Aliki Caloyeras

We’re teaching Moby-Dick in our American Novel course. Yesterday, we had a gam. Here is my contribution. . . all about my Moby-Dick anxiety and obsessive reading habits.

My contribution to the English 102 Gam (02.20.06):

I must begin with a confession: Moby-Dick overwhelms me. At the moment, while I am in the midst of reading Moby-Dick, I can think of no other novel that instills in me such anxiety. It is not because Moby-Dick is long or difficult to read. It is not because reading Moby-Dick requires patience, persistence, and perseverance. It is not that Moby-Dick bores, confounds, or repels me as I’ve heard it does many readers. On the contrary, Moby-Dick pulls me in and entangles me in its mesh of excess.

All weekend, as I read and reread various chapters of this fascinating and downright bizarre book, I racked my brain trying to come up with something, just one thing, to talk about today. But each time I settled on just one thing, just one passage, just one motif to meditate on and briefly discuss, I found that the singular thing I chose proliferated into something much bigger and much more difficult to grasp.

Let me give you an example. After going back and forth, choosing and then changing my mind about what to talk about, I finally picked out chapter 60, “The Line,” in which Ishmael describes the whale-line–the rope used to haul in the harpooned whale. I was struck by how this seemingly mundane object is imbued with such mystery and power in the chapter. Ishmael calls it the “the magical, sometimes horrible whale-line” before going on to detail how it is made and of what materials as well as how it is stored and used. On the surface, I see why these kinds of details may bore or turn off some readers. But a closer look reveals the odd, domestic similes he uses to describe the line and the activities it allows for:

Take, for example, the line near the top of p. 228 : “When the painted canvas cover is clapped on the american line-tub, the boat looks as if it were pulling off with a prodigious great wedding-cake to present to the whales.”*

Or, take the 2nd full paragraph on the same page which describes the reasons for leaving the whale lines exposed and hanging over the side of the ship: “This arrangement of the lower end is necessary on two accounts. First: In order to facilitate the fastening to it of an additional line from a neighboring boat, in case the stricken whale should sound so deep as to threaten to carry off the entire line originally attached to the harpoon. In these instances, the whale of course is shifted like a mug of ale, as it were, from the one boat to the other; though the first boat always hovers at hand to assist its consort. Second: This arrangement is indispensable for common safety’s sake; for were the lower end of the line in any way attached to the boat, and were the whale then to run the line out to the end almost in a single, smoking minute as he sometimes does, he would not stop there, for the doomed boat would infallibly be dragged down after him into the profundity of the sea. . .”

As I read this chapter I was reminded of other times in the book that “line” imagery comes up. I thought of Queequeg’s early appearance in ch. 4, “The Counterpane,” where Queequeg’s arm, which is “tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan labyrinth of a figure” is likened to “a strip of that same patchwork quilt” that covers Queequeg and Ishmael as they sleep (37); or later in “The Monkey Rope” chapter (ch. 72) when Queequeg is tied to Ishmael by a so-called monkey rope. Ishmael describes their dangerous connection on p. 255:

“It was a humorously perilous business for both of us. For, before we proceed further, it must be said that the monkey-rope was fast at both ends; fast to Queequeg’s broad canvas belt, and fast to my narrow leather one. So that for better or for worse, we two, for the time, were wedded; and should poor Queequeg sink to rise no more, then both usage and honor demanded, that instead of cutting the cord, it should drag me down to his wake. So, then, an elongated Siamese ligature united us. Queequeg was my own inseparable twin brother; nor could I any way get rid of the dangerous liabilities which the hempen bond entailed” (255)

This reminded me of “The Grand Armada” chapter (ch. 87) where Starbuck sees “long coils of the umbilical cord of Madame Leviathan, by which the young cub seemed still tethered to its dam. Not seldom in the rapid vicissitudes of the chase,” Ishmael narrates, “this natural line, with the maternal end loose, becomes entangled with the hempen one, so that the cub is thereby trapped” (303). This page also includes one of Melville’s original footnotes about whales occasionally giving birth to “an Esau and Jacob,” recalling once again the twin imagery of chapter 72.

I wondered what other occurrences of this motif I could find in the text, so I did a search of the Princeton digital version of Moby-Dick online. I found 256 occurrences of variations of the word, “line. That number rises to 438 occurrences if you includes similar words like, “cord,” “rope,” “thread,” “hemp,” “yarn,” “strand,” as well as related words like “loom,” “weave,” and “knit.” There are only 427 pages in the book, but that’s right, 438 occurrences of the “line” motif. . . in case anyone was wondering why Moby-Dick overwhelms me.

How is one to deal with such a pervasive and intricately woven pattern of line imagery? In Moby-Dick, a simple object such as a “whale-line” is never just the thing it seems on the surface; it is a single stitch in a complicated and crazy counterpane that pulls the reader in, too–everything is connected in every direction. And the same thing that connects you to your fellow man also threatens to pull you under. . .

