Cannery Row



Susan Shillinglaw has in her introduction to Cannery Row said that Steinbeck's tough yet charming portrait of people on the margin of society, dependant on one another for both physical and emotional survival.
Published in 1945, CR focuses on the acceptance of life as it is: both the exuberance of community and the loneliness of the individual. Steinbeck draws on his memories of the real inhabitants of Monerey, California and interweaves the stories of Doc, Henri, Mack and his boys and the other characters in this world where only the fittest survive., to create a novel that is at once one of his most humorous and most poignant works.She tells of S's "scientific detachment, empathy toward the lonely and the depressed..... and, at the darkest level... the terror of isolation and nothingness."

Frequently shy and essentially modest, S sought buffers to confront the world and Ricketts was one of the many in his life who held that station. The writer could be as ebullient as he could be retiring, could be both storyteller and listener, intellectual and emotional bond, so that his friend becomes, in fiction the voice of the author.

Doc is essentially a lonely man, yet he befriends everyone.

Steinbeck's intetion is to see life in its broadest definitions as it exists in this one place, Cannery Row.


"The world of man is now mainly fit for satire,....."

Cannery Row is born out of loss of self, of his California home, of the friend who sustained him, and of certainty in a meaningless world.

Steinbeck's art luxuriates in mimetic representation. He insistently blurs the border between art and life.

S in this text that self consciously re creates his sources with painstaking fidelity ad thus heightens the reader's awareness process by which language changes the "thing" into the pattern of the novel


A book without a tight plot, a without a clear resolution, not a book working towards a clear ending or purpose. Bulk of the novel focuses on life as it is.
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This is the introduction in the author's own words.

Cannery Row in Moterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone , a habit, a nostalgia a dream.
Cannery Row is the gathered and the scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honkly tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, "whores,pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches," by this he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said,"saints and angels and matyrs and holy men," and he would have meant the same thing.
In the morning when the sardine fleet has made a catch, the purse seiners waddle heavily into thebay blowing their whistles. The deep laden boats pull in against the coast where the canneries dip their tails into the bay. The figure is advisedly chosen, for it the canneies dipped their mouths into the bay the cannned sardines which emerge from the other end would be metaphorically, at least , even more horrifying. Then cannery whistles scream and all over the town men and women scramble into their clothes and come running down to the Row to go to work. Then shining cars bring the upper classes done, superintendents, accounted, owners who discover into offices. Then from the town pour Wops and Chinamen and Polaks, men and women in trousers and rubber coats and oilcloth aprons. They come running to clean and cut and pack and cook and can the fish. The whole street rumbles and groans and screams and rattleswhile the silver of rivers of fish pour in out of boats and the boats rise higher and higher in the water until the last fish is cleaned and cut and cooked and canned and then the whistles scream again and dipping smelly, tired Wops and Chinamen and Polaks, menand women, straggle out and droop the ways up the hill into the town and Cannery Row becomes itself again-quiet and magical. Its normal life returns. The bums who retired in disgust under the black cypress tree come out and sit on rusty pipes in the vacant lot. The girls form h eDora's emerge for a bit of sun if there is any. Doc strolls from the Western Biological Laboratory and crossed the street to Lee Chong's for grocery for two quarts of beer. Henri the painter noses like an Airedale throughout the junk in the grass -grown lot for some part or piece of wood or metal he needs fort eh boat he is building. Then the darkness deges in and the strrtlight in fron tof Dora's -the lamp which makes perpetual moonlight in Cannery Row. Callers arrive at Western Biological to see Deoc, and he crosses the street to Lee Chong's for five quarts of beer.
How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise-the quality of light, the tone, the habit dn the dream-be set dow live? When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. They must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift hem gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book-to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves.


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This chapter is one of the best.

