A while ago I had the opportunity to see the stage show Hadestown, a jazzy operatic retelling of the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. We had to drive a while to get there and I wasn’t sure how much down-time I would have beforehand, so on the way I grabbed a book I’d been meaning to read for some time, The Grapes of Wrath. I hadn’t realized as I was doing so how much these stories resonated with one another, how many of the same ideas they approached from radically different angles.
Before I begin: These are both, I think, great works and highly worth experiencing. Hadestown is a relatively new play so it can be difficult to get tickets to see it performed, but the entire soundtrack is available for streaming and is a fairly complete experience in it own right due to the absence of spoken dialogue in the show. The Grapes of Wrath is, shockingly, not yet in the public domain, despite a publication date of 1939, due to the absurd expansion of US copyright terms – but you should have no issues finding a copy for free or borrowing one from your local library if you haven’t read it.
Hadestown uses Greek myth as a jumping-off point, but spins it into a parable of the cruelties of extractivism and the importance and struggle of solidarity. In this riff on the old myths, Hades, god of the underworld, has grown insecure and jealous of the love of Persephone’s, his wife and the goddess of Summer. Each year Winter becomes longer Summer becomes shorter as he calls her back to his domain sooner and sooner, wreaking poverty and starvation on those who live above. Using their combined power and the enslaved labor of the dead, he renovates the underworld into an industrialized wonderland, brightly lit at all hours, full of wealth, with everyone constantly laboring to maintain it and no one in a position to actually enjoy it.
This might sound familiar.
Eurydice, desperate and hungry on the world’s surface, signs a contract with Hades and descends into the underworld to serve him. When Orpheus is told of this, he breaks into the underworld to save her, eventually uniting the indentured dead to revolt against Hades’ rule. With his hand forced by this, and his heart charmed by Orpheus’s song, Hades is forced to release him – but, as in all tellings, Orpheus is forbidden from looking back at his love and (in this version) at the slaves he has freed. He must go alone and isolated, as an individual rather than as an organizer. At this, he fails, as Orpheus always fails, and Eurydice falls back into the underworld. An old song; a sad song; a tragedy.
The Grapes of Wrath’s use of religious imagery and parable is quite different, using it to accent the details rather than the core of the story. As the Joads struggle with their epic journey west, moments occur with a sort of biblical resonance but each time with some strange inversion: Noah is carried away by the river, leaving the rest to fight the flood; the stillbirth is set adrift on the water like Moses in the reeds; a mother with no husband and no child nurses a starving stranger: Echoes of scripture – but wrong, saddened, a suggestion of a world operating in reverse, of a blasphemy against the natural order.
Both tales reside in the tension between industrialization and nature, exploitation and solidarity, individual and greater good. Whether it’s the lord of the underworld or California millionaires, these men claim the earth and make it their own, say they know how to use it better than anyone else, and dole out the right to work it and to enjoy a tiny fragment of its wealth, barely enough to survive on, while pretending it’s some special privilege, some favor. “The enemy is poverty!” declaims Hades at the end of the first act, justifying the building of a wall separating the lands of the living and the dead – a tidy sleight of hand conflating the poor with their poverty, instilling in them the essence of their plague, a plague set upon them but nothing other than the greed of Hades himself. Meanwhile the Californians who live in relative comfort regard the “okies” with disgust, as being subhuman, using their poverty as evidence that poverty is all they know how to want. This dehumanization process echoes other bigotries familiar to us, racism and misogyny and queerphobia. On that note, it seems odd to me that a novel about US labor history would have so little to say about race, would stop short of drawing this parallel – it is, perhaps, a flaw in the work, that this line of thought is never explored.
The Grapes of Wrath is tonally much darker than Hadestown, but its message seems more hopeful. The tale argues that there is a sort of innate human solidarity, a shared spirit which instinctively gives to others even when under massive pressure to survive. No – that’s wrong: It’s not despite the brutal pressure that these poor displaced people give their last possession to help one another, it’s because they’re all under such threat that they band together as one being to survive, to carry on even as individuals fall to disease, starvation, or oppressive violence. Further, I would argue it illustrates how the USA is defined by that violence: America, it is said, is a land of freedom and plenty. These definitions are treated as axiomatic: America must be a land of freedom and plenty because that’s what America means. But where does that leave those of us who are not free, who do not have plenty? Why, that means that by definition we are unAmerican. What is “plenty” if not more than enough – and how can you know what enough is without seeing those who don’t have it? What is “freedom” if not the freedom to withhold plenty from others, to decide to act against the interests of the all and for the interests of the one? As we stockpile more and more, as we distance ourselves from starvation, from our status as a social animal that must cooperate to survive, we define ourselves as individuals, an individuality which rejects solidarity, which inverts the natural order. This cruelty and inhumanity, however, is finite: Not a law of the world, not a god that sits beneath us and dictates our lives and deaths, but a human construct which, like all human constructs, will one day fall.
So there are those among us who claim for themselves what should belong to all, define an individuality that is wholly premised on theft. How can taking what is shared and allowing others to die by its absence be described as anything but violence? But murder laundered by economics is not defined as a crime, because that would be far too inconvenient to those assigned to define what a crime is. Those who are left without, those who starve inconveniently, freeze inconveniently, sleep outdoors inconveniently, are murdered inconveniently, are who we judge to be criminals. It repeats again and again: An old song; a sad song; a tragedy.