Author: Daryl L. L. Houston

Vignettes

Daryl L. L. Houston3 Comments

I have a lot of things I want to write about this week but not a lot of time to do it in, so I’m resorting to little vignettes or teasers.

Prophecy.

There’s a lot of prophecy in Moby-Dick, isn’t there? We start, of course, with Jonah, a reluctant prophet whose fate in the belly of the whale is certainly relevant to the text. Then Peleg mentions (in “The Ship”) an old squaw named Tistig who said that Ahab’s name would be prophetic. The Biblical Ahab was counted a vile king, and Elijah prophesied that the dogs would lick his blood upon his death. This leads nicely into the chapter entitled “The Prophet,” in which a prophet named Elijah has vague, foreboding things to say to Ishmael and Queequeg about the Ahab of Moby-Dick. In chapter 37 (“Sunset”), Ahab soliloquizes about the prophecy that he would lose a limb, and then he himself prophesies that he’ll dismember his dismemberer, planning to become (in a typical Ahabian bit of hubris) “the prophet and the fulfiller one.” In another soliloquy two chapters later, Stubb mentions prophecy and predestination (not so much religious predestination as fate, I think) with respect to Ahab. In “The Mat-Maker,” as Ishmael ruminates on a great big Homeric conceit about fate while weaving a mat with Queequeg, he describes Tashtego (aloft in the rigging with an eye for whales) as seeming a “prophet or seer beholding the shadows of Fate.” We meet another prophet on the Jeroboam who suggests that his (the prophet’s) crew not lower for Moby Dick; when they do, the mate is killed by the beast. This is one of many ominous signs that fairly scream to Ahab and crew to turn away from the vengeful business at hand. In “The Virgin,” Melville quotes from a bit in the book of Job about the leviathan and then mentions the prophets. More about this in the next vignette. Ishmael says that Pip’s misadventure in the deep “ended in providing the sometimes madly merry and predestinated craft with a living and ever accompanying prophecy of whatever shattered sequel might prove her own.”  We learn during the chapter about Queequeg’s coffin that his tattoos relate a theory of heaven and earth as given by a prophet of Queequeg’s tribe. There are other references to prophets here and there but none so interesting as the ones I’ve listed. There’s an important one coming up in chapter 117.

If I had more time, I’d ponder the relationship between fate and prophecy and how that relationship bears on the matter of finding meaning in suffering (which I wrote about before and which I think is another thing central to the book).

Lines

There are miles and miles of line in Moby-Dick, most notably the rigging and ropes for fixing your boat to a whale. There’s the monkey rope. There are the strands of material woven into a mat that serves as a nice model for how Ishmael conceives of fate and will. These opposing ideas are key ideas in the book, and Melville handles them from a number of angles, from philosophical meditations and epic similes on the topic to examples of mutiny (or near-mutiny) that seem to me to represent a loss of (or reclaiming of) free will. The monkey rope chapter illustrates how inextricably linked we are to others (an argument against any fully intact will, I think). This idea meshes very well, I think, with the circumstance of being fixed to a sounding fish. I mention above the reference to Job. Melville gives us this as the boats are chasing and have fixed to a whale that the Virgin has missed. A lengthy quote is unavoidable:

As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down into its eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan or cry of any sort, nay, not so much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its depths; what landsman would have thought, that beneath all that silence and placidity, the utmost monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in agony! Not eight inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows. Seems it credible that by three such thin threads the great Leviathan was suspended like the big weight to an eight day clock. Suspended? and to what? To three bits of board. Is this the creature of whom it was once so triumphantly said–“Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish-spears? The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold, the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon: he esteemeth iron as straw; the arrow cannot make him flee; darts are counted as stubble; he laugheth at the shaking of a spear!” This the creature? this he? Oh! that unfulfilments should follow the prophets. For with the strength of a thousand thighs in his tail, Leviathan had run his head under the mountains of the sea, to hide him from the Pequod’s fish-spears!

What an image! These guys are just sitting there on the still sea with no real idea what’s going on at the end of this rope they’re attached to. The whale could come up and stave their boats or roll over top of them, and though they’ve gotten themselves into the situation by fixing themselves to the whale, their fate after the fact is utterly out of their hands. The same can be said of how the men on the ship fixed themselves to Ahab. (Can probably be said, to some degree or another, of any choice we ever make.)

