In Praise of Moore

I enjoyed Moore’s piece.  It certainly displayed well the role of absentee/obsolete/missing fathers (like Tim Allen’s story, his subsequent Esquire interview, and Moore’s own life) in the characters he presents.  I liked the use of the alphabetically ordered glossary as a formal device; as Simon points out, it’s a great way to allow a multitude of stories to show through.  The play between a rigid structure, and the fact that glossaries often involve one, highly specific, cut-and-dry topic (as opposed to a “meditation” on a slightly more abstract idea) makes the piece much stronger than it would be with, say, line breaks every few paragraphs.

But what I liked most about the piece was its irony.  Simon touches on it when he talks about Moore seeing his own father in these stories.  That’s something I hadn’t even thought about; I reacted more generally to the complicated notion of missing fathers.  The premise of the essay, and even the first two entries, suggest the title is appropriate.  But immediately after that, the essay quickly becomes a study in irony, and complicate the notion of supportive fathers.  The emperor penguins, his own relationship to Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver as well as the lives of the characters within the shows, and his own family life are themes he returns to within this context of missing fathers. Each one contains varying degrees of sympathy.  And, his almost nostalgic recollection of his father’s singing voice, the description of the male emperor penguin’s sacrifice, and the particularly compelling story from the University of Arizona psychologist seem to garner more sympathy for the fathers in question than they do incriminate them.

Especially interesting is his own story.  He reveals to us first, after listing a few selfless acts of fathers of the animal kingdom, that he flatly rejected his wife’s desire to have a child (running scared from the thought, quite literally).  He later goes into his dealing with drugs (a decades’ worth), and the fact that he has a vasectomy, before admitting the change of heart after “many years of considerable prodding.”  He discusses xenogenesis right before that; until then, we see him as critical of absent and cruel fathers (fish that eat their young; model TV daughters whose interactions with father figuers turn them to drigs prostitution), while also running scared from the idea of being a father himself, morally and physiologically.  He makes no effort to hide the fact that he’s not exactly the role model he desires, until the very end when he cites xenogenesis as a way to move beyond it.  At least while I was reading, I was waiting for the condemnation of absentee fathers, and it never came–like Simon mentioned, it might have been something he couldn’t will himself to write without qualifying it.

It’s a shame–I suppose it’s pretty obvious that there should be some kind of conflict in a work like this–and my reading seems like I assumed there wasn’t going to be any.  But the point stands.  The most important device he used, in my eyes, wasn’t the structure of the piece–it was the complicated relationship between its title and what was written beneath it.

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I apologize for these highly irrelevant images–I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t going crazy and thinking of a company that didn’t exist.

Also, additional irony comes from his own writings on his name, apparently based on a comic book character–the quote comes from a book of his:

“[W]hy in heaven’s name would a woman knowingly name her son after a comic strip whose chief activity was luring respectable fellows out of their homes to drink beer and play cards? Especially given the fact that her husband stayed out night after night, drinking beer and playing cards. There’s an odd one for you.”