Category: 2018 Blog Post

Ship and the Sea

“Where am I? There is nothing here I recognize. This isn’t the world I know, the little ship I’ve trimmed and rigged.” (101)

When Elgin tells the narrator about Louise’s cancer everything they know is shaken, “Where am I? There is nothing here I recognize” (101). A couple lines before, “‘Louise tells me everything,’ I said coldly. ‘As I do her.’” (100), the narrator has this absolute certainty about their relationship with Louise, and to an extent a certainty about the world around them.

In this passage the narrator returns to the metaphor of a ship on the open seas. This is not the first time this metaphor of a ship on the seas is used “the journeys they made were beyond common sense; who leaves the hearth for the open sea? especially without a compass, especially in winter, especially alone” (81), but it is the first time it is used in a negative manner. For the narrator their relationship is an exploration of something new; Louise is the ocean and the narrator a ship. This metaphor is commonly used during sex, the first time the narrator begs Louise to let them “sail in you over the spirited waves” (80).

For the narrator Elgin took the map they had so carefully and painstakingly drawn and ripped it apart, “this isn’t the world I know, the little ship I’ve trimmed and rigged” (101).

This passage is about the narrator’s loss of balance and certainty in everything.  This relates to the whole of novel  because for the first we saw the narrator passionate and in love with someone just as passionately in love with them, the first person we know of that chose them, possibly the first time the narrator truly was loved by their partner as more than a dirty little secret. And now the narrator is faced with losing this, and not just to another person but to death.

it’s not your fault is it?

“The most reliable Securicor, church sanctioned and state approved, is marriage.  Swear you’ll cleave only unto him or her and magically that’s what will happen.  Adultery is as much about disillusionment as it is about sex.  The charm didn’t work.  You paid all that money, ate the cake, and it didn’t work.  It’s not your fault is it?” (78)

In the entirety of the novel, the narrator never attempted to avoid blame; there was a sense of being at fault in the main character. However, in this moment, they blame someone or something else. Indeed, the narrator argues marriage created adultery, when they say adultery is as “much about disillusionment” (78). In other words, they are saying adultery itself is the disillusionment to marriage. In the context of the passage, the narrator is arguing marriage cannot work, because it is held up to be the end all be all. In their sarcastic fashion, they state if you make your vows to remain faithful to that person, then “magically that’s what will happen,” referencing the supposed result of marrying someone (78). There is also a sense of doing all one can, putting even less blame on Louise and the narrator. After all, she and Elgin paid “all that money, ate the cake, and [yet] it didn’t work” (78). Louise put all of this time and effort into her marriage, yet she still fell for the narrator. How then, the narrator argues, can it be either of their faults for falling in love with each other? Louise’s marriage to Elgin was bound to fail, because they both attempted to follow what the state and church ordered.

The passage, therefore, is about the narrator attempting to put the blame on something else, to ease the guilt of committing adultery. In relation to the text as a whole, this is the crux of the change in the relationship between Louise and the narrator, because there is now a hint of the narrator’s own hesitation to their relationship.

“She smells of the sea”: Sexuality and the Senses

“She smells of the sea. She smells of rockpools when I was a child. She keeps starfish in there. I crouch down to taste the salt, to run my fingers around the rim. She opens and shuts like a sea anemone. She’s refilled each day with fresh tides of longing.” (73)

The connection to the ocean is significant. Sexuality as fluid. Sexuality as connection—that is, as taste and smell over sight. There is no separation by viewing, no watcher and watched to create an object out of a person. Taste and smell are visceral and they bring the narrator and Louise together. There is no distance between partners.

This happens in conjunction with the curious language of exploration, i.e. “rockpools when I was a child” and “to run my fingers around the rim.” Here, in this passage, the narrator comes to know Louise’s body. He or she explores through sex, and there is a certain child-like quality to this, this tendency towards play and taste and smell.

What I’m really trying to say here is that maybe people grow out of equal connection. Maybe the tendency to produce a viewer and a viewed object during sex is a learned one. Maybe we grow into this distance as we learn to prioritize one sense over the others. This passage connects taste and smell and touch to a time of innocence, of ignorance. Not willful ignorance, but the kind of ignorance that can and must be remedied through exploration.

The narrator is exploring and thereby learning about Louise’s body in this passage, and through this, he or she comes to know Louise.

my love for you makes any other life a lie.

“I’ve hidden those words in the lining of my coat. I take them out like a jewel thief when no-one’s watching. They haven’t faded. Nothing about you has faded. You are still the colour of my blood. You are my blood. When I look in the mirror it’s not my own face I see. Your body is twice. Once you once me.” (99)

The repetition of the word you in this passage gives insight to the mind of the narrator and how it revolves around this woman. Even when the author is talking about themself, they are incorporating Louise as a part of themself, (i.e. you are my blood). Here the narrator is saying that they are in essence, her, and she is them. That she is a hidden jewel so precious and protected that she is apart of them, and that specifically her love alone fuels the narrator to feel this.

This passage reflects on the question of why the measure of love is lost. I believe that at this particular moment the narrator would argue against that notion, as their soliloquy shows just how deep and intense the feeling of reciprocated love is. The narrator struggles to determine whether love is as confusing and unattainable as it has been most of their life, or if it is this  bright and shiny thing, the stuff of fairy tales. Although they have finally achieved reciprocal love, it has been at the expense of others happiness.  I think that is important to note because the narrator is blindsighted and living in their own world that only contains Louise. It is almost as though they lost touch of reality. Sometimes it seems that love borderlines infatuation.

 

 

 

The inside of your body is innocent

“Will you let me crawl inside you, stand guard over you, trap them as they come at you? Why can’t I dam their blind tide that filthies your blood? Why are there no lock gates on the portal vein? The inside of your body is innocent, nothing has taught it fear. Your artery canals trust their cargo, they don’t check the shipment in the blood.” (115)

The narrator is asking themselves multiple rhetoric questions about the human body, and how the sickness that is affecting Louise’s body manages to take hold. The questions are filled with naïve and hopeful imagery, of “gates” that could be closed to keep cancer out of the body. The narrator is using the questions to cope with the facts they have just learned about the sickness that will cause their lover to die.

The passage is lined with a theme of ships and the sea. The narrator uses words like “tide”, “canals”, “cargo” and “shipment” to describe the ways in which the sickness is transported through the body. They also describe the trust the body has in the “shipment” that is being transported. The body does not expect a deathly attack of cancer cells and is consequently not prepared to defend it.

Parallel to that, one could compare the narrator to Louise’s body. They have never lost a lover to a deadly sickness, or death at all for that matter. They are innocent, no one has taught them this specific kind of fear. The narrator didn’t check the “cargo”, the “shipment”, that Louise is carrying with her because they never had to before. Maybe they would have wished for a “lock gate” themselves, to protect their heart from hurt and pain. However, it is already too late. They have fallen in love with Louise and Louise is going to die. There is no changing nature. They can try to prolong Louise’s life, fight cancer as long and hard as possible – only at a terribly painful prize.