Blackness of Darkness

This phrase appears two times in Moby-Dick. It’s a striking, redundant-seeming phrase that stands in stark contrast to the whiteness of the whale, which Melville goes at length to position as a thing of terror itself. The relevant passages:

It seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred black faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a black Angel of Doom was beating a book in a pulpit. It was a negro church; and the preacher’s text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there. Ha, Ishmael, muttered I, backing out, Wretched entertainment at the sign of ‘The Trap!’

And:

then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.

There’s an interesting note here on the origin of the phrase (either Carlyle or Jonathan Edwards). Though that article says there’s no scriptural source for the quote, I find that the King James version of the Bible uses the phrase in Jude 1. I don’t have much in the way of analysis of this. It’s merely a striking phrase, repeated.

Mountains

And finally, an intratextual similarity of image that I’m surely not the first among this group to have noticed but that I wanted to bring up anyway. The first occurrence we find in “The Try-Works.” Ishmael has fallen asleep at his post and has managed to turn himself around. He’s confused and terrified for a moment before he gets his bearings. From a Biblical consideration of this event, he derives the pretty heavy statement that “there is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness,” and then he goes on to describe an eagle flying in the mountains. Even when at his lowest, that eagle, by virtue of being in the mountains, still flies higher than the highest among those not in the mountains. Such, I suppose, is the wisdom — or perhaps rather the woe — of Ahab.

In “The Doubloon,” we have this interesting presentation of people watching people watching people talk to themselves about the doubloon Ahab has nailed to the mast. Ahab sees in the mountains pictured on the coin his own firmness, courage, and victorious spirit. He sees himself in the gold coin. Starbuck, by contrast, marks the valleys and sees the peaks not as the expression of human achievement or virtue but as the Trinity. The coin is not a mirror in which one sees himself, to Starbuck, but is rather a beacon radiating the sweet solace of God (and its absence from those seeking solace in the wrong place). Both men regard the image sadly.

Ulysses

Daryl L. L. Houston17 Comments

Happy Bloomsday! For any who may have missed my prior brief announcement, the next book queued up for a group read here at Infinite Zombies is Ulysses. It’s a book I’ve started and stopped several times, and so from an Infinite Summer/Zombies standpoint, it represents the first book for me in the true spirit of the original program. It’s one I should have read but have never managed. It’s one I just can’t lug myself up the hill of. It’s one I’m still not sure I’ll be able to get through, even with the help of insightful commentary and cheerleading. With the exception of the (by comparison) light reading of Dracula, I had read and enjoyed all the other books we’ve covered to date. Two of them are among my very favorites. So, a year late, I’m finally taking on a book that represents a known and almost dreaded challenge rather than a reread of a loved thing.

Because I think I’m ill-suited to provide adequate context and background for the book, I’ve asked someone else to coordinate this read. I know Judd Staley because we share an interest in the work of David Foster Wallace. Judd comments with some frequency on the wallace-l discussion list, and he was one of the coordinators of this past November’s Footnotes conference devoted to Wallace’s work. When I measured the temperature of wallace-l a few months ago regarding the possibility of a Ulysses read, he enthusiastically expressed an interest, and when I put out a specific call for help more recently, he answered. A doctoral student working on 19th and 20th century fiction, narrative theory, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, affect, Joyce, and Wallace, Judd was a presenter at the 2009 North American James Joyce Conference, and he’s active in the James Joyce Society of New York. So we’re in good hands.

As we wrap up Moby-Dick, you’ll begin seeing overlapping posts from Judd preparing us for Ulysses. He’ll provide information about differences among the varying editions of Ulysses (if you’re in a rush to buy yours, read the bottom of this, but know that Judd will add some color soon), make suggestions regarding supplemental materials, and provide some literary background. Several of us who have blogged other books here at IZ will continue to write about our reading experience.

Just as we leaped straightway into Moby-Dick after finishing up 2666, we’re not taking much of a break before starting Ulysses. The date by which you’ll want to have finished the first chunk of reading is July 12, and this will be an eight-week read.  Ulysses has no clearly marked chapter breaks but is divided up informally into episodes (about which presumably more later). This will be something of a pain to track across multiple editions. The weekly assignments and approximate page counts will be as follows:

July 12: Episodes 1-3 (~40 pages)
July 19: Eps 4-6 (~50 pages)
July 26: Eps. 7-9 (~80 pages)
August 2: Eps. 10-12 (~ 100 pages)
August 9: Eps. 13 & 14 (~65 pages; ep. 14 is where a lot of people give up)
August 16: Ep. 15 (~150 pages, but it’s a play, so there’s not that many words per page)
August 23: Eps 16 & 17 (~100 pages)
August 30: Ep. 18 (~35 pages of unpunctuated monologue)

I do hope you’ll join in.

