an ‘Other’
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(symbolizing alienation). As an Other, the faeces as a form of excretion involves
both control of Self (through mastery of the bodily function) and control of
Otherness (through the production or “creation” of a visible, concrete Other):
this creation becomes part of the child’s environment, but is non‐threatening
because created by the child him/herself.
Using Brady’s idea of excretion as a form of creation, the Humanist
perspective sees the novel as analogous to the faeces in that the novel is an
excretion of thought; a product of a human that exists as a non‐threatening part
of its creator’s environment. Therefore, the traditional view of the novel form is
very much a psychoanalytical view with an anthropocentric consideration of
how this form provides comfort as an external but personally created object for
the human.
Most current criticisms on Cannery Row are also taken from this
psychoanalytical and anthropocentric perspective, discussing plot and other
literary actants only in terms of what they mean for the reader. Therefore, as
most current criticisms are concerned with the novel’s literary actants from a
psychoanalytical perspective, they do not pay attention to the materiality and
physicality of those actants that are at the heart of a Speculative Realist literary
criticism. Herein lies the paradox of the Speculative Realist approach: it is a
group of ideas made by people, therefore humans, in one sense, are always at the
centre, at the origin. Therefore, if we start thinking about where we start, then
we will always be in the middle. However, this is a productive paradox since it
allows the human to see how it is already always in the middle of things, in a set
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of relations with things, and thereby begins the process of decentralization in the
attempt to understand such connections differently.
In order to discuss Cannery Row’s physical form from a materialist
perspective, it is useful to consider sociologist and anthropologist Bruno Latour’s
Actor‐Network‐Theory (ANT) to gain an understanding of the novel as a thing‐
in‐itself, not just as a product of human creation as given in the psychoanalytical
approach. ANT developed from an “attention to science and technological
activity” (as did Speculative Realism), taking “seriously the agency of non‐
humans” by defining its “volitional actor” (the actant) as any “agent that can
associate or dissociate with other agents” (Crawford and Veloso 1). This actant
“can be either human or nonhuman: it is that which does something, has
sufficient coherence to perform actions, produce effects, and alter situations”
(Bennett 355). In this way, a novel and all its components have a certain agency,
as they have sufficient coherence to produce effects as the entire novel affecting
the reader through the affectivity of the actants within the novel.
Bennett uses the concept of ANT in her book Vibrant Matter to describe
the way in which she sees matter as “generating” (Bennett vii) and alive. Her
application of the ANT to “litter, rubbish, trash, or ‘the recycling’” demonstrates
Bennett’s view that these, and other nonhuman actants including novels, are “not
“away” in landfills,” or elsewhere, but are potentially “accumulating [piles] of
lively and dangerous matter…generating lively streams of chemicals and volatile
winds of methane as we speak” (vii). This has affiliations with the Structuralist
idea of the relation between things that psychoanalytical approaches to the novel
form are akin with, but places significance on the non‐human mode as opposed
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to the human’s relation to it, in the suggestion that “humans are never outside a
set of relations with other modes” (Bennett 354). In this light, literary actants,
and literature in general, are not things that await human intervention; their
physicality lies in their autonomy and capacity as things‐in‐themselves that do
not exist solely as a creation of man to return to after creation/excretion when
s/he needs. This is the line of thought that needs to be followed in a Speculative
Realist approach to the physical form of Cannery Row.
In further support of the novel’s physical form as an autonomous, active
nonhuman entity, Eileen Joy responds to Derridean critiques of her lecture on
“Notes Towards a Speculative Realist literary criticism” (as outlined in the
introduction), which acknowledge the Derridean inaccessibility of reality
without human consciousness. Joy responds to such claims of inaccessibility:
“even if we want to talk about texts as forms/objects of mentation, they can
never exist entirely outside of larger sentient/cognitive systems [which include
human authors and human readers]”. She does not purport that a novel by
Proust for example can “do” anything by itself without human‐cognitive
“support” or infrastructure or “platforms”. However she argues that thinking
about “autopoeisis…would be a very rich area of thought for re‐thinking our
relationship to texts” (Joy).
Deleuze and Guattari consider autopoeisis in A Thosuand Palteaus in their
argument that “a book itself is a little machine” (4). Given Guattari’s background
in the autopoeitic theory of Maturana and Varela, the machines referred to are
presumably autopoeitic. Autopoeitic machines are those that draw something
from their environment and transform them into something else, as is the case
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with texts. Readers are drawn into books, absorbed by books, and produced as
something else as a product of the novel’s affectivity when finished reading it. In
the same way, users are drawn into computers, absorbed by the computer, and
produced as something else as a product of the computer’s affectivity.
In this comparison it is crucial to note that computer coding and human
language (and any other language used between any actants) are variations of
communication; they are different languages. Computer coding varies in the
same way that human language does in that programmers have invented
different codes (HTML, Javascript, C++ etc.), just as nationalities/regions have
different languages/dialects (Spanish, French, Afrikaans etc.). Whatever the
language (coding, human or otherwise), it can be interpreted through texts that
create new forms of affectivity; new collectives, new practices, instigate
revolutions, and so on. It is in this sense that books do, rather than mean, thereby
giving them the same dimensionality, agency and autonomy as computers.
An example of applying computational thinking in literary criticism is
Moretti’s “distant reading”, as alluded to in the introduction. Moretti’s newest
paper in the LitLab, “Network Theory, Plot Analysis”, seeks to detect hidden
aspects in plots (primarily in Hamlet) by transforming them into networks by
turning characters into nodes (“vertices” in network theory) and their verbal
exchanges into connections (“edges”) (computational data). This has the effect of
thinning the plot in that the content of such verbal exchanges and all of Hamlet’s
soliloquies are not included, however, Moretti claims his networks “make visible
specific ‘regions’ within the plot” (4) and enable experimentation. So the process
of abstraction makes a “model” out of the text, which is “less than the original
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object”, but in another sense, “much more than it”. Therefore the advantage of
applying mathematical thought to literature is that a computational model
exposes the underlying structures of a complex object, just as an X‐ray does (4),
alluding to the content beneath the surface of a narrative that Cannery Row is
said to contain (French), which cannot be accessed from a Humanist perspective.
“Network Theory, Plot Analysis” reveals 57 network diagrams from which
insights can be drawn, such as when the nascent divide between court and state
in Renaissance Europe becomes visible in the network. However, a more obvious
conclusion drawn from this integration of disciplines is the definition of the
“protagonist” in terms of network theory as “the character that minimized the
sum of the distances to all other vertices” (Moretti 3). This means that the
protagonist is the character with the smallest average degree of separation from
the others, or “the centre of the network” (3). With this, Moretti’s results could
be seen as somewhat self‐evident, and the use of a computer unnecessary, as a
computer is not needed to understand that Hamlet is the centre of the network
and therefore protagonist of the play. However, the paper remains a further
example of what can arise from novel approaches to textual analysis and textual
form when literary criticism uses the scientific approaches that are fundamental
to Speculative Realism.
The Speculative Realist approach to physical form in Cannery Row
chooses to approach an analysis of its literary actants in a more qualitative way
than Moretti’s that focuses on the physicality of the text itself, and those actants
found within it. Cannery Row’s self‐acclaimed physicality is found in both the
novel and the geographical place in the extra‐textual world, alluding to this
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approach’s focus on the interaction between actants in both literary and non‐
textual worlds. Cannery Row calls itself “a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light,
a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream” (Steinbeck 387), each of which are physical
qualities embodied by the novel. The physical book used for this dissertation has
a stink of librarian musk, a yellowing quality of light and a leafy rustle to its
pages, which with the help of its characters and other literary actants, has the
power to evoke a memory of the stink of salt and, once upon a time, of sardines,
of Cannery Row, Monterey. Furthermore, the novel is a habit; it habitually affects
its various readers in different ways, just as the inhabitants of Cannery Row fall
into the inescapable habits encouraged by the town. The novel is Steinbeck’s
dream for Cannery Row in the physical body of a book, which although he
created, is now an entirely separate entity that has propelled itself through time
since 1945, long after the creator’s death and proceeding far beyond any of its
critics expectations. This provides support against the view of the novel as
something that serves humans and lends itself to the concept of Speculative
Realist actant autonomy.
A Speculative Realist approach to the materiality of this novel would also
consider the physicality of the literary actants within the novel and the words
used to describe them. Chapter 5 draws attention to a particular time of day
“when the street light has been turned off and the daylight has not come” (396).
This hour, “the hour of the pearl” (424) is a “time of magic in Cannery Row…after
the light has come and before the sun has risen,” wherein “the Row seems to
hang suspended out of time in a silvery light” (423). The novel then takes on the
qualities of that hour; they are transferred to manifest themselves in the gentle,
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smooth and mystical qualities of Doc’s shells and stars. The pearly qualities of
the hour of the pearl resonate in the diction used throughout the descriptions of
Doc’s collections, and are a foundation of Steinbeck’s romanticised view of
Cannery Row with Doc as a fundamental character. Here, Doc is again serving as
a vessel who, while carrying a scientific tone which he drapes over the novel,
enables the hour of the pearl to be carried through the novel by way of the pearly
contents of his laboratory that he brings into the novel.
