Listen to the Music
LISTEN TO THE MUSIC
There are a few novels I consider perfect and The Pearl is one of them. Steinbeck’s parable is a complex symbolic story told in simple poetic language. The symbolism is built up layer by layer, like an oyster coating a grain of sand, and the result is a flawless tale, smooth and clear, like the Pearl of the World.
This is The Pearl as the story of the dawn of consciousness: The story human beings have been telling themselves since human beings started telling stories. The story of us, what we are, and how we came to be. The perennial story. Steinbeck tells it as well as the best of them.
The Pearl is fable as poetry, fable as philosophy, like the story of Genesis, like creation stories the world over, a fable that tells every story from Adam and Gilgamesh and Achilles to the Greatest Story Ever Told, the story we need to save us – if we will allow ourselves to be saved, to spit out the fruit, to give up the God-likeness that makes the origin story necessary in the first place.
In the beginning, there is peace. La Paz. The little family lives in harmony with nature. Kino wakes up in the morning and hears the song of the family. He looks at the world around him. The crowing rooster. The rooting pigs. The waves lapping on the shore. The dog curled up at his feet.
“And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31).
In his primitive idyll, Kino is both animal and God. Both less than human and more than human. He lives in an eternal present, like an animal, like God. He is whole. He has no ego. Consciousness has not yet emerged in Kino. He is not yet “fallen.” The songs that he hears are the nonlinear and nonverbal impressions that prefigure thought. Steinbeck’s prelapsarian man is Julian Jaynes’ bicameral man.
In this preconscious paradise, Kino observes and understands without turning everything into a narrative. After his awakening, after consciousness dawns, he starts to tell himself a story: Coyotito will go to school. He and Juana will marry in the church. This story replaces his music. Thus begins the fall.
Kino says each thing out loud and by doing so, he makes it real. For as all primitive people know, words are magical.
“And suddenly he was afraid of his talking.”
Kino is right to be afraid. He is already losing his connection to nature. The familiar sound of crickets, tree frogs, and toads has become a song of evil. He sees only his story now. He doesn’t even see the dog at his feet. He is alone, like Jaynes’ bicameral man when the voices of the gods were gone. And with the dawn of consciousness comes the expulsion from paradise.
Kino tries to return to animal innocence, but it is too late. There is no going back. He removes his clothing, replacing his white shirt with his brown skin, but to no avail. The apple cannot be unbitten. Man and consciousness are now joined as are Kino and his pearl.
The only way out is through.
Consciousness has overreached itself. God is dead and his absence, deus absconditus, is the fatal flaw (the Achilles’ heel) of consciousness. It is time to go under – like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. To go under – like Freud’s oceanic feeling. Maybe microdose the water supply. To go under and live as the rest of creation lives. Not without reason. Athens had reason. Not without faith. Israel had faith. But without discontent (to use Freud’s word).
All language began as poetry and all language must resolve into poetry. Pure symbolism. Blake understood this. Novalis understood this. I think Steinbeck understood this too.