When you read something
in a book, do you believe it?
You might say, “Of
course not if it’s fiction,” but well-researched historical or
science fiction can offer plenty of accurate
information, entertainingly packaged. Nonfiction, on the other hand,
might seem true by definition—but what about memoirs? Polemics? Even
textbooks tend to be outdated at best, if not outright biased.
“We can never be
privy to the elusive ‘whole story,’ as it’s ever usurped by
legend,” writes Matthew Gavin Frank in Preparing the Ghost,
a book which is kind of about giant squid and kind of about the
nature of narrative, the existentialism of fact, the reigning
subjectivity of our existence. Frank divides the text between
obsessively hunting down the precise facts surrounding the first
photograph of a giant squid, and gleefully muddying said facts with
his own vivid imagination.
The tantalizing title
is explained in the final quarter of the book: “An infant giant
squid is called a paralarva, and it’s the size of a cricket. In
Latin, para means to make ready, to prepare, and a larva
is a ghost, a spectre.”
I’ve spent a bit of
time studying paralarvae, and I’m also an amateur classics nut, and
these roots didn’t match what I thought I knew. I hied to the
American Heritage Dictionary, which told me that larva
originally meant demon or ghost, but also came to mean mask. “Larva is
therefore an appropriate term for that stage of an insect’s life
during which its final form is still hidden or masked, and New Latin
larva was thus applied in 1691 by Carolus Linnaeus.”
Para, in
addition to being a form of the verb “to prepare,” is also a
Latin preposition that has become an English prefix, as in
paramilitary. “The prefix ‘para’ is Latin for ‘almost’
or ‘nearly,’” wrote squid scientists Richard Young and Robert
Harman when coining the word paralarva in 1988.
Up until then,
scientists had been rather liberally applying the word “larvae”
to baby squids, a word that many felt should be limited to creatures
like caterpillars that undergo metamorphosis, breaking down a
baby body and using the parts to construct a nearly unrecognizable
adult form. Squid don’t do that.
But neither do fish,
and ichthyologists have been writing happily about larval fish with
no compunctions for centuries. Although fish cease being larvae when they grow scales, which is a pretty drastic change if not
a proper metamorphosis . . . Young and Harman sidestepped this
quandary by inventing a new word, a word that eschewed anatomical
change for behavioral. “We define paralarva as ‘a cephalopod of
the first post-hatching growth stage that is pelagic in near-surface
waters during the day and that has a distinctively different mode of
life from that of older conspecific individuals.’”
Anyway. I queried Frank
about the prepositional para
over e-mail, and he responded: “I do know about the 'near'
definition, though in discovering that para is also the 3rd
singular present of the Latin verb parare (to prepare, or to
ward off), I thought that, given the context of the book, ‘Preparing
the Ghost’ made sense as a title and governing principle (at least,
lyrically-speaking), as we're dealing with an animal that, in its
larval state, already holds within it the code that will eventually
yield a beast that is larger-than-life, that spans the actual and the
mythological; in its larval state, it is already ‘preparing’ to
become a thing of mythical proportions, a giant tool in our giant
narratives. Given our associative brains (and my love of etymology),
I wondered: can we really consider one ‘para’ without considering
the other?”
I think this gives you
a pretty good idea of both Frank’s writing style and the book’s
governing thesis.
Preparing the Ghost creates a deliberately blurry view by seamlessly juxtaposing the actual with the mythological, both in the author's words and in quotations from historical
characters. Revered Moses Harvey,
first photographer of the giant squid, epitomizes the dual human
drive to document fact and to create myth. He loves science,
capturing the giant squid for posterity with a flash and a chemical
burn, yet freely injects wild speculation into his written accounts
of the creature.
In presenting the idea
that the giant squid “is the semimissing link between vertebrates
and invertebrates,” Frank quotes Harvey: “the glassy internal pen
. . . and the calcareous internal ‘bone’ . . . are held to
foreshadow the spinal column of higher animals.” This is nonsense; ancestral vertebrates likely evolved from something
like a larval tunicate, which has a stiff “notochord” analogous to our spines.
Squid “pens” or “bones” are analogous to the shells of snails
and clams.
Harvey was a hobby
naturalist in the 1800’s; his errors are understandable. But I was
puzzled that Frank would present them to the modern reader without
editorial comment. I wrote to him, “I couldn't tell whether you
thought [the scientific inaccuracies] were true, or if you were happy
to be ‘usurped by legend’.”
Frank wrote back, with
what I imagine to be maniacal laughter, “Ha! I am happy to be
usurped by legend! . . . [These] inconsistencies derive from our very
real (and ever-evolving) engagement with the animal over the course
of many centuries and via various lenses (science, pseudo-science,
religion, literature, etc.). So, yes, of course: some of these are
inflamed, and feverish, and delightfully wrong-headed, but all
represent our very real relationship with the giant squid over the
many years (which has been, in stages, delightfully wrong-headed),
and are culled from historical (and sometimes delightfully
wrong-headed) sources.”
An author’s note at
the beginning of the book reads, “Though I’ve taken imaginative
leaps with many scenes in this book, all quotations and historical
facts, unless otherwise indicated, are as accurate as possible.”
Frank sought to be historically accurate to the entirety of human
thought about giant squid, and in so doing he chose not to call out which of these thoughts have held up to scientific inquiry,
and which have not.
As a scientist, I can’t
deny that this jumbling of (what we now know to be) fact and fiction
makes me uncomfortable. But as a writer, I was often moved and
charmed by the beauty of Frank’s prose. He writes, in a whimsical
one-line deconstruction of neurobiology’s model system, that the
giant squid “has the world’s largest nerve axon, or nerve fiber,
or cellular jump-rope, the plaything of the dendritic schoolchildren
who snort nodes of ranvier between recess and electricity class.”
However, describing the
smell of a dead squid on the beach as "sweet, throat-inflaming
mustard" went a little too far beyond my own (frequent)
experiences of dead squid on the beach. I inquired about his
inspiration for these words, and Frank responded:
“It’s always a
struggle for me—a holy one—trying to determine to what degree I
should signal to a reader that I’m speculating, that I’m
imagining, that I’m caught up. Usually, my initial instincts are
that I should not overtly signal at all. That context will do its
job; that a reader will figure it out. And if it’s muddy in the
book—this blurry line between fact and conjecture—that’s
because it’s actually muddy. Supposedly factual historical research
yields varying—and often conflicting—narratives. Once we impose
narrative(s) onto a fact, it ceases to be a hard fact. It softens.
It’s shapeable. Like boiling water into which we dissolve sugar
teaspoonful-by-teaspoonful, it doesn’t become another thing
completely. Until we add that ultimate spoonful which supersaturates
the solution, it’s still water, still maintains the integrity of
water. It still maintains the shape of the original fact. It’s just
sweeter. So, this is a long-winded way of saying that I blame the
‘sweet, throat-inflaming mustard’ description on me getting
caught up, and surrendering to an imaginative flight of fancy.”
I’m reminded of a
science writers’ debate about literary nonfiction, in which Ann
Finkbeiner calls out “the contract with the reader that the fiction
writer doesn’t have and the nonfiction writer does, the contract
that a beauty-obsessed nonfiction writer can easily slight.”
But the nonfiction
she’s concerned with is science writing, a category which doesn't really contain Preparing the
Ghost. Could any contract apply to this
work, which seems to be a species of creative nonfiction nearly as far removed from
just-the-facts reporting as it is from fiction? Frank is neither pure
professor nor pure entertainer; he’s an eccentric storyteller who
offers you bits of lyrical language to savor while you try to figure
out if he believes his own story.