The things found in Doc’s lab, Western Biological, hold a physical, pearly
quality that resonates throughout the novel in both the imagined appearance of
these objects and animals, and in their literary descriptions. Western Biological
deals in “strange and beautiful wares”, selling “the living moving flowers of the
sea,…the stars and buttlestars, and sun stars,…the bivalves and barnacles” (397).
Firstly, these crustaceous, gentle, otherworldly creatures have a pearly quality to
them by way of their physical description; sunstars, buttlestars and bivalves
evoke a certain ethereal and mystical tone of light, bivalves, for example, having
that smooth, coloured and slightly shiny surface to the shell. Secondly,
considering the words themselves as physical actants with tendencies and
frequencies, they too have a pearly quality in their rarity in occurrence in
everyday language with the use of the word pearl as a metaphor for something
“rare” (Berry 21). The word‐actants lend their rarity to the literary significance
of the crustaceous objects, and to the physical qualities that they evoke. Thus the
pearly quality of the words, making those animals rare, special, magical,
otherworldly, serves as a further metaphor for the characters of Cannery Row,
who, as previously discussed, are rare and pearl like too. So here can be seen a
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movement of this pearly quality, a literary actant, between objects, words,
characters and structure, and a movement to the extra‐textual human world in
its use of the human connotations of the word pearl to depict rarity. The word in
the text borrows that human connotation and distributes it amongst its
nonhuman literary actants.
Thus physical form of the novel, and the physicality of those actants
within it, encourages the reader to think about more than just humans when
reading Cannery Row. This is emphasised in the scientific view of reality that
acknowledges the capacity, both literary and physical, of all literary actants
within the text, which is further reminiscent of the literary forms of the novel in
the attention to animals found in the Great Tide Pool, reinforcing the notion of an
all‐inclusive community comprised of creatures of varying physical and literary
forms.
Conceptual form
Finally, the conceptual form of the novel also allows a reader access to
perspectives that move beyond the ideas and interests of the human by
demonstrating a Feedback Loop present in a passage of Cannery Row, which
encapsulates the novel’s philosophical, conceptual aims. This passage as a
Feedback Loop will be discussed in more detail in Chapter Three, however here
it will be noted as the conceptual summation of the novel, which encourages a
view of all its physicality as expressed through capable literary actants. This
passage entails a complex analogy, which for discussion purposes is included
below:
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“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.”
(Steinbeck 392)
Literary critic Charles Etheridge argues that this “conjunction of the real and the
imagined” contains “the meaning of the book” (Etheridge 85). However, before
interpreting the concept embedded in this passage as acknowledging the
physicality and agency of literary actants, it is first useful to consider previous
interpretations of this passage to grasp an understanding of where the
Speculative Realist approach lies in relation to existing criticisms. Etheridge
purports that Steinbeck embroiders the description of his methodology in this
chapter. As god‐like artist, Steinbeck creates the Logos. Through the medium of
the word, he translates the real Cannery Row into a poem, while Mack and the
boys become “the Virtues, the Graces, and the Beauties” (379) who inhabit
cosmic Monterey. Etheridge continues his argument from a Humanist
perspective by suggesting that Steinbeck establishes a theological (religion being
something which circulates in human society) context very early in the novel,
deliberately adopting a biblical tone in the above passage as it echoes the
opening passages of The Gospel According to John:
“In the beginning was the Word and Words was with God and the Word
was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came to being
through him. What has come into being in him was life and the life was
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the light of all people…and the Word became flesh and lived among us.”
(Holy Bible 1:1‐5, 14)
In the Gospel, “Word” derives from the Greek logos; “it is God in action,
creating…revealing…redeeming”. Etheridge argues that the motion and “life
spirit” implied by the use of the biblical phrase “the Word” is carried through in
Steinbeck’s language, as suggested by the phrases “sucks up men and scenes and
trees” and “warped and woven into a fantastic pattern.” The transformation
suggested by John in the phrase “and the Word became flesh and lived among us”
is clearly suggested by Steinbeck’s “Then the Thing becomes the Word and back
to Thing again”.
Contrastingly, from a Speculative Realist perspective, a critique of this
section could borrow Etheridge’s claim that the passage contains the concept of
the novel, but then build on that with a focus of the exchange between “the Thing”
and the “symbol” rather than interpreting that passage as an echo of the Gospel
According to John. Focusing on the ability of the text, the real world place of
Cannery Row (the “Thing”) is warped by Cannery Row (the novel as “symbol”, the
“word”), then back to “the Thing” again. In this exchange, the place has taken on
the qualities of the novel through the production of text, and has thus been
transformed (Deleuze and Guattari) through the affectivity of the text (the code,
the language, the Logos) to produce the final “Thing” that is a revolutionised
version of the original Cannery Row, the original “Thing”. This is how a text is an
autopoeitic machine capable of producing affects, in the same way that coding
used to create a webpage layout put into a computer produces something
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visually different (an interactive website) from the original input of textual
coding.
This relationship is the same relationship between Cannery Row,
Monterey, and Cannery Row apparent in the Humanist critique of the novel, in
that the novel is a symbol of the real world place. However, from a Speculative
Realist perspective, the focus is not on the fact that it is either an accurate or
inaccurate depiction of the place, but rather it is on the agency of the novel in
that it has the capacity to engage in a relationship with the real place, just as a
person discussing the town has the ability to do so as well.
Therefore, the novel‐actant is able to behave and change the perception of
the real place Cannery Row by transforming things to words to symbols and back
again. Evidence of this actually taking place is supported by the status of Cannery
Row today, as a tourist attraction, as something that people go to seeking the
idealism and romanticism of Cannery Row, because the Thing itself, the real place,
is now reminiscent of the mystical, pearly beauty contained within and
envisaged by the literary actants of Cannery Row. The affect of the novel in
reference to geological Cannery Row, and this passage as a Feedback Loop within
Chaos Theory, will be discussed later in more detail. However here, it is
significant that this passage encapsulates the transformation and interaction of
actants that is prevalent to a Speculative Realist literary criticism.
This approach to the passage discussed above draws attention to the
interchange, absorption and expulsion between novel‐actants and the world
outside the novel, in turn, displaying a counter‐narrative to what is deemed to be
the narrative of the American dream. This occurs in a process of decentralization
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wherein the reader is forced to understand connections differently by way of
drawing attention to different kinds of social groupings. From this perspective,
the bum is the American dream as he is free. He colonizes the natural world and
is free within it, thus the bum, as member of the community, embodies an
expression of the city’s liberalism, an alternate way of understanding
connections between kinds of social groupings; this is the novel‐concept of
Cannery Row, and is encouraged through attention to the interaction between
textual and extra‐textual actants.
Furthermore, the idea of Cannery Row’s novel‐concept encouraging the
reader to understand connections differently relates to Michael Whitmore’s “We
have never not been inhuman” in his argument that advances in technology are
forcing us to reconsider the depth of the in/human divide. Using Claudius’
complaint in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, when he cannot pray, Whitmore purports
that poise turns to paralysis when two forces are at work (guilt and the desire to
confess) and manifest themselves as opposed inclinations, neither of which can
be expressed. He suggests that in this plurality of forces, the narrative of the play
is a “diagrammatic reduction of human impulses, dispositions and inclinations”
(8) that makes visible the presence of potential movements and states unrealised
(this approach is also similar to Moretti’s distant reader with the reference to
“diagrammatic reduction of human impulses”).
Therefore, particularly in terms of plot, there appear to be ways in which
narrative itself is designed to implement a strategic reduction in complexity
among the social and psychical sources of change and transformation in the
world. Cannery Row’s novel‐concept does precisely that; it uses the view of Mack
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and the boys as the gems of society as the social and physical sources of change
and transformation in the world. This view is made possible by the strategic
reduction in complexity in the narrative’s plot line, thereby allowing the novel’s
concept of the counter‐narrative to the American dream that is expressed
through the literary actants of Cannery Row to be encapsulated within the
physical form of the novel.
As demonstrated in discussions of the literary, physical and conceptual
forms of Cannery Row from a Speculative Realist literary perspective, alternate
views supplementing and complimenting existing analyses of the novel’s form
are expressed that draw attention to a nonhuman affectivity present in the text.
The literary community, which comprises the novel’s pearl‐like physicality that
expresses its ability to absorb then regurgitate conceptual ideas of the American
dream, is a view unique to a Speculative Realist literary criticism in a primary
focus on the abilities of the novel’s actants to perform such actions, and then
considering how they affect the extra‐textual world (hence why the conceptual
form of the novel relating most strongly to the effects of the novel on humans is
discussed last in this chapter; actant agency comes first). Therein lies the
foundation for a discussion of how such forms, which allow us access to
perspectives that move beyond the ideas and interests of the human affect, and
what patterns of effect consequentially emerge.
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Chapter Two: Affect
Understanding Affect
The affectivity of Cannery Row uses human mediations that act as a kind
of open interface to allow nonhuman constructs such as enchantment and
disturbance to emerge and manifest themselves as affects of the novel. This
chapter will firstly establish a common understanding of “affect” as a literary
term, and a general understanding of enchantment and disturbance, in order to
understand where they fit into branches of Affect Theory. Then enchantment and
disturbance will be discussed according to Bennett’s and Ngai’s views (as
outlined in the introduction), respectively, as relevant work in fields of both
Affect Theory and objected‐oriented philosophies, in order to examine how
those affects manifest themselves specifically within Cannery Row.
