Alma Mater Literary Blog

The First Novel that I Read

Professor Yi had a strong character and great spirituality and was also a very prudent man. He wanted to give a second lesson of courage, as Professor Pupo had previously given me a lesson of manhood having me box a classmate who had verbally offended me the previous year about still wearing short pants at age 10, a classmate by the name of Fernando Bustamante, whom I happen to see once more at the law school. I recalled that Professor Pupo acting as referee stopped the fight when Fernando went to the ground for third time on the second round. But yes indeed, Professor Yi gave me a much better lesson of courage: The first novel I was to read. While I had read many short stories from Selected Readings, a Spanish series that was given to me for reading by my mother. Those readings greatly influenced my technique to write many of the short stories written in my early years, which I posted in a billboard weekly at the Instituto Alexander Von Humboldt (formerly Fundación Humboldt) during my high-school time, some of which deserved my first literary prizes, and later published in Colombia papers like El Heraldo, Diario del Caribe in Barranquilla, and El Espectador in Bogotá. But before that, at Instituto San José, I was yet to say good-bye to the all-boys Catholic School, with a gift that I keep to today’s date. Professor Yi wrote a dedication note that encourages me to a full endeavor in any activity and that reads: “Para Anthony Noriega por su notable aprovechamiento y excelente conducta. Obsequio cariñoso de su profesor Mario Yi.” (To Anthony Noriega for his remarkable performance and excellent conduct. Lovely gift from his teacher, Mario Yi.” It was the dedication note to Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf (El Lobo de Mar, as it is read in Spanish.)

Reading the first novel is not an easy task. Professor Zimmerman at Rutgers University has suggested a technique called reading like a writer, which enables a particular strategy to reading comprehension, yet on my first reading I had to go over chapter one to finally and clearly understand the story of the Martínez ferry-steamer sinking from his trip from Sausalito to San Francisco under extremely foggy weather conditions. When the steamer sinks, the Ghost comes to the rescue of Mr. Humphrey Van Weyden. And there also comes the arrogant personality of Ghost’s Captain, Wolf Larsen. The novel in fact has an enormous literary value in my perception that, as some critics have also pointed out, it contrasts the civilized man and the extreme approach of Nietzsche’s will to power, by a nearly barbaric man; it represents the collision between the civilized world and the brutality of force; between romance and love, and pure physical passion. And, in spite of most of the beauty of the sea, the fog, and the open air at deck, most of the story actually happens à huis clos, as the ship is itself the literary space and the limit of any true action. The in-depth psychological and perhaps mystic meaning of navigating over waters, the confrontation of brutal manhood nuanced with some sort of intellectual manhood something that for Larsen does not exist, as he is also quite an educated man driven by passion interested in literature and the universe; the antagonic dominance represented by extreme will to power and the desire to attain freedom and liberty within the boundaries of the ship, where Larsen’s sole authority was law. In my perception, the ways to perceived freedom within the space given were love and a sort of philosophical wisdom derived from faith as narrated, yet doubts –indeed– are obvious for a man that had never been challenged by life events driven by violence rather than by philosophical wisdom, which is in fact presented by the writing of poetry, among other literary tasks. The novel also has a strong existentialist value, since it conveys the will to power beyond the response and will to live, i.e., the need and desire to survive. In my life I have read a few novels conveying similar meanings, such as Sartre’s trilogy Les Chemins de la Liberté. There is also a short story by García Márquez, Sólo vine para hablar por teléfono, that nuances the vanishing of a reality arising from a sudden event into a dramatic friction with the outside world as the inner unexpected scenary that transported a reality from the Martínez to the Ghost. But the fog and the storm were to go away.

So London beautifully writes:

By the following morning, the storm had blown itself quite out and the Ghost was rolling slightly on a calm sea without a breath of wind.

A new era novel that I picked up a random from the East Brunswick library, Skinny Dip, also explains the drama of being at open sea, but in it an expert swimmer surpasses her limits and reaches a different reality as well, written with a more modern writing style.

As nearly no character in the novel is atypical to sea and a ship scenary, London nuances his novel with a happy romantic ending:

“My man”, she said, looking at me for an instant with tremulous lids which fluttered down and veiled her eyes…

“One kiss, dear love,” I whispered. “One kiss more before they come.”

I am yet to read the Call of the Wild, which I do now . Surprinsingly, I have read other stories were the sea is the outdoors world, and the closed space is represented by a ship or a ship cabin, and like in London’s novel or Hemingways’s The Old Man and the Sea, man is not made for defeat: a man can be destroyed but never defeated.