The Two Moby-Dicks

Daryl L. L. Houston2 Comments

In my preparation for this group read, I ran across a number of references to an article entitled “The Two Moby-Dicks.” I have myself mentioned a couple of times in comments that some have proposed multiple modes of composition for Moby-Dick. Only this weekend did I get a chance to sit down and read the whole article (written by George Stewart of UC Berkeley and published in American Literature, Vol. 25, No. 4, Jan. 1954). Stewart posits that there’s an unmissable contrast between the first fifteen or so chapters of Moby-Dick and the rest, and he seeks to investigate by internal evidence (ie, the text itself rather than evidence from what few revelatory letters and other documents exist external to the text) what this unmissable contrast may mean.

I won’t say that I had missed the contrast, but I had surely never articulated it. Looking back on what we’ve read so far, though, it is a pretty stark contrast. The first few chapters have Ishmael and his particular adventures at their heart. We hear his stupid chowder jokes, his weird memory of being punished as a child, a detailed account of his misadventure turned bosom friendship bedding with a cannibal, and so on. But as we make our way deeper into the text, Ishmael becomes more a mouthpiece than a central character. He becomes omniscient, telling us things that the Ishmael of the first few chapters wouldn’t have been able to know. In the first lowering, he seems to be in first one whale boat and then another, so detailed and intimate are the accounts he gives of what the mates are saying. Stewart provides 20 or 25 pages of internal evidence for multiple modes of composition, and many of his arguments are convincing. He suggests that the book be divided into three sections, delineated as follows:

  1. Chapters I – XV. These represent an original story, very slightly revised.
  2. Chapters XVI – XXII. These chapters represent the original story with a certain amount of highly important revision.
  3. Chapters. XXIII – Epilogue. These represent the story as it was written after Melville reconceived it, but may preserve certain passages of the original story, doubtless somewhat revised.

In considering a shift in style as an indicator of the composition shift, Stewart provides a partial answer to one of my questions about ornamentation seemingly for its own sake (“UMD” stands for Ur-Moby-Dick, or the first fifteen chapters; “MD” is section 3 described above):

In style of writing there are great differences between UMD and MD. UMD is plain, even prosy and colloquial. It contains such dialectal expressions as “says I,” “says he,” and “thinks I.” Moreover, these occur not in conversation, but in the narrative itself. These colloquialisms are not characteristic of MD, and are, in fact, wholly lacking, as far as I have observed. In addition, UMD differs from MD by lacking almost entirely the elements of the conventional poetic style of the nineteenth century, ie., the use of thou with the corresponding pronominal and verbal forms, and the use of such devices as apostrophe, personification, and figurative language in general, including the Homeric simile.

He goes on to suggest that though Melville sought in the beginning to provide an account of a shabby whaling voyage, he ultimately needed to amp things up a bit and transform the narrative from a shabby account to something epic. The formal devices Stewart lists above go some of the way toward doing that. So too do the chapters on cetology (Stewart notes that two of these occur near the opening of the third section he enumerates), which give the book more the feeling of a great inquiry than of a simple travelogue. The extracts (I posit) probably contribute to the epic tone as well.

Stewart and others have pointed to a number of details — among them various sudden disappearances and appearances and doublings — that seem to indicate that Melville may have intended to take the story in one direction and wound up taking it in another, with rather shoddy patchwork editing to bind the two stories together. This may also account for some of the problems of narration in the book. Perhaps Melville wasn’t a visionary willfully writing an unreliable narrator but was merely trying to salvage what he could of an original story while finishing his book in a grander mode than originally planned.

The ramifications of the shift with respect to who the hero of the book turns out to be are pretty interesting, and thinking about these ramifications takes me back to Matt Bucher’s post from week one, in which he wrote the following:

Who is the main character of Moby-Dick? Is it Ishmael, Ahab, or the whale? How is Melville playing upon traditional ideas of the hero or the hero’s quest (the odyssey) by having Ishmael appear to be a passive observer throughout much of the book?

Now that we’re well over halfway into the book, I wonder what people would answer to Matt’s question (and I hope I’m not running away here with something Matt had planned to follow up on). I also wonder what people might think (without spoilers) about who the hero of the book might have been, if it turns out (as Stewart suggests) not to have been one of the suspects Matt proposes.