Affect is an “impingement or extrusion of a momentary or sometimes
more sustained state of relations” as well as the passage (and the duration of
passage) of forces or intensities (Gregg and Seigworth 1). It is found in those
intensities that pass from body to body (“human, nonhuman, part‐body and
otherwise” (2)), in those resonances that circulate about, between, and
sometimes stick to bodies and the world. Affect is the name given to those
“visceral forces beneath the surface” (4), which can drive us toward movement,
toward thought and extension, and can likewise “suspend us across a barely
registering accretion of force‐relations” (4). In this accretion of force relations
lies the real powers of affect, affect as potential; a body’s capacity to affect and be
affected. Affect transpires within and across the subtlest of shuttling intensities:
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all the minuscule or molecular events of the unnoticed, of the under
acknowledged literary actants.
Enchantment and disturbance embody this affectivity in their ability to
move through the text between literary actants and across the extra/textual
boundary to human mediators. To Bennett, enchantment is a feeling created
through a surprising encounter with something in a novel that you did not
expect which creates a mood of fullness, plenitude and/or liveliness; it includes a
condition of exhilaration or acute sensory activity. Enchantment reminds us of
nothing else so that we are not distracted by association, but remain temporarily
suspended in chronological time and bodily movement; “a moment of pure
essence” (Bennett 5). In this way, enchantment as an affect of the novel is an
actant that moves of its own accord between and through reader and text.
In regards to Ngai’s “negative” emotions, as discussed in the introduction,
Bennett also purports that fear plays a role in enchantment. Saint Albertus
Magnus (1193) explicates this relationship in his traditional description of
wonder as “’shocked surprise’…before the sensible appearance of a great prodigy,
so that the heart experiences systole, thus wonder is something similar to fear”
(Farago 160). Ngai categorises emotions such as fear and disturbance as
expectant emotions, which “open out entirely into the horizon of time” (Ngai
210). They aim less at some specific object as the fetish of their desire than at the
configuration of the world in general, or at the future disposition of the self
(Bloch). They have a greater anticipatory character, which puts them into a
closer relationship to time in general. Thus disturbance affect as an actant shifts
across extra/textual spaces, as does enchantment, but also through horizons of
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time specific to each non/human actant that it affects. Therefore enchantment
and disturbance can arise in the same way, however disturbance has an added
temporal dimension to its affectivity.
With a general understanding of affect, and disturbance and enchantment
as examples, they can now be understood amongst the varied branches of affect.
Although there is no single generalizable theory of affect, there are infinitely
multiple iterations of affect and theories of affect, which will now be discussed
with reference to their relevance in the fields of enchantment, disturbance and
Speculative Realism. There are two dominant vectors of affect study in
humanities: Sylvan Tomkin’s (1962) psychobiology of differential affects
(Sedgwick and Frank), and Deleuze’s Spinozist ethology of bodily capacities
(1988) (Massumi).
For Tomkins, affect follows a quasi‐Darwinian “innate‐ist” bend towards
matters of evolutionary hardwiring. However, these wires are not fully insulated,
nor do they terminate with brain or flesh. They “spark and fray” (Gregg and
Seigworth 5) enough to transduce those influences borne along by the ambient
irradiation of social relations. Contrastingly, Deleuze’s Spinozan route locates
affect in the midst of things and relations (in immanence), and then in the
complex assemblages that come to compose bodies and worlds simultaneously.
Thus there is a sense of reverse flow between these lines of inquiry – an “inside‐
out/outside‐in” (6) difference in directionality. Tomkins sees affect as the prime
“interest” motivator that comes to put the drive in bodily drives, whereas
Deleuze considers affect as an entire, vital and “modulating field of myriad
becomings” (6) across human and nonhuman, the latter being that with which a
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Speculative Realist approach to affectivity (including both enchantment and
disturbance) aligns itself most closely.
However, there are more than just the dominant two strands of affect,
which Gregg and Seigworth have organised into categories (unnamed and
numbered in no particular order) that sometimes overlap in their approaches. A
relevant sample of these categories will be discussed, highlighting a different set
of concerns reflected in their initiating premises and the endpoints of their aims
in relation to a Speculative Realist approach to the affects of enchantment and
disturbance.
(1) The first is a nonhumanist, oftimes subterranean and generally non‐
Cartesian tradition in philosophy, “linking movements of matter with a
processual incorporeality (Spinozism)” (8). In an attempt to move beyond
various gendered and other cultural limitations in philosophy, this line of affect
contains sometimes archaic and often occulted practices of human/nonhuman
nature as intimately interlaced, including phenomenologies and post‐
phenomenologies of embodiment as well as investigations into a body’s
incorporative capacities for scaffolding and extension. This branch explores such
avenues through assemblages of the human/machine/inorganic such as
cybernetics, the neurosciences, ongoing research in artificial intelligence,
robotics, and bioinformatics/bioengineering where life technologies work
increasingly to smudge the affectional line between the living and non‐living.
This branch of affect lends itself to a Speculative Realist approach to affect in
Cannery Row in its aim to breach the boundaries between human and nonhuman
affectivity (in the way that both enchantment and disturbance flow between
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non/human entities) through recognition of the material power of affect with a
somewhat autopoeitic and scientific focus.
(2) The second is a category most often undertaken by feminists, queer
theorists and disability activists. It attends to materialities of everyday life,
where repetitious practice of power can simultaneously provide a body with
predicaments and potentials for realizing a world that subsists within and
exceeds the horizons and boundaries of the norm. This category is applicable to
Bennett’s thoughts on the affect of enchantment in her view of enchantment as
something instilled by a posed reality that extends to the realm of the extra‐
ordinary, beyond the boundaries of the norm. Here, there is again a similarity
between exceeding the horizons and boundaries of the norm and the Speculative
Realist propensity to include within the “Real” realities that exist in extra‐
ordinary, nonhuman realms.
(3) To demonstrate a contrastive approach, the third category is more
psychoanalytical in its inquiry with a biologism that remains open to ongoing
impingements and pressure from inter‐subjective and inter‐objective systems of
social desiring with ultimate aims that are often more human‐centred. This is an
example of a branch of affect theory that opposes a Speculative Realist objected‐
oriented ontology. Current criticisms on Cannery Row’s affectivity would align
themselves with this category in their propensity to consider the novel as
nothing more than a statement about the human world, thereby ignoring the
agency and autonomy of the literary actants within the text, and does not
account for their independent roles in the wider implications of the novel.
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As a primary example of actant‐affect in Cannery Row, before discussing
specifically the affects of enchantment and disturbance, Mack and the boys serve
as an actant that has both textual and extra‐textual affectivity. Mack and the boys,
are written as the keystones, the ones who maintain equilibrium in the
community of Cannery Row. Where a humanist approach to Cannery Row may
see Mack and the boys as inactive or lazy, a Speculative Realist literary criticism
sees them as inhuman actants constantly affecting change; even when doing
nothing but sitting in the Palace Flophouse, they are “the stone dropped in the
pool, the impulse which sent out ripples to all of Cannery Row and beyond”
(421). As literary actants, they are never passive, and the human is not necessary
for the actant to create change. Their affectivity is evident in their influence on
other actants within their literary community who hold them close to their
fictional hearts, and in the extra‐textual world on the reader who may feel any
number of the varying affects that Mack and the boys have to offer. They are the
common factor in affectivity, not the human. In this sense, an affectivity‐actant
can manifest itself within the novel and then propel itself across textual and
extra‐textual spaces. In those extra‐textual spaces, the human serves as a
mediator but the agency, the movement, lies in the nonhuman actant, thereby
acknowledging its power to affect change.
Enchantment Affect
With an understanding of where a Speculative Realist approach to affect
fits with the existing branches of affect, Cannery Row can now be discussed in
relation to how enchantment and disturbance manifest themselves within the
novel as active agents that can propel themselves through textual and temporal
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spaces, rather than just as things that serve solely to influence the reader.
However firstly, it is useful to understand current critiques of Cannery Row’s
affectivity, which come namely from an anthropocentric perspective, akin to the
third branch of Affect Theory discussed above.
The affect of Cannery Row as an enchanting novel is supported by
criticism arguing that those qualities render the novel less valid, less important
and less capable. Orville Prescott of the New York Times claims that the novel has
“no real characters, no ‘story’, no purpose” (Chiang 317). It is criticized for being
unrealistic in that it is “illogical for tourists to expect the “real” Cannery Row to
duplicate the novel” (317). Despite the “pleasant thrill of recognition” induced by
Lee Chong’s grocery’s prototype, Wing Chong, there are very few remnants of
Steinbeck’s Cannery Row.
So much criticism seems to understand Cannery Row as a poor reflection
of the actual place of Cannery Row, rather than focusing on the ability of the
novel as an active thing that has the power to create an alternate view, to
enchant, as the Speculative Realist approach does. In the current critique of
association to the geographical place, the enchantment is lost, as the Cannery
Row of the 1950’s was quiet and deserted, “not charged with excitement and
activity, as Steinbeck had suggested” (Chiang 319). In that comparison, Cannery
Row’s independence as a thing in and for itself is overlooked, seeing it only as an
inaccurate reflection of the human world. The enchantment is lost by association
(or frustration at a poor association), and the power of the novel and all its
literary actants is surpassed.
