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I didn’t expect to get any mileage at all out of Voyage Along the Horizon, a relatively minor work. I assumed it would be a curiosity to alternate with the more traditional English and American narratives of life aboard ship. And it turned out to be curious. It actually had so many unexpected things in common with the other narratives, and so many other things unexpectedly different.*
As a little diversion, it is really pretty good. A somewhat negative point is that it’s really one of these novels about “storytelling.” Just, you know, how many can we do? Victor Arledge, a writer, reaches his ruin by obsessing over a story. It gets so meta Arledge actually lies and tells Bayham he would like to write a novel about the kidnapping because he thinks it might convince Bayham to spill.
The inner-Voyage Along the Horizon is in appropriately stilted prose, and it’s not exactly clear that it’s a good book. I was beginning to suspect it was not when, within the span of two pages, various passengers on the Tallahassee, headed toward Antarctica, were described as “cold,” “icy,” and even “glacial” (!). Javier Marías might not think it’s very good either.
Mr. Branshaw has been the novel’s champion for years, but after reading it aloud to the narrator is completely disenchanted and no longer believes it should even be published.
And it may even be possible that Voyage Along the Horizon is in fact a very respectable novel, but then what is ‘respectable’ compared to the destiny I had envisioned for it? A terrible disappointment, I can assure you. No, no—please do not interrupt me. I am telling you the truth. My friend’s novel should never be published and should never have been read or listened to by anyone other than myself.
Wait a minute. The novel we just read isn’t worth reading? The novel we are reading right now isn’t worth reading?
The narrator actually thinks it was. He remains impressed by Voyage Along the Horizon even years later, though, amusingly, thinks Victor Arledge’s work inferior, which “made me wonder why Mr. Branshaw’s friend had dedicated his life and fortune to learning the motive that could have driven such an unexceptional author to abandon his literary vocation.”
So, to recap: why did the friend bother writing it, why did Branshaw bother trying to publish it, and why did we bother reading it? I halfway feel someone’s played a joke on me.
*Also curious, I believe this is the first piece of Spanish literature I have ever read. How is that possible?
Margaret Cohen borrows a line from White Jacket to describe the ship in “The Chronotopes of the Sea”: “a ship is a bit of terra firm cut off from the main; it is a state in itself; and the captain is its king.” A state in itself, a tiny piece of land floating around the blue and white and brown water. And because it’s tiny, and cut off, no one can come and no one can leave.
This is a central force behind the action of the inside novel Voyage Along the Horizon. Victor Arledge, Hugh Everett Bayham, Léonide Meffre, the Handls, Captain Kerrigan, all are stuck together for the duration of the Antarctic voyage. They are also all stuck with the crew and the scientists. The artists, it should be mentioned, are there to make a floating colony and create austral-inspired art. The scientists are there to perform their own art in the Antarctic. But the artists seem like a bunch of dilettantes, deciding to make port calls all over the Mediterranean before setting out in earnest. This means before the trip even makes Gibraltar, everyone is ready to strangle everyone else.
This itself is almost an inversion of the normal ship. As Richard Henry Dana put it in Two Years Before the Mast:
…at sea—to use a homely but expressive phrase—you miss a man so much. A dozen men are shut up together in a little bark, upon the wide, wide sea, and for months see no forms and hear no voices but their own, and one is taken suddenly from among them, and they miss him at every turn. It is like losing a limb. There are no new faces or new scenes to fill up the gap.
But on the Tallahassee, if only losing a limb were so easily accomplished. In fact, the boatswain does disappear and turn up near Alexandria, dead, and not only is no one upset, no one even misses him or does much to look for him (this is among the passengers; we have limited knowledge of the crew). And Captain Kerrigan disappears in a way when he is shut up in his cabin, and no one could be happier. Eventually he even escapes the ship and while the passengers may want him brought to justice they are thrilled to be rid of him. No one can get off this ship fast enough—except the scientists. They want to continue to Antarctica, but the ship never makes it past Tangiers.
While Victor Arledge’s antics cause a decent part of the awkwardness on board, it’s really Kerrigan whose actions make the trip fall apart. The whole voyage was undertaken almost entirely through the force of his personality. He persuaded his own artistic friends and acquaintances to make the huge project their own, and after he is on the outs the glue holding them together quickly melts away.
That’s getting ahead of myself a little. Why does Kerrigan end up locked up? The immediate cause is a drunken rampage that culminates in him actually throwing another passenger off the ship, and threatening to throw off another. The cause of the drunkenness is depression brought on by thoughts of his lost love, part of a past no one but Arledge knows about. That story forms another of the novel’s nested narratives: Arledge recounts for Bayham the sordid history of Kerrigan—not really a captain—as a smuggler and pirate. Kerrigan’s got a whole slew of ship and blue water happenings in his past. This isn’t the first time he’s wanted to get rid of some passengers on his ship; he acquired his lost love after killing her husband and their friend on a desert island he helped them discover in the Pacific.
