Timbuktu

by Paul Auster

Novels and memoirs featuring dogs are a dime a dozen; some are tragic, some comic, and others are filled with maudlin clichés.  When my children were in elementary school, one of their favorite books was No More Dead Dogs by Gordon Korman, about a boy who finds it upsetting that dogs in literature usually die.  Where the Red Fern Grows and Old Yeller are two fine examples of this phenomenon.  The sad fact is, however, that dogs only live about ten years in the best of circumstances so even if Old Dan, Little Ann, and Old Yeller had survived their travails, their owners’ hearts would have been broken anyway.  For those of us who are fortunate enough to share our lives with dogs, the end always comes too soon, because no matter how much trouble they cause dogs have a way of wrapping themselves around our hearts, and without them our lives and homes feel empty.  Of course, not every dog is loved and wanted and not every person loves dogs; but when a dog and a person bond, it is a mysterious and beautiful connection.

Timbuktu,  by Paul Auster, invites the reader into the world of a homeless man, Willy G. Christmas, and his canine companion, Mr. Bones.  Unlike the typical dog story, Timbuktu is about a dog who loses his person and not the other way around.  Mr. Bones, with his keen olfactory, recognizes that it’s the end of the line for Willy G.; and as the two make their way to Baltimore, Maryland, we learn bits and pieces of their individual and joint life stories, just enough to paint a picture of two good souls who live their lives on the fringes of society.   While Mr. Bones cannot engage in a dialog with Willy G., he listens carefully and patiently to his partner’s constant and rambling monologue, paying close attention to the unspoken messages and the magnificent “symphony of smells” that greet his miraculous senses at every turn.  

In Willie G.’s mythology, “Timbuktu” is the afterlife.  (In reality, Timbuktu is an ancient city in the African nation of Mali, which was once a major crossroads on the Trans-Saharan caravan routes.  It was long a place shrouded in mystery because no westerner who ventured there had come out alive until 1828, when a Frenchman named René Caillié, disguised as a Muslim, visited the city and returned to France to collect his 10,000 franc prize.)  Mr. Bones worries that Timbuktu is not a place for dogs and he fears that he will never see Willy G. again.  For all of Willy G.’s love of and devotion to Mr. Bones, he never speaks of seeing his dog in the afterlife.  Instead, Willy G. provides Mr. Bones with plenty of warnings about the dangers lurking everywhere a stray dog might find himself.  His most dire warning is about Chinese restaurants.  “The chefs round up strays and slaughter them in the alley right behind the kitchen – ten, twenty, thirty dogs a week…  Unless you want to wind up in a platter of moo goo gai pan, you’ll think twice before you wag your tail in front of one of those [Chinese] beaneries. ..  Know thine enemy – and then keep a wide berth.”

A theme Paul Auster often explores in his works of fiction is that of the social misfit who writes endlessly in notebooks which pile up over a period of years.  We learn that Willy’s reason for walking from Brooklyn, New York, to Baltimore, Maryland, is to deliver his manuscripts and his dog to Miss Bea Swanson.  Willy G. explains to Mr. Bones the urgency of finding his English teacher because without her to safeguard his manuscripts, it will be as if he had never existed.  When the hour of Willy G.’s death is at hand, Mr. Bones dreams a clairvoyant dream in which he becomes a fly and is able to watch as Willy G. is taken to a hospital by ambulance and reunited with his high school English teacher, the one person who ever believed in him. 

When the police officers from Mr. Bones’ dream appear in reality and call an ambulance, rather than wait for them to start chasing him he runs, confident in the knowledge of Willy G.’s fate.  During the seven years that he accompanied Willy G. Christmas on his ramblings across America, often hungry, but never lonely, Mr. Bones’ world was narrated, annotated, and footnoted.  Willy’s monologue continues to play in Mr. Bones’ head and in this way we learn how it is that Willy Gurevitch, a gifted Columbia University student, lost his way in life and ended up homeless; why he overcame a lifelong indifference to dogs in order to adopt Mr. Bones; and how the the long arm of history distorted his parents’, and therefore his own, life.

After several days on the street avoiding capture, Mr. Bones surrenders to hunger and allows a young Chinese boy to befriend him.  The boy, whose parents own a Chinese restaurant, suffers from loneliness and harsh discipline at his father’s hands.  He and Mr. Bones bond immediately, in the way that dogs and children will, and a surreptitious feeding program begins.  Because dogs live in the moment, Mr. Bones temporarily forgets about Willy G. Christmas and adapts to life hidden in a box in a blighted vacant lot behind the restaurant.  When the inevitable happens and Mr. Bones finds himself once again homeless, he remembers Willy G.’s warnings and runs as far and as fast as he can until he collapses in a thicket behind a suburban home many miles away from Baltimore.

