The White Ship

by CKR

Some time ago, Phila was kind enough to send me a small volume he found while preparing to move. The volume was The White Ship: Estonian Tales by Aino Kallas, Translated from the Finnish by Alex Matson, With a Foreword by John Galsworthy.

The publication date is 1929 (“first publication;” this particular book appears to be a reprint, but not too far removed from that time), by Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith.

The book was very difficult for me to read. It is a collection of stories from Estonia. They seem to have been collected from elderly people in Estonia about the old days, what we would call today oral history. Much about those old days was not good: the nobility in Estonia was German, having been imported in the thirteenth century by crusading orders, and Estonians were serfs. Estonia was part of the Russian empire, which imposed additional layers of oppression.

One story begins with a joyous wedding. The wedding is interrupted by a summons from the lord of the manor for the bride to come to the manor house. The newlyweds face each other wondering what that would do to them and their relationship. The story ends with the bride taking a knife from her husband, along with a promise that he will join her in Siberia.

Another story has overtones of current religious excesses. A young housewife falls under the spell of a religious sect, follows the group to the beach near Lasnamäe in Tallinn (now a Russian enclave), where they await an revelation that never comes, and she returns to her village, perhaps disenchanted, perhaps not.

The collection starts more positively: Odile, the wife of a councillor of Tallinn, finds it within herself to give a rose to a leper and sees him transformed. Perhaps this is Kallas’s way of suggesting that Estonia’s leprous past might be redeemed, a possibility that would have presented itself in 1929, as Estonia enjoyed its seventh year of independence from Russia.

Aino Kallas was not a familiar name to me when the book arrived in the mail. Estonia has many writers, and I knew nothing more of her than was in Galsworthy’s preface. She was Finnish and wrote in that language, but much of her material came from Estonia, her husband’s home. The book’s translator, Alex Matson, was also Finnish. A bit more about her can be found in this article from the Estonian Literary Magazine.

A recent article in the New Yorker made me think again about this book, which has been languishing on my worktable in the hope of a review. It seems that our DNA contains bits and pieces of viruses that infected our ancestors; killed some of them, even, although others survived by incorporating the virus. How this happens is poorly understood. Viruses that may be close to those ancient viruses have been reassembled from the DNA information of modern humans.

Yes, that’s quite a shifting of gears. But not entirely. I’ll take a poorly understood and developing set of facts as a metaphor for something even less understood. I’m going out on a limb here.

Human behavior seems to follow a similar pattern to those ancient viruses. We do one set of things for a while, then an idea comes along to change those behaviors. We modify the behaviors, but the old behaviors remain somewhere deep inside our behavioral DNA. And then come other modifications and other fossilizations.

For example, even through the fourteenth century, torture of humans and animals was generally acceptable. In A Distant Mirror, we hear about village games in which players with hands tied behind them competed to kill a cat nailed to a post by battering it to death with their heads, or men with clubs chased and killed a pig while spectators cheered them on. At that time, torture was part of the Church’s way of dealing with heretics. We have come to a point where torture was recognized as wrong, agreements and treaties were made to eliminate it, but the virus can still reassemble itself.

Likewise, it was once acceptable to enslave other humans, to end their liberty and fill their lives with labor for others. Serfdom was part of that; the German masters freed the Estonian serfs before Russia freed its serfs or the United States freed its slaves. All of that occurred during the middle of the nineteenth century, a time that would have been accessible to Aino Kallas through older Estonians.

That virus reassembles itself in traffickers in human lives, for sex or labor. But in groups, societally, we seem to have incorporated the virus and eliminated its larger effects.

The White Ship shows us what a world with that virus uncontrolled is like. People balance their spirit, their will, against the ever-present necessity imposed on them. We can feel a bit of this in apprehension as we approach the airport’s TSA checkpoint; the care we must take in behavior, speech, even thought as the monitor waves us through; the humiliation of stuff we must quickly gather up as the bins emerge from the x-ray machine. But then it is over. Just a few minutes of that world that Kallas’s characters lived in.

The virus is not gone, maybe not yet sufficiently incorporated into our DNA to make us resistant to it.

Photo credit: Estonian Literary Museum (Tartu)

Comments

[Phila]

Interesting to see where you went with this...now I'm wishing I'd gotten around to reading TWS!

In response, I've accused you of being a crypto-Deleuzian over at my place. I hope you'll take it in good humor!

[CKR]

Whoa! Now I'm going to have to do some googling!

[Phila]

I wasn't all that serious about the Deleuze thing...I really just mentioned it because of the DNA analogy. But some of the stuff Foucault says in Discipline and Punish is very much along these lines.

[CKR]

Well, you helped me learn something, and I hope to write more about it.

BTW, TWS is available in a more recent paperback edition from the online booksellers.

[Phila]

BTW, TWS is available in a more recent paperback edition from the online booksellers.

Posted by: CKR | Saturday, 08 December 2007 at 05:09 AM [kill]​[hide comment]

Arrgh. So much for clearing the house out....