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Sunday, June 1, 2025

Index

The index has grown to the point of becoming unwieldy, leading me to offer first a brief sketch of its contents.

For the most part the site contains literary criticism with topics ranging around the globe and through the centuries. There are also other essays, translations, travel stories, a few memoirs, a few political comments. With rare exceptions (mostly early) I do not post my poetry here.

In the literary essays I am willing to discuss virtually anything. This site is strong on literary theory, the idea of the avant-garde, ancient Greek, medieval European, and Asian literatures, and includes a series of treatments of blues songs as poetry.

Some of the essays are technical and include academic jargon, probably indigestible to a lay reader. Others are directed toward a general audience. Perhaps the most accessible are those in the Every Reader’s Poets series (section 5G below) which assume no background knowledge. 


The index now features hypertext connections. Simply click on any title below to read it.

Though this listing serves, I think, a clear purpose, not every posting falls easily into the categories. One essay might equally be placed under literary theory or medieval texts while another might fit under memoir, politics, or travel. Translations with comment might be either criticism or translation. Poke around a bit.

The categories are:

1. speculative, familiar, performance pieces, and other essays

2. literary theory

3. Greek texts (and a few Latin)

4. medieval European texts

5. other criticism
A. 16th-19th century
B. 20th century to the present 
C. Asian texts
D. songs
E. Notes on Recent Reading
F. Rereading the Classics
G. Every Reader's Poets

6. translation

7. poetry

8. politics

9. memoirs

10. travel


1. Speculative, familiar, performance pieces, and other essays
Agnostic Credo and Vita (October 2015)
Confidence Games (August 2022)
Contronyms (March 2019)
Cookbooks (April 2014)
Dead Reckoning (February 2011)
Deer (December 2012)
Documents of the first Surreal Cabaret (March 2012)
Documents of the second Surreal Cabaret (June 2012)
Documents of the third Surreal Cabaret (October 2013)
Documents of the fourth Surreal Cabaret (July 2014)
Documents of the fifth Surreal Cabaret (February 2015)
Notes on Pan (June 2014)
Oedipus and the Meaning of Polysemy (July 2011)
The Subversive Wit of Jerry Leiber (December 2022)
"The Three Ravens" (August 2013)
Trinidadian Smut (April 2016)
Truckin' (November 2014)
The Verbal Dance of the Blues (September 2020) 
“Walkin’ Blues” [Son House] (December 2011)

E. Notes on Recent Reading
Notes on Recent Reading [Melville, Greene, and Whalen] (September 2011)
Notes on Recent Reading 2 [Crane, The Crowning of Louis, Thornlyre] (October 2011)
Notes on Recent Reading 3 [Kipling, San Francisco Mime Troupe, Lynn’s Tao-te-ching] (November 2011)
Notes on Recent Reading 4 [Sarah Scott, de La Fayette, Wharton] (January 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 5 [The Deeds of God in Rddhipur, Burney, Cooper] (January 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 6 [Jewett, Addison, Crabbe] (February 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 7 [Nabokov, Austen, Grettis Saga] (April 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 8 [Bakhtin, Lewis, Brown] (May 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 9 [Plutarch, Tacitus, Williams](June 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 10 [Voltaire, France, Dryden](July 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 11 [Wright, Kerouac & Burroughs, Gilbert] (August 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 12 [Huxley, Norris, Dōgen](September 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 13 [Mirabai, Wood, Trocchi] (November 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 14 [Algren, Hauptmann, Rolle] (January 2013)
Notes on Recent Reading 15 [Hemingway, Orwell, Gaskell]{February 2013}
Notes on Recent Reading 16 [Howells, Ford, Mann] (April 2013)
Notes on Recent Reading 17 [McCarthy, Chang, Snorri](July 2013)
Notes on Recent Reading 18 [Radcliffe, Stendhal, Erasmus](October 2013)
Notes on Recent Reading 19 [Powers, Zhang Ji, Vietnamese folk song] (February 2014)
Notes on Recent Reading 20 [Rowe, Stevenson, Issa] (May 2014)
Notes on Recent Reading 21 [Fussell, Mahfouz, Watts] (August 2014)
Notes on Recent Reading 22 [Waugh, Belloc, Okakura] (October 2014)
Notes on Recent Reading 23 [Naipaul, Dinesen, Spillane] (January 2015)
Notes on Recent Reading 24 [Fielding; Izumo , Shōraku, and Senryū; Plath] (June 2015)
Notes on Recent Reading 25 [Baskervill, Gissing, Capote] (July 2015)
Notes on Recent Reading 26 [Tuchman, Premchand, Cocteau] (November 2015)
Notes on Recent Reading 27 [Forster, Sackville-West, Capote] (January 2016)
Notes on Recent Reading 28 [Verne, Waley, Hurston] (March 2016)
Notes on Recent Reading 29 [Achebe, Jewett, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam] (October 2016)
Notes on Recent Reading 30 [Bradford, Scott, Marquand] (April 2017)
Notes on Recent Reading 31 [Marlowe, Trollope, p'Bitek] (August 2017)
Notes on Recent Reading 32 [Morrison, Cary, Kawabata] (October 2017)
Notes on Recent Reading 33 [Tourneur, Peacock, Greene] (December 2017)
Notes on Recent Reading 34 [Hawthorne, Huncke, Bentley] (January 2018)
Notes on Recent Reading 35 [Scott, Norris, Jacobs] (August 2018)
Notes on Recent Reading 36 [Norris, Rexroth and Laughlin, Sand] (November 2018)
Notes on Recent Reading 37 [Waley, Wharton, London] (January 2019)
Notes on Recent Reading 38 [London, Vonnegut, Cather] (June 2019)
Notes on Recent Reading 39 [Aristophanes, Machiavelli, Braddon] (September 2019)
Notes on Recent Reading 40 [Saunders, Adichie, Radhakrishnan] (January 2020)
Notes on Recent Reading 41 [McCarthy, Priestley, Ehirim] (July 2020)
Notes on Recent Reading 42 [Bulgakov, Tedlock, Wlliams] (October 2020) 
Notes on Recent Reading 59 [Balzac, Hauptmann, Updike] (March 2025)

