‘Moby Dick’ – My Nemesis?

This is going to have to be a personal post rather than purporting to be a more abstract lit crit or review of said novel. I want to start more generally. A-levels seemed to be structured in an interesting way from an external perspective, that at some point they would confront the student or pupil with a particularly challenging, testing incident which almost seemed designed to force them to make a decision regarding their possible future or otherwise in that field. This may of course be paranoia, but if it is, it might still make a lot of sense to do this. For me, both English Literature and Biology seemed to do this, actually at the same time, although RE didn’t so far as I can tell, unless there’s something about my approach to such a subject, which after all has similarities with Philosophy, which meant that I breezed through whatever it was supposed to be. It may have been Biblical criticism. Alternatively, maybe it’s just that exposing oneself to a rigorous, wide-ranging and relatively advanced area of study just will tend to test one and is simply more likely to provide such hurdles. I’ve mentioned in passing that my experience at Pegwell Bay was nasty enough to persuade me that marine biology was not my future, but I won’t dwell on that because I want to focus more on what was happening at the same time and my response to it.

The Pegwell Bay experience was in fact linked to the ‘Moby Dick’ one. Since I was busy away trying to do fieldwork in a muddy patch of beach over in Thanet, I didn’t get informed of the summer reading for A-level English Literature. It wasn’t all bad by the way: there were cuttlefish eggs washed up on the beach containing fetuses which changed colour according to their background, and it may also have borne in certain facts about me to one of my biology teachers which were helpful when he became year head for writing my reference for UCCA. However, a couple of things came together, one of which was that I totally failed to read the set novel for the summer, Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’. I also failed to read James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’, but that was easier to remedy because it’s an anthology. ‘Homage To Catalonia’ was also involved now I come to think of it, and I managed to bluff my way through that quite effectively. The same was unfeasible for Melville’s brick of a novel. I haven’t re-read it for the purposes of this blog, but I have listened to Melvyn Bragg and guests going on about it and other things, and one comment made on it is ironically probably true of my life. The reviewer said that reading that novel was likely to completely change one’s life and attitude towards literature. Ironically, that’s entirely true of me because what it did was persuade me not to want to have anything at all to do with mainstream literature ever again, and this has been a major theme in my life ever since, with one exception in the form of considering writing my MA dissertation on the pauses in Samuel Beckett’s plays, which I didn’t follow through, and thereby hangs another unrelated tale too boring to relate here.

I first heard of ‘Moby Dick’, probably in November 1975 when David Attenborough mentioned it on ‘Fabulous Animals’ as a story where a white sperm whale is pursued by the one-legged Captain Ahab who dies holding on to the harpoon impaled in their side. It seemed to be some kind of sea story, something on which I was quite keen on at the time – Flannan Isle comes to mind, and the mysterious fate of the Waratah. There was nothing in my experience which should’ve put me off it, although I never considered reading it back then. And of course I unfortunately never considered reading it when I was supposed to either. It’s a dramatic life change to shift from being so enthusiastic and engrossed in mainstream novels to being utterly hostile and disillusioned about them. Some of this is undoubtedly due to the sheer length of ‘Moby Dick’ and the circumstances surrounding my failure to read it, but it was also observed by my O-level English teacher that whereas the earlier course did a good job of encouraging love of literature, the later one tended to kill it stone dead, such that even decades later someone exposed to it is happily using the cliché “stone dead” rather than using my imagination a bit more.

I still don’t really know what to make of the novel. It’s been observed that it has strong homoerotic overtones and that it probably isn’t post hoc eisegesis to read that into it. “Ishmael” shares a bed with Queequeg early on in the story and the man’s world described almost throughout lends itself to that too. Queequeg’s tattoos are also significant masculine adornment, and his unused coffin being decorated with them and later saving “Ishmael’s” life after the shipwreck, where he hugs the empty coffin until rescued. This seriously suggests that the references to “seamen” and “sperm” are absolutely meant as doubles entendres, and this is not a retroactive projection by bored schoolboys, but the actual “Moby Dick” title just seems to be a happy accident as the word “dick” wasn’t used that way back then. It seems strange that something so puerile-seeming could be incorporated into a popular mainstream novel of the nineteenth century without any comment, but maybe it was hidden in plain sight, as so many things are. It probably goes without saying that the whale in this is easily interpreted as a phallic symbol, and in fact just as many phalluses are unwanted and intrusive, the presence of this book in my life was also like that. It’s a massive erection, basically.

