The Red Pony: life and literature
I once read a quote somewhere like this, “Humans obscure their meaning by ascribing meaning to language. What is cannot perfectly be described. As our reliance on language increases so does our obscuration of what really is.” I think this quote is beautiful — if only I could craft sentences like the person who wrote this did. This quote encapsulates so much, even though the substance of the quote isn’t anything material. I wish my words could be more precise and unambiguous. Commenting on this quote makes me feel even more clunky. As I try to express myself. Package my thoughts into words.
I haven’t read actual books in a while. I’ve been dwelling in uncertainty for the last several months of my life, and for a few months, I think I forgot how much genuine joy reading brings me — not to anyone else, but solely by being a selfish pleasure for me. Books are a reliable source of comfort. I think after a while, extrinsic motivation creeps in and subs in for what was intrinsic. Then, I get caught up on the # of books on my TBR and the flashy pretty booktok content. And people who read paperbacks on buses look so immersed in their books that I somehow tell myself reading is sexy and that’s the reason why I read. And I honestly lose sight of why I read. Then I rediscover it all again, when I’m in the middle of a book, when I’m actually entrenched in a storyline. I’m then appalled by what I’ve missed out on.
Preamble aside. The Red Pony was unpretentious but charming. I’m going to be basic and quote the introduction here, courtesy of John Seelye. “For Steinbeck, life and literature were reciprocal functions, and he regarded the duty of the author as one of devising fictions that captured the kinds of discontinuity that define life, both animal and human, which is made up of no final terminations, no neat packages of events, just a sequence of happenings productive to other happenings. Much of Jody continually contrives to escape the authority of his parents, so these stories subversively evade the traditional role of literature, which is to shape the raw, discontinuous stuff of life into orderly units chiefly defined by the strategies of closure.”
Life and literature as reciprocal functions. John Steinbeck’s writing feels simple, tangible, and yet wise. I don’t know to how to describe it — I feel like I’m gesturing and the essence is not coming through to you (re: paragraph #1, first quote). I remember in elementary school, I read a book called 城南旧事. A simple memoir of a girl growing up in the 1920s (a similar time period as The Red Pony), in old Beijing. Multiple stories followed this little girl meeting different people, and encountering different incidents. And as her life intersected with the lives of others, and as the stories unfolded, she matured. Both 城南旧事 and The Red Pony brought me nostalgia. Reading The Red Pony was like growing up all over again, but this time not beside a big park in Shanghai, or in the nooks and crannies of Beijing. I grew up through the eyes of a little boy in California’s Salinas Valley, on a family ranch. He’s at that age when things start to make a lot of sense, but there is inevitable freshness and a lack of perspective.
Coming-of-age novels usually pave obvious themes. The protagonist establishes a stronger sense of identity. He shoulders greater responsibilities. He faces and then overcomes significant life challenges. Sometimes he discovers a romantic partner.
The Red Pony doesn’t fit into a box, or read like a chore. It’s such a natural progression of perspectives that our little boy Jody simply gains. There’s no major event, but slowly, the edges of the world seem to curl in as Jody realizes things. The grown-ups he thought were perfect actually are not. But they can still be close to perfect, in his mind. The world can be a little bit cruel, even if life’s not quite solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, or short. There are mysteries in life that simply have no answers, and there are people whose demands will not be met. There are people who we care about, but we do not have the capacity to care for. And some people just long for some empathy and some company.
A lot of emotions cannot be identified or labelled. If the six basic emotions encapsulated everything — sadness, happiness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust — wouldn’t life be boring.
Steinbeck crafts these emotions without artifice. He just allows them to take up space organically. Some feelings cannot be acquired. And it’s appalling to think that I may never know how someone else feels. Because sentiments are not merely files we can airdrop into someone else’s consciousness. I think a lot of us find it difficult to express certain emotions, because maybe there isn’t anything to be said. Given the cultural folkways in Steinbeck’s time, he crafts something very ordinary, but not without depth.
