We’re attempting to unravel the tangled web of literary influence by talking with the great writers of today about the writers of yesterday who inspired them. This month, we spoke with Academy Award–nominated filmmaker and novelist Julian Brave NoiseCat (We Survived the Night) about the “epic stage” of Herman Melville, and National Humanities Medal recipient Abraham Verghese (The Covenant of Water, Cutting for Stone) about the discipline and moral courage of Ernest Hemingway.
Julian Brave NoiseCat on Herman Melville
Why did you want to talk about Melville, and Moby-Dick specifically?
It’s a book that takes on an epic stage, and that tries to get at so many huge questions about America and the world. There are 30 crew members on the whale ship, each one representing a state in the union, and Melville was way ahead on questions of race, indigeneity, all that sort of stuff. I mean, the Ishmael character floats away on the coffin of Queequeg, and the implication is that Ishmael and Queequeg are—the phrase he uses is “bosom friends.”
It's also a book that bends genres. Melville spent a year on a whale ship, and Moby-Dick has a bit of a nonfiction air to it. There are entire sections of it, like the very famous "whiteness of the whale" section, where he does these taxonomies of whales that is really genre-bending and ahead of his time. And then you get this peg-legged mad captain who's chasing a fucking white whale to the end of the earth, and to his demise; I think it gets at so much of the madness of men. It’s an American classic, and what's also interesting to me about it is that it was not celebrated in the time that it came out.
Why do you think it’s still relevant 200 years after publication?
One thing I find very interesting about Moby-Dick as a Native person is that there are prominent Native characters in the book. There's Queequeg, the Polynesian, and Tashtego, the Aquino Wampanoag guy. They're both harpooneers, which is really an interesting position, because the harpooneer was essentially on the frontier of capitalism, using their ancestral knowledge of the whale to pursue it. There is a real argument to make that at the root of modernity stands a Native man with a harpoon.
I also think that the book is engaging with questions of civilization and savagery, but constantly subverting them. It's constantly asking, if this entire civilization is chasing whales to their demise, how can you possibly call Queequeg and his supposedly cannibalistic people savages? Are we the savages? This book took a big swing at a bleak vision of America: the entire country on a ship chasing a white whale to the end of the earth until all that was left was the guy who survived to tell the story. That vision of America as a bunch of fucking mad men loving each other and hating each other and eventually all dying together—maybe that's what we're doing.
What do you think writers should learn from Melville?
I think it's really cool that he actually spent a year on that ship. Some people poo poo that, like, Oh, he was only on a whale ship for one year, but I don't know, man. He was on a whale ship for a year. I also think that the ambition to have your work talk about the biggest questions is admirable. To take on the big questions facing a society and have unusual, unconventional perspectives on them that are in some ways ahead of their time is part of what great art and literature are for.
And now this book is considered one of the great entries in the Western canon. On that note, what do you think of the concept of such a canon?
I went to a school where we were supposed to read the great works of Western civilization in our core curriculum, and I think that the notion of a canon is complicated. Who gets to be in the canon, who does not? In my own work, I'm working with narratives that my people consider canonical, like the coyote stories that were told all the way from Central America to Western Canada. This is one of the most significant bodies of oral literature known to mankind, and they encapsulate a whole heck of a lot about the creation of the world, about why things are the way they are, why we are the way we are. And while there can be such a thing as essential works that people need to look at, I think we need to have a broader sense of what those are. I wonder why, in my freshman lit course at Columbia, in addition to the Iliad and Plato and Virginia Woolf and all that, we didn't have to read, like, a trickster narrative from North America.
Abraham Verghese on Ernest Hemingway
You’ve mentioned that A Farewell to Arms was one of your seminal inspirations. Why did it have that impact?
I think, first of all, because it was the earliest work of Hemingway’s that I read. I went on to read pretty much all his novels, but for me, at a young age, it set a very high bar, especially when I think of the lack of sentimentality. It would have been so easy to write a war novel that descended into theatrics and false heroics. It was very moving, instead, because of the precision of his descriptions and the great economy with which Hemingway conveyed the devastating effects of people waging war against other people. It has an authenticity that very few other war novels have. Not only was he in that war, but he was wounded, and so when he talks about his disillusionment—his moving from being there out of some false sense of patriotism or bravado to feeling like a pawn pushed around by people who have nothing personally at stake—you get the sense that it was very true, very real.
Next year will mark the 100th anniversary of The Sun Also Rises, a book that’s frequently cited as game-changing. Why do you think Hemingway had that impact he had?
He was, first of all, completely different from the writers who preceded him—the ones working in the Victorian, elaborate style. Something about his being part of the Lost Generation, and his spending time with Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, who famously crossed out all his adjectives, made his writing feel completely new when it first appeared. It was the same feeling I had when I first read Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things: that she’d somehow invented a new vocabulary, paying no homage to the past. He had that same confidence, and he had the chops to pull it off.
Why do you think he's still relevant today?
As a writer, I think he's a shining example of two things. One is discipline. He kept talking about the “one true sentence,” and you find those true sentences again and again in his work—not necessarily on every page, but they're there, a distillation of everything. The other is his belief that writing is a collaborative act. The writer provides the words, the reader provides their imagination, and somewhere in the middle this fictional dream is created in the reader's mind. Part of the joy of reading is imagining based on what the writer provides. If they provide too much, you’re reading a didactic essay. If they provide too little, like Finnegans Wake, you're left wondering what it is. If you trust the reader and provide just enough words, they will fill in the blanks. Hemingway used the iceberg metaphor: the visible story is one-eighth of the iceberg, and the other seven-eighths live in the reader’s imagination if you've done your job well. He said something very telling: it's alright to leave out critical details, but you have to know what they are in order to leave them out. It's fatal to omit them because you don’t know them.
What do you think writers should learn from him?
Again: discipline. If you read A Movable Feast, you come away with a sense of how many pains he took—to learn the craft, to get it right, to apply himself by leaving the house every morning, leaving his wife and young kid, and go to this cold studio in Paris to write. And to use those little tricks we all have; in his case, finishing at the end of the day when he knew he had something to begin the next day's work. That kind of discipline carries over to the words on the page: the discipline not to show off every little trick you have, but to trust the reader.
I also think there was a moral courage, a desire to tell the truth. The power of A Farewell to Arms, to me, is in the condemnation at the end: the best people in war are often the ones who are killed and brutalized. There would be no wars if the people who decided to wage war were asked to go out and duel the people on the other side. It was telling that he was willing to be censored, castigated, ostracized for some of his views. If he believed them, he was willing to state them. Someone like John Irving is in that mold: very brave and willing to take on and say anything if he believes it. That’s how writers should be.