Homeric Simile, Fate, and Will

Daryl L. L. Houston8 Comments

We all know from ninth-grade English that a simile is a comparison of two things joined by the word “like.” But what about a Homeric (or epic) simile? Harmon and Holman define the epic simile in The Handbook to Literature as follows:

An elaborated comparison. The epic simile differs from an ordinary simile in being more involved and ornate, in a conscious imitation of the Homeric manner. The vehicle is developed into an independent aesthetic object, an image that for the moment upstages the tenor with which it is compared.

(The weird terms “tenor” and “vehicle” are basically fancy words for the two parts of the comparison.)

Moby-Dick is full of these suckers, or something like them. In the lengthy example following, I suppose Melville doesn’t use the word “like,” but it’s surely a protracted comparison:

I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat. As I kept passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline between the long yarns of the warp, using my own hand for the shuttle, and as Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid his heavy oaken sword between the threads, and idly looking off upon the water, carelessly and unthinkingly drove home every yarn: I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads. Meantime, Queequeg’s impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be; and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding contrast in the final aspect of the completed fabric; this savage’s sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chance–aye, chance, free will, and necessity–nowise incompatible–all interweavingly working together. The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course–its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events.

I wonder if this is one of those passages that tends to sort of fall through the cracks as people are reading. It’s a short one that, as Paul points out (he’s doing double-duty, posting commentary here and summaries plus brief commentary at his own blog — dude must have a deal with the devil to make time for all he reads and writes), leads into the action-packed first lowering for a whale. But however lost it may be in the transition from peaceful, dreamy work to frenzied action, it weaves together (har har) a number of references in this week’s reading to free will and fate.

Consider Ishmael’s affidavit, given to us after “The Chart,” in which we learn that Ahab is plotting methodically to hunt down Moby Dick (“threading a maze of currents and eddies,” as it turns out). Ahab defies fate, will have his way or else: “therefore it must have been that, in Ahab’s case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own.” The whale himself, Ishmael would have us believe, doesn’t merely strike out at whatever’s in front of it, but has been known to exhibit a sort of will and intelligence.

Later, we read of Ahab’s “precise agency,” but then there’s the hyena chapter, in which something like fate is represented as an “unaccountable old joker.” Radney is described as a predestinated mate, and that Town-Ho chapter seems very much to be about taking your fate (I don’t mean here to equivocate) into your own hands vs. being thrall to the whim of others. Melville makes several Christ references in this same chapter, calling to mind the free-will question, not only in terms of the fact that Christ is said to have been sent to redeem us for original sin (the product of free will) but also because he had to make the choice himself to be brutally crucified. And then of course there is Steelkit’s premeditation to murder Radney, which is taken out of his hands by the very whale that haunts Ahab. Of the events that took place on the Town-Ho, Ishmael says this:

Gentlemen, a strange fatality pervades the whole career of these events, as if verily mapped out before the world itself was charted

We opened this week’s reading with charts, recall, as Melville, also a victim of Moby Dick, charted and planned to impose his will on the whale that dismasted him.

As I’ve encountered a few ornate bits of prose such as this and other epic similes, I’ve found myself wondering why writers include such things when, sometimes, they seem gratuitous. Can it be that the great authors are all self-indulgent? I’ve had cause a time or two to think about the description of Achilles’s shield in The Illiad. Homer takes a long time to describe how the warrior’s shield has been specially decked out by Hephaestus, and it always seemed a bit much, description of ornament merely for the sake of ornament and not so much to move the story along or to enhance the story in some other larger way. (It is by coincidence that Melville himself mentions the shield in this week’s reading, though that coincidence is what makes me bring up the topic of ornament here.)

I’ve wondered if Melville’s not often guilty of the same gratuitous ornamentation. Why so many pictures of whales? Why the silly classification? Why the long bit about chowder? Why the big todo about a woven mat? This last is a lovely conceit, I’ll own, but it has always seemed just kind of dropped in, as do many of the sort of philosophical asides in Moby-Dick. It has taken me many reads culminating in this, apparently closer, read to see how well the mat passage fits within its context, a context that itself fits in very well with much of what is central to the book the book (ie, “meaning”), which I wrote about last week. So the mat episode is in a way a perfect little embellishment perfectly placed, an implicit simile expanded to an epic simile right in the middle of a larger series of events pertaining to the matter the simile addresses, within a book that is very much about that simile’s concern.

