Pirate Talk or Mermalade Book

I can't say I'm a fan of Austin Powers, but it does include one of my favorite screen moments. After a henchman is killed, the story digresses to show his family receiving the news, and his wife says, "People never think how things affect the family of a henchman." It's telling -- almost self-fulfilling -- that the scene was cut from the film, and only included as DVD extra. And while the henchman has his own Facebook page, his family does not.

I was reminded of that scene while reading Pirate Talk or Mermalade. It's a novel in dialogue between two brothers who fall into a life of piracy, a novel historically grounded and yet outside history (which is to say, very much of the immediate moment) at the same time. These brothers aren't especially good at being pirates, but as one says to the other while trying to think of alternative lies they might tell to avoid being found out and punished, "I'm bound into being a pirate." Bound, that is, by the stories they've defined their lives with, as that henchman and his family are, too.

As the brothers roam -- largely against their will -- from Nantucket to the Caribbean to anonymous islands and into the Arctic, they are enmeshed in the historical, economic, and political machinations of the age of sail (the novel begins in 1718) and yet totally, helplessly outside it. Theirs are the lives lived alongside, or behind, the grander lives history and literature pay attention to, perhaps a maritime Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The brothers (and their left-behind mother) are a reminder that there are characters other than the hero and villain, the avenging admiral and the pirate captain; there are other characters bound up in the romance of desperately wanting to see their own lives as stories, and those other characters include us, the readers. Or, at least, this reader.

Like those brothers, I got bound up by romantic notions of piracy and life before the mast, of whaling and desert islands and mermaids. So I read with an eye toward fitting these two lives, bounced around the oceans by the will of more powerful actors, into familiar modes. With description and setting coming through dialogue, the cloudiness of trying to see content and context at once, to "justify" the text in history and literature, became a fascinating but frustrating puzzle. Until one brother said to the other (steadily losing body parts in completion of an expected pirate image), "It's a blessing is what you must think -- your one eye will see what comes next where two cannot, they are too busy conferring." It felt like a reprimand for my elevation of context over (at least up to) content, of my insistence on applying history to aesthetics thereby binding these characters all over again in an enforced narrative mode of my own, of my inability to read without performing "cultural studies." So I gave myself forty lashes and walked the readerly plank.