Another salient feature of the chronotope of the ship is discipline. The captain is its king, and his word is law. On the Tallahassee, Kerrigan is not really captain, and the captain is stabbed by Kerrigan and laid up in bed much of the voyage. Fordington-Lewthwaite, formerly third in command, ends up in charge, and he is ready to begin the authoritarianism that thus far the ship has been missing. He’s all too happy to take charge of Kerrigan, and to humiliate Arledge just for the hell of it.
In many ship-based novels, this discipline is also reflected in the activities of all the people on board. Those people are usually sailors, and sailors are always working. According to Cohen,
In land-based narratives, characters generally maneuver to procure social advantage. On board ship, characters work, and indeed this chronotope, in interaction with other chronotopes of the sea, provides one of the most extended opportunities for the narratie dramatization of human labor.
Not so on the Tallahassee, where Jane Austen has been transplanted into the middle of the Mediterranean. First, we hardly see the crew at all. But the passengers are supposed to be working, too. Isn’t writing and composing work? They don’t do it though; they sit around idle, making small talk and pissing each other off. Maybe that’s why they want to get rid of each other. If they were hard at work they would be bonding over the shared task of sailing the ship, but instead they are jockeying for social position and since the losers can’t disappear from the scene the conflict boils over.
 Javier Marías’s Voyage Along the Horizon is another one of the Russian nesting doll novels I like so much. An unnamed first-person narrator has a party and overhears a Miss Bunnage and a Mr. Branshaw (neither of whom he knows) discussing the author Victor Arledge. It turns out Branshaw has a friend who once wrote a novel about Arledge, as yet unpublished, which Miss Bunnage would like very much to read. So Branshaw invites her and the narrator over the next day to listen to him read it.
The novel Branshaw reads is Voyage Along the Horizon, the story of a voyage undertaken by a group of European and American writers, artists, and musicians to Antarctica sometime in the early 20th century. Arledge, an English writer living in Paris, is encouraged by his American friend Captain Kerrigan to go on the trip.
Many of Arledge’s acquaintance, including his friends the Handls, are also on the ship, the steel-hulled sailing vessel Tallahassee. Before leaving, Arledge got a very interesting story from the Handls, whose letter is reproduced in the inner-Voyage Along the Horizon. It’s the story of Hugh Everett Bayham, an English concert pianist who is mysteriously kidnapped from London and taken to a private home in Scotland for four days. Arledge becomes obsessed with the story, and must know the details. Bayham, of course, is also on the Tallahassee, and Arledge fairly humiliates himself trying to get the secret out of him.
The bit about the secret is almost a little too frustrating for the reader, I think. Arledge spends his entire time on board ship quietly planning some way to find out what happened to Bayham, a man he doesn’t know at all and who clearly does not want to discuss the matter. And Arledge’s strategizing is pathetic, leaving him looking desperate and just bizarre. He even, attempting to draw out Bayham, ends up in a duel with another party, a French writer he despises. The fact that he ends up killing the Frenchman quite in cold blood as some kind of footnote to his curiosity kind of turns people off, too.
But then, surprisingly, Arledge does find out what’s happened. We don’t; the man overhearing that part of the story walked away just at the important moment. The narrator of the inner-Voyage is confident that Arledge was disappointed with the truth, and the next morning he acts like none of it ever happened. The whole thing had a funny effect on me. I despaired of ever knowing Bayham’s secret before Arledge did, to the point where I was just as over it as he was even though I didn’t get to hear about it.
Oh, and outside the nesting doll structure, the very first piece of the novel turns out to be a first-person fragment from Victor Arledge himself (the “real” Victor Arledge, or the Victor Arledge in the inner-Voyage?), musing on his foolishness on board the Tallahasee.
You see, I am a man who tends to be acquiescent and easy to please, and when people like myself abandon an endeavor or illusion we usually have little trouble finding the right arguments to convince us that our plans were in fact quite insipid; these arguments, in turn, allow us to actually feel thrilled and relieved when our endeavor goes awry. And so, the following morning, everything—or at least nearly everything—had already been forgotten.
(He’s clearly insane. Acquiescent and easy to please?)
After the voyage along the horizon, Arledge was pretty much ruined. We’re not quite sure why or how, but that trip was basically the end of him, and it seems the kidnapping business, or the duel, or just the whole terrible sour atmosphere of the voyage, must be at the root of it.
Did I mention the sour atmosphere of the voyage? Tomorrow: how Voyage Along the Horizon (the inside one, at least) illustrates Margaret Cohen’s chronotope of the ship (and turns it on its head).
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"As is quite clear, the enchanter interests me more than the yarn spinner or the teacher."—Vladimir Nabokov
Currently Reading Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville
The March of Literature by Ford Madox Ford
The Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo
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