There used to be a whale fetus in a large jar in one of the biology labs. I always used to feel equally sad and fascinated about it. I expected that some unfortunate event had occurred to the mother, possibly in the Faroes, which had led to it falling into the school’s hands. The human skeletons which used to be present in state schools often also had dodgy origins and the one at mine was apparently eventually repatriated to its next of kin, which was actually two separate families as it was made up of two separate sets of human remains. I don’t know what happened to the whale, but I wonder if it might have been used by the English department in connection with the novel.

I’d long been fascinated by whales, and in fact cetaceans in general. The only ones I’d actually seen in the flesh except for the pilot whale were bottlenose dolphins, but there had been a lot of emphasis over the ’70s and ’80s that they were both magnificent and endangered, and in Britain they are of course the property of the Crown, like swans. It was what everyone used to associate with Greenpeace. Beyond that, as I’ve said before I used to be really into reading stories centred on other species such as ‘Watership Down’, ‘Ring Of Bright Water’, ‘Tarka The Otter’ and many others. These don’t sanitise the lives of the animals concerned and there’s plenty of death and suffering in them. Anthropomorphism also varies. ‘Tarka the Otter’ probably does it the least out of these examples. I’ve talked about my “preganism” before on here. I wasn’t to go vegan for three years after reading the novel and at that point wasn’t even vegetarian although I’d considered it. However, I had already long since begun to adopt what I might call a biocentric attitude: that humans are members of the animal kingdom and not set apart in a manner which is different than the individual traits of any other species.

I read ‘Moby Dick’ with that mindset, and having that attitude makes it a really difficult read on top of the difficulty the book presents more generally. Whales are charismatic organisms associated with characteristics such as majesty, grace and beauty. Melville does attempt to acknowledge that in his writing, but when it comes down to it, ‘Moby Dick’ is basically about a group of men who go out and murder numerous beings for their livelihood. They’re basically contract killers, but their victims are also generally arbitrary, with the exception of Ahab and the White Whale. It isn’t even expedient that these individuals need to be gotten out of the way as it might be in war, espionage or organised crime. They’re not even on the level of drive-by shootings, which seem to be about demonstrating loyalty and how far a gang member is prepared to go. These murders are arbitrary and solely motivated by profit, and okay it may be a tough life and manly, dangerous work but it reflects an obliviously genocidal attitude towards the biosphere. All that said, there is some mitigation in that in a sense going out and murdering whales is more humane from a utilitarian perspective than killing buffalo, a comparison Melville doesn’t make because the big massacre didn’t happen until a couple of decades later, because a whale can have a mass of more than a hundred buffalo and only one of them dies to provide all that mass of material for food and industrial purposes. By contrast, murdering the nameless beasts exploited for their milk, or sheep and pigs requires a lot more deaths to produce the same amount of materials, so in a sense whaling is much less unethical than “livestock” farming, and this is reflected in the murder of pilot whales in the Faroes – it’s just the same as what happens in a slaughterhouse except that it takes place in the open for all to see rather than being hidden away as if we’re ashamed of it as a society. But I felt like I was being expected to empathise with characters carrying out genocide. Now that can happen of course, and I’m sure that there are plenty of works of art that attempt to force their audiences to throw their lot in emotionally with the “baddies”, as ’twere, but when this is done as far as I know this is more to give the readers pause for thought about humanising evildoers. I wouldn’t say there’s no element of this at all in the story but I still feel that Melville cannot bring himself to condemn the practice of whaling completely, and it’s hardly worth observing that this is because he’s a man of his times and culture. Likewise, I can’t step out of my life and times in considering this book, which raises the frequent question of universality.

Melville does not, however, portray whaling as a morally neutral or positive activity. In chapter 105, ‘Does The Whale’s Magnitude Diminish? – Will He Perish?’, he does contemplate the possibility of whales becoming extinct at a remarkably early stage for that mindset. He compares the blood-soaked lower decks and crew as the corpse’s flesh is rendered to being in Hell, in Chapter 96, ‘The Try-Works’. This, however, also draws a parallel between this industrialised work and the “dark Satanic mills”, so it isn’t that the rendering toil is particularly infernal just because of what they’re essentially doing so much as it being infernal along with, say, working down a coal mine or in a steelworks. Hence industrial labour itself is a form of damnation, and certainly those who work in slaughterhouses are doing “proper” work and also the dirty work for a carnist population who seem to prefer to be oblivious, and the existence of factory ships out in the ocean carrying out the same dirty work is similar. But I don’t know whether Melville shows them in the same light.