I want to conclude by suggesting that the last paragraph of ch. 60, “The Line,” not only addresses why the whale-line is “magical” and “horrible” but also describes one reading experience of the novel itself: “. . . so the graceful repose of the line, as it silently serpentines about the oarsmen before being brought into actual play - this is a thing which carries more of true terror than any other aspect of this dangerous affair. But why say more? All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side” (229).

* All references are to the Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick.

The Breakdown:

“Lines”: A digital text search of one of the online versions of Moby-Dick reveals that variations of the word “line” appear 256 times in the novel.

Synonyms of the word “line”. . .

“Cords”: . . . 75 times.

“Ropes”: . . .53 times.

“Threads”: . . .11 times.

“Hemp”: . . . 10 times.
[. . .although the whale-line is later made out of ‘golden’ Manilla rather than dark hemp.]

“Yarn”: . . . 6 times.

“Strand”: . . . 3 times.

That adds up to 414 appearances of the word “line” or its synonyms in the 427-page novel.

Add to that the 24 combined occurrences of the words: “Loom” (10); “Weave” (8); and “Knit” (4), and you have 438 occurrences of line-related words strung through the text.

Written for My African American Poetry Class.

Beginning with a recollection of my first encounter with Gwendolyn Brooks–I remember reading “We Real Cool” in an anthology in my high school English class. This is probably how many people first encounter Brooks. But what is striking to me now is how we read the poem in my private, all-girls, mostly-white, high school in the late ’80s. I don’t remember discussing the “We” of the poem as black youths in particular, and I think I imagined the pool players of the poem as white kids–a West Side Story street gang of sorts. The message I received as a teenager reading the poem was a general, “stay in school.” But there is, of course, so much more to “We Real Cool.” As Professor Alexander states so well in her introduction to this edition, “the missing ‘we’ that the poem’s pattern has led us to anticipate is a yawning chasm, the absence of the we, these young black boys, from the poem and from the earth once they have frittered their lives away” (xxi-xxii). Specificity here is important–the loss here is specific.

In other words, the universal can be problematic. I am thinking about the current discussion of Brokeback Mountain as a “universal love story.” This is a phrase I keep hearing over and over again in relation to the film–both in advertisements and from friends and relatives recommending the film. While I don’t disagree that most anybody can relate to the love story presented in the film, I think there’s a tendency in playing up the universal to forget the fact that not everybody will know what it’s like to live in fear of being mutilated, tortured, and beaten to death because of who they love. I don’t mean this response to be about Brokeback Mountain. My point is simply that the term “universal” has the potential to erase difference and politics and often works as a homogenizing force.

I think Brooks, however, works counter to that homogenizing force. The figures in her poems are specific, local, and Black. I am thinking about this, too, in relation to Langston Hughes’s “Racial Mountain.” Brooks is anything but the black poets who want to write like white poets that Hughes describes in his 1926(?) essay. We might read Brooks’ “Primer for Blacks” (118-120) as a kind of continuation of or response to Hughes’ groundbreaking essay–a call to take pride in one’s Black identity, which is not monolithic (universal?), but multifaceted. A “meaningful metamorphosis” occurs in the poem, where the racist symbolism of “black as negative, impure, morally corrupt, etc.” that has been put in place by white writers for hundreds of years is turned on its head so that “Black” comes to stand for “Glory” and “power.” “It’s Great to be white” is transformed into we can “Love the fact that we are Black.” The poem, furthermore, enacts what it describes in its third stanza: “The word Black/ has geographic power,/ pulls everyone in. . .”; by the end of the poem, the “You” is not only the “All of you,” which is given specificity by the list in the previous stanza,” but also the reader.

The “You,” that is given its own line at the end of the poem pulls the reader in and also points us back to the poem’s central strophe: “remember your Education:/ ‘one Drop–one Drop/ maketh a brand new Black.’/ One mighty Drop.” Brooks is in a sense re-educating readers through her poem (which is, after all, a “primer”) so that “Blackness/ stretches over the land” not as a shadow but as a powerful force worth celebrating. Given my original general premise, I’m not sure I want to say that this “you” at the end of the poem is “universal”; rather, I think it is all-inclusive–the difference being that there is difference in the all-inclusive. There is multiplicity here.

There’s a lot happening in this poem, and I doubt I’ve done it justice. We could productively look “Primer for Blacks” with others in our collection. “I Am A Black” on p.128 immediately comes to mind–I’m thinking about how the term “African American” doesn’t quite cut it for Brooks. There are also a few other poems that I really love, and I wonder if others have anything to say about them. They include: “The Anniad” (36), “The Egg Boiler (82), “To Don at Salaam” (112), “Paul Robeson” (113), and “Shorthand Possible” (124).