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This is further demonstrated by scholar Richard Astro’s “Steinbeck’s Post‐
war Trilogy: A Return to Nature and the Natural Man” in which he discusses
Steinbeck’s aims for the novel. Astro argues that Steinbeck wanted to write
something funny because it enabled him to “desert the chaos of war in favour of
the tranquility of the tide pools” (99). Astro purports that beneath Steinbeck’s
“casual tone” is the novelist’s clear‐sighted evaluation of man’s attempt to escape
the ordeals of modern life. It is in this light that this “mixed up book” is
considered “an unrealistic novel” (110) as it attempts, from this view, to escape
reality. Due to this anthropocentric critical perspective, the novel looses its
enchantment and its independence as a powerful actant that has the potential to
enchant by way of creating a world unfamiliar to the reader, albeit unrealistic,
that a Speculative Realist literary criticism would argue for.
The Speculative Realist view of enchantment, as previously discussed, is
akin to Bennett’s view of enchantment as an affect that has the ability to
encapsulate one in a moment of pure essence, and as an actant that can shift
between reader and text. This view is supported by geographer J. K. Gibson‐
Graham’s idea of “the performativity of social representations” (Gibson‐Graham
ix), an idea on which Bennett’s work on enchantment is founded; the ways in
which the cultural narrative that we use helps to shape the world in which we
live. Bennett discusses enchantment as an active engagement with objects of a
sensory experience, associating itself with the branches of affect previously
discussed (1 and 2), which interlace practices of human/nonhuman nature.
Bennett weaves the moments of enchantment that she finds into an alter‐tale,
and imagines the impact on ethical relations that such an alternative narrative
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might have. Bennett does this with the aim of inducing an experience of the
contemporary world – a world of inequity, racism, pollution, poverty – as also
enchanted – not a tale of re‐enchantment but one that calls attention to magical
sites already here; in the cultural practices that mark the “marvellous erupting
amid the everyday” (Bennett 8). This is precisely what a Speculative Realist
reading of the affectivity of Cannery Row aims to do; weaving the novel’s
enchantment into an alter‐tale that encourages the imagination of ethical,
cultural and political impacts that could create a Speculative Realist reality.
Therefore, a Speculative Realist literary criticism would approach the
enchantment of Cannery Row in a way that considers its relationship to the real
world from an angle not considered in current interpretations of the novel. The
view of the relationship between the novel’s real‐world origins and its actant‐
independence insofar as considering the novel as an actual reflection of the real
world can be reversed by way of accepting the novel’s origin as the human in the
real world, but then arguing instead that the novel holds something enchanting
(because of a lack of association) beyond that origin in its ability to create
another world that stands independently of its creator. Viewing the relationship
in this light, Steinbeck’s literary romanticism enchants in Steinbeck’s crafting of
his story from the bits of experience ordinarily discarded as irrelevant.
Although the novel is not entirely independent of the real world, as it was
born in a particular historical and cultural context, the story of Mack and the
boys planning a party for Doc was not by any means the most momentous story
of that time. Cannery Row is generally associated with its history as a sardine
cannery that thrived throughout the 1920 – 30’s and plummeted into economic
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depression in 1945 (Watkins and Watkins). Thus Cannery Row is crafted from
the flotsam and jetsam of experience ordinarily discarded as irrelevant to the
history of Cannery Row generally given; the homeless people, the brothel and the
local grocery store are the key constitutes of the enchantment of the story in that
they are not what people associate with a historical account of the town,
therefore there is no association to distract and break the spell of enchantment.
Steinbeck’s characters make Cannery Row an enchanting place, as
opposed to the poverty stricken town that history tends to write it as. Instead of
creating characters who struggled to make ends meet during the depression,
Steinbeck writes an alternate history of Cannery Row about Mack and the boys
who, although they live in an abandoned house with minimal belongings and no
jobs, “[take] the sun while they [discourse] slowly and philosophically of matters
of interest but of no importance” (394). Dora Flood, the owner of the Bear Flag
Restaurant, a brothel also strongly encapsulate this. As a “great woman” who
keeps an “honest, one‐price house” (Steinbeck 393), and even when “she was
hardest hit” (394) during the depression, she “saw the hungry children of
Cannery Row and the jobless fathers and the worried women”, and she paid their
grocery bills “right and left for two years,” very nearly “going broke in the
process” (394). This is evidence of Steinbeck’s, and the novel’s itself,
acknowledgement of its geographical and historical context, but reflects the
romanticised glimmer of enchantment that the novel has the power to leave over
the row. Now, after Steinbeck’s death in 1968, the novel continues to enchant as
an actant that stands apart from its creator, and has the capacity to produce
continual effects. Therefore, human mediations (as the origin of the novel and as
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the reader) enable the nonhuman construct, or the literary actant, of
enchantment, to emerge and manifest itself as an affect of the novel when
criticism acknowledges the novel’s depiction of the supposed less vital elements
of the town’s history.
Steinbeck’s romantic prose, a literary actant, creates this exaggeration or
“unrealistic” nature of the novel as an exact reflection of the historical temporal
and physical space in Cannery Row and envelops the novel in a thing‐
independence, rendering it something separate from anything human, or
anything that a human its accustomed to. His romanticism whisks the reader
away in a magical moment of enchantment, just as the contents of Doc’s
laboratory enchant by way of association with the sea, another world much less
familiar to humans as discussed in Chapter One. Such is the beauty of fiction that
a Speculative Realist literary criticism celebrates; it takes control over the reader
and brings her/him to a place outside of the human world, into the textual realm.
With the use of these elements in his story, Bennett’s work would argue
that the lack of the novel’s reflection of Cannery Row in Monterey adds to the
enchantment of the novel, as the reader is not distracted by association to
previous tales and knowledge of Cannery Row, but can learn about the new,
enchanting world depicted in the novel. Thus Prescott’s criticism discussed
above in the supposed purposelessness of the novel’s story and characters
perhaps lies in ignorance of the power of these actants as having the capacity,
the agency, to enchant by way of encapsulating one in a unrecognized moment of
pure essence.
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Furthermore, in The Enchantment of Modern Life, Bennett also considers
the etymology of the word enchant in its relation to the French verb to sing:
chanter. To “en‐chant” means to surround with song or incantation; hence to cast
a spell with sounds, to make fall “under the sway of a magical refrain, to carry
away on a sonorous stream” (Levin 116). Cannery Row creates enchantment on
this melodic note as well (and one of disturbance which will be discussed
shortly) when Doc plays a song at his surprise birthday party, causing the guests
to sit “quietly” with “their eyes…inward” (Steinbeck 467). The feeling of a
“golden pleasant sadness” (467) encompasses everyone in the room as they each
slip into their own pensive states, and serves as an example of the enchanting
affect of music as a literary actant within a text. It has the capacity to envelop the
character actants and draw them into a state of enchantment by sensory
interaction as they listen. This is a state of enchantment caused by a literary
actant shifting across textual spaces and affecting other literary actants. The
enchantment actant may also shift over the boundary into the extra‐textual
realm and take place on the reader if the song instils a pensive state for the
human as well, in which case the enchantment’s affectivity, not the reader’s
perception of it, would still be the focus of that movement.
When Doc turns off the music and begins reading Bilhana’s
Chaurapanchsikha, translated as “Black Marigolds” by Powys Mathers (Syed),
aloud, this has a further enchanting affect through repetition. Deleuze and
Guattari argue that repetition of word sounds not only exaggerates the tempo of
an ordinary phrase and eventually renders a meaningful phrase nonsense, but it
can also provoke “new ideas, perspectives and identities” (Massumi 24). Eleven
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out of the twelve verses recited of the 52‐verse poem begin with the line ‘Even
now’ (as do the remainder of the verses not included in his recital). This
repetition carries and encompasses the words of each verse; it opens each verse
with its announcement and puts the last verse behind it with the next repetition.
The guests at the party, including Phyllis Mae, one of Dora’s girls, Dora, Hazel and
Mack all appear to have been whisked away into a state of deep engagement with
the poem as they all sat listening intently. This supports Deleuze and Guaratti’s
argument that new ideas, perspectives and identities can be created through
enchantment in sound and word repetition.
While a Humanist perspective might see this poem as a demonstration of
Steinbeck’s interest in Indian concepts and religious thought, a hint at his
encounters with New England transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau, and the
poetry of Whitman and T.S. Eliot (Syed), the Speculative Realist perspective
would focus on the ability of repetition to evoke new ideas and perspectives in
the actant‐characters listening to the poem. This supports the view of actants as
things capable of affecting amongst those with whom/which they interact. In this
way, the affect of enchantment as an actant shifts from song to poem to
characters and reader. It is a doing, active agent that as a nonhuman construct,
emerges and manifests itself as an affect of the novel, using the novel and other
literary actants as its medium.
The recital of “Black Marigolds also exemplifies a loss of enchantment by
association. While the poem is being read, the characters remain in a state of
enchantment and stay that way until they begin to associate the poem with
themselves and their relationships. When Doc stops reading, “a little world
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sadness had slipped over all of them” (Steinbeck 468) as everyone remembered
“a lost love, everyone a call” (468). When the association with something else
begins, when the distraction occurs and the train of thought develops, the state
of childlike wonder is lost along with the enchantment. Phyllis Mae was openly
weeping and “Dora herself dabbed at her eyes” (468). Only Hazel remained
enchanted as he “was so taken by the sound of the words that he had not listened
to their meaning” (468). He did not listen to their meaning and therefore did not
make connections between the words, himself and people in his life. He simply
remained in a state of enchantment induced by soothing sounds and repetitions.
