Today I’m discussing a prescient novel which analyses the subtleties of social order and stability, and the place we each accept within it. John Steinbeck’s The Pearl is a brilliantly insightful work about a pearl diver named Kino, who lived in a poor area of Mexico in 1940. He acquires the most valuable pearl he, or anyone he has ever known, has ever seen. The acquisition of this pearl, rather than bringing riches, brings with it great misfortune, opening up cracks in his society, and showing the misfortunes of such gains.
Here, I intend to analyze the deeper meaning of the pearl in the novel in terms of what it symbolizes, and what messages it confers to the reader.
The pearl, of course, is a literal metaphor for money. Money isn’t merely an object; it symbolizes, and contains, the promise of acquisition, fulfilment of desires, mobility. We don’t want money for money’s sake, we want money for what it can get us, or what we can get with it. Money, then, symbolizes freedom.
The fact that Steinbeck talks about Kino finding the pearl rather than a cache of money is interesting. One can refer here to the symbolic meaning found in pearls and gemstones- they token, in a singular image, the object and attitude of desire, they contain the idea of the beautiful, but also the feeling of rarity. That Kino finds the pearl symbolizes not merely that he has found wealth, but that the wealth he has found is rare and highly desirable. It is also worth noting that the village in which Kino lives is a community of pearl divers, symbolizing that they are all desiring a sudden bounty of opportunity.
The society in which Kino lives is well ordered and well structured. It is unequal, but everyone is happy because they accept their lives the way they are. There is an undercurrent not verbally expressed which alludes us to the fact that although everyone in the story dives for pearls, nobody actually expects to obtain life-changing wealth. It expresses the psychology that we live in hope of something, but plan, and want, only for the life we have now.
This is why Kino’s finding of the pearl is so destructive. His social order is stable, everyone accepts their social order and their place in it because it’s all they feasibly believe their lives could be. When one person’s life becomes richer, of at least attains opportunity, everyone else’s lives become defined in relation to that change- either they can see their lives as now lesser than his, or they can become the person who elevates in society. This is why people attempt to steal it from him, they want the wealth, the totemic opportunity to reestablish the accepted social order, but with new fortune for the holder of the pearl.
One reason why Kino’s new fortune is seen as so destructive, or more importantly, transgressive, is because it is not only that those who have wealth are accepted by society, but that how wealth is distributed is also accepted. The pearl traders maintain a facade that they compete against each other, but in reality, there is no monetized pearl market. The market is a facade which creates the illusion that the market is open and competitive, when in fact it is under bureaucratic control and regulation by one unnamed higher person.
On a vocal level, the townsfolk deny this because denying this maintains their ability to live in false hope of riches through pearl diving. In actual fact, however, this ordering of the market and society is unconsciously understood and accepted by all of them, and is in fact their desire that it be maintained. It is in accepting this that they also accept their own place in society. If they did not accept this, they would not be happy where they were in the world.
Who we are, we see, is formulated by what our society is, but who we are is also dictated by how our society operates. This is why people change with their cultures over time; they identify themselves with the world around them, but their world does not stagnate, it changes over time, and so does each successive generation. The danger with the acquisition of wealth is showcased in the story as deeply existential. If the order of society is unsettled so suddenly, in the way that Kino has done, then the society through which people identify themselves changes, and their identity both as a society and as individuals is threatened. People do not want Kino to be rich from the pearl not because they do not want Kino to be rich, but because they do not want the social substrate through which they identify themselves to change in a way which identifies they themselves negatively. Instead, if society has to change, and consequently their own identity, they seek to steal Kino’s pearl so that the social substrate from which they self-identify is transformed in their favour, not against them.
We see the recognition of the Jungian social unconscious in Kino’s mind whenever he hears the song of his people. He identifies with it; it signifies to him that he can trust his emotional instincts in situations, but these correspond to the ordering and assumed beliefs of those in his cultural society. The song becomes angry or upsetting to him when the pearl distorts the stability of his society. What this shows is that whenever we act as an individual, we act with the general consensus of our society in mind, consciously or unconsciously. Kino’s experiences of the song of his people are experiences of the Freudian superego, attempting to make him aware of the importance of acting as a member of a stable society within a stable society. The song, the superego, stops him from doing those things which would hurt his society and culture. At the same time, in the Lacanian sense, the positive side of the song, the superego, contains the imperative to enjoy, but to enjoy those things which do stabilize and build his society and culture.
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The Wolfe Review 