I suspect that the White Whale is supposed to be a tabula rasa. I think it’s possible that the whiteness is supposed to be like a screen onto which diverse things can be projected. Chapter 42 is called ‘The Whiteness Of The Whale’. Without reading it, the concept of White fragility, though highly anachronistic, comes to mind, as does Han Kang’s ‘White Book’. Melville himself seems to portray whiteness as blankness and makes it horrifying, evoking the polar bear, the paleness of death and going on to connect it to cosmic indifference, and this might actually be the key to the whole book. Captain Ahab sees a rival in the White Whale, but none of the other captains or any of the crew think that way. He’s trying to make the whale personal when in fact the sheer vastness and whiteness make the true nature of the animal beyond comprehension, like the Universe. One gets the impression that “Ishmael” and Melville are both wrestling to make sense of the whale as a concept, and that the sheer length of the book is an attempt to render his narrative incomprehensible in the same way as the whale, and by extension the Universe, are. To the White Whale, Ahab is at most a tiny figure standing on a ship at the top of the world, dimensionally marginal and maybe not even that. Maybe to the White Whale, Ahab doesn’t even exist and there’s just the threat of the harpoon. The whiteness also acts as a mirror on which the characters see reflected their dominant attitude: anger, fear and awe. It’s also like the glare of the whiteness obliterates distinctions between good and evil, humanity and nature and sanity and madness.

One frustrating element of my English course’s, and in fact the more popular, approach to the novel is that the long quasi-encyclopaedic sections on “cetology”, as Melville puts it, are padding and can be skipped, because to my mind at the time, and possibly still, they’re the best bit of the novel. All the protagonists, human ones at least, emotional realism, interaction and dialogue mercifully take a back seat and finally we get to read something interesting and engaging. Even so, I think they’re there for two reasons. One is to ensure the novel is whale-sized and the other is to show a different way of attempting to encompass the cetacean and metaphorically the newly scientifically analysed natural world. This also fails. I may find it superficially comforting through systematisation, as I often do, but it’s not deep in the way Melville wishes it to be, and he acknowledges his failure as something common to us all.

Then there’s the issue of Starbuck, which nowadays is more shocking to me than it was then. Starbuck is the Pequod’s first mate and a Quaker, the first to recognise that Ahab is insane. He says of Ahab’s monomanic quest, “Vengeance on a dumb brute, [. . .] that simply smote thee
from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing,
Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.”. Starbuck is the voice of reason, supposedly, and the moral compass. However, considering they’re out there murdering countless whales, it seems to me that the entire enterprise is operating in a moral vacuum. I don’t understand how a Quaker can be involved in something like this. I presume it isn’t supposed to be realistic but I do believe they were involved in whaling. They also owned slaves, and while I’m aware that the past is not like the present, I would also hope that there are certain values which would persist and the fact that this actually happened is almost enough to make me give up hope for humanity. Quakers, although I’m sure they acknowledge their failings, are supposed to be examples to others and carry the torch of progress. I also seem to recall that the ship is owned by Quakers: it’s a Quaker business. That’s enough to make me want to puke to be honest. Quakers as mass murderers, and that’s probably entirely realistic for the mid-nineteenth century CE.

I have to say that in spite of all this I found the names “Pequod” and “Queequeg” tantalising because they seem to betray a pattern of sound from the same language, possibly one spoken in Nantucket, and I wanted to know what that language was. It’s quite distinct from languages spoken elsewhere on the continent, unsurprisingly, which does at least show some respect for the distinct ethnicities the White people genocided and oppressed. Queequeg represents non-Western spiritual completeness, which is a bit like the noble savage myth but you can’t really expect English language literature from getting on for two centuries ago not to be racist, so unlike the rest I can look past that. Entertaining it, there is the well-known difference between the White men killing the buffalo and removing only small parts of their bodies and the more reverent and ecologically sound approach taken by their previous killers. It might be worth mentioning that Queequeg may be from a less homophobic culture than “Ishmael”, and therefore that the homoerotic overtones in their relationship might be less repressed for him, and there’s also the contrast between their friendship and Ahab’s animosity with the whale.