Insurgent Summer (and Ulysses)

Daryl L. L. Houston6 Comments

Those who have been following (or playing) along since this blog started up as a splinter of Infinite Summer will no doubt remember another splinter blog, Infinite Tasks. Its author (Jeff) was at times eerily on the mark when writing about his first read of Infinite Jest, and I’ve looked forward to his return to lit blogging since the end of that inaugural summer project. At last he’s back, this time leading a summer read of his own. See his announcement below.

What is this summer’s most radical online project? Insurgent Summer is an online book reading and cooperative blog discussion of Fredy Perlman’s 1976 book Letters of Insurgents. This is a 800+ page book of fictional letters between two Eastern European workers, Yarostan Vochek and Sophia Nachalo, separated by twenty-five years and two continents. As they reconnect through an exchange of letters, we learn about the battles they have fought – physical, political, emotional, and moral – and eventually the ones they have left to fight.

Your reading of Letters will begin on June 11, 2010, with the first of the ten exchanges between Yarostan and Sophia. Each week, three “Guides” (DeAnna, Artnoose, and Andrej) will post discussion pieces, reflections and analysis, preparing the terrain for an engaging discussion to which everyone is invited! We will conclude on August 20, in honor of Fredy Perlman’s birthday!

Though copies of the book are limited, we are happy announce that we have both audio and full-text downloads of Letters of Insurgents available. Insurgent Summer is an opportunity to read one of the most important books of anarchist fiction and morality of all time. Please visit http://insurgentsummer.org/ for more information, and let us know that you’re going to participate!

It’s sure to be an enlightening and fulfilling group read. In fact, I have only two reservations about suggesting that you sign right up. Of course, there’s some overlap with the last half of Moby-Dick, so by advertising this, I’m inviting defection. But I think (hope) people are finding Melville’s book not to be the slog they expected it to be. And if you’re not more or less committed to Moby-Dick by the midpoint, you’re a defection candidate anyway, and I can think of no better endpoint for your defection than Jeff’s reading project. The second reservation pertains to the next Infinite Zombies read, which I’ve been planning but had not announced officially. That read will be Ulysses, starting around July 12, right in the middle (not by design) of Insurgent Summer. I don’t think I have the wherewithal to read both at once, but Jeff says he plans to. Maybe you can too! At any rate, one way or the other, you can go ahead make firm plans to dig into something heavier than Cosmo as we wrap up Moby-Dick.

Meaning

Daryl L. L. Houston8 Comments

To say that Moby-Dick is a book about meaning is probably not a terribly bold statement. I haven’t done a search of the literature, but I’d wager a big bag of M&Ms that there are a dozen or more theses floating around whose titles (or tortuous subtitles) incorporate variants of our book’s title and author and the word “meaning.” During our first week’s reading, I spent some time poking around to find instances of the word (and its kin — it was this effort that resulted in Moby-Diction) and discovered some thirty in the opening sixteen chapters, of which a number of significant instances could be retained after paring off some of the junk. I’ll spare you the rambling set of quotes I had originally planned to pull by way of illustration, but I will offer one, Ishmael, on the appeal of the water:

Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned.

Although one might mark this down as simply a convenient literary reference on Melville’s part, I believe it bears some more scrutiny as it fits into our second week’s chunk of pages. What’s interesting to me isn’t so much the correspondence with certain patterns of narcissism through chapter 41 (not the least of which turns out to be Ahab’s decision to draft a ship and its crew to fulfill his personal vendetta), but the sense Melville’s word choice gives us of a yearning for (I think) understanding where none can in truth be found. In some versions of the Narcissus myth, the youth does reach out and try to grasp his reflection, thereby plunging to his death by drowning. This is a physical grasping. The OED cites usages of “grasp” meaning “to lay hold of with the mind… to comprehend” as far back as 1680. What a tactile definition for such an abstract sense of the word! By choosing this word, Melville imbues the circumstances of this myth with the sense of not only a physical grasping for something but also a mental grasping, as in a search for meaning. Further, it is a search for meaning not within the self but within some dumb, other, obsessed-about thing.

