Fictional foreclosures can illustrate the pain

Dip a battered tin cup into the choppy, overwrought waters of “The Grapes of Wrath” and you’ll pull up a mess of stuff: anger, sadness, dirt, drowned dreams, rusty screws, rocks, thwarted passions and gravel.

When times get tough, as John Steinbeck chronicles in his 1939 novel, the American dream gets turned inside out. Everything that was wonderful turns to ash. The sweet goes sour. And homeownership -- the foursquare foundation of the nation’s self-image -- becomes a source of frustrated rage. It’s not just that people are losing their homes; that can happen in the wake of floods or fires or hurricanes. Steinbeck’s point -- one that has acute relevance to the contemporary sub-prime mortgage crisis -- is that the loss is intensified when the home is yanked away by a bank, by an institution with a hunk of polished marble in lieu of a heart:

“The Bank -- or the Company -- needs -- wants -- insists -- must have -- as though the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling, which had ensnared them,” Steinbeck wrote of the men who repossess workers’ homes. “The Bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.”

The United States has faced a variety of economic catastrophes. But what makes the current sub-prime mortgage situation especially calamitous is a concept that authors and filmmakers have recognized for a long time: It’s not just the loss of a home that hurts. It’s the loss of a home at the hands of high-powered financial institutions. The victims aren’t relinquishing simply a garage, a family room and maybe some nice drapes; they’re saying goodbye to an ideal of trust and belief.

Foreclosures are the dark side of the American dream. And just as many works of art depict the joys of homeownership after long striving, such as Lorraine Hansberry’s powerful 1959 play “A Raisin in the Sun” or John Grisham’s heartfelt novel “A Painted House” (2001), others have depicted with equal vigor the pain of losing those homes -- and losing them because of fast-talking salesmen who peddled not snake oil but adjustable-rate mortgages.

Even when played for laughs, home foreclosures are a staple of American popular culture. The ebony-cloaked, mustachioed villain known as Snidely Whiplash, who relished kicking widows and orphans out of their cottages in the cartoon series “Dudley Do-Right” beginning in 1963, remains a stock figure: the evil, cackling bad guy who does the bank’s odious bidding.

The serious portraits, though, still resonate. In “Cloudsplitter” (1998), Russell Banks’ jumbo novel about John Brown, a watershed moment for the extremist abolitionist occurs when he borrows against the family home -- and loses everything.

“To his [Brown’s] further horror, the original lien against the place had been called in by the bank and sold at auction,” recalls Brown’s son, who narrates the tale. “Blinded by his anger, Father was unable to accept the reality of the situation . . . and as a consequence, one warm day the county sheriff and his deputies came out to the farm to put us off it.” John Brown was out of control, his son remembers: “The prospect of losing the place had put him in a mindless frenzy.”

Banks intimates that such an ego-shattering experience may have planted the seeds for Brown’s later fury and violence. Seeing his family forcibly sent away from home by men with money and power was enough to push Brown over the edge, enough to turn a righteous wrath against slavery into a blaze of domestic terrorism.

The 1984 film “Country,” in which a farm couple played by Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard get behind in their mortgage payments, features a wrenching scene. An auctioneer shows up to dispose of their house and property, but before he can get the sale going, neighbors arrive and begin chanting, “No sale! No sale!” It is a potent reminder of the emotional trauma of losing one’s home -- the place for which one has struggled and sacrificed for long years -- to a cold, soulless bureaucracy.

Yet it is “The Grapes of Wrath,” that great dark symphony of Americana, that turns foreclosure into a stubborn bass note, ponderous and snarling, as it drowns out hope and reason.

“And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves,” Steinbeck writes of the hired gangs who come to throw people out of their homes. “Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshiped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling. . . . The bank -- the monster has to have profits all the time. It can’t wait. It’ll die.”

Steinbeck’s words are melodramatic and over the top, as great novels sometimes are, and it wildly oversimplifies a highly complex situation, as great novels sometimes do. But it gets at a theme that the present sub-prime crisis has revived: A home is more than walls and a floor. It’s a piece of the American dream that, when it is dragged forcibly away from the people who believed in it, leaves a mark on the soul as well as the side- walk.