BBC'S WOLF HALL

A few minutes into the first episode of the BBC serialization of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, I'd forgiven British actor Mark Rylance his ridiculous and offensive anti-Stratfordianism--and every other sin he might have committed.  Within a handful of scenes, he has reminded me why I so loved the way Mantel portrayed Thomas Cromwell in her novels.  To say that Cromwell (the fictional character--who knows about the real man?) is simply an emblem of Realpolitik or Machiavellianism would be a rank error.  The screenwriter who adapted the script from Mantel's novels knew what he was doing: by the end of Cromwell's first scene with his beloved wife, Liz, we have a real live human being before us, one of considerable intelligence, resourcefulness, and foresight; a pragmatic man who wants not only what is best for himself but equally so (perhaps more so) what is good for the kingdom he serves--which means not only its monarch (or not especially its monarch) but also the people who, Cromwell believes, deserve the bloody chance to read (or hear) their religion's holy book in a language that they can actually understand.  This Cromwell is a man who wants to cut through whatever bullshit (there's simply no other word for it, though we could never imagine the man himself employing such an indelicate phrase) that can reasonably be cut through to find the pith and marrow of any matter.

Seeing the drama unfold is a different experience from reading it--a complementary experience.  Seeing the story makes clearer the tragedy of it.  Cromwell is not simply an admirable man; he's an admirable man with flaws that prove his undoing.  Thomas More is not simply the stick-in-the-mud religious extremist that he initially presents.  He is that, but there's more to him, and Rylance makes us feel Cromwell's genuine dismay and frustration at the demise of his sometime rival.  Working largely through meaningful silences, Rylance makes us feel what Cromwell feels: that even his triumphs are attended with melancholy, that in politics (if not in business) every deal (however necessary) is struck at an unreasonable price.  More and more, as he gains King Henry's favor, Cromwell pays at higher costs to himself, and you can see it toll on him.  Nothing, however, seems to cost the king a thing.

If Rylance is good, much of it has to do simply with the gravity, the reserved and subtle feeling, that he brings to his Cromwell, whose utterances are comparatively few considering the amount of time the camera expends upon him.  (The show does a remarkable job of translating Mantel's narrative technique -- focused so much upon the run of Cromwell's thoughts, on his perspective -- into a kind of functional reverse perspective: we see Cromwell instead of seeing what he sees.  But it works -- it achieves largely the same effect.)  Damian Lewis, as Henry VIII, and Claire Foy, as Anne Boylen, are fully Rylance's matches, though, and their characters experience no such compunction when it comes to speaking their minds.  Lewis, who riveted us so with his virtue in Band of Brothers, who made us to feel that the good fight could be fought and that decent men may be behind it, gives us an altogether different beast here: a lion, as Cromwell acknowledges, whose claws are always at the ready.  Lions do not make for good friends, and yet, Cromwell himself notes, Henry is his only friend.  (It's hard to have any other friends under the circumstances.)  In one remarkable scene that takes place late in the series, fickle Henry reveals the capriciousness of his own nature by undertaking a series of turns that result in what is, more or less, a casually issued death warrant for his current wife.  The look on Cromwell's face tells us two things: one, that he is aghast at the prospect of having the queen executed, and two, that he foresees his own fate.  If the mercurial king can turn his claws upon one former darling just-like-that, he will still have plenty of claw left for another.  Lewis captures Henry's sense of entitlement--one that knows no bounds, one in which everything can be justified as a manifestation of his kingly will--and yet we have already conceded to Cromwell's perspective, which is that if any good is to come to the British people--to the common people--it is only through this man and his might.  There is simply no way of reconciling oneself to this situation.

Foy's Anne Boylen bears the requisite stamp of haughtiness and imperiousness, but she has more than that.  She has a shrewd but limited intelligence, as well as a sense of entitlement that rivals only that of her consort, but which is all the more daring as it comes from the lower rungs.  When the time comes and aloofness and anger no longer serve any purpose, Anne never reveals any more weakness or fear than is necessary.  There's a respectable dignity about her.  You feel sorry for her.  Cromwell watches on from the crowd below and, in a touching gesture, holds his hand upon his adolescent son's arm when the moment comes.  It's a telling moment.  He's the architect of her demise, but he feels sorry for her, too.  Plus, he's watching his own throat now.  There are all sorts of catharsis going on here.

Tragedy, as Aristotle would have it, ends with the moral ruination or death of the tragic hero.  We have a well-realized sense of moral ruination here, and we know how the story will end.  Cromwell does, too, I would imagine.  Though I have truly enjoyed Mantel's novels and the BBC series, part of me thinks that the story should end here with Anne Boylen's death.  We should have no trouble extrapolating the rest.