One notable feature of the book is that it purports to be the Great American Novel and is not set in America but on the ocean. It begins in North America but quickly leaves it, and there may be something about the idea that America actually is the world or aims to dominate it in that approach. The ocean is also the Wild West in a sense, unbounded, vast and full of potential. Twentieth century SF author Barry M Longyear also extended the notion of Manifest Destiny, this time into the cosmos, though in a manner conscious of colonialism, and in a way this novel is a precursor to that, although that potential is still quite nebulous at this point, perhaps reflecting the tabula rasa and projections made upon the whale. It makes the US feel like an infant nation looking forward to growing up and achieving great things.

As you can see, I haven’t got a lot to say about ‘Moby Dick’ and what I have said is highly contaminated by my own views and doesn’t seem germane to the novel. To me its role is probably as a whiteboard on which to discern what went wrong with my literary appreciation. I find that I can’t read it without being overcome with a kind of moral repulsion at its acceptance of the outrage against cetaceans as a backdrop to the story. This is partly admitted by Melville, but it also says something about me. You’d fail to appreciate Shakespeare if you couldn’t look past the fact that he wrote in an early modern Western society where Christianity was dominant, patriarchy and the monarchy were unquestioned and democracy was a minor detail of ancient Greek history. I do know someone who is in fact unable to appreciate him for these exact reasons, but I do enjoy his work. I encounter two basic problems with mainstream literary novels. One is that I tend to make too many associations and am unable to give them different weights, which is similar to my inability to recognise my own strengths and weaknesses. The other, though, is illustrated by my response to ‘Moby Dick’, namely that I can’t see past my moral outrage and am dominated by my immediate impressions of a piece of writing. Maybe in the end I am myself like Ahab and I can’t see past the white whale that is mainstream literary fiction. Maybe it’s a tabula rasa to me on which I end up projecting anything arbitrarily, or maybe it mirrors myself.

Han Kang’s ‘The Vegetarian’

First of all, my understanding of mainstream literary fiction is that it can’t be “spoilt” because although the plot is there for a reason, it isn’t the main point, so there just will be “spoilers” here. Not that it matters.

Han Kang is a South Korean winner of the Nobel Prize in literature who also won a big prize of some kind, possibly the Man Booker. You see, this is how ignorant I am in this field. She’s written quite a few novels, one of which, ‘Greek Lessons’, I’m currently reading. ‘The Vegetarian’ (채식주의자) seems to be her best known. It’s quite short. In it, a previously apparently conventional woman, Yung-Hye (romanised differently by the way – her name’s 영혜 I think) who has a series of gruesome nightmares which persuade her to go veggie. Although it’s described as vegetarian, she is in fact vegan. She throws out all the meat in the kitchen and refuses also to wear animal products. Her family problematise all of this and regard her as harming herself and being unnecessarily defiant. She loses a fair bit of weight and eventually her father hits her and attempts to force feed her a piece of pork violently. She then slashes her wrist and is admitted to hospital where she’s psychiatrically assessed and diagnosed with anorexia nervosa, then leaves and after she’s found, she’s sitting at a fountain apparently having taken a bite out of a song bird. That’s the first of three sections, called ‘The Vegetarian’ and told from her husband’s viewpoint. In the second section, ‘Mongolian Mark’, her brother-in-law, the new narrator, becomes erotically preoccupied with her and the idea of painting her with flowers because of her Mongolian blue spot, which he thinks of as a petal. She wants to retain the floral body painting. He hires a young man to do the same to, videos it and tries to get them to have sex. When he refuses and leaves, they have sex themselves and fall asleep. In the morning, his wife, that is, her sister, discovers them. The final section, ‘Flaming Trees’, is from her sister’s viewpoint. Yung-Hye is in decline in the mental hospital refusing to eat and insists on standing on her head most of the time. In-Hye, her sister, is aware that she’s wasting away, takes her into her care and leaves the hospital with her, knowing that she’s wasting away and apparently wishing to become a plant.