This will be discussed in more detail in the following section on disturbance in
its potential to exemplify an instance of an expectant emotion wherein a
temporal quality is added that encapsulates the poem’s listeners.
The view of the poem enchanting its listeners strongly equates them, as
inhuman literary characters, to human beings. Bennett’s affect of enchantment,
and Ngai’s work on disturbance, refers to the affect of literature on a human
reader, or listener. However since the literary actants behave in the same way
and are also capable of falling under the spell of enchantment, similarities can be
drawn between humans and literary characters in terms of their reactions and
their propensity to be influenced by other literary actants such as affect. This
situation renders a nonhuman construct as the one asserting control,
demonstrating how human mediations can act as an open interface allowing
enchantment to manifest itself as a powerful affect of Cannery Row.
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Disturbance Affect
Disturbance is another affect that, through human mediations acting as an
open interface, manifests itself as a powerful affect of Cannery Row. There are
instances in the novel that do not have the affect of creating enchantment, but
rather create “negative” emotions with a temporal quality added to their affect.
As described in the introduction, a novel can create variations of
disturbance; Ngai’s Ugly Feelings presents a series of studies in the aesthetics of
negative emotions, examining their politically ambiguous work in a range of
cultural artifacts produced in what T. W. Adorno calls the “fully administered
world of late modernity” (Adorno 60). Ngai marks disturbance as those emotions
that are tolerable but uncomfortable, those that are experienced on a daily basis,
such as irritation, anxiety and paranoia. With a focus on anxiety, Ngai focuses on
a correlation between anxiety and projection in that they paradoxically intersect
by virtue of the fact that both are deferred for analysis to a future which never
arrives – they are expectant emotions. Filled emotions, such as envy, greed and
admiration, are those whose drive‐object lies ready, if not in respective
individual attainability. Then in the already available world, expectant emotions
like anxiety, fear and hope, as previously explained, evoke a temporal element in
the emotional reaction.
This can be seen in Cannery Row in the traditional angle of criticism taken
when interpreting the novel. Reading it from a Humanist/psychoanalytical
perspective as a critique of the American dream, in which all that it promotes is
argued to be shallow and futile, could create feelings of anxiety in the reader by
causing them to question along a temporal horizon their own goals and motives
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in the past and future. When the narrator questions what it can profit a man “to
gain the world and to come to his property with a gastric ulcer, a blown prostate,
and bifocals” (Steinbeck 393), this literary actant, a question, has the power to
create an expectant emotion such as anxiety, or fear, as it questions the dominant
perception of success in the Western world (Etheridge). Thus the Speculative
Realist approach would build on the Humanist’s acknowledgement of the
question forcing a reader to self‐reflect by focusing on acknowledging the
capabilities of the actant to evoke such emotions in the first place; to shift from
the text, to the human and through the human’s temporal existence, thereby
evoking the abilities of that affect‐actant to create further repercussions outside
of its own textual realm.
Moreover, the poetry reading scene previously discussed in which “a little
world sadness had slipped over all of them” (468) as everyone remembered “a
lost love, everyone a call” (468), could also be a scene evoking expectant
emotions that open out into the characters’ horizons of time. In this sense, it is
not that enchantment is lost by way of association, but rather that fear, or
anxiety, as evoked in the same way as enchantment, is churning within those
literary character‐actants, causing them to sink into a contemplative moment of
golden sadness. Thus disturbance is affecting change in other actants, just as
Mack and the boys influence the other characters in a ripple effect as previously
exemplified. Therefore, disturbance is rendered it a nonhuman entity, an actant,
capable of producing affects, thereby deserving recognition for its abilities.
However, it could be argued again here that the affect of disturbance, or
enchantment for that matter, on the literary, fictional characters is not applicable,
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as Bennett’s and Ngai’s arguments for enchantment and disturbance are
discussed in relation to the reader, not between characters (that is not to say
they are anthropocentric – they still focus primarily on the agency of the affect‐
actant). Thus if it is argued that the novel is not in fact a reflection of the real
world, then such rules and affects are perhaps not applicable to literary actants
but only to people.
Nevertheless, if it were applicable, viewing expectant emotions from a
Speculative Realist point of view would not analyse the reader’s contemplation
of these things in their own life, as the angle of focus is redirected and pointed
away from the reader, so that it does not read as a critique of humanity. Rather
the anxiety created by the questions that the novel poses is seen as an actant
with the capacity to shift between novel and human spaces, and can remain
within the novel as something embedded in its stimulus.
Moreover, ability of an expectant emotion to encourage self‐reflection in
both literary actants and readers, and the implications of that self‐reflection, is
something akin to the Speculative Realist literary critical focus on building and
opening up a text. An expectant emotion encourages whichever non/human
actant to build on their previous actions and experiences and open up their
possibilities by way of self‐reflection. However, this is potentially not applicable
to nonhuman actants as the ability to self‐reflect is arguably an exclusively
human tendency (Terrace).
In this Deleuzian light, enchantment and disturbance as individual affects
can be seen as an actants, thereby acknowledging their agency as entire and vital
regulating fields of innumerable changes across humans and nonhumans. It is an
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argument that to an extent deflates current criticisms of Cannery Row as a trivial
and disorganised novel by cherishing the novel’s stance as an autonomous actant
that has the power to cast a spell of enchantment across Cannery Row in
Monterey, rather than focusing on its unreliability as an exact replica of the
geographical place, on its own textual actants, and on its reader. A reader, as a
human mediator, acts as an interface for both enchantment and disturbance to
exist on both sides of the non/human boundary, as a part of the novel, and of the
extra‐textual world, ready to burst into either realm at precise moments.
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Chapter Three: Effect
Chaos Theory: The Butterfly Effect
Lastly, the forms of Cannery Row, which encapsulate the affects of the
novel, can be discussed empirically by way of detecting patterns amongst the
novel’s literary actants that align themselves with principles of Chaos Theory. As
discussed in the introduction, a Speculative Realist literary criticism could
include literary discussions from a scientific or mathematical perspective based
on the philosophy’s scientific and empirical foundations, Chaos Theory has not
been previously applied to Cannery Row, nor has it been studied from any other
mathematical perspective (as far as the extensive research for this dissertation
understands), so this chapter firstly grounds an understanding of Chaos Theory
within science, then looks at its application to other disciplines and examples of
its use in understanding other chaotic literature. It then considers to what extent
Chaos Theory’s principles of the Butterfly Effect, Feedback Loops, and Fractals
can be used to provide insight into the relationships between literary actants
within Cannery Row.
Chaos Theory looks beyond superficial, apparent order (Rapp) to hidden,
real disorder (Goldberger), but then attempts to determine the principles of
organization behind that disorder. It offers a way of seeing order and pattern
where formerly only the random, the erratic, the unpredictable had been
observed, as in the ordered pattern produced by random throwing of a die. It can
also emphasize that behind hidden order there exists a state of disorder, as, for
example, in the pathological orderliness of certain emotionally disturbed families
(Mellor).
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Chaos theory lends itself naturally to investigation of formal arrangement
in a variety of different disciplines, such as meteorology, astronomy and
chemistry, as well as arts and literature by suggesting ways to move beyond
certain anthropological stances that dominate much critical theory within the
humanities (Brady). One of the ways in which Chaos Theory can be used in the
study of literature is its potential as a key to understanding sudden thoughts and
intuitions in the creative process. Artists speak of their creativity as rising from a
mental churning of “confusion, disorder and impurity” and of their “obsessive
desire for reducing chaos and for finding beauty” (Maxfield 4, 5). Many writers,
both male and female, use writing as a means of putting order into a disorderly
world. Thus in the case of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, it could be argued that the
novel was a way for him to find order amongst the chaotic strife for the
American dream during the depression. This however is still a relatively
Humanist approach despite the use of a mathematical analytical concept as it is
concerned with the human purpose behind the creation.
As discussed in the introduction, previous applications of Chaos Theory to
literature include Brady’s work on the Butterfly Effect in Proust’s A la récherche
du temps perdu and Yasser Aman’s existentialist perspective on chaos in Sartre’s
Nausea, Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, and Al Hakim’s The People of the Cave.
Firstly, to discuss Brady’s focus on the Butterfly Effect, an understanding of the
effect is needed. The Butterfly Effect was discovered by Edward Lorenz, an
American mathematician and pioneer of Chaos Theory, while working on
weather prediction in 1961.
He saw “a fine geometrical structure, order
masquerading as randomness” (Lorenz 91) in his weather prediction model, for
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which he devised a water wheel whose rotations, when mapped, “traced a
strange distinctive shape, a kind of double spiral in three dimensions, like a
butterfly with its two wings” (91) (see Figure 1 in Appendix A for diagram). The
shape signalled pure disorder, since no point or pattern of point ever recurred.
Yet it also signalled a new kind of order that became known as The Butterfly
Effect: “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” (87) in which a small change
at one place in a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in
a later state.
