From its opening paragraphs, I expected East of Eden to be about the dichotomy of good vs. evil. It invokes a list of opposites right away: dry/wet, East/West, mountain/valley, birth/death.
It goes on to use Biblical binaries with two sets of brothers whose stories echo Cain and Abel (the rejected/the accepted), as well as Jacob and Esau (the loved/the hated).
And yet, the key theme of East of Eden isn't that good and evil are counter to each other but that they are possibilities that exist in all of us and over which we always have the power of choice.
Midway through its nearly 600 pages, the book records a conversation between Sam Hamilton, Lee, and Adam Trask about the Cain and Abel story as recorded in the Bible, focusing on the passage where the Lord tells Cain not to be jealous of his brother, and that if he does right, his offerings will be accepted. "But if you do not do right," the Lord continues, "sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it."
Lee discusses three different translations of this, one of which is "Do thou rule over sin", which Lee interprets to be an order, another, "Thou shalt rule over sin", is interpreted by Lee to be a promise or a guarantee. But the Hebrew word, Lee says, is timshel, which means "Thou mayest."
Lee goes on to say that choice is implicit in the final translation; for if "thou mayest", then "thou mayest not." This, Lee claims, "makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice...It is easy out of laziness, out of weakness, to throw oneself in to the lap of deity, saying 'I couldn't help it; the way was set.' But think of the glory of the choice!"
This emphasis on choice is reinforced in the final scene where a son begs for his father's blessing (reminiscent again of Isaac and his sons), even as he admits that he has evil within him.
The final scene got me thinking about the theme of choice woven throughout the book, and how even the most evil characters do in fact have the opportunity and ability to make good choices. Cathy for instance, who is presented as a straight-up sociopath, is nonetheless moved at the sight of her son and fantasizes about taking him to New York with her. Charles, who is brutal and jealous, the embodiment of Cain, still loves his brother Adam and their father Cyrus devotedly.
Even more interestingly, the very saintly characters, such as Adam and Aron, are actually in many ways evil because they deny others choice. Adam's love to Cathy is so consuming that he can't see who she really is, not allow her the space to reveal who she is (a condition under which he might possibly have been able to influence her). In the same way, Aron's love for Abra is conditional; she is unable to be the person she is and still have his love and acceptance because in his fantasy, she is perfect and pure, not human and fallen.
True love (and hence, true goodness) always gives a choice. After all, what meaning does love have if we are compelled to love?
In this way, true love and true goodness by their very definition create the possibility of evil. For if "thou mayest" then "thou mayest not"- and thus, the Bible answers, with the Cain and Abel story, the question of how a loving God could create a world that contains evil; and Steinbeck affirms the Bible throughout his strange, epic, beautiful work.
I will wrap up with some of my favorite passages and a follow-up reading suggestion.
"She [Liza Hamilton] had a dour Presbyterian mind and a code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do."
"It was well known that Liza Hamilton and the Lord God held similar convictions on nearly every subject."
"When a child first catches adults out- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods; they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into the green muck."
"Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was every created by two men...the preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man."
"And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual."
"No, they kept order the only way our poor species has ever learned to keep order. We think there must be better ways but we never learn them- always the rope, the whip, and the rifle."
Follow-Up Reading:
The focus on choice (rather than on nature or circumstance) reminded me of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. If you haven't read it, it's another great story about fathers, sons and choices. Plus it has really cool dogs.
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