Menus (August 2021)
My Most Politically Active Year (February 2011)
Nova Academy (March 2011)
Pestering Allen [Ginsberg] (March 2012)
Poetry on the Loose (September 2011)
A Scholar's Debut (October 2012)
Sherman Paul (August 2016)
Suburbanite in the City (November 2010)
Tim West (March 2013)
Vignettes of the Sixties (October 2019)
VISTA Trains Me (June 2011)

10. Travel 
Arrival in Nigeria (August 2015)
Acadiana [Lafayette, Louisiana] (May 2010)
An Armenian Family in Bordeaux (December 2014)
Carnival [Portugal] (May 2012)
Cookie Man [Morocco] (October 2011)
Creel (October 2010)
Dame Fortuna in Portugal (May 2012)
Dinner with Mrs. Pea [Thailand] (April 2013)
Election Day in Chichicastenango (January 2012)
An Evening in Urubamba (July 2011)
Favored Places (July 2019)
Festival in Ogwa [Nigeria](January 2011)
Fictional Destinations (April 2020)
On the Ganges' Shore (August 2013)

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B. Traven’s Death Ship

 


B. Traven
 

     B. Traven’s Death Ship [1] is unusual among proletarian novels for its anarchist ideology which allows the author to criticize all governments and all political parties, including those on the left.  His protagonist Gerry Gales’ work experience is a fierce caricature of the worker’s plight under capitalism.  On an ordinary ship Gales had been overworked and underpaid; on the Yorikka his exploitation seemed to have been exaggerated to the limit; but when he was shanghaied into the crew of the Queen of Madagascar which was bound, he rightly suspected, for the bottom, an even deeper level of the owners’ depraved greed emerged.  The novel exposes thereby the extreme of inhumane treatment by bosses and corporations Traven regarded as always inherent in the system.  In different times and places the injustice of capitalism may differ in degree, but the worker is always cheated.

     For Traven government bureaucracies are more genteel but no less heartless.  Every consul with whom Gales deals is free enough with hypocritical good wishes and regrets, but each refuses to help him, claiming ironically to be simply a worker under orders, implying that no individual but only the bureaucracy as a whole is responsible for his plight.  To Traven as an anarchist every structure of governance is oppressive.  His loyalty is to the anarcho-syndicalism of the Industrial Workers of the World which posited decentralized voluntary groupings around the workplace as the basic form of social organization.  He had then no difficulty in opposing Friedrich Ebert’s Social Democratic regime in Weimar [2], denouncing strike-breaking under a “socialist” (245) and calling the supposedly socialist leader “more nationalistic than old man Bismarck ever was” (57).  The temporary hope inspired by the Munich Soviet of 1919 was, disappointingly, quelled by those who claimed to represent the people’s interests (271) [3].  Traven’s lack of rigid ideology allows him to avoid the simplistic reductiveness of agitprop literature.  He willingly concedes, for instance, that the solidarity of the working class envisioned by Communists is an illusion and that workers’ rivalries are effectively exploited by owners to maintain control [4].  According to Traven the omnipotence of the state has become an end in itself and government bureaucracy has become “the great and almighty ruler of the world” in service of financial interests.  “Expanding markets” and making large profits” is, he says, “the oldest religion in the world” with “the best-trained priests” and the “most beautiful churches” (216).