The Butterfly Effect is most commonly understood and used in weather
prediction in the consideration of the movements of a butterfly on the weather. If
a stationary butterfly may flap its wings once rather than twice, the minuscule
difference in the resulting eddies of air around the butterfly makes the difference
between whether, two months later, a hurricane sweeps across southern
England or harmlessly dies out over the Atlantic (Smith). Thus Brady sees a
reflection of the Butterfly Effect pattern in A la récherche du temps perdu wherein
the trivial incident of tasting a cake soaked in tea produces from this simple act
the whole town of Combray with its gardens, and ultimately the entire novel
(Brady 74).
Secondly, Aman looks at Chaos Theory in literature from an existentialist
perspective by outlining the way in which Sartre’s concept of chaotic absurdity is
responsible for his concept of existentialism, in that “every existing thing is born
without reason; prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance” (Sartre 133).
Roquentin, Sartre’s protagonist, suffers duplicity of life, discovers the chaotic
absurdity of his situation, and after an odyssey of hysterical scenes, in which he
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confront chaos and reflects what is inside him, he decides to write a novel in
order to achieve his being and to enjoy a new order. This relates back to the
artist’s obsessive desire previously discussed “for reducing chaos and for finding
beauty” (Maxfield 5), in that Roquentin was striving to find order behind the
chaos of his life, supporting Chaos Theory’s belief in the hidden order
masqueraded by randomoness.
Amongst such investigations into chaotic systems of literature, some
analogies with the search for hidden literary order are more obvious. French
philosophical writer Denis Diderot’s dialogue novel Le Neveu de Rameau is a
robust, disorderly work generally considered to “end in a stalemate or stand‐off
between the two speakers of the dialogue” (Brady 69). Brady broke the text
down into levels of discourse and discovered that one of the levels contained just
four passages, similar in length and tone, that revealed a definite progress
through the work and gave it, in spite of the “superbly chaotic style” (Brady 70),
a clear and solid structure and a conclusion in which one side comes out as
dominant and therefore successful. This order that governed the text had been
concealed by the surface appearance of chaos.
Chaos Theory’s unpredictability and disorderliness were also prominent
features within the Rococo period, an eighteenth century artistic movement that
developed in Paris as a reaction against the strict regulations of the 1600’s
Baroque period (Sypher). Rococo literature reflects principles of Chaos Theory in
its
indeterminacy
(unfinished,
nonteleological
narratives),
non‐linearity
(predominance of comedy in the theatre), and spontaneity (the kiss, a whim or
caprice – in Geothe’s Die Laune des Verliebten). This draws similarities to Cannery
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Row in its disturbed chronology and spontaneity in both structure and character
behaviour, supporting the notion that the novel may too reflect Chaos Theory’s
principles of unpredictability and disorderliness.
In consideration of the seemingly chaotic narrative and structure of
Cannery Row as two of the literary actants into which Chaos Theory could
provide insight on the behaviour of actants within the novel, it is useful to
discuss again but from this perspective how the structure and plot have been
previously critiqued. The book’s narrative line is said to be “a very thin one,
consisting of Cannery Row’s two attempts to throw a surprise party for Doc,
whom they all admire” (Lisca 112). The first party is a failure, after which a
period of gloom precedes a second party, which proves a riotous success.
Alternating almost regularly with these are the “little inner chapters…that
sometimes add to our knowledge of the main characters and sometimes
introduce material of no causal relationships” (113). According to such criticisms,
the literary structure and plot line of the novel is apparently chaotic in its
nonlinearity lacking sequential chapters. Thus a Speculative Realist approach
wants to build on the existing acknowledgement of the novel’s chaos by, instead
of discarding it, studying it to find hidden patterns of order behind the chaos.
Moreover, the novel’s nonlinearity, purported in Steinbeck’s prefatory
analogy of letting the stories ooze into the book by themselves like delicate sea
worms into a collecting jar, rather than forcing them into an order, has been
focused on as a moral statement about humanity, which argues that people
cannot successfully or positively be forced to do something that they don’t want
to do (Lisca). This is an anthropocentric criticism that does not take into account
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the capacity of actants that can ooze by themselves, and does not leave room for
detecting patterns behind that nonlinearity that may be similar to those found in
Chaos Theory because the focus is entirely on what that aspect of the novel says
about people.
Furthermore, Cannery Row’s chaotic structure has been said to hold the
informing spirit of the Tao The Ching of Lao‐tzu, a Chinese philosopher of the
sixth century B.C (Meyer). Lao‐tzu’s book teaches the wisdom of appearing
foolish, the success of appearing to fail, and the strength of weakness. Meyer
purports that the novel in its simplicity, disordliness and ordinarily considered
reprobate characters teaches the wisdom of such attributes by alluding to the
uncluttered, uncontrolled happiness one could achieve if man did not work to
“gain the whole world” (Steinbeck 393). From this perspective, Cannery Row is
said to be an antidote to cure this “contentious modern world of its inveterate
belief in force and struggle for power” (Meyer 31). Again, this discusses chaos in
terms of humanity in its view of chaos as conformation of a Taoist precept, a
precept constructed by humans as part of a religious practice.
Thus the above interpretations of chaos in Cannery Row are all
considerations of its reflection of humanitarian values. A Speculative Realist
literary criticism would consider the chaotic structure and plot of the novel by
delving deeper into the behaviour of actants in a consideration of what patterns
might emerge, firstly using the Butterfly Effect as a model in which the literary
actants serve as the data wherein the patterns lie.
In order to discuss this, it is important to consider the starting point of the
novel. The novel begins with a prelude to the first chapter, which captures the
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tone and tendency of the novel. Steinbeck introduces the setting of Cannery Row
and its characters who, usually seen as the “whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of
bitches”, are the “Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men” of the “poem” and
“grating noise” of a town. It is this point that captures the essence of the novel
from which all the stories unravel and “crawl in by themselves” (Steinbeck 387).
So that peephole, from which the characters are seen as angels and martyrs, is
the initial condition from which the rest of the novel unfolds. If that were a
different peephole, a different initial condition, the novel would be telling a story
of different characters.
Moreover, the initial condition could also be interpreted as the following
image towards the end of the preface (previously described, but included here
for discussion purposes as a piece of data that could be interpreted as the initial
condition): “when you collect marine animals, there are certain flatworms 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 on to
a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water” (387). In a
way, the rest of the story stems from this image of biology as the stories
thereafter do exactly that i.e. develop in a biological manner. This is in keeping
with the theme of Speculative Realism in that as a philosophy it stems from an
attention to reality as determined by science. With this image, the stories and
characters of Cannery Row are alive; they are living actants that grow, just as the
marine animals do.
Furthermore, an initial condition from which other actions stem can be
detected in the opening setting of the novel, Lee Chong’s grocery store. This is a
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central point of the town in which “a man could find everything he needed or
wanted to live and to be happy” (389). This sentence provides a space for Dora’s
brothel, the Bear Flag Restaurant, which has the “one commodity Lee Chong did
not keep” (389). Lee Chong has everything that Mac and the boys need, including
the Palace Flophouse, which Horace Abeville gave to Lee to clear up his debt in
the grocery. Thus the nature of Lee Chong as a generous man, as someone who
lets people come and go and doesn't get too caught up on how much people owe
him, leads to Horace giving him the Abbeville building to pay his debts. Thus the
nature of Lee Chong, Horace and their exchange, provides Mack and the boys
with the Palace Flophouse, in which they find their home, get on their feet and
plan a party for Doc.
So it could be argued that the literary structure, develops from the first
initial condition discussed, the peephole, in that it encapsulates the structure and
the pace that the novel holds. Perhaps then the plot line, the narrative of the
story stems from Lee Chong’s grocery and his exchange with Horace; the
exchange seems relatively insignificant at first, and involves a seemingly
insignificant character who does not feature in the story thereafter. Yet without
that exchange, or with a different one taking place, Mack and the boys may not
have made their home and Doc may never have had a party. Thus the literary
actants that are the initial conditions of the Butterfly Effect have the capacity to
determine the entire novel.
These variations in potential initial conditions that lead to the
development of actants, human and nonhuman, demonstrate the many different
paths that the chain of happenings could take, reflected in the pattern of the
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Butterfly Effect. Considering and embracing all the possible actions between
actants is a way of opening up and building on the text rather than closing it. The
Butterfly Effect allows room for this type of building, thereby validating its
inclusion in a Speculative Realist literary criticism that holds building on and
opening up a novel central to its premise.
Chaos Theory: Feedback Loops
Secondly, another principle of Chaos Theory which could be used in
understanding the relationship between the literary actants of Cannery Row from
a Speculative Realist perspective is the principle of Feedback Loops, a process by
which information about the past or present influences the same phenomena in
the present or future. Chaotic systems contain feedback loops enabling outputs
to feed back into the system as input. This can bring stability or turbulence to a
system. A thermostat is an example of a feedback mechanism that causes
temperature stability. Conversely, when the sound from a loud speaker feeds
back through a microphone, it is rapidly magnified to create a disruptive shriek.
Feedback can also cause a system to move towards greater levels of complexity.
The “daisy world” postulated by James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia
hypothesis, provides a simple illustration of a feedback loop. White daisies
reflect light making the planet cooler, while black daises absorb light, thus
making the planet warmer, the result being biological homeostasis – “a self‐
sustaining process of dynamical feedback” (Gleick 279).