The Word is a symbol and a delight which sucks up men and scened , 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. Lee chong is more thatn a Chinese grocer. He must be. Perhaps he is evil balanced and held suspended by good-an Asiatic planet held to its orbit by the pull of Lao Tze and held away by Lao Tze by the centrifugality of abacus and cash register-Lee Chong suspended, spinning, whirling among groceries and ghosts. A hard man with a can of beans- a soft man with the bones of his grandfather. For Lee Chong dug into the grave on China Point and found the yellow bones the skull with gay ropy hair still sticking to it. And Lee carefully packed the bones, the femurs, and tiabis really straight, skull in the middle , with pelvis and clavicle surrounding it and ribs curving on either side. Then Lee Chang sent his boxed and brittle grandfather over the western sea to lie at last in ground made holy by his ancestors.
Mack and the boys, too, spinning in their orbits. They are the Virtues, the Graces, the beauties of the hurried mangled craziness of Monterey and the cosmic Monterey where men in fear and hunger destroy their stomachs in the fight to secure certain food, where men hungering for love destroy everything lovable about them. Mack and Boys are the Beauties, the Virtues and the Graces. In the world ruled by tigers with ulcers, rutted by stictured bulls, scavenged by blind jackals Mark and the boys dine delicately with the Tigers, fondle the fantic heifers, and wrap up the crumbs to feed the sea gulls of Cannery Row. What can it profit a man to gain the whole world and to come to his property with a gastric ulcer, a blown prostate and bifocals?Mack and the boys avoid the trap, walk around the poison, step over the noose while a generation of trapped,, poisoned, and trussed-up men scream at them and call them no-goods, come to bad ends, blot-on-the town-thieves, rascals, bums. Our Father who art in nature, who has given the gift of survival to the coyote, the common brown rat, the English sparrow, the house fly and the moth, must have a great and overwhelming love for no-goods and blots-on-the town and bums,, and Mack and the boys. Virtues and graces and laziness and zest. Our Father who art in nature.


(I think this description of the Chinaman encapsulates best what loneliness is,,,,,,and how terrible a thing it is,,,,,,, )
Down the hill, past the Palace Flophouse, down the chicken walk and through the vacant lot came and old Chinaman. He wore an ancient flat straw hat, blue jeans, both coat and trousers, an heavy shoes of which one sole was loose so that it slapped the ground when he walked. I his hand he carried a covered wicker basket. His face was lean and brown and corded as jerky and his old eyes were brown, even the whites were brown and deep set so that they looked out of the holes. He came by just at dusk and crossed the street and went through the opening between WEstern Biological and the Hedionodo Cannery. Then he crossed the little beach and disappeared among the piles and steel posts which support the piers. No one saw him again until dawn.

It has been happening for years but one got used to it..... only one brave and beautiful boy of ten named Andy from Salinas ever crossed the old Chinaman. .....And then one evening Andy braced himself and marched behind the old man singing in a shrill falsetto," Ching Chong Chinaman sitting on a tail-Long came a white man and chopped off his tail."
The old man stopped and turned . Andy stopped. The deep brown eyes looked at Andy and the thin corded lips moved, what happened then Andy was never able to either explain or to forget. for the eyes spread out until there was no Chinaman. And then it was one eye-one huge brown eye as big as a church door. Andy looked throughout the shiny transparent brown door and through it he saw a lonely countryside, flat for miles but ending against row of fantastic mountains shape like cows' and dogs' heads and tents and mushrooms. There was low coarse grass on the plain and here ad a little mound. And a small animal like a wood chuck sat on each mound. And the loneliness-the desolate cold aloneness of the landscape made Andy whimper because there wasn't anybody at all in the world and he was left. Andy shut his eyes so he wouldn't have to see it any more and when he opened them, he was in Cannery Row and the old Chinaman was just flap-flapping between Western Biological and the Hedionodo Cannery . Andy was the only boy who ever did that and he never did that again.



(And the novel ends with these lines from Doc....(which I have found difficult to understand)

Even now
I mind the coming and talking of wise men from towers
Where they had thought away their youth. And, I listening,
Found not the salt of the whispers of my girl,
murmur of confused colors, as we lay near sleep;
Little wise words and little witty words,
Wanton as water, honied with eagerness.
Even now,
I mind that I loved cypress and roses, clear,
The great blue mountains and the small gray hills.
The sounding of the sea. Up a day
I saw strange eyes and hands like butterflies;
For me at morning larks flew from the thyme
And children came to bathe in little streams.
Even now,
I know that I have savoured the hot taste of life
Lifting green cups and gold at the great feast.
Just for a small and a forgotten time
I have had full in my eyes from off my girl
The whitest pouring of eternal light-