Week 50, Day 5: Adventure Story
Martin Eden is the eponymous character of a novel by Jack London, Jack of Call of the Wild and White Fang fame. All those classic northern adventure books. Curious as to why Matthew Cooper chose to name this project after Martin Eden, I downloaded it to my Kindle (free book!) and started reading. I thought that maybe by showing us the path to the book Cooper was trying to clue us in to some musical adventure he was taking, or to point us toward some novelistic Artic tundra, ice-crusted and wind-scraped, just like some of his compositions.
Though so far I’ve only read one-fifth of the book, it has become plain that it is not an adventure story, at least not in the typical Jack London-fashion. Martin Eden is a sailor, a brute of a man and rough at every edge, yet also possessed of a fineness of soul and perception unique for one of his ilk. While on land he happens to save a gentleman from getting a good beating, and is invited to dine with the gentleman’s family. There he falls in love with the gentleman’s sister, Ruth, but more, he is made agonizingly aware of his own uncouthness. He sets out on a great self-improvement scheme, that he might be worthy of Ruth, and is aided by her along the way, for Ruth is also falling in love with him, though she doesn’t yet realize it. A lover of all the arts, music, painting, and the written word in particular, Martin decides to make a career as a writer, that he might have money to get an education, that he might have the basis to mold himself into a man able to roam the realms of the upper-classes with ease.
That’s as far as I’ve gotten in the novel, and I’m sensing some disturbances in Martin’s plan up ahead: becoming a writer won’t prove so easy, getting an education will be a trial, Ruth’s family won’t approve of their feelings for one another, etc. I have the feeling it will be an “American dream” tale, though whether it turns out badly or not is, at this point, a toss up.
More than being a simple story of class ascension, however, Martin Eden is about a man’s struggle to birth the artist and lover within himself, to hone the abundance of raw emotion and perception writhing around within him into something tangible, something communicable, an art. Martin Eden desires nothing less than to turn the shoddy grammar of his life into the exulted diction of the poem; Life itself, as he sets out to live it, will be an art form, a canvas prepped for the brush, and the colors and strokes he covers it with will be unmistakably his.
But art is a bruising and cold fire to throw oneself into, often unforgiving, often unrelenting. It might show a man more of life than he cares to see. He will turn upon his family, his lovers, himself. He will wither even as he blooms.
Maybe this is Dedicate Function. The artist falling apart at the moment he comes into his own. A profound beauty sunk beneath its own weight. A man destroyed by the very medium he seeks to master. Lifted by it. A heart’s very beat reinvented, and the body shivers at the change, adjusts, attempts life.
