Book Review: The Pirates! In An Adventure With Whaling

Posted on | November 24, 2009 | No Comments

The Pirates! In An Adventure With Whaling
Gideon Defoe
http://www.gideondefoe.com

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This short novel or novella concerns the adventures of a pirate crew, headed by a pirate captain, who have lost their ship in their previous adventure, which was with scientists. In a fit of macho bravado, the pirate captain decides to purchase the most expensive ship being offered by the fearsome Cutlass Liz, and so the crew now needs to find a fortune of 6,000 doubloons. Along the way they repeatedly run into the eccentric Captain Ahab, who is looking for his whale. The search takes them to many strange places, adventure, gambling and floor shows.

The plot presents issues related to both Neo-Marxist and Capitalist ideology and explores their relative approaches, as well as economic politics in general, with the other major conflict in the narrative seeing archetypes and social roles pitted against individual experience. The Pirates! In An Adventure With Whaling beautifully condenses the pirate adventure genre while crossing said genre over with other, incongruous genres and situations to create an absurdist alternate reality where all directions, including the one that goes through the fourth wall, are open to the characters, thus also challenging the reader to question the limits of accepted reality within a given emic sphere.

The pirates are on one hand driven by a monetary obligation wilfully entered into and enforced by show of strength – Cutlass Liz’s superior skills and network – which is comparable to Capitalist debt slavery, but are themselves pilferers and outlaws, by their profession driven to confiscate other people’s possessions without their say-so. This model of competitive society is tempered by the inherent humanity of the pirates. On the other hand, the apparently autocratic but essential elective model of pirate democracy can be applied also to post-Capitalist society.

The pirate captain represents not only the figure of the archetypal leader and the ideal of a pirate, but ideology itself, and also social conditioning, especially pointedly in the scene where he writes a list of occasions on which pirates are “allowed to cry”. This also works as a chilling image of government truncating human emotion.

None of the pirates have names. They are simply called by their position in the crew – the first mate, the pirate with a scarf, etc. Yet their humanity and individuality shows through the narrative, where they act for their own ends and from their own motivations, and not simply to fulfil said role. Even so they must defer to their autocratic alpha male leader, who has the best beard of them all, and has very little else to recommend him for his position – a scathing comment on the democratic election process or on the deification of leaders in certain Communist states? There is room for debate here.

Quite aside from the social commentary inherent in the plot itself, the “humoristic” or “stupid”* approach the novel takes on the art of fiction-writing itself works as a commentary on the nature of linguistic truth versus experienced reality.

For example, when the pirates sail into Las Vegas in search of the White Whale (which functions as a symbol of the elusive unseen enemy, the mythical villain upon whom blame for human misfortune is projected, ignoring any actual intricate causal chains), we’re told this impossible fact in one simple sentence. In the world of the novel, language has accomplished something that in experienced reality would require quite a feat of engineering. This is much in the spirit of the opening sequence of the remarkable film The Meaning of Life by Monty Python, in which corporate piracy is taken on by rebel accountants sailing the seas of finance in a captured office building. This linguistic trickery forces the reader to reflect on the duplicity of language and eventually to declare the world of the novel entirely fake. Some may experience this forcible disengaging of the suspension of disbelief as uncomfortable and alienating, while others experience it as “funny”.

I find the approach challenges the reader to reflect on the construction of stories and on fiction’s position between poetic expression and deceit. Language can never fully describe reality**, and on occasion associative expression can seem to capture reality*** in a more meaningful and nuanced way than language that strives to be scientifically accurate. But what happens if language is used with linguistic accuracy but in a manner that breaks all pretence of being tied to experienced reality, or when the narrative doesn’t even strive to communicate a genuine experience, save through subtle symbology? Then you get fiction like the Monty Python films, Lewis Carroll’s “nonsense” poetry or, alternatively, The Pirates! In An Adventure With Whaling.

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* Defoe’s own definition – see “Important Work I Am Doing Re: pie-Charts”.
**See, for example, Semiotics: The Basics by Daniel Chandler.
*** For a given value of reality – see for example Quantum Psychology by R.A. Wilson.

Rating 3.00 out of 5
Category: 2 Stars, Reviews, Reviews - Books

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