. Spinning .

There are several forms of imagery:  simile, metaphor, solid description.  Steinbeck uses them all to best advantage, but in his description he is concise, that is, using many words perhaps, but each word is strung in a list that results in a rat-a-tat-tat picture-perfect target hit with his bullets:

Coffee in its own can was simmering on its own rock, far enough from the flame so that it did not boil too had.  Mack awakened, started up, stretched, staggered to the pool, washed his face with cupped hands, hacked, spit, washed out his mouth, broke wind, tightened his belt, scratched his legs, combed his wet hair with his fingers, drank from the jug, belched and sat down by the fire.  "By God that smells good," he said.

Men all do about the same thing when they wake up.  Mack’s process was loosely the one all of them followed.  (p. 74)

Steinbeck uses this "listing" method quite often, when giving a description in full sentences of "then he…" would have seriously detracted from the story and slowed the pace.  This quickness of action gives a full image, and keeps it interesting and lively.

Here’s imagery:

The Carmel is a lovely little river.  It isn’t very long but in its course it has everything a river should have.  It rises in the mountains, and tumbles down a while, runs through shallows, is dammed to make a lake, spills over the dam, crackles among round boulders, wanders lazily under sycamores, spills into pools where trout live, drops in against banks where crayfish live.  In the winter it becomes a torrent, a mean little fierce river, and in the summer it is a place for children to wade in and for fishermen to wander in.  Frogs blink from its banks and the deep ferns grow beside it.  Deer and foxes come to drink from it, secretly in the morning and evening, and now and then a mountain lion crouched flat laps its water.  The farms of the rich little valley back up to the river and take in water for the orchards and vegetables.  The quail call beside it and the wild doves come whistling in at dusk.  Raccoons pace its edges looking for frogs.  It’s everything a river should be.  (p. 72)

He’s no slouch at simile either:

Behind him the rabbits stirred in the bush.  Then the sun came up and shook the night chill out of the air the way you’d shake a rug.  (p. 71)

Cats drip over the fences and slither like syrup over the ground to look for fish heads. (p. 81)

And personification: 

The water chuckled on the stones where it went out of the deep pool. (p. 78)

The more I read the masters, the more I am convinced that good writing is quite possibly primary to even good story. 

There are, of course, some deeper things I’ve discovered in Cannery Row that need be more fully covered.  A two-page chapter slipped in, seemingly unrelated to the story but bursting with metaphorical sense of it.  These, I need to get back to.

I’m sure the comparison has been made, not only in the writing styles of Steinbeck and McCarthy, but in these two novels in particular.

Each holds a treasure box of character, history and a hard look at a society that may be very different than our own.  A group of ne’er-do-wells, surviving as best they can in the downtimes of America, in the downtimes of their lives, their environment. 

While Bud Suttree is the obvious protagonist in Suttree despite the indepth personality McCarthy bestows upon the others, I am finding it harder to select the main character in Steinbeck’s Cannery Row.  While Doc seems to be the levelheaded philosophical intellectual as is Bud Suttee, I realize that the character of Mack, a leader of a work-whenever-the-need-arises-only band of men seems to be the main interacter with all the others.  He is the second character introduced in the novel, immediately after the grounding of Lee Chong and his grocery store.  He is portrayed as a wily, clever manipulator, though most are aware of this and attempt to prepare for him.  He is a winner of whatever he seeks to gain–though it not be much.

And my beloved Harrogate of Suttree seems to come in the guise of Hazel, one of Mack’s main group:

"Oh!" said Hazel, and he cast frantically about for a peg to hang a new question on.  He hated to have a conversation die out like this.  He wasn’t quick enough.  While he was looking for a question Doc asked one.  Hazel hated that, it meant casting about in his mind for an answer and casting about in Hazel’s mind was like wandering alone in a deserted museum.  Hazel’s mind was choked with uncatalogued exhibits.  He never forgot anything but he never bothered to arrange his memories.  Everything was thrown together like fishing tackle in the bottom of a rowboat, hooks and sinkers and line and lures and gaffs all snarled up.  (p. 34)

There is a difference in intelligence between Hazel and Harrogate, the latter being more able to see to his own survival via great schemes that haven’t been thought out all the way through (the bats!) while Hazel’s concentration is more geared towards being sociable, likeable, needing the wealth of simple communication to survive.  But there is an innocence about both that is endearing. 

Steinbeck gives his characters more of an individuality that does not seem as yet as reliant on the another for story.  Although they do touch and meet just as Bud Suttree’s friends and certainly Harrogate stands out as a strong second to Suttree in importance to the narrative.

While there seems to be a narrative structure introduced by “In the evening, just at dusk, a curious thing happened on Cannery Row.” (p. 24) for example, the chapters appear more to be unrelated episodes from the overall lives of those characters Steinbeck has presented.

We get the basis of the setting in Lee Chong’s grocery store, then his acquisition of the warehouse which becomes the Palace Flophouse, and then by directing us around the locale we are given Dora and her Bear Flag Restaurant, a whore house she has madamed for fifty years.

This method of grounding the reader within the setting and tieing in the characters to their spaces reminds me of Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree and it is an excellent way of bringing the reader into the world of the story.  While Suttree does follow a more linear narrative structure, we are unsure of the exact passage of time in Cannery Row. Steinbeck’s establishment of setting however does give us the feel of building Cannery Row to its present state at the time of story, and allows some history to reinforce the image.