A Little Coffee with Your Milk?

How much foreshadowing can a writer indulge in? It's all over the place, but he doesn't seem to be embarrassed one bit. It ain't subtle, that's for sure. Maybe because I know the outcome I'm conscious of more than I would be otherwise, but tone it down, Man!

The Early Chapters

Okay, this is really good. I'm already two hundred pages in, and there's a lot going on. I should have stopped to blog before this, but I'm enjoying it more than I thought I would. I thought the blogging would be a kind of chronicle/journal to help me wade through, but so far I haven't needed much in the way of self-help.

All right, the thing that is the greatest surprise is his humor. My impression of him was that he was going to be unrelentingly morose and heavy, but that's not true at all. He's actually kind of funny, esp. when using Queequeg the barbarian to expose the hypocrises of 19th C. western civilization. Queequeg is the epitome of the direct, open, loving voyager through life, his pagan religious ideas aside for the moment. Melville is having some fun using him to poke at the mores of the "civilized" people around him. I never expected such humor. So points for you, Mr. Melville.

Not that Melville is ant-religion per se: Ishmael speaks of his own deep Presbyterian roots, and one takes that as rather auto-biographical and dearly-held; the character of Father Mapple is as humble and pious as Melville can make him without him becoming caricature, deeply conscious of his own sin and shortcoming, both as a man, and as Man, quaking in recognition of an Almighty God in the heavens. I think Father Mapple's life verse would be "What is Man, that You are mindful of him?" (Ps. 8:4). What seems to matter to Melville is one's earnestness rather than propositional truth. At least, he suggests that even Queegueg is a member of a Universal congregation of Man to which we all belong, when Capt. Bildad challenges Queequeg before allowing him to sign ship's articles.

Another sign that Melville isn't taking himself too, too seriously is the chapter on cetology, where his taxonomy uses Folios, Octavos, and Duo-decimos (the three different sizes for manuscript pages) to categorize whales. But I'm not sure if his definition of a whale as "a spouting fish with a horizontal tail" is meant to be serious or evoke a smile in his contemporary readers. That's the problem reading 150yr-old tongue-in-cheek: we don't have a feel for the pulse of the audience, and much of this kind of humor relies on what is known to be true and what is known to be false in past eras. Methinks he teases, but I'm not sure. I do get the impression, at the very least, that he's poking fun at the naturalists and their contradictory, ever-changing classification schemes; and so it is today with the paleo-anthropologists: the purported "ascent of Man" by incremental links from bi-pedal ancestors is a shifting path, and yesterday's missing link today sits on the top of a trash heap of disproved previous links. Still, they toil. Still, they call every biped "hommo." Still, they create whole villages out of a jawbone or a single tooth, with the help of "artists' conceptions." If you strip away all but the actual evidence, there is very little to go on. But we dig, and arrange, and hypothesize.

Why I Went a-Whaling

"Call Me Ishmael."

Those three words resound down the corridors of American literature like the voice of the principal calling a student into his office to be confronted with an unpleasant truth. Like the whale itself, this tome is out there, under the surface, malignant, stealthy, and to be avoided if at all possible. After all, there's so much of the sea that is navigable: we don't have to go courting the behemoth, hurling our tiny intellectual harpoons at its leathery hide (unless you've bought paperback), all the while fearing in your heart that they will bounce off as so many toothpicks, and that it will swim on, primal, unassailable, indifferent to us.

Well, that's the way I've always felt. I wrote that I picked this up when I was twelve ("Quite a reader, that boy"), and I remember being interested the way a child is interested in an antique shop: curiosity keeps him going, the novelty of the experience sustains him for a while; but ultimately, there needs to be a car crash, er, pay-off somewhere, and this plot just doesn't do any paying off for about eight hundred pages: building suspense and developing character and grappling with our place in the Universe can't carry a kid's interest by themselves. So I bailed out on it, and returned to the comfort of Bradbury and Asimov: a different captain, a different ship, and a different whale.

I threw myself upon Moby-Dick, and he tore my leg off and spit me out. But I knew I'd be back someday to hunt him down.

That is how this book became one that I have always thought I should read, if I'm going to be a good disciple. It's on The List: in terms of American literature, arguably it heads The List, but there are so many other ShouldReads that can we can play with: Twain, and Poe, and Faulkner, and that's all 19th C., which is the ground we're treading here. I'm not even going back to Cooper and his ilk. It's so much easier to laconically float down Ole Miss on a raft wth Jim while someone on shore plays a banjo than it is to roam the Indian Ocean wth Queequeg, deck pitching, spray in your face: it's work, Man. Work, I tell you!

So that was my attitude when I cracked open the cover thrity-five years later. And I'm surprised.

Melville (oh! the dark clouds that appear on the horizon at the mere intoning of that name!) can be vague and oblique, but no more so than Poe, and I teach that to sixteen-year-olds. He's not impenetrable, just metaphysical at times, but that's the age he lives in, so I shan't fault him for that. And it's a sign of a high intellect, it is. I can't be afraid to stand in the penumbra of his radiance for fear of being blinded. I have to walk out into the full blaze of his Melville-ness, and if I am burned, I will have the comfort of knowing that the redness will soon suffuse into a smooth even tan.

You can praise all your Moderns and Post-Moderns, but how sturdy is the house built on a bad foundation? I'm down in the cellar, shoring up the foundaton.

Blogging Moby-Dick

Dived into this when I was 12, but only made it through 100 pages or so. It's been lurking out there since then, like the white whale himself, daring me to pursue. So call me Ishmael & here I go.

Apologies to Conrad

Teaching writing is hard. And I hate reading papers, esp. demand writing, because I always become frustrated at the low skill level of students. The flights of logic I can understand, the grappling with meaning I have sympathy for; but their refusal to absorb the correct usage of the English language is frustrating.

I go over and over this stuff, but their patterns are stuck in their heads, and they fall back on them time and time again. Lack of agreement, no attempts at subordination, and the ubiquitous "they" when speaking of individuals. I want to scream, so I come here.

Our language use is not like our math use. The one is personal and part of our self-identities, the other is not. Even if we don't get our sums right, we all agree that there is a right answer, that we've made a mistake somewhere, and that it will never do to just keep going on adding together one and two and getting five. But language is not the same: the patterns of usage, our own idiolect, is so deeply ingrained in us that it is difficult to wholly and completely accept that how we use English is wrong and needs to be corrected before it is right. We think we're not so bad.

I have to re-design my content and come back to basic writing skills more and more often; I have to emphasize that the way they use language is not merely a matter of style, but that there is a matter of correctness that has nothing to do with style. It can by a stylistic feature to depart from standard usage, but the writer/speaker must know he's doing it in order to control it. And they don't know. Their non-standard usage is so ingrained in them that they will try to correct my standard English with their bastardized version, that they think is right. The irony, the horror.

Job security, I guess. Sigh…