     Traven’s radical questioning of the economic and political order will strike the reader strongly on first reading.  Even a reader unsympathetic to anarchist principles may appreciate the author’s critique of the status quo.  His stance, never positively advocating for any specific form of social organization allows him to appear as a critic of all.  His narrator is the universal “little man,” put upon by the powers that be, and his sympathies are given only to others like himself.  He is, after all, a “nobody” (20), “always chased and hunted by police,” “hungry,” “tired from sleeping in gateways, in corners, in nooks,” “chased and hunted by policemen” (33), a member of a class that can do nothing but stand and wait” (58).

     Far from alone in this status, he depends on “true fellow workers” (102) for charity [5].  The most livable country among the many he traverses is Republican Spain where he finds a warm reception and no officials eager to interrogate him (95).  There “wherever I asked I got food, and the peasants were always willing to put me up for the night in their barns” (82-83).  While his story might seem singular, his friend Stanislav’s history is similar, as are others more briefly recounted [6].

     These specific political themes, however,  seem less the book’s center than the protagonist’s attitude, expressed more in tone and rhetoric than in explicit ideas.  In his penniless wandering, the narrator may remind readers of Jack London and Jack Kerouac (both of whom like Traven spent time at sea as well).  His literary family tree might include as well the Ancient Mariner, the good soldier Švejk, Céline’s Ferdinand Bardamu, and Henry Miller’s persona in the Tropics.  The alienated labor of Traven’s sailor is depicted in comic form in the factories of Chaplin’s Modern Times and Clair’s À nous la liberté.  Though both rely on the predicament of the stateless individual, Traven’s story is in a way an antidote to the simple-minded patriotism of Edward Everett Hale’s ”The Man Without a Country” (1863) whose hero spends his life regretting his disavowal of the United States [7].

     Unlike Philip Nolan, Gerald Gales never regrets shedding his national identity, finding that the common man is more friendly to a supposed German than to an American in spite of the recent war.  He has his hands full always hustling, just trying to look after his immediate interests.  He is totally cynical, expecting nothing, but buoyant in spirit, rolling with every pitch and roll life sends him. 

     This mood is expressed throughout the text.  Even when describing the bleakest conditions, the narrator maintains a grim humor.  In a brief passage he can satirically denounce not only capitalism, but militarism, reactionary Christianity, social prejudices and, at the same time, the failure of most workers to realize their predicament.

We go to hell without martial music and without the prayers of the Episcopalians.  We die without the smiles of the beautiful ladies, without holding their perfumed handkerchiefs in our hands.  We die without the cheering of the excited crowd.  We die in deep silence, in utter darkness, and in rags.  We die in rags for you, O Caesar Augustus!  Hail to you, Imperator Capitalism!                          (151)

     His characteristic tone is here: stoical in the face of injustice, but uncompromising in his view of the system’s unsalvageable savagery.  In spite of the inimitable tone, the voice is wholly collective.  “We” suffer everything together. 

     Much of the book in fact reads like an extended stand-up comedy routine.

I don’t know where jobs as presidents and as millionaires could be found for all the readers of success stories if they who should try to cash in on the promises.  A hundred and twenty years ago there was a saying: “Every one of my soldiers has a marshal’s baton in his bag.”  Today it is: “Everyone of our employees may become president of our company.  Look at Mr. Flowerpot, he did it.”  I think all these successful men must have shine boots of a different sort than I, and the newspapers they sold must have been different from the papers I carried.   (139)

     Traven’s persona is so humble that he seems cocksure and so readily adaptable it seems he can survive anything.  Yet he never reassures the reader with the conventional left-wing optimism typified by this exchange between Steinbeck’s Tom Joad and his mother.

     "Why, Tom – us people will go on livin’ when all them people is gone. Why, Tom, we’re the people that live. They ain’t gonna wipe us out. Why, we’re the people – we go on."

     "We take a beatin’ all the time."