For me, reading mainstream literature is pearls before swine. I won’t appreciate it or understand it because I’m overcome by stress and a sense of inferiority when I attempt to read it, even if I have an aptitude for following it in the first place, which I probably lack. Also, before I read it, absolutely will not listen to or read anyone else’s take on a novel because I want my reaction to be my own rather than being informed by someone else’s personality. Therefore, what I’m about to say is purely my own reaction. Here we go then.

The novel is unusually structured, being divided into three sections, each expressing a different character’s perception of Yung-Hye. The only time she speaks for herself is through the nightmares she has at the start of the novel. I think it’s clear that this is to deny her agency and illustrate how her perspective and therefore she as a woman in South Korean society is not respected. This theme permeates the whole story. Even initially, her husband finds it embarrassing that she doesn’t wear a bra, making everyone aware of her nipples in his unfortunately probably accurate view. At no point is her decision taken seriously and it’s generally seen as wilfully causing a problem for everyone else. It would be easy to say that the mere fact of her going vegan is one possible symbolisable act among many and is fairly arbitrary, but it isn’t quite that. It’s a reaction against perceived violence, which is not only stereotypically masculine but is shown as such in the story. And to be honest, I am well aware that dietary veganism is often seen as a nuisance by carnists, and I don’t want to go into too much depth here but there is a tendency for carnists to see their own dietary choices as, dare I say, “normal”. This brings about a second theme, that of conformity and the stigmatisation of non-conformity, where the latter is seen as obstreperous and disrespected. There’s no distinction here between rational and irrational decision-making. Yung-Hye can certainly be seen as anorexic but the real point is that no attempt is made at any point to empathise with her and what of her dietary choice means to her is entirely ignored by her family and the psychiatrists.

In the second section, she’s clearly strongly sexually objectified by her brother-in-law. Concern is expressed by others that he’s taking advantage of her but it’s also ambiguous because she does seem to want to become a plant and the sex may be akin to pollination, so he’s fulfilling her desires in one sense and she could be seen as having consented, though very passively. Her brother-in-law is only very distant from his wife and I didn’t get a feeling of outrage from her about his infidelity.

In the final section, Yung-Hye’s sister comes to perceive her as having done something with her life, unlike herself, because all she’s done is conform and not really lived her life at all compared to her sister’s own decision, or perhaps natural drift, into becoming a plant. Even her psychosis is an achievement compared to her own life. At this point, I began to worry that the novel was going to turn out to be magically realist, but thankfully it didn’t. I think magical realism is the kind of thing which needs to be present throughout a story rather than introduced most of the way through, and I half-expected Yung-Hye to turn literally into a plant, which I think would’ve been silly.Okay, so there’s all of that, but I do still have a problem. A fairly unimportant part of this is that I probably missed the significance of almost everything in the story, but there’s a bigger issue, which is that of universalism. I’m aware that South Korea is a distant country on the other side of Eurasia and not much of what goes on there filters through to the Western media, so I know about a few things and as usual a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and it may lead to a mental caricature of the country. I know, for example, that it’s a young democracy where there was recently an attempted coup which was defeated by parliamentary representatives themselves, that it’s rather surprisingly mainly Christian, the origin of the Unification Church, and more relevantly that there’s a “4B” movement among women which seeks to avoid sex with men, childbirth, marriage and heterosexual dating — 비섹스, 비출산, 비연애, 비혼 — which is also prejudiced against queer men. Moreover, I’m aware of Chip Chan, a woman who appears to be mentally ill and not receiving much help who has confined herself to her flat and streams everything 24/7 because she wants the world to monitor what’s going on for her personal safety. I have also heard, and this may be incorrect, that they’re highly conformist and anti-vegetarian for that reason. There are other things, like K-pop, which are largely irrelevant to this story, and also the sublime and inspired invention of Hangul, the Korean alphabet, which is perhaps a little more so. And this is what gets me, because from those few features I could easily construct a largely inaccurate image of the culture, but at the same time I have to say that this novel does seem to confirm this. I’ve written about Korea before of course. But this is what bothers me. There’s an attitude referred to as Orientalism, which fetishises the specialness of Eurasian cultures outside our peninsula and can be seen, for example, in certain attitudes towards Yoga and the suicide forest in Japan, or even something as simple as taking your shoes off when you go in the house, where utterly routine and prosaic things are othered, so I don’t want a Korean author’s writing to be pigeonholed in this way. All the same, the question of universalism arises. I already find it surprising and disquieting that, for example, Greek drama seems to speak to us today over two thousand years later, because it makes me feel that I’m not letting the work itself speak on its own terms and not hearing the playwright owing to projecting my own preconceptions on it. I tend to find – look, I’ll try to define universalism first as that might help.