The idea of dumb, other, tormenting things endowed with reason or agency and so a sort of significance or meaning appears again and again in the first 41 chapters of Moby-Dick. The examples I took note of:

  • Ishmael desires to “[find] out what [a] painting meant” in The Spouter Inn.
  • In “The Chapel,” Ishmael meditates on the mind/body distinction as he ponders the ways in which we commemorate the bodies of our dead and seems to settle on the importance of the reason/mind over the body.
  • In “A Bosom Friend,” Ishmael speaks dismissively about Queequeg’s worshipping a piece of wood.
  • Also in “The Ship,” we see Yojo warming himself at the fire.
  • Again in “The Ship,” we’re told of the peculiar ferocity of the particular whale that took Ahab’s leg.
  • Still in “The Ship,” Yojo is credited with agency for having chosen the Pequod for Ishmael and Queequeg.
  • In “The Ramadan,” as Ishmael tries to bust down the door to the room he shares with Queequeg, it “stubbornly resist[s].”
  • Of Starbuck in “Knights and Squires”: “Wherefore he had no fancy for lowering for whales after sun-down; nor for persisting in fighting a fish that too much persisted in fighting him. For, thought Starbuck, I am here in this critical ocean to kill whales for my living, and not to be killed by them for theirs; and that hundreds of men had been so killed Starbuck well knew. What doom was his own father’s? Where, in the bottomless deeps, could he find the torn limbs of his brother?” (He knows that being attacked by a whale is a workplace hazard and not a personal affront, in other words.)
  • Flask, in “Knights and Squires,” is described (tongue-in-cheek, to be fair) as seeming to think that “the great Leviathans had personally and hereditarily affronted him”
  • Stubb’s dream, in “Queen Mab,” revolves around his kicking at an insulting and inamimate pyramid that has kicked him with a dead ivory leg (this pyramid image is later used to link Ahab and the white whale himself).
  • In “The Quarter Deck,” Starbuck cries “Vengeance on a dumb brute that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.”
  • Ahab replies that all things are as pasteboard masks, which must be struck through. And, of Moby Dick: “That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and, be the white whale agent or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.” (Note that the sun is another inanimate thing here given the potential for agency.)
  • In “Moby Dick,” Ishmael reflects on the reported “infernal aforethought of ferocity” of the white whale, and of that directed ferocity’s resulting deaths not “having been inflicted by an unintelligent agent.” To Moby Dick here are attributed “direful wrath” and “seeming malice” and “malicious agencies.” Ahab’s rage is made a thousandfold more potent by its dumb recipient than had he aimed it at “any one reasonable object.”
  • And, finally: “Ahab did not fall down and worship [malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them] like [others]; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.”

There it is again, that word torment. Melville used it in describing the plight of Narcissus. Consider Narcissus and Ahab together: both obsessed; both willing to subvert the desires of those around them to their own obsessions; both reaching physically through a sort of mask; both grasping at a sort of understanding by pursuing a dumb thing (for Narcissus fails to bodily grasp his image but also fails to mentally grasp that it is a mere image and not a reasoning man); both punished (Narcissus literally) by a Nemesis for their hubris.

Starbuck’s admonition in “The Quarter Deck” seems to me to be a central lesson of Melville’s book. I hate, in a way, to look for a pat lesson, but I think it’s there. I can’t be the only person reading who has stubbed a toe only to deliver a retaliatory kick to the dumb thing I stubbed it on, making both the injury and the insult that much worse. It’s a good lesson.

Delbanco puts it rather more philosophically in his biography of Melville (p. 173):

[Ahab] speaks to the human need for finding meaning in suffering, to what he calls the “lower layer” of consciousness from which arises the demand to know if the “inscrutable” whale is the agent of “some unknown but still reasoning thing” that has sent it on its mission or if it is a mindless beast driven by purposeless instinct. To Ahab, we are all prisoners of our metaphysical ignorance about the meaning of our suffering, and so he demands of the dubious Starbuck, “how can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?”

[The speech Ahab gives in answer] is delivered by a man unafraid that meaning itself may prove to be an illusion, yet who is willing to destroy himself and, indeed, his whole world in pursuit of it.”

Delbanco goes on to quote Nietzsche, who suggested that “every sufferer instinctively seeks a cause for his suffering . . . a ‘guilty’ agent who is susceptible to pain.”

I would add to Delbanco and Melville and Nietzsche a near-contemporary of Melville whose own arc as an author rather mirrored our venerable author’s. Here’s Thomas Hardy’s dreary “Hap”:

If but some vengeful god would call to me
  From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
  That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!”	

Then would I bear, and clench myself, and die,
  Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased, too, that a Powerfuller than I
  Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.	