     "I know." Ma chuckled. "Maybe that makes us tough. Rich fellas come up an’ they die, an’ their kids ain’t no good, an’ they die out. But, Tom, we keep a-comin’.  Don’ you fret none, Tom. A different time’s comin’." [8]

     Indeed, in the end, Gerry Gales and his friend Stanislav drown.  (Though Gales might very well tell his story from beyond the grave without violating fictional proprieties, his voice certainly gives the impression that he somehow survived.  The question of whether the narrator is alive may be undecidable, but it is fortunately also immaterial.)  Their position on the lowest rungs of the socio-economic ladder has been for them fatal.

     This conclusion may seem to conflict with the narrator’s jaunty tone throughout, but it could scarcely be a surprise to any reader who had noticed the title or the consistent reminders throughout of coming doom.  The last lines, however, do come as a surprise.  As they bob about in the open sea, Gales salutes his fellow worker calling him “Brother.  Comrade.  Sailor.  Dear, dear comrade,” but it is too late.  His fellow worker has gone under.

     He had signed on for a long voyage.  For a very great voyage.

     I could not understand this.  How could he have signed on?  He had no sailor’s card.  No papers whatsoever.  They would kick him off right away.

     Yet he did not come up.  The Great Skipper had signed him on.  He had taken him without papers.

     An the Great Skipper said to him: “Come Stanislav Koslovski, give me your hand.  Shake.  Come up, sailor!  I shall sign you on for a fine ship.  For an honest and decent ship . . . Can you read what is written above the quarters, Stanislav?”

     Ans Stanislav said: “Aye, aye, sir.  He who enters here will be forever free from pain.” (372)

     The one sense this cannot convey is the conventional Christian salvationist solace one hears at funerals.  It has a range of other significances, though, which combine in a harmonic chord of meaning.

     In the first place, such an ending is a satisfying technical device, leaving the reader with a feeling that  normalcy has been in part restored.  This effect comes at the cost of a bit of the lameness of the old story-telling gambit in which fabulous adventures turn  out to have been a dream, as in Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz.  The deaths do round out the story arc tidily.

     On a strictly realistic level, the passage may imply a kind of intoxication, a near-death delirium born of wish fulfillment.  Of course, the cliché about release from suffering is true, even for the unbeliever, as life ends.  Part of this final rapture, though, might be attributed to the brotherly love expressed a few lines earlier.  Perhaps, in a materialist’s version of Christian dogma, the emotion of these affectionate salutations is in fact redemptive, uplifting Gales’ spirit in his last moments.  Finally, the conclusion recalls a sentiment most associated with Alexander Pope that need not rely on no supernatural authority: “Whatever is, is right.”  

     Traven succeeded in representing a working-class Everyman whose struggles are unnecessarily multiplied by the greed of others, who reacts with good-humored winning spirits, doing the best he can, and laughing rather than weeping about life’s suffering.  While he sees the mechanisms of oppression, he expresses no apocalyptic hopes of revolutionary change.  He simply endures until he finally goes under at which point the story becomes not merely an analysis of a cruel economic system, but a case study in the tragedy of being human, an early twentieth century soul scrabbling for subsistence.  For all his travails, Traven’s main character does not lament (for what good could that do?) but instead displays a cheeky irreverence and finds, in the end, the human attachment of friendship a comfort in a hostile world.  He endures, and his type endures yet today.

 

  

1.  First published in German as Das Totenschiff in 1926.  Though the book had originally been written in English, this version with the title The Death Ship was not printed until 1934.

2.  Ebert had in  fact strongly supported Germany’s role in WWI and made alliances with reactionary forces. 

3.  Though little of Traven’s biography is known for certain, e is alleged to have held a role in the  Press Department of the revolutionary government.  He expressed his political views at that point in his journal Der Ziegelbrenner.  See, for instance his essay “Im freiesten Staate der Welt,” Der Ziegelbrenner 1.1917-5.1921, p. 9.

4.  “Workers are not all so chummy toward each other as some people think when they see them marching with red flags to Union Square and getting noisy about a paradise in Russia” (101).  On 282-3 he explains the status distinctions on shipboard and their use by capitalists to divide and dominate their workers.

5.  Another example is the kindly waitress who gives him free food (103).

6.  The lives of Frenchy (who had died in the boiler room) and Kurt, for example.

7.  The story was written to increase national feelings during the Civil War.  It continued this role into the 1950s when I recall its being included in my elementary school reader.

8.  Grapes of Wrath Ch. 20.

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