"The New American Cain"

Among the spate of American works all invoking the Cain-Abel story that appeared after World War II, John Steinbeck's East of Eden excels. In some ways, all of these works--and they include three films, The Gunfighter, Shane, and High Noon (only the second of which figures also as a prominent literary text), and two novels, Steinbeck's work, and Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny--are all concerned with defining the nature of the American experience, wherein the character of Cain becomes something of a national type. [1] Like Demian, these are all devoted to depicting a national Cain, one representative of the defining characteristics of a nation. In a journal note, to which we shall later return, Steinbeck declared the subject of his novel to be "my country for the last fifty years." Despite the fact that the subject matter of East of Eden covers American history from the death of Lincoln to America's participation in World War I, it is indeed about America's history in the twentieth century, in particular its emergence from World War II. Similar to the other works mentioned, Steinbeck's novel is about violence and guilt, about the justification of violence (hence its relation to World War II) and the transcendence of guilt. East of Eden abundantly shows, once again, how the elaboration of a national type is abundantly suited to aspects of the Cain-Abel story, and variations thereupon. [2] . . .

Like the New Prince of Machiavelli, or Hesse's variant who responds to a new order of being (and who was first adumbrated in Byron's "mystery"), Caleb [in East of Eden], the American type, is involved in violent change requiring sacrifice. [9] It is interesting that the contemporaneous Shane, by Jack Schaefer, brilliantly invokes many of the same issues. It is more directly a foundation work, wherein the Cain figure is more properly a Sacred Executioner, who assumes the burden of violence, and who sacrifices himself in order to establish a community. As a Western, Shane deals with outright violence, not symbolic or indirect slayings. Yet, like the others, it addresses the question of the role of violence as a necessary ingredient in civilization. Shane resorts to violence in order to remove it. One thinks back to Beowulf, where a superior, even heroic, violence is required to defeat the forces that threaten civilization.

But Shane is even different from Beowulf. This is because the main hero, as his very name suggests, is Cain. [10] In the modern tradition Cain himself is the Sacred Executioner; the action he undertakes by reasserting his former self is one of self-sacrifice. In this way it may be related to what is perhaps the greatest myth of the West, that of the gunfighter who is not permitted to reform, whose past catches up with him. Jimmy Ringo, in that starkly spare film, The Gunfighter, receives it as a blessing that he has been mortally wounded, and in some way a curse on the man who shot him to let it be falsely believed that he, Ringo, had actually drawn first. In the Ambrosian sense, to live on under the curse is a far greater punishment than is death itself.

Shane himself is not being pursued, but he is unable to avoid being a marked man. First, the role he assumes as Joe Starrett's hand makes him something of a point man. If Fletcher's people succeed in scaring him off, as they did the earlier hired man, that would be the key step in scattering the settlers. "Father was right. In some strange fashion the feeling was abroad that Shane was a marked man. Attention was on him as a sort of symbol" (148). After the final shoot-out in Grafton's saloon, Shane, already wounded (much more seriously than the movie version would indicate, since it is a stomach wound and not a shoulder wound), expresses his own consciousness of his fate: "'A man is what he is, Bob, and there's no breaking the mold. I tried that and I've lost. . . . There's no going back from a killing. . . . Right or wrong the brand sticks and there's no going back'" (263). Somewhat in the mold of Leggatt (and the other stern-natured Cains of destiny who existed even before Byron's creation), Shane has assumed the burdens of an heroic action, an action that is somehow necessary to the preservation of the "state," but one that nevertheless requires the sacrifice of the individual who commits the action. In a world where the gods themselves are envious, action itself is an extraordinarily volatile and ambiguous undertaking.