But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
  And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
—Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
  And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan….
  These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

The Whiteboard

Daryl L. L. Houston11 Comments

Since the beginning of my participation in the Infinite Summer and spin-off reads nearly a year ago, I’ve dog-eared books, scribbled dog-legging notes in the margins, and woken up in the middle of the night to frantically scrawl near-illegible paragraphs in a little notebook. I’ve drafted things in Google Docs, written ideas on decade-old receipts I’ve found tucked into books as bookmarks, and, to my children’s great consternation, inked my hand with sudden thoughts when out of reach of paper. But I had never — until last night — resorted to a whiteboard.

My dilemma was one of what felt like an unrein-in-able tendency toward expansiveness. There’s so much good stuff in this opening week’s reading that I wanted to write about it all. But my children need a father, my wife a husband, my employer a sub-sub of a something or other. So, having broken out the whiteboard to draw diagrams for my day job, I allowed myself a great white tabula rasa (Dare I confess how tempting it was to encircle my my notes in the outline of a great sperm whale? Only my howling ineptitude in the fine arts prevented it.) and narrowed the field of topics to thirteen items.

As I started to try to put an essay together, I found myself yearning to be expansive. I was going to head into a very busy weekend attempting to write a monograph or bust. And since I rather suspect there’s going to be a spurt of really intriguing posts early in the week from the other fine folk blogging here, I decided to pull back a little bit and offer instead a brief statement, a quote, and an invitation to ponder the two together as we go forward.

So, the statement. Moby-Dick has always struck me as an old-fashioned text. I’ve written before about how, before I read it, I expected it to be stodgy and dull and humorless. These things it is not, but it does present its share of sort of epic Biblical language (usually from the Quakers). It is highly allusive, and it addresses philosophical or moral questions in often direct ways, with figurative language, surely, but not in ways so hidden in elements of plot and character that sussing out its meanings becomes a puzzle. Melville will come right out and say something like:

And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

I don’t think you often encounter such direct statements in more recent fiction. Authors these days often deliver meaning via things like character development rather than by just coming out and saying things directly as Melville often does. Of course, allegory and symbolism are as old as the hills, and there’s plenty of less-directly conveyed meaning in Moby-Dick as well. Still, something about this mode of writing has always struck me as not at all modern (or Modern).

That was an awfully long statement. Now for the quote (a lengthy one), from Andrew Delbanco’s Melville, which I’m well over halfway into and am enjoying immensely.

Looking back at his labors on Moby-Dick, Melville saw “two books . . . being writ . . . the larger book, and the infinitely better, is for [his] own private shelf. That is, whose unfathomable cravings drink his blood; the other only demands his ink.” Moby-Dick was Melville’s vampire book. It sapped him — but not before he had invented a new kind of writing that, we can now see, anticipated the kind of modernist prose that expresses the author’s stream of consciousness without conscious self-censorship. Melville was aware of this ideal in its incipient Romantic form, having marked approvingly a passage in an essay by William Hazlitt that declares true writing to be “an ebullition of mind,” a “flow of expression” that, by analogy with frescoes, must be executed with fast and free strokes before the wet plaster dries — a burst of inspiration whose “execution is momentary and irrevocable.” Melville was the first American to write with such outrageous freedom. He was the first to understand that if a literary work is to register the improvisational nature of experience, it must be as spontaneous and self-surprising as the human mind itself. Aware, as Freud later puts it, that “in mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish,” Melville also knew that by concealing the existence of earlier versions of his work, he ran the risk of falsifying himself. In this sense, Moby-Dick was like an active archeological site in which the layers of its own history are left deliberately exposed.

So, my old notion of Melville as an amiable if in many ways old-fashioned author is dashed to bits. He’s a pioneer, Delbanco has it, writing in ways that anticipate the sorts of encyclopedic and fractured narratives that have often appealed to me from much more recent authors.

What was your first impression of Melville? Does Moby-Dick have for you an old-fashioned feel or does it (I know we’re only partway through) bear the markings of something newfangled for its time?

A Few More Intros and a Plug

Daryl L. L. Houston1 Comment

I wrote intros for new contributors Matt Bucher and Matt Kish and promptly realized that several who had written for 2666 had never gotten formal introductions. Then another blogger signed up. I hate to lump these together, but I also hate to bombard you with a bunch of short individual intro posts on the eve of the kickoff, a day on which I imagine several posts about the book itself will land. So with apologies to the contributors I may be giving short shrift here, please allow me to introduce the other zombies.

