Here is a masterpiece, from start to finish. Moby Dick without the whining. Bukowski, had Bukowski been able to get out of his own arse. Traven's English is even more roughly chopped than Beckett's French.
Traven writes class literature. Working class literature. Some critics categorize novels based on the arch drawn by their heros, from dire to glory, from glory to misery. Traven takes his characters at their lowest and brings them down. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre starts with Dobbs scrapping for twenty-five centavos to see him through the day and takes him to the ultimate destitution. The Death Ship's narrator bargains his opening scene through ten dollars. When all ends he has lost everything: his job, his country, his name. He does not even have a pocket to hold the compass he managed to rescue. Holding dearly to a piece of wood he glares, astounded, at where the sea just swallowed his comrade Stanislav. Does he cry? Does he despair? None of that with Traven, "no sir". Pippip is no Job, no Ishmael. For in death he sees hope. Stanislav was at sea when, in 1919, Danzig went from Germany to Poland. Stanislav was born in Danzig. He is now neither German nor Polish - to both countries Stanislav is not alive, for "how can we be sure that you were really born if we cannot see your birth certificate?" Nonetheless, death opened to him its big liquid arms and swallowed him without further question. "The Great Skipper had taken him without papers."
Forget Melville. Forget Bukowski. Forget Beckett. Traven lines up with Kafka. But where Kafka has the comical voice of an office clerk fleeing his boredom in the fantasy world of his imagination, Traven has the raucous, mocking inflections of a runaway. Traven is Kafka in real life. He is the dire bottom, the unbreakable rock against which all literature ends up banging, no matter what it is trying to say. He is class literature at its utmost universal.
Traven writes class literature. Working class literature. Some critics categorize novels based on the arch drawn by their heros, from dire to glory, from glory to misery. Traven takes his characters at their lowest and brings them down. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre starts with Dobbs scrapping for twenty-five centavos to see him through the day and takes him to the ultimate destitution. The Death Ship's narrator bargains his opening scene through ten dollars. When all ends he has lost everything: his job, his country, his name. He does not even have a pocket to hold the compass he managed to rescue. Holding dearly to a piece of wood he glares, astounded, at where the sea just swallowed his comrade Stanislav. Does he cry? Does he despair? None of that with Traven, "no sir". Pippip is no Job, no Ishmael. For in death he sees hope. Stanislav was at sea when, in 1919, Danzig went from Germany to Poland. Stanislav was born in Danzig. He is now neither German nor Polish - to both countries Stanislav is not alive, for "how can we be sure that you were really born if we cannot see your birth certificate?" Nonetheless, death opened to him its big liquid arms and swallowed him without further question. "The Great Skipper had taken him without papers."
Forget Melville. Forget Bukowski. Forget Beckett. Traven lines up with Kafka. But where Kafka has the comical voice of an office clerk fleeing his boredom in the fantasy world of his imagination, Traven has the raucous, mocking inflections of a runaway. Traven is Kafka in real life. He is the dire bottom, the unbreakable rock against which all literature ends up banging, no matter what it is trying to say. He is class literature at its utmost universal.