This is why when Shane enters the town, unlike the buckskin-clad Alan Ladd of the film version, he is dressed in black. It is not Stark Wilson, the hired killer, who represents dangerous violence but rather Shane himself. [11] His shirt and trousers are of a dark material, his belt and boots black, and his hat is black "with a wide curling brim swept down in front to shield his face." He is recognized to be a dangerous and mysterious force. When he determines to fight on the side of the settlers, he reappears as the power of blackness. Young Bob, whose eager eyes are so imaginatively responsive to the drama of Shane, sees his ambivalence: "I remembered Ed Howells' saying that this was the most dangerous man he had ever seen. I remembered in the same rush that my father had said he was the safest man we ever had in our house. I realized that both were right and that this, at last, was Shane" (242). When Shane rides off to the climactic confrontation, it is again through Bob's eyes that we sense something of the primitive terror in the explosive potential of violence itself:

He was tall and terrible there in the road, looming up majestic in the mystic half-light. He was the man I saw that first day, a stranger, dark and forbidding, forging his lone way out of an unknown past in the utter loneliness of his own immovable and instinctive defiance. He was the symbol of all the dim, formless imaginings of danger and terror in the untested realm of human potentialities beyond my understanding. The impact of the menace that marked him was like a physical blow. (249).

This is the work of the father, here not abandoned but only underestimated and finally shown to possess hidden virtues. In the psychic drama unleashed by Shane in which the family partakes, the father is Shane's true competitor and counterpart. As does the young captain in regard to the fugitive Leggatt in The Secret Sharer, he comes to Shane's aid physically. What is more important, he trusts him as a person of integrity. In this sense, his own regularity and stability have room to accommodate the stray and fugitive qualities of the Cainite Shane. By incorporating the qualities of Shane, the father brings back to himself his wife and son. In an act of violence, civilization is founded, but in the act of psychic violence--the complex process of sundering and incorporation involved with the second slaying--civilization is restored. Shane must leave because he is no longer needed. He becomes the shadowy self, the lost brother who has performed his function. He is the sacrificed one, called by his character and destiny to occupy the point of conflict, to be the person to whom things happen, not innocently, but inevitably bound up with his character. [13]

See Comment by Louis Torres.

Notes

2. Steinbeck, East of Eden (New York: Viking Press, 1952), to which citations in the text refer. It is an understatement to note that the secondary literature on the Cain-Abel theme in the course of Steinbeck's work is not as abundant as it might be; in fact, the lack of such attention, particularly in contrast to the secondary literature devoted to Unamuno, is startling, if not scandalous. See William Goldhurst, "Of Mice and Men: John Steinbeck's Parable of the Curse of Cain," Western American Literature 6 (1971): 123-35.

9. All citations refer to Shane: The Critical Edition, ed. James C. Work (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1984).

10. See the similar pun, as Charles W. Scruggs remarks, in Toomer's Cane.

11. This very fact might cause us to revise the generalization made by M. E. Grenander in "The Heritage of Cain: Crime in American Fiction," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 423 (1976): "The western story reflects a frontier society's desire for an uncomplicated system of law and order" (48). The great danger is to confuse myth, or even mythology, with lack of complication. I owe this reference to my late colleague, John Snortum.

12. I borrow this phrase from William Kittredge's discussion of Louis L'Amour, Los Angeles Times, June 23, 1988: "There's a darker problem with the Western. It's a story inhabited by a mythology about power and the social utility of violence, an American version of an ancient dream of warrior righteousness. And because of that, it's a story many of us find threatening. We don't want to live in a society fascinated by fantasies of killer wish-fulfillment. We keep hoping the Western will just go away. But it won't." This last desire has certainly been realized insofar as the cinematic Western is concerned. If the Civil War invoked the myth of Cain-Abel as a pessimistic revocation of the dream of an agricultural paradise, and World War II reinstated Cain in a drama of national and individual regeneration, the Vietnam War (perhaps under the barrage of realistic television depiction) put an end to any mythology of regenerative violence.

13. We must remember that this story appeared in 1949, when the myth it presented could very well be construed as a defense of the recently achieved victory of the American armed forces. It is hard to conceive East of Eden or Shane without bringing into the formula this national emergence. Some thirty-five years later, in the midst of rampant development in the West and from the perspective of a naturalist, Jack Schaefer would alter this perspective somewhat. He does not recant on the roles of exceptional individuals, but he comes to believe it is a skewed view to judge the species by its heroes and not by its mass (as we judge other species):

What replaced that assumption [judgment on the basis of peak performances of selected individuals] was a deepening conviction that my species, taken as a whole as in any objective view it should be, is more ignoble than noble, more contemptible than admirable, is a dangerous evolutionary experiment, a menace to all important forms of life including itself on this spaceship earth. (423)

Louis Torres comments:

|| Schaefer home page || Schaefer Update || Aristos home page||