Jeff Anderson is a writer and copy editor; he’s also a quilter, an incessant reader, a sometime musical ambassador to Cuba, and a member of that very exclusive elite: the 150 Jeopardy! contestants who lost to Ken Jennings. Although he wrote about Infinite Jest at his own blog, he started writing for Infinite Zombies as we plunged into 2666, about which he wrote this memorable and defining and pitch-perfect haiku:

I was just thinking,
“You know what else this book needs?
Prison rape with blades”!

Jeff lives in Los Angeles with his husband.

Paul Debraski is a librarian in New Jersey.  But he does not relish your silence…speak out about what you love.  Paul loves his wife and two awesome kids.  Pictures of said kids are littered about the internet but can be seen by following specified links on his blog I Just Read About That, where you’ll find more thoughts about Moby-Dick and all manner of other big books. Paul has been a frequent commenter here at IZ, but this will be his first time blogging here (if you haven’t read his summaries of 2666 at his blog, run — don’t walk — go to take them in).

Joan Sberro has been a part of the Infinite Summer series of readings from the beginning but made her debut as a blogger right here at Infinite Zombies, cutting her teeth, so to speak, by writing a number of posts pertinent to Dracula. Although she was visible in the comments for 2666, she didn’t blog much about it, but she’s enthusiastic about Moby-Dick. And, having swum with the pink porpoises in the Amazon and walked under the great squid model every day on her way to work at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, how could she not be enthusiastic about this sea-faring book? Joan now lives in Orlando and plays Wagner at high volume for her retired greyhounds.

Well, and then there’s me. Just because I’m organizing this thing doesn’t mean anybody knows who I am. I’m Daryl L. L. Houston, and I happened into administering this site after signing up as a “maybe” blogger for Infinite Jest last summer. I wound up writing obsessively and, it sometimes must have seemed, near-daily, and I guess I ran everybody else off. I’m squatting still. A computer programmer and sysadmin by trade, I’m a student at heart. Moby-Dick is one of my all-time favorites, though I’ve enjoyed it largely in a vacuum and so am excited to see what emerges from the discussion here. I live in Knoxville with my wife and two kids.

And now for the plug. When contemplating a post the other night, I wanted to count occurrences of a particular family of words in the first week’s section of reading. Not wanting to reread the whole section and tally the words manually, I fetched the text for free from Project Gutenberg and wrote some code to count the words for me. That effort blossomed into a little project to make it so that I could do the same for any word, and then I decided it might be neat to make it available to any other nuts who’d be interested in that sort of analysis. It makes for a fun few minutes of poking around in the text, in any case. So, for fellow-nuts, I hereby plug Moby-Diction.

Welcome Matt Kish

Daryl L. L. Houston4 Comments

In the very heart of Moby-Dick, Melville dedicates three chapters to artistic representations of whales, with decreasing levels of scorn for the accuracy thereof. He rates them “monstrous,” “less erroneous,” and “true” and then holds forth briefly on artifacts of scrimshaw and the like created by people who actually hunted whales rather than merely painting them based on hearsay.

There is, of course, another type of art — art that is willfully not realistically representative but that nevertheless evokes, expands, and delights. It is this variety of art that Matt Kish creates. Quick to shrug off the title “artist,” Matt has nevertheless begun to accrue a sort of niche fame for his current ongoing project, in which he creates a piece of art a day by illustrating an excerpt from a page a day of Moby-Dick. As he meekly put it in his first blog post about the project on August 6, 2009:

Because I honestly consider Moby-Dick to be the greatest novel ever written, I am now going to create one illustration for every single one of the 552 pages in the Signet Classic paperback edition. I’l try to do one a day, but we’ll see.

A few days later, he landed his first brief interview. By December, he had landed another interview and been invited to be a guest illustrator at quotizzle.com, and he closed the year on the news that one of his illustrations had been the inspiration for a poem at The Storialist. So far this year, he has been interviewed for a couple of German web sites, had his portrait painted by another interviewer (!), and begun making standing-room-only appearances to display his work in Ohio and New York. He fits this all in, of course, around a day job and a schedule of creating a piece of art a day, some of it meticulously detailed and clearly a labor of love and time.

When I found his site a few weeks ago, I immediately flipped back through all the pieces he had done to date, and I’ve been keeping up with great interest ever since. You can imagine how thrilled I was when he agreed to write for Infinite Zombies. Please do yourself a favor and check out his site. I think the perspective he brings — not only that of a great admirer of Melville’s book but that of someone who has paid particular detailed, visual attention to it — will be a great addition to the discussion.