In terms of its previous applications to humanities, the principle of
Feedback Loops can be considered in literature by viewing a novel as a chaotic
system that contains feedback loops that can create enchantment (stability) or
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disturbance (turbulence). Hayles remarks that “both the literary and scientific
manifestations of chaotics” are involved in feedback loops with their respective
disciplinary cultures. They help to create the context that energizes the
questions they ask; at the same time, they also ask questions energized by the
context. In her collected volume Chaos and Order: Complex dynamics in Literature
and Science, which Aman has called the “most well‐reasoned application of chaos
humanities scholarship” (Aman 2), the science of Chaos Theory and the literary
reading method with regard to deconstruction are both outlined to “subvert
longstanding values of established paradigms” (Hayles 16).
Overall, the papers explain the relation of Chaos Theory to recent
developments in literature and literary criticism, especially Post‐Structuralism
and Deconstruction. The work in the volume shows that both Chaos Theory and
literary trends involve attempts to understand the variability of meaning in
systems or texts and questions the traditional concepts of Chaos Theory and the
longstanding viewpoint that equates it with disorder. Hayles argues that in the
last twenty years, there has been a “radical reevaluation of this view”. Chaos has
now been conceptualized as extremely complex information rather than an
absence of order. As a result, textuality is conceived in new ways within critical
theory and literature, and new kinds of phenomena are coming to the fore within
an emerging field known as the science of chaos (Hayles, 1).
Within the wider field of the arts, Feedback Loops are present in Rococo
visual arts, however, specifically in literary criticism, the discussion of Feedback
Loops is limited. Nevertheless, Marivaux’s La Vie de Marianne provides one
example: the reprise of a word already used, often at the end of a thought‐
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sequence, serves in turn as a catalyst for the production of another thought
(supplementary proposition). This reprise resembles the motion of the waves of
the incoming tide as they fold under themselves upon a stretch of beach before
surging further up the sand. Such a technique represents a stylistic version of the
feed‐back loop, in which output is processed again as input.
Specifically in Cannery Row, Feedback Loops could be seen firstly in the
behaviour of the literary actants of Mack’s two parties. He plans a party, which
fails and thereby releases negative output, then that negative output feeds back
into Mack planning another party in order for the outcome to be positive and
stable. On a more complex level, the principle of Feedback Loops could be seen in
the passage containing the exchange between “Thing [that] becomes the Word
and back to Thing again” (Steinbeck 392) (see pg. 38 for full reference). Within
Cannery Row (the novel), the stink, the grating noise, the junk heaps and weedy
lots come as input from the physical place of Cannery Row in Monterey. As a
feedback loop, the book Cannery Row warps that input (the stink, the grating
noise, junk heaps and weedy lots), and outputs it as the “fantastic pattern” that is
transformed into a poem, a quality of light and a dream (392). In this model, the
entire relationship between the text and its geographical origins is a feedback
loop, further debunking previous claims that the relationship between the novel
and the extra‐textual world is invalid. This approach builds on the
acknowledgement of the relationship between Cannery Row and Cannery Row
and instead finds a mathematical pattern in it, rather than seeing its failure to
accurately represent the human world.
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An acknowledgement of this feedback loop is vital to a Speculative Realist
critique of Cannery Row in that it encourages a view that sees much more in the
relationship between the textual and extra‐textual worlds than lack of accurate
representation. It provides a pattern for novel’s enchanting affect and its
conceptual form, providing empirical, scientifically theoretical evidence that
those literary actants perform those actions. This kind of support is crucial from
a Speculative Realist perspective in the philosophy’s attention to scientific detail,
and strongly supports the capacity for disciplines to blend and thereby add and
build on current understandings of the text.
Chaos Theory: Fractals
Lastly, Chaos Theory’s principle of Fractals can also be used in
understanding the behavioural patterns of literary actants of Cannery Row,
namely the character‐actants, in order to understand the text from a nonhuman
perspective. In Chaos Theory, the principle of Fractals describes the behaviour of
a chaotic system that takes on a fractal geometry. Fractals are irregular shapes or
number
sequences
that
repeat
themselves
on
varying
scales
(e.g.
tree/branch/twig). A major finding of chaos research is that natural objects
seldom fill the space available to them. What appears to be a solid in nature is
shown to be sponge‐like and fill up but a fraction of the space available (Garousi).
Mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot discovered the fractal in studying
several years of cotton price data that was presumed to move in a manner that
was random and unpredictable in the short term and orderly in the long term.
However, he discovered that price movements for daily changes and those for
monthly changes matched perfectly: they produced curves that were
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symmetrical from scale to scale. Their degree of variation “remained constant
over a tumultuous sixty‐year period that saw two world wars and a depression”
(Brady 67). Within the most disorderly reams of data lived an unexpected kind of
order. Such an irregular phenomenon or datum that remained constant from
scale to scale, Mendelbrot called a “fractal”.
In Chaos Theory, the principle of constrained randomness is expressed in
strange attractors, which are described by David Ruelle as “systems of curves,
these clouds of points [suggesting] sometimes fireworks or galaxies, something
strange and disquieting in vegetal proliferations” (468). One example of a fractal
is a chaotic or “strange” attractor, which is a state towards which a system tends.
A strange attractor is stable, low‐dimensional, non‐periodic, and characterized
by complicated geometry, unpredictable, chaotic movement, and apparent
internal randomness. Since it has an infinitely long line within a finite area, its
true dimension is fractional, hence a strange attractor is a fractal (Meyer) (this
will be discussed shortly in relation to patterns of Mack’s character).
Again, previous discussions of fractals in literature are limited. However
fractals were also a feature prominent in the rococo period in Western
architecture and decorative arts in the form of stylized shell‐like, rocklike, and
scroll motifs, the descriptions of which are useful in understanding the patterns
seen amongst Cannery Row’s literary characters. The rocaille constitutes a fractal
to the extent that it is an irregular shape repeating itself on varying scales.
Nicholas Pevsner analysed fractals in the rocaille ornament: “The forms in detail
seem to be incessantly changing, splashing up and sinking back…like shells,
sometimes like froth, sometimes like gristle, sometimes like flames” (Pevsner
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195). They are characterized by an appearance of radical indeterminacy, but one
thing about them is certain: they are derived not from the static, rationalistic
straight lines and fractions of circles so typical of Classicism in all its modes, but
rather from the dynamic, organic forms, whether animal or vegetable, found in
nature. This source relates the rococo to such previous styles as Gothic,
Mannerism and Baroque, with their rejection of the strait‐jacket of la raison
raisonnante (the ability to reason) in favour of intuition and imagination (Brady
69).
More specifically within literature, one example can be found again in
Marivaux’s La Vie de Marianne (Brady 69). In La Vie de Marianne, self‐similarity,
fractals, is represented by two episodes. One is the Varthon episode inserted
within the Marianna story, and the fractal character of its relationship to the
main plot is obvious. It starts with a very similar incident, in which Valville takes
advantage of helping a young lady in distress to examine her body, first
Marianne’s leg and then Varthon’s bosom, and as a result falls in love with the
victim. However this similar episode occurs on a smaller scale to the extent that
it is told more briefly and not by the protagonist, as is Marianne’s story, but by
her rival, Marianne (Braun). Varthon thus remains merely an episode in the story
of Marianne and Valville; an example of self‐similarity that is much more drastic
on the level of formal structure than is the Tervire story that entirely replaces
the Marianne/Valville/Varthon plot. This development prevents Marianne from
finishing her own story; and then Tervire does not finish hers either, so that the
whole work remains unfinished, making the fractal relationship even clearer
(Brady 69).
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On the surface, a Speculative Realist reading of Cannery Row could see
fractals in the novel, firstly on the basis that, if taken literally, it is “warped and
woven into a fantastic pattern” (Steinbeck 392). Using Pevsner’s discussion of
fractals in the rococo period, this fantastic pattern could be argued to be a fractal
that is not derived from rationalistic, Classicist thought, but from organic forms
found in nature. This is seen in the novel’s structural behaviour as a biological
organism, one tuned in to its natural rhythm and flow, further strengthening the
relationship between the novel and the Speculative Realist focus on nature and
empirical evidence.
As further exemplification of fractals in Cannery Row, using Pevsner’s
analysis of the rocaille ornament, Mack could be considered a fractal in his entire
character. He is not derived from static, rationalistic straight lines and fractions
of circles, but rather from the dynamic, organic forms found in nature with his
rejection of the “so‐called successful men…with bad stomachs, and bad souls”
(Steinbeck 448) who look to gain the world and all its money, in favour of
intuition and imagination. It was their “impulse” (448), their natural intuition, to
give Doc a party, even though it failed. They “can satisfy their appetites without
calling it something else” (448), and “know the nature of things too well to get
caught up in all that wanting” (448). This is further demonstrated when Doc bets
his friend Richard Frost that Mack and the boys won’t even turn around to watch
the parade because they know what’s going to happen, so “they don’t have to
look again” (448). In this sense, Mack and the boys, to borrow Ruelle’s words on
strange attractors, are the “fireworks” of Cannery Row (Gleick 153), those that
stand out and excite.