Responses to my classmates:

Antonio, I really appreciate your deftly drawn characterization of the arc of Brooks’ oeuvre, which moves from a Modernist “reworking [of] traditional [European?] forms” towards a poetry of social protest (which is still formally rich). You said it so well: it “is not to say that her earlier work has no social content, or that her later poems are less carefully crafted; but there is certainly a shift in intensities there as Brooks got involved with the Black Arts movement.” We can characterize Brooks’ work as both formally intricate and socially relevant. It is never simply art for arts sake–Brooks’ formal (whatever the form), shapely poems are a call to action but also enact protest and change.

I think an example of this is “Primer for Blacks,” which GerShun and I have already begun to explicate. Along those lines, I wonder if we can think of “re-education” as both a theme/motif that runs through Brooks’ poetry and an actuality, something that happens as we read the work. Jackie, for example, has described her own re-education as she reads Brooks. And my anecdote of my first encounter with Brooks’ “We Real Cool” was meant to call up images of a “problematic education” that asks for revision. (I want to, as an aside, refer to a poem by Natasha Trethewey from her new collection, Native Guard, which has to do with what I am calling “problematic educations.” Because my e-mail program cannot indicate italics, I am attaching a (Word file) copy of the poem, “Southern History.” I am only attaching the poem for your reference, since it reminds me of Brooks/ seems influenced by Brooks. I read it as a call for revision and re-education. (It is also a sonnet.) But I do want to stay with Brooks.)

Jackie, a quick response to your initial post, where you refer to Brooks’ “simple language,” and suggest that her poems function on a straightforward narrative level. I think I experienced Brooks’ poems differently– I mean, while I see that Brooks uses narrative quite a bit (ballads traditionally are, indeed, narrative poems), I also see that her language is really rich, nuanced, and varied. . . and anything but straight forward. In trying to come up with a written response to Brooks for our “e-class” today, I’ve found that I’ve needed to read the poems again and again in order to figure out what they’re doing–and with many, the jury is still out. That is, for me, Brooks’ language (although she uses the vernacular) is often really complicated–”The Egg Boiler” comes to mind as an example of what I meant. Seems like there is a metaphor at work hear–this sonnet is not simply about boiling eggs, is it?

GerShun has pointed to the motif of childhood that runs through the poems. I agree that Brooks is very protective of black childhood, and I think this also accounts for the tone of celebration and hope that runs through the poems. Reading GerShun’s post, I thought again of “Young Heroes II: To Don at Salaam,” one of my favorite poems in the collection. Am I correct that “Don” is Don L. Lee/ Haki Madhubuti? I know that Madhubuti and Brooks had a kind of literary mother-son relationship, and I am struck my the tone of love and care that underlies this poem. The image in the opening stanza of this loved boy-poet leaning back, reaching beyond almost to the point of falling–but not quite falling–is really lovely and moving. His “fine hands” in “print pockets” is, I think, symbolic of his writerly abilities–This is the young poet sitting at his desk, a virtuoso creating something that seems like it should fail or fall apart (as he should fall from his chair) but succeeds nonetheless. (Jazz can be like this, too, I believe.) He is “Beautiful” and “Impudent,” bold and alive. And his work is a tribute to his ancestors (literary and otherwise). This poem reads, to me, like the flip side of “We Real Cool” where the black boys are absent in the end. Here, instead, the black boy–a poet–has found his voice, “the listened-for music” and is “living in the world.” Such care for “black youth” here; such love.

*All references come from Elizabeth Alexander, ed., The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, Library of America/American Poets Project, 2005.

Here are some images from the weekend blizzard:

Zoe before the Storm.

There’s a 4Runner under there.

Showing off my skills.

See more on my flickr accout.

The Shiffle turned me on to this–the solution to all our New Yorker caption contest woes:
“Christ, What an Asshole!”

Translating Anne Spencer’s “Translation”

We encounter, on the last page of James Weldon Johnson’s selection of Anne Spencer’s poems in The Book of American Negro Poetry, two brief poems. On the page, “Translation” sits, left-justified atop the centered “Dunbar,” a five-line poem, which asserts a poetic lineage that includes the Romantics, “Chatterton, Shelley, Keats,” along with the titular Paul Lawrence Dunbar (218). I will defer a close reading of “Dunbar” in favor of “Translation,” but I would like to note the importance of the placement of the poems on the page, which came about as the result of Johnson’s editorial choices to include these poems in this way in his anthology. “Translation,” in other words, might be thought of as built–though built askew; that is, a little to the left– upon the metaphorical foundation of a Romantic tradition that includes Dunbar as the most recent predecessor.