At one point in Mr. Bones’ remembering of Willy G.’s surreal and poetic monologue, he reminds us that “dog” is used as a metaphor for everything from sickness to happiness.  We have the dog in the manger (greed), junkyard dog (violent bully), sick puppy (head case), and bitch (mean lady).  On the other hand, the big dog (leader) often has his (or her) lucky day.   Paul Auster obliquely refers to the differences in human relationships with dogs:  some cultures revile them, some eat them.   Why many of us in the Western World live with them and treat them as family probably has much to do with our conception of the soul as the essence that departs the body upon death.  We look at them and they look into us.  When they leave us, we mourn, sometimes for years; and yet they remain in our hearts to remind us that goodness exists.

Understanding the nature of existence is the essence of Timbuktu.  Existentialism is a branch of philosophy concerned with the notion that each human is an individual adrift in a sea of other individuals.  For many, living a social life seems easy and natural, but for others every interaction is a challenge.  Life in primitive societies was about surviving day by day: hunting, gathering, and protecting the young.   As societies moved away from clan-based subsistence and evolved into complex social hierarchies in an industrialized world, people began questioning the purpose of life and a few, who did not have to toil in order to eat, became consumed with finding reasons for their own existence.   As monarchies fell to democracy, fascism, and communism  -- and news of cruel and hateful acts, committed on an epic scale, spread far and wide -- the absurdity of human existence became the primary focus of writers and philosophers such as Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Eugène Ionesco, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and others.  Paul Auster studied the existentialists as well as Freudian psychoanalysts such as Jacques Lacan in his own attempt to make sense of a perplexing world.

The great beauty of dogs is that they don’t care about things like mental illness and physical attributes.  They love us no matter what we look like, who are parents are, how nice our home is, or the number of friends we have.  The nature of this love is unknowable, however.  Some scientists posit that domestic dogs evolved over time as a matter of survival:  becoming appealing to their human hosts in order to secure regular meals.  They theorize that the love is one-sided, that dogs are mirrors reflecting what we want to see.  Paul Auster’s book suggests something else; that dogs are spiritual creatures who connect with us to help us see that there is an afterlife where hope never dies.

Copyright 2013 Teresa Friedlander all rights reserved

Moby Dick

by Herman Melville

Moby Dick is a book that is rarely read for pleasure.  Unlike a page-turner such as War and Peace it is a dark and grim story with not a hint of romance, gallantry, or triumph in tragedy.  In truth, most of us who have read Moby Dick have done so because our high school or college English Literature teacher required it, after all, “The Whale” is one of the great works of American literature.  Despite its lack of entertainment value, Moby Dick  is a fascinating story, rich with biblical, literary, and philosophical references.  Moreover, this book contains a deep and detailed discourse on the practice of whaling, from ship construction to harpooning to slaughtering to butchering to the rendering of whale oil.  In the 19^th century whale oil literally "lit the night" and was therefore vital to the growth of industry and technology in the 19^th century.  As a result, whales were nearly hunted to extinction.  Around this same time, however, petroleum refining and production had developed sufficiently to fuel the Industrial Revolution; and so, one way or another, the whaling industry and a way of life for many New Englanders were doomed.

The author, Herman Melville (1819-1891), lived an odd, itinerant life, including time on a whaling ship, and mined his experiences for his writing.  He first published Moby Dick, a groundbreaking American novel, in England, where it received scathing criticism for being poorly written by people who did not understand that American English writing reflected the character and soul of a people who had built a nation from the ground up.  Melville’s American contemporary, Nathaniel Hawthorne, was one of the few who recognized the importance of the book, but with the abandonment of the whaling industry and the frenzy of the Gold Rush, Moby Dick  languished for decades before receiving the attention of authors Carl Van Doren and D. H. Lawrence in the early 20^th century.  Had it not been noticed by these men and kept in circulation by New York’s literary society, Moby Dick could have quietly disappeared into obscurity.