This might not be the right phrase, but by literary universalism I mean the way that works separated considerably in space and time, i.e. culturally, still seem to speak to an audience which is very different to the creators. Due to my own background as a Northwestern European, I experience this particularly with the works of William Shakespeare. That said, many people do benefit from reading the notes which often accompany his plays. We may need a study guide, and that makes a lot of sense because of the drastic differences in cultural mores between then and now. I’m sceptical that we’re really able to make a connection and wonder if we’re just hallucinating. It seems to me that there cannot be any kind of phenomenon which facilitates that. At the same time, the Good Samaritan is a relatable parable and if we really could not understand another culture, passing by on the other side would be entirely feasible. I want to give an example of this from my own life. Many years ago I was walking down the street on a windy day and a woman had her umbrella blow inside out and she was struggling with it. I decided it would be an insult to her independence to “help” and walked on by, at which point she irately and sarcastically said “thank you!” to me. This is probably an example of failing to meet expectations of some kind, and it’s also an example of trying to pass by on the other side in a supportive way. There was presumably some kind of script I was expected to follow in these circumstances which I didn’t. Likewise, the tale of the Good Samaritan, among other things, attempts to indicate that one can transcend cultural differences and marginalisation by “being human”, i.e. it does seem to recognise or assert that there is a universal human nature. I imagine that she had a kind of idea of the “done thing” in this situation against which I consciously rebelled in a manner which was supposed to be passively supportive, or rather, because that’s quite patronising, not assuming that she’d want or need any intervention from someone else to deal with her problem. Some years after when I told someone about this incident, they imagined it as a “meet-cute”, which struck me as utterly bizarre but indicates how we might try to cram incidents into particular cultural narratives which have no real significance.

This in a more general sense is what bothers me about ‘The Vegetarian’, or perhaps I should actually be writing ‘채식주의자’ to emphasise its foreignness. I generally try to avoid reading works in translation, partly because I’d then have to trust the translator but also, and mainly, because they’ve then been ripped out of their cultural context and plonked unceremoniously into mine, at which point I will fail to understand them completely while having the illusion that I have. So, looking at ‘채식주의자’, I see it as including themes of women’s oppression, conformity, cruelty and failure of empathy, and I realise that good literature has to try to leave room for ambiguity and not close off the narrative, but I don’t know how what I call veganism and what I call anorexia nervosa maps onto Han Kang’s world view. I am aware that some people, particularly teenage girls, describe themselves as going vegetarian or vegan as a way of masking eating disorders, but I also find it a little irksome that this decision is pathologised in this way. It shouldn’t be associated with what seems to be self-destructiveness because to me that’s a lazy equation which makes concessions to carnism. The trouble is that in a wider setting, Yung-Hye’s vegetarianism and what’s constructed as an eating disorder does actually work very well as a kind of quiet rebellion, shorn of the question of whether it’s primarily a conscious decision, because of its contrast with the inherent violence of Korean, and in fact most, societies. She has nightmares and this provokes her to behave in a manner her peers find unacceptable. Her husband and sister in particular then take her current behaviour and use it to reinterpret her past, as if everything was inevitably going to lead to this. Her behaviour, perhaps, feels like an accusation. She does in fact seem to impose it on her husband by throwing out all the meat and dairy and refusing to prepare animal products, but it may be more out of obliviousness than a conscious attempt to assert herself, and this is probably in fact a theme of the story.

One thing I completely failed to understand is why she seems to have bitten a living song bird, to the extent that I wonder if I got that scene wrong. This indicates a bigger issue: I lack lived experience as a South Korean woman. I don’t know how I can be expected to appreciate any of this, and more broadly how any reader can be expected to appreciate any novel. It seems like an illusion or a form of trickery to me that this seems to be possible.

I don’t know. I just find these things very hard and quite traumatising, and not because of any trauma or conflict portrayed in the pages so much as that I seem to be expected to hear this communication when I don’t know how I possibly could, and it’s quite depressing. I can’t step out of myself far enough to do that, and have doubts that anyone really can.