A Pilgrim’s Digression

The coffee of the day at Starbucks is Coupage del Sol, which Alta Vista’s babelfish helpfully translates from Italian to English as “coupage of sol.”

My babelfish is ill, I think.

My High School and College French suggests it means a “cutting of the sun,” or maybe a slice of sunshine. The placard at Starbucks says it is a blend of peaberries from Africa. Peaberries are the little green coffee beans that look like split peas. Tastes like coffee to me; I didn’t notice much of a difference, though supposedly this is a very select blend.

Recently, I finished reading A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I am almost afraid to admit I did not find it terribly impressive. It’s clever and funny, but not particularly deep. I think it makes a better movie than a novel. I am not rushing right out to buy a copy of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. I’ll wait until the sequel to the movie and then read it.

Instead, I recently picked up a copy of Günter Grass’s 2002 novel Crabwalk.
I read The Tin Drum in my early college years, on one of my family fishing trips to Ontario. Grass is an interesting writer, and I was especially eager to read something recent by him.

Crabwalk is the story of a man whose mother was aboard a refugee ship, the Wilhelm Gustaff, when it was sunk by a Russian torpedo in the Baltic in January 1945. His mother gave birth to him aboard the ship that rescued her from that disaster. The remarkable circumstances of his birth rather remind me of Salman Rushdie’s protagonist in Midnight’s Children in that respect, another book I read long ago.

The protagonist of Crabwalk is a journalist for a Leftist newspaper who is obsessed by the sinking of the Gustaf. His mother charges him early in life with writing the story of the disaster, something he increasingly finds to be impossible. He, too, considers it his life’s work, though he makes no progress on it. Then one day while doing some research on the Internet, he comes across a neo-Nazi website about the disaster. After a lot of brow-beating about how this right-winger is telling the story he himself feels charged to tell, he discovers that the author of the website is his own twenty-something son. His mother has infected her grandson with the obsession with the Gustaff as well.

To me, the book is about the ease with which ideologues appropriate narrative for political purposes while the Left fumbles with meaning. Inasmuch as he is the “writer” or storyteller behind Crabwalk, the protagonist tells the story of his research, and the story of the sinking only as it relates to his search for meaning. His son, however, finds it easy to simply tell the story and then apply the rubric of right wing ideology to it to determine its meaning. All this disturbs the boy’s father, not to mention the fact that his cute, curly-headed, bespectacled, loner son is a right wing, neo-Nazi ideologue.

I am about a hundred pages into the book, and I am anxious to see how all this resolves itself, if it resolves itself. The subject hits close to home, because I have been thinking near-obsessively about my own problems with narrative and how I feel both entrapped by narrative and compelled to follow its rules in my own fiction. In my blog, too, I have written a couple political posts lately, against my better judgement, and in looking at them a few days later they seem hopelessly bound up in this fictional struggle between the left/right dichotomy of good and evil. I want to break free of ideological, rigid thinking, but I find it difficult. When writing of politics, it’s all too easy to fall into patterns of conspiratorial thinking and rhetorical hyperbole. And unfortunately, moderate writing which tries to consider the point of view of the opposition is not in favor among readers. People want to read people who strongly, vehemently support one point of view over another, not some diplomat like Tom Friedman. People want to know exactly where a writer stands. You’re either with me, or against me.