Dunbar may in fact be the “friend” to which the speaker refers in the first sentence of the poem: “We trekked into a far country,/ My friend and I.” The word “friend” indicates that the speaker’s relationship with the “he” of the poem is platonic; however, upon reading the poem for the first time, it is striking how many references to romantic love pop up as the poem unfolds. The “wooing” bird’s “mating-note” in line 7 recalls the love lyrics of the Romantic tradition. And the enjambment of “We laid tired bodies ‘gainst/ The loose warm sands” places the emphasis on “bodies ‘gainst,” suggesting sexual imagery before the next line indicates that the bodies are laid against “warm sands.” In the antepenultimate line, the stars watch over “lovers in oblivion,” which may directly refer to the “we” of the poem (ll. 13-4). But then, the object of the lovers’ love is not clear–if we take “lovers” by itself, the object of love could be one another; however, the word is modified by the possessive pronoun, “their,” suggesting the possibility that the lovers love the stars. The meaning is ambiguous. Do the stars possess the lovers simply because they guard them “in oblivion,” offering starlight in darkness? Or do the lovers both direct their love to the stars rather than toward each other? Whatever the relationship, it is clear that the “he” and “I” of the poem are kindred spirits, perhaps two poets, who understand each other despite the fact that their “deeper content” is “never spoken” (l. 3). One possibility, is that this friend represents Dunbar.

Whether or not the friend is Dunbar (or a Dunbar-figure), we must wonder what this “far country” is into which they trek. A metaphor, surely, but for what? The title of the poem offers rich clues. How are we to read the trope of translation? “Translation” might refer to language. “Our deeper content was never spoken/ But each knew all the other said” suggests that the impossibility of total translation, total communication between the two figures of the poem–there is always something lost in translation. Yet, it also suggests an ease of understanding and knowing between the two. In one sense, the “far country” may be the poem itself, which must be translated from a thought or idea into language or writing. And the two friends seem to share a writerly sensibility. But, “translation” also has religious and supernatural undertones.

According to the OED, translation specifically refers to the “removal of [a bishop or minister] from one charge to another; also, the removal of the body or relics of a saint to another place of interment,” and more generally to the “removal from earth to heaven, orig. without death, as the translation of Enoch; but in later use also said fig. of the death of the righteous.” The far country, then, might be thought of as death. And, within the space of the poem, the speaker communes with the “friend” as he is translated to the “far country.” The friend, indeed, tells the speaker, “how calm his soul was laid/ By the lack of anvil and strife” suggesting that he is at peace a difficult life full of toil and conflict. Such a reading might also refer specifically to Dunbar, an exalted and saint-like poetic peer and predecessor. Finally, “Anvil and strife” suggest physical labor and continuous antagonism, which alongside the image of “trek[ing] into a far country” recalls a northward escape from slavery. I want to suggest that vehicle of this metaphor carries multiple parallel tenors: The trek into a far country, is a march towards freedom, towards death and salvation, towards poetry.

The making of the poem, in other words, is connected to freedom and salvation. In fact, as the poem develops, poetry and salvation become more and more intricately linked. As previously noted, the kestrel “wooing” in line 7 might, at first glance, remind us of a romantic songbird. But kestrel, according to the OED, is really a bird of prey, a small hawk. Who would this bird of prey be wooing? And if he “mutes his mating-note,” is he getting ready for the hunt? And then, according to another line of thinking, wooing and hunting might be considered parallel endeavors if not the same thing. The kestrel is then wooing death. These lines draw attention to the tension between strife and harmony as connected through lyric poetry.

It is tempting to say so that the speaker of the poem is a woman since the poet is a woman, but there aren’t really any clues. The Romantic love poetry undertones suggest a heterosexual love relationship according to romantic convention, but in the end this is not a love poem. Or if it is a love poem, it is one of mourning. The harmony attained in the poem is the “harmony of this sweet silence” (l. 8 ). And we notice that there is a prevalence of “silence” in the poem: the “deeper content was never spoken” and the kestrel “mutes his mating-note,” which both lead up to the silencing of the speaker’s own song. The last lines of the poem: “my evening prayer/ Stole my morning song.” As prayer replaces poetry, we must wonder if the morning song is not a specific kind of lover’s lyric (an aubade?) but a mourning song. Note that the poem breaks free of form. Thus, “Translation” might be read as a kind of free verse prayer, an elegy for Dunbar–the tragic death of whom has translated him to saint-like status.

If the far country is death, and Dunbar’s soul is calm and at peace, then how are we to read the speaker? The space of the poem seems to be a kind of dream space where the speaker encounters the dead poet. The “I” encounters the “he” and is struck silent, unable to make poetry, by the loss. Yet, the poem is made. There is one other definition of translation that may prove relevant here, and that is the legal definition: “A transfer of property; spec. alteration of a bequest by transferring the legacy to another person.” Thus, if we read the speaker as the female poet who writes the poem and her friend as Dunbar, then the poem enacts a legal translation of Dunbar’s poetic legacy to his kindred spirit, Anne Spencer.