Les Raisins de la colère et l’histoire : conditions sociologiques de production

Because unconscious desire presides over the production of human discourse, literature, as parole, can be said to bear the traces of its production. History, however, cannot be excluded from the various determinations at work in the production of writing. I wish to show how it constitutes one of the architects of the text, the other being the individual artist who, because of the specific nature of his or her unconscious desire, happened to be the adequate mouth-piece of the socio-historical forces at work at the time of the writing. Whether we consider the structure (repetition of a cataclysm) or the details of the writing, The Grapes of Wrath can be analyzed as a worried interrogation about events to come in Europe in 1937-1938.Silhol Robert. Les Raisins de la colère et l’histoire : conditions sociologiques de production. In: Revue Française d'Etudes Américaines, N°53, août 1992. Séquelles de guerres. pp. 281-292