A facile outline of the plot is the story of a whaling ship’s captain, Ahab, who having lost his leg to the great white whale, Moby Dick, devotes his entire life and being to slaying the legendary beast, at any cost.  The narrator, Ishmael, is a social outcast like his Biblical namesake; he joins the crew of the Pequod as a way of further exiling himself and likens going to sea in pursuit of whales as a way of leaving life, abandoning the self, perhaps a form of suicide.  Melville crafted Ishmael carefully so that he would be a credible narrator of a work that is a literary masterpiece with its study of humanity, treatise on whaling, and allegory of human self-destructiveness.  Because he had once been a teacher, Ishmael's sophisticated narration fits what little we learn of his character.  As a character, however, his role in the story is almost exclusively that of a fatalistic observer.

Captain Ahab enters the story cloaked in mystery.  He boards the Pequod in the early hours of the day it is scheduled to depart Nantucket, and immediately retreats to his cabin.  Elijah, one of the crew, adds to the sense of foreboding by engaging Ishmael in a cryptic conversation about fate and whether he has a soul.  Days later when Ahab finally emerges to meet the crew, he explains that rather than hunting whales for their oil, they are hunting a specific whale:  the mythical great white whale that he has sworn to track down and kill.  To Ahab, Moby Dick represents everything that is evil and destructive in the known world.   The whale, however, is nothing more than a living creature determined to survive in a forbidding and often hostile environment.  Melville uses Moby Dick to symbolize the enormity of what is unknown and unknowable in our world.  Ahab’s mission to bring down the great white whale can be viewed as an attempt to master the universe.  The crew, spellbound by Ahab’s charismatic personality, follow his lead out of a combination of admiration, fear, and having nothing to lose.

One reason the book received severe criticism from its first readers is that it journeys beyond the straight ahead telling of the story of Captain Ahab and his cetacean nemesis.  Herman Melville, through Ishmael, illuminates the world of whaling.  Several chapters describe in detail the construction and design of a whaling ship, as well as explain the art of killing and harvesting ten-ton  marine mammals.  Regardless of the horror of slaughtering and butchering whales, the whalers were men of great courage and strength whose movements resembled a work of intricate choreography.  Melville’s writing about this way of life is so beautiful, that the reader can appreciate the human achievement that whaling represents, rather than dwell on visceral and emotional reactions to the subject matter.  That, more than anything, is what makes Moby Dick a great book, worthy of being called a classic.

At the time Herman Melville was writing Moby Dick, the United States was heading toward civil war over the questions of slavery and states’ rights.  White Americans exploited and enslaved Native Americans and Africans; while around the globe, white Europeans invaded and colonized nations of darker-skinned people.   On board the Pequod, the crew represents a broad spectrum of religions and races.  These differences disappear almost completely at sea because a ship is a world unto itself and each member of the crew has an interest in everyone else’s survival.  Just the same, the ship’s leaders are white men who reveal their subconscious racism in unguarded moments. 

Almost everyone knows that the original “Starbuck” had nothing to do with coffee.  He and some of American literature’s most memorable characters appear in Moby Dick.  In addition to Captain Ahab and the whale, there are Queequeg, Pip, and Elijah who give the story its edginess.  The crew of thirty individuals represents the diversity of our world and a microcosm of human behavior.  As the journey progresses, the crew exhibit character weaknesses, acts of heroism and kindness, as well as brutality.  Starbuck, the first mate, is the only one to see the folly of Ahab’s pursuit of Moby Dick, but remains loyal to Ahab out of a sense of duty.  Queequeg, Ishmael’s closest friend, is from a cannibal tribe in the South Seas and serves as a harpooner on Starbuck’s crew.  Considered a savage, he is meticulous in his grooming and personal hygiene.  At one point Queequeg becomes deathly ill and requests that a coffin be built for him.  He lives, however, and converts his coffin into a life-preserver for the ship.  What happens to Pip can only be appreciated by reading Moby Dick.

In its essence, Moby Dick is about the universal and eternal struggle of man against nature, of life against death, and what can happen when that struggle becomes an obsession that crosses over to madness.  A good analogy to Ahab’s blind quest for vengeance would be an Iraq War veteran who, having lost a leg, attempts to murder the President:  not only would the leg remain lost, the veteran would spend the rest of his life in jail, a felon rather than a hero.  Some things are not available for our understanding nor are they suitable adversaries.  The whale in its unfathomable marine world symbolizes the danger of turning that which we do not – and cannot – understand into an enemy which must be defeated at any cost.

Copyright 2011, Teresa Friedlander, all rights reserved