WHAT IS THE DEAL WITH MOBY-DICK?

Moby-Dick is, to some extent, a 600-page penis joke without a punchline -- unless being rammed to death by a massive creature that roughly resembles a detached, mobile, and sentient phallus counts as a punchline.  Of humor, though, there is none at the end.  Ishmael himself is a superior punster, but he is largely absent from the ending -- until his obligatory appearance in the epilogue.  One wonders: was Melville himself aware of how phallic and, at times, homoerotic the imagery in the novel is?  Perhaps some of it can be chalked up to the times: the fact that homophobia was generally unknown (because homosexual behavior was so thoroughly closeted as to be out of public scrutiny, and because, as a result of the previous fact and because of practical necessity, men could, for instance, cuddle up together in the same bed with no hint of impropriety) and therefore no one would accuse the narrative of anything untowardly.

If the phallic joke is a locker-room staple, then the Pequod is something like the ultimate locker-room: thirty men alone together for a voyage potentially spanning years with no literal female presence to balance things out, engaged in the manly pursuit of subduing nature and, in essence, subverting it to human ends.  The men deal in sperm oil, for God's sake!  An entire chapter is devoted to the "squeezing" of the sperm and the immense satisfaction to be had from doing so with your bosom companions -- all of whom are male.  The closest thing to female companionship during the voyage is the saving grace of the Rachel, wandering about toward the novel's end and searching out -- literally and figuratively -- her lost children.  She finds only Ishmael -- whose namesake was famously abandoned by his father.  If there is a homosexual undercurrent to the novel, it's a rather abysmal one.  This is a novel of men doing manly things, but doing them as though they live in a world in which there are no women.  It's roughly an opposite masculine inversion of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's radical feminist utopia imagined some fifty years later in Herland.  Well, whatever: Ishmael seems to be having a good time.

And Ishmael is, in a way, the novel's mainstay and security but also its great flaw.  He holds everything together, but he doesn't quite fit in a way, and his curious absence at the end diminishes the cohesiveness of the narrative somewhat.  The novel is messy and flawed, as perhaps all great works of literature must be.  (Show me something that is perfect, note for note, beginning to end, that is longer than a sonnet.  I don't think you can.)  At times, it is even somewhat dull and unedifying.  But it is appropriately vast, meaningfully broad, expansive by design and by necessity.  It is about the very concept of greatness -- not greatness as in Alexander or Gatsby, not greatness as in a full measure of admirability in character or quality, but greatness as a measurement of sheer significance, the ability to carry meaning.  Nothing else quite like it has ever been accomplished.   

Like that other great American measure of greatness -- The Great Gatsby -- the question is whether the protagonist is essentially the narrator or that other character whom the narrator fixates upon.  In other words, are these novels about Ishmael/Nick Carraway, or are they about Gatsby/Ahab?  Gatsby and Ahab are the characters whose obsessions (the white whale/Daisy -- what's the difference?) dominate the stories and drive the narratives, but perhaps more significant is the fact that the narrators find significance in their obsessions.  In other words, if a tree falls in the forest ....  Had Ishmael not survived to tell the tale, there would be no tale to tell.  Had Nick not puzzled at length over the inscrutability of his summer acquaintance, that novel would be bust as well.  Every story requires a storyteller.  It has to be one of the primal laws associated with the articulation of human speech.  "I met a traveller from an antique land / Who said ...."  As for Ahab, his apostrophe to the head of the decapitated whale in Chapter 70 is both sublime and surreal -- but also comic, gross, and revolting.  It stands out as a singular episode in American literary history.  Once Ahab does wrest the narrative from the narrator himself, he does so forcefully.  The forging of his harpoon, the deliberate destruction of the quadrant, his taking up of little Pip -- these things come one after another toward the end of the novel, reminding us that Ahab's obsession is what drives the novel. 

And, finally, regarding the whale, there comes a development that Melville might never have considered, which is that the modern audience might be prone to sympathize more with the poor, maligned whale than with those who would destroy it.  The power of the novel, though, can only be enforced by this, the dramatic tension rendered more taut by it, the madness of Ahab enhanced by it.

So, what does make Moby-Dick one of the primary candidates for the title of Great American Novel?  A vast majority of the novel doesn't even take place in anything that could legitimately be called "America."  But America is somehow there in the same way that it was there when the Stars and Stripes were planted firmly in lunar soil.  With the westward expansion nearly complete, the oceans of the world became the next frontier -- the next fresh, unspoiled place for men to spoil, the utter imaginable limits of the empire.