Tiffany Troy finds Daniel Magariel’s new novel an imperative, Delphic hymn to change.
Daniel Magariel, Walk the Darkness Down (Bloomsbury 2023), 224 pp.
On Monday by chance, I listened to Peter Sacks’s 2007 Stronach Memorial lecture, “‘You Only Guide Me by Surprise’: Poetry and the Dolphin’s Turn.” According to Sacks, dolphins are animals revered by the ancient Greeks for saving sailors at sea and for nursing sick dolphins among the pack back to health. The root of the word for “dolphin” is “delphis”, a near homonym for “womb” in Greek. The Delphic Apollo (based in Delphi) is the first God which spoke directly to the ancient Greeks, and he appeared first as a dolphin, before rising up to the sky like the stars. The edict of Apollo to the Cretan sailors who beheld him is basically, “You must change your life”, which is also the last line of “The Archaic Torso of Apollo” by Rilke – “Du mußt dein Leben ändern” in the original German. This imperative to the sailors looks to change as Apollo transforms from his animal form (the dolphin) and bursts from the boat like a star.
Like the miracle of the Delphic Apollo transforming himself from a dolphin to a god, the wonderful transformation of the characters of Daniel Magariel’s Walk the Darkness Down has changed my life. In an imperative no less stark than the line in Rilke’s poem, Magariel’s characters find themselves washing down a spiral of broken relationships. It is a braided epic narrative that weaves between husband Les, the scalloper, and wife Marlene, the stay-at-home wife and former bookkeeper. The stakes of the novel are built episodically through Les and Marlene’s inability to continue their way of life any longer: a symbolic broken door to the family home and the way Marlene refuses to step outside hints at how Marlene has turned inward, almost afraid of the light of hope.
Entangled in the threads of their stories is their late daughter Angie, an angel who is unhealthily obsessed with Dolphy, the stuffed doll Les won for her at the carnival. This obsession – a result of insecure attachment – means that Angie sees in Dolphy a substitute for her father during Les’s long and frequent absences from home.
Walk the Darkness Down defies gendered stereotypes through the figure of the dolphin, the “fish with the womb”, through Dolphy the dolphin plushy, which ultimately proves central to the reader’s understanding of the cruel twists of fate for the characters within the novel. Similarly, sailors like Les, are portrayed with finesse beyond their archetype as the masculine breadwinner and conqueror of the sea. Instead, we see how the sailors act tenderly towards each other and hold themselves up as the motherly protector of the sea in juxtaposition with that romanticist view. Walk the Darkness Down thus follows the tradition of Moby-Dick, in painting the sea with its infinite vastness, its wondrous colors, its episodic adventures, and its emotional depth. But beyond that, we hear the sailors let out “Yeehah”’s and “yips” like dolphins at the loss of their fellow sailors to the vicissitudes of the sea, as monkfish are not just fantastical enemies to be knocked down by real horrors that leave men maimed and dead. In this way, interludes of cruelty and flamboyance surround realizations of more profound truth in the “Yeehah” as the crew of strayed men “yips” rowdily, “alive in the dread of having nearly lost one of their own”. The proximity of the sailors to the sea renders their transformation into the dolphin all the more poignant because what we see are not miracles but men broken the way dolphins are, in mourning their dead, the way perhaps Achilles mourns Patroclus, in tender brotherly love. Beyond this tenderness is a deep sorrow at the heavy burden felt the sailors who are united by their desire of survival, adventure, and moneymaking, as their bodies transform through years at sea.
I am in awe of how the novel rises beyond the prescribed fates of its characters the way the imperative of “must” by Rilke fuels the drive that has defined the coastal town through generations. Generations of men from whale hunters to lumberjacks to scallopers have held on to the tradition that adventure can be more than just another failure. It doesn’t justify the sailors’ infidelity or drug use, but it contextualizes Les’s neglect of Angie.
Marlene, who reminds me of Somnya in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, at first appears stuck inside a home where Les’s “last will never be the last”, where she continually massages Les’s hands back into shape after his scalloping trips. Then the cycle repeats itself, Marlene is disappointed, she waits for Les, she cares for Les, and Les is gone again. But unlike the saintess-like Somnya, Marlene changes dramatically through her deepening friendship with girl prostitute Josie, as she sought to rebuild a “family” that isn’t defined by Angie’s death and Les’s absence.
It is no coincidence that the pod of dolphins make their appearance at Marlene’s childhood home right before the height of her distress in ending up “so far from where [she] hoped to be”, as her makeshift “family” consisting of Les, Josie, and herself crumbles. Marlene’s heroism comes not from her unwavering faith but from her breaking down at the weight of her guilt, her Neverland fantasy of having a family, and her fear that Les would leave her, or she him. She is brave in facing the darkness of Angie’s death despite quivering in her uncertainty that the future will in fact change, even if she tried with all her might.
The braided narrative of land–sea–back to the Marlene’s parents’ home where Angie, the dead daughter’s presence is felt in the makeshift family of Marlene, Jolene, and Les. The convergence of both worlds shifts the stakes towards the metaphysical: less about Les’s job or Josie’s survival and more about how the proximity of two broken souls can mend with time and faith. Magariel carries – through Les and Marlene – the faith that people who are scared out of their wits in their love-turned-wrongs can try to walk the darkness down, with “a small pod of dolphins swimming besides” them.
Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]) and the chapbook When Ilium Burns (Bottlecap Press), as well as co-translator of Santiago Acosta’s The Coming Desert /El próximo desierto (forthcoming, Alliteration Publishing House), in collaboration with Acosta and the 4W International Women Collective Translation Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly and Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review.
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