the blue whale

Spring break came very late this year for NYC students, at the very end of this month. On the kids’ first day off, I took them to the American Museum of Natural History, where we saw the blue whale, space show, and dinosaur bones. The 15yo apparently still knows everything he ever learned about dinosaurs but was surprised that their skeletons weren’t as large as he remembered, especially the bones of the T-Rex. I again marveled at the comparatively teeny tiny head of the Apatosaurus and wondered about the millions upon millions of years when creatures roamed the earth without any notion of philosophy or poetry.

En route to the museum I reread the beginning of Forgottenness by Tanja Maljartschuk, translated from the Ukrainian by Zenia Tompkins. I had started reading the novel earlier in the month but had put it to the side for a couple weeks while I reacquainted myself with Ukrainian history, via Timothy Snyder’s lectures at Yale (I listen to them as I would a podcast) and The Gates of Europe by Serhii Plokhy. The narrator of Forgottenness is obsessed with the life of Viacheslav Lypynskyi, a historian who became involved in the Ukrainian nationalist movement that before World War I was based in Halychyna (also known as Galicia, where my maternal grandmother’s parents came to the States from). In a metaphor that runs through the novel, the narrator compares time to a blue whale:

I suddenly began to think about time as the thing that unites an endless rosary of senseless events; and also about the fact that only in the sequence of these events is there meaning; and that it’s not God, not love, not beauty, not the greatness of intellect that determines this world, but only time—the flow of time and the glimmering of human life within it.

Human life is its sustenance. Time consumes everything living by the ton, like a gigantic blue whale consumes microscopic plankton, milling and chewing it onto a homogeneous mass, so that one life disappears without a trace, giving another, the next life, a chance. Yet it wasn’t the disappearance that grieved me the most, but the tracelessness of it. I thought to myself: I’ve already got one foot there, out in complete forgottenness. The process of my inevitable disappearance was initiated at the moment of my birth. And the longer I live, the more I vanish. My feelings and my emotions vanish, my pain and my joy; the places I’ve seen vanish, and the people I’ve met. My memories vanish,as do my thoughts. My conception of the world vanishes. My body vanishes, more and more very day. The world within me and around me vanishes, leaving no trace, and I can do nothing to safeguard it.

This blue whale, like the dinosaurs it consumed so long ago, leaving behind only a few fragmentary remnants for us to puzzle over, has no notion of philosophy or poetry. As the narrator says, it “continues to live in its own whale-space, absolute and immutable, where the need to think about something or remember anything doesn’t exist.”

My reading and understanding of philosophy and literary theory are slim and shaky at best, and I habitually relieve myself of any responsibility for dealing with any of it by finding a fault in the reasoning of whatever has momentarily engaged my attention. When John Ganz wrote a series of posts on René Girard at the end of last year, I worried that I was going to have to deal with Girard, given his writing on Don Quixote and Madame Bovary. Girard’s central theory, among those ideas for which he has found great favor in the American Right, is that of mimetic desire: “Man [sic] is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.” I finally read all four posts this month, and Ganz kindly found the fault in Girard’s thinking that relieved me of having to read him; in explaining how Girard accounts for the novels of Honoré Balzac, which do not really fit Girard’s theory, Ganz writes:

For now I will just say that the way Girard attempts save his theory here is quite frankly a piece of definitional chicanery: the novels and novelists who replicate his theory are the really novelistic ones, while those who don’t are merely romantics, who reflect but do not reveal mimetic desire: “In the future we shall use the term romantic for the works which reflect the presence of a mediator without ever revealing it and the term novelistic for the works which reveal this presence. It is to the latter that this book is primarily devoted.” So, the really novelly novels are the ones that novel the way you say they ought to novel—Uh huh.

Distinguishing between the romance and the novel to favor one over the other is nothing new. In A Natural History of the Romance Novel, Pamela Regis traces the history of the use of the terms romance and novel; the account of their difference that Regis cites by novelist and historian Clara Reeve, writing in 1785, is far more typical than Girard’s: the novel is “a picture of real life and manners, and of the times in which it was written” whereas the romance “in lofty and elevated language, describes what has never happened nor is likely to.” Additionally, writes Regis, “Deborah Ross claims that this novel/romance distinction has been manipulated to argue that women always write the wrong sort of books—‘novelists’ such as Henry Fielding could scorn ‘romancers’ such as Eliza Haywood. Then, years later, which the aesthetic wheel had turned, ‘romancer’ Sir Walter Scott scorned ‘novelist’ Jane Austen.” Finding ways to belittle and scorn the work of women—nothing new under the sun!

Anyway, the volume of what has been written on Don Quixote is far too large for me to read in my time on Earth. John Milton is probably the last person in history to have read what he thought was everything.

I read far more in April than I can account for here. I haven’t kept track of any of it, and meanwhile the green that a few weeks ago was just a mist in the trees has grown full and bright. Let’s see what I can do with this space in May.