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Furthermore, using Ruelle’s description of strange attractors as fractals,
then Mack could be considered more specifically a strange attractor as well, in
that strange attractors are “stable,…unpredictable [and] chaotic” (Brady 74)
points towards which systems tend. Mack is a stable/constant character in that
he is reliably chaotic. He has a “good reputation” (Steinbeck 406) for behaviours
such as only keeping “a job for a month” whenever he takes one (406), and
stealing from Lee Chong’s grocery. He is unpredictable and chaotic in movement,
demonstrated in Doc’s preparations to move “every bit of equipment that was
breakable” (460) when he finds out about the party the boys are planning for
him. Mack’s chaotic and haphazard movements are constant features of his
character throughout the novel that charm people because he can “do what [he
wants]” (448). Moreover, he is a well‐liked character, despite his unpredictability,
causing other literary actants, other parts of the system, to tend towards him.
This is demonstrated by William’s character (the previous watchman of Dora’s
brothel), who used to watch Mack “raise the pint one after another” and “wish
that he could join that group” (394), referring to Mack and the boys, of which
group Mack is the central figure. Thus there are several instances in which
Cannery Row reflects the patterns of fractals through both its overall tendencies
as a novel to behave as an organic, biological being, and in those tendencies of its
character‐actants who attract and deviate from the norm of straight‐lines and
Classicism, and behave as their biological instincts dictate.
The applicability of Chaos Theory to this novel, and literature in general,
can be viewed therefore as an empirically supported explanation of all the actant
behaviour discussed in this dissertation, taking place within and between the
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extra/textual worlds of Cannery Row. Just as graphs are used as diagrammatical
illustrations of sets of data, principles of Chaos Theory when applied to literature
are demonstrations of the patterns created by the data comprised of the actants
within Cannery Row, and can also be represented visually (a potential area for
future research and alluded to in the conclusion). The similarities between the
behaviour described by Chaos Theory and the literary actants of Cannery Row
demonstrates that mathematical formulas can be applied to literary data,
thereby supporting the explanation of the novel as an autopoeitic machine, and
of interdisciplinary concepts such as chaos that appear to exist in both science
and arts. This has the effect of breaching the boundaries between disciplines
through drawing attention to the behaviour of literary actants in a way that
focuses on their agency and their affectivity.
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Conclusion
The philosophy of Speculative Realism can be used to form a literary
criticism that focuses on the autonomy and agency of nonhuman literary actants
(in this dissertation: form, affect and effect) through the philosophy’s ability to
draw attention to nonhuman materialities in a way that other more
anthropocentric criticisms do not allow. Cannery Row is a novel to which a
Speculative Realist literary criticism lends itself in its self‐acclaimed propensity
to acknowledge the natural flow and cooperation of all things human and
nonhuman. Previous criticisms on the novel have realised the novel’s notion of
community as a general theme, however, have only discussed its relevance to
human tendencies. A Speculative Realist literary criticism sheds new light on
Cannery Row, and has the potential to do the same for other novels, by way of
focusing on the deeper complexity that lies not in the statements about humanity
made by the novel, but in the affectivity of the novel’s literary actants, thereby
delving deeper than criticisms which deem it a simple, surface narrative.
To conclude the findings of each chapter, looking firstly at the literary
form of Cannery Row, the Speculative Realist perspective encourages a reader to
move beyond human interests in its reflection of the biological, natural flow of an
ecological community comprised of human and nonhuman characters,
nonhuman chapters, and the Cannery Row community comprised of both. These
literary features draw attention to and are embodied in the pearly physicality
and the rarity of the novel’s literary actants, which comprise the physical form of
the book itself as an autopoeitic machine that houses an alternate dimension to
the extra‐textual world that is contained within the dense web of nonhuman
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relations between its actants, similar to that of a computer, or the interweb. The
literary and physical forms of Cannery Row comprise something akin to Bennett’s
ideas of an all‐inclusive political ecology based on a vibrant materiality, as
expressed in this perspective’s interpretation of the novel’s conceptual
summation.
Since a Speculative Realist literary criticism sees the variations of form
each as efficient literary actants capable of producing affects, they have certain
affectivity. The reader acts as an open interface, allowing nonhuman constructs,
such as enchantment and expectant emotions such as fear or anxiety, to emerge
and manifest themselves as affects of Cannery Row, as expressed through the
various forms of the novel. As a Speculative Realist approach founds itself on
attention to empirical evidence, the behaviour between the literary actants of
form and affect can then be expressed and represented in the patterns of effect
found in Chaos Theory’s empirical principles of the Butterfly Effect, Feedback
Loops, and Fractals. Drawing a connection between Chaos Theory and Cannery
Row lends empirical validity to the complexity of the novel, a stance that goes
beyond existing anthropocentric criticisms. Furthermore, the structure of this
dissertation reflects the relationship between the form, affects and effects of
Cannery Row, in that the form is that in which affect lies, which then, as a physical
body, can produce recognisable effects.
The dissertation demonstrates that a Speculative Realist critique of
Cannery Row could pull the novel out of the depths of its condemnations as a
trivial and unorganized work. It could be used to view the novel through a new
peephole, just as Steinbeck begs of his reader on the first page, to acknowledge
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the power, the beauty and the agency of all things small and inhuman. This
approach would be an exact response to Steinbeck’s proposal; whether he
intended to or not, what he asks for in Cannery Row is a Speculative Realist
consideration of his literary figures to be extended to the extra‐textual world, to
affect this world by way of decentralizing the dominating human figures and
incorporate into a view of reality the supposedly trivial actants, the “irrelevant”
interchapters, and the worms that are so embedded in the foundations of human
endeavours. In this sense, Cannery Row realises the Speculative Realist reality.
An aspect key to the philosophy behind this dissertation is the bridging of
gaps between supposedly opposing fields, to begin the process of creating equity
between actants by creating equity amongst disciplines. The applicability of
Chaos Theory to this novel, and literature in general, to empirically explain the
behaviour of literary actants serves to bridge the gap between arts and sciences
by suggesting they share similar patterns of behaviour. It is a testament to the
validity of literary data, and the capacity for disciplinary boundaries to be
breached, a view supported by Speculative Realism in its existence as a science
based philosophy. To an extent, there is a certain legitimacy given by objective
scientific or mathematical arguments over debatable and oftimes subjective
debates within the arts (Shils). Thus the application of mathematical thought to
literature, according to its supposed objective validity, levels out the plains of
authority and leans towards an equal balance of the disciplines. The aim of a
Speculative Realist literary criticism, and of Cannery Row, is to equate, to
acknowledge and respect, thus the application of a mathematical theory to
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something of another discipline produces something more akin to disciplinary
equality and cooperation.
The application of principles of Chaos Theory to Cannery Row leads to
areas for future research that are not fully explored in this dissertation. Firstly,
as the “art of fiction…demands pattern” (Humphrey 115), more analysis of other
disordered literary works using Chaos Theory could establish its validity within
literary criticism (or revoke it) by way of providing further exemplification of the
theory’s ability to shed light on a new aspect of a text that previous approaches
have not. Using Chaos Theory, for example, in a critique of stream of
consciousness works, such as that of James Joyce or Virginia Wolf, could detect
patterns that lie beneath the stream of consciousness novel’s “texture of density
and chaos” (116) in the author’s commitment to dealing with what he writes as
“unpatterned, undisciplined and unclear” (115). Furthermore, Chaos Theory
provides a visual representation of data (as can be seen in Figure 1 in Appendix A)
in diagrammatic and graphical form. Thus a fusion of the visual representations
of Chaos Theory and literature could go beyond simple graphical representation
to the creation of visual arts as a product of a literary work based on
mathematical theories, thereby breaching the gaps between visual arts,
philosophy and maths.
However, more akin to the subject of this dissertation, if Speculative
Realism can be applied to literary criticism, there is an argument for its
application to other disciplines, such as education. Speculative Realism could be
incorporated into education in a number of ways; through the teaching of
Speculative Realism as a philosophy of reality, through studying literature using
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a Speculative Realist literary criticism, or even through an application of
Speculative Realist thought to the policies and structures of educational systems
to create a Speculative Realist Education. In any of these ways, a view of reality
that acknowledges nonhuman actants could become more widely established,
leading to the potential realisations of something more similar to Bennett’s
political ecology, and the community of Cannery Row, that acknowledges the
agency of worms, rubbish and people by way of reaching the broadest spectrum
of people through education.
“The hour of the pearl” (Steinbeck 424) is the time of day that
encapsulates the vision of a Speculative Realist literary criticism. Described as a
time of day only once, the qualities of that hour are subsequently strewn across
the novel, particularly in the mystical and ethereal nonhuman contents of Doc’s
laboratory and the Great Tide Pool. These nonhuman entities are enchanting in
their otherworldly essence, as enchantment carries itself between actants and
extra/textual spaces, pausing in different places to manifest as affect. The
movement of these actants reflects mathematical patterns, thus lining the novel
with the same scientific undertone as Speculative Realism. Therefore, Cannery
Row exemplifies the vision of reality in which all things human and nonhuman
coexist, each deserving equal recognition in the pearlescent beauty of their
unique appearances, forms and capacities. With or without intention, Steinbeck
writes through a Speculative Realist “peephole” to create a world in which all
actants are elucidated as “the Virtues, the Graces, and the Beauties” (379) of their
intricate communities.
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Appendix A
Figure 1
“The Butterfly Effect”
This provides an visual illustration of a system of data reflecting the patterns of
the Butterfly Effect (Young).
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