Today is the anniversary of the publication of Moby-Dick in 1851. So I was thinking about that novel when I happened to read Jane Friedman’s blog post “What Writers can Learn about Voice from Opera.” * While these two things may seem to have nothing in common, they connected for me because I have only seen two operas live; one of them was Moby-Dick.
Moby-Dick and the Maturing Reader
I didn’t like Melville’s Moby-Dick when I was required to read it as a college freshman. Too much whaling, too philosophical in its musings and too much boiling of blubber. I was glad to be done with it and never looked at it again until I was finishing a master’s degree in English. I was working full time as a high school English teacher; I was going to school part time in the evenings; my husband was also working full time as an educator and working on a PhD. In my last year of the program, I was pregnant. During the final spring semester, I was so overtaken by nausea that a photograph of food—say a billboard advertising a hamburger—would make me vomit. The professor told the class that I was quitting and wouldn’t be back—something he had incorrectly divined when I once had to leave a class session after running to the restroom. He was the only teacher I had in my program who was an asshole, but I was determined to stay in the class because I had a timeline goal.
The following fall semester, I was doing independent study of the heavy hitting American classics and would also take qualifying exams. Moby-Dick was the most difficult of my reading material. But this time I loved it.
When the World Considers You a Whale
I would deliver my first son during that semester. I wasn’t allowed to have a doctor of my choice, but had to see whoever showed up at each of my appointments. In the final months of the pregnancy, the doctors all gave me a quick up and down, telling me I was too fat, and that I should get more exercise and drink nonfat milk. I had been drinking nonfat milk for more than a decade, and I was exercising as well. So I started walking in all spare minutes though these were the Southern California dog days. Finally, a mere week before I delivered, there was no doctor to be had for my appointment and a merciful nurse practitioner poked a finger into my calf, making a deep dent. “You don’t need more exercise,” she said. “You need to put your feet up and get some of this water off.”
My experiences over the months of pregnancy—the harried schedule, the illness and uncontrollable vomiting, the ballooning weight, the dismissal by unsympathetic doctors, and the fact that I was carrying not only a baby but, apparently, my own internal ocean, affected my experience of the novel. The words were the same, but, both internally and externally, I was in a new setting. I felt the close quarters of the ship. I was trapped with the belittling doctors who held authority over me. I caught myself in philosophical musings about my future at all odd moments.
Moby-Dick and the Mature Reader
So, it was the right time and place for me to read Moby-Dick. I understood why it is one of the great American novels. Years later, because I couldn’t stand the fact that my husband, who didn’t major in literature but rather psychology, hadn’t read the book, I bought an audio version with my favorite reader, Frank Muller. My husband loved it. I decided I might as well listen to it to refresh my memory. Oddly, what came through in Muller’s reading that I had completely missed as a grad student was bright comedic moments. That I was no longer worried about catching the ‘deeper meaning’ had to be part of that. But it was Muller’s voice that was giving me a fresh reading.
To give a character the appropriate voice is a lesson of Friedman’s post on listening to opera. When, almost exactly two years ago, I cajoled my husband into going to a modern opera based on the novel (“You liked the book, right?”), I did experience voice in a fresh way. (There’s nothing like an operatic tenor swearing to strike the sun if it insults him). The staging itself gave me a new emotional understanding of the lives of the characters.
Moby-Dick on Stage
While the stage was crowded with the large masts and intricate rigging that would be foremost in a 19th-century whaling ship, the transformation of the back wall into the curved hull of a ship with several hooks embedded in its side was brilliant minimalism. The crew used the metal grasps to climb as though they were steps in the rigging or a ladder. They would grab them and be thrown about to indicate a storm. They slid down the sides of the ship in more tossing or in readiness for work. With the addition of simple projections, this single ship scene seemed to change over and over, allowing us both the confined sense of the ship’s deck and its bowels as well as the broad emotional stretch of a vast sea. While the opera couldn’t contain the entire philosophical depth of the long novel, the production was great stuff if you needed to know how it feels to be locked down with a madman.
Cosi fan tutti: An Opportunity for a New Experience
I might not have been willing to go to the opera, even though it was Moby-Dick, if I hadn’t been tricked into my first opera about a year and a half before. In fact, if I had known I was going to see an opera, I might have feigned a cold. I had season tickets for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which, as you might guess, usually performs symphonies. Nevertheless, their season always includes something outside the box. And so I was present at the Disney Concert Hall for a performance of the Mozart and Da Ponte opera Cosi fan tutti.
If you aren’t familiar with the story, think about the Shakespeare plays with mistaken identities, of characters in disguise. Cosi fan tutti is a comedy on the fecklessness and infidelity of women, a few of whom who throw over their fiancés (whom they believe to be off at war, but who are right in town in the guise of Albanian suitors), in a ‘love the one you’re with’ move.
The Disney Concert Hall is not a space designed for opera productions, but the staging was brilliant. Perhaps, because of the fame of the architectural design, you are familiar with the interior of the concert hall. Though the wood is warm, its curves suggest waves. The organ acts as a centerpiece to the audience members, and its pipes look like the leaping splash of ocean foam. (If you haven’t seen it you should check it out online and then go in person.)
Since I’m looking at production here, let’s put aside the worthiness of the music. Outside of it, we have a dated story about the lack of integrity in women. Yet through staging and costume, this sexism is turned upside down. Men are shown to be as fluid in their values as women. The very ground the characters stand on is fluid. As I mentioned, the Disney Concert Hall has a wavelike atmosphere. In this production, the stage curved and swirled, continuing the ocean theme. There was a whirlpool concept at the center of the floor which looked alternately like water and a nautilus. The floor actually moved–part of it was solid, part was some sort of fabric over hydraulics so the waves went up and down. A curve of the inner circle would become a high wall and then recede.
The costuming also contributed to malleability. The devious men show themselves to be just the same as the women when their clothing expands from pants into dresses in the wedding scene. This very original, perfectly conceptualized staging extended the themes of turbulence in love, of infidelity and fickleness. Everyone is flawed and this allows the audience identification with the characters. I’ve never seen a more beautiful, emotionally articulate setting.
It’s All about Setting
If characters are hard to develop, think about your own settings. I’m guilty of writing dialogue for characters who seem to live in a void. (I’m lucky they don’t start hallucinating from sensory deprivation.) The opportunity to experience creative staging is a reminder that environment contributes to character development. In novels, it helps readers to make the emotional connection to the character’s destiny that will keep them turning the page. Indulge in stagecraft.
*If you don’t follow Jane Friedman, you should. She’s one of the most helpful writing advisors you’ll come across.