human dog metaphors (2)

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

I simply want to note the use of
dog metaphors in Pynchon, Grass, and Melville and provide
some personal observations.

His Majesty was forced at last to proclaim martial law, and
actually hunted and shot with his own hand several of his
rebellious subjects, who, with most questionable intentions,
had clandestinely camped in the interior, whence they stole
by night, to prowl barefooted on tiptoe round the precincts
of the lava-palace. It is to be remarked, however, that
prior to such stern proceedings, the more reliable men had
been judiciously picked out for an infantry body-guard,
subordinate to the cavalry body-guard of dogs... The human
part of the life-guard was now disbanded, and set to work
cultivating the soil, and raising potatoes; the regular army
now solely consisting of the dog-regiment. These, as I have
heard, were of a singularly ferocious character, though by
severe training rendered docile to their master
He marched
against them with all his dogs. A deadly battle ensued upon
the beach. It raged for three hours, the dogs fighting with
determined valor, and the sailors reckless of everything but
victory.

H. Melville --The Encantadas or Enchanted Isles, Sketch
Seventh. “Charles’s Isle and the Dog-King.”

http://www.melville.org/encant.htm

Las Encantadas, The Enchanted Isles, was the first name
bestowed on the Galapagos by Tomas de Berlanger, Bishop of
Panama. In 1841, Herman Melville visited the islands. In
this brief sketch, Melville, employs what is otherwise a
shopworn metaphor (dogs as men or men as dogs) ingeniously,
to create paradoxical contradictions. In Melville’s Satires,
allegory dissolves into narrative irony and metaphor into
metonymy. To play the “Confidence Game,” Melville reached
into an old bag of tricks. Thomas Pynchon has his hand in
that bag now and is making superior use of it. Before
examining some of the contents of that old bag of tricks, I
would like to consider why Melville played the Confidence
Game, and how it affected his writing.

>From Palmeri’s ‘Satire In Narrative,’ “Philanthropist,
Misanthropist, and the Excluded Middle”

If Melville is the least successful of the works studied
here in designing a space outside existing paradigms of
meaning and value, perhaps that is because less distance
separates opposite perspectives in [The Confidence-Man]. The
lack of a sharp opposition between Christianity and capital,
between confidence-men and cynics, and between the
Cosmopolitan and the Indian-hater makes it difficult for
Melville to locate an alternative between competing
paradigms. Melville levels the two terms in each of these
pairs and demonstrates that each depends on its
complementary opposite. Yet all positions appear as aspects
of a comprehensive paradigm whose contours Melville can
describe, but beyond which he finds it impossible to
proceed.
A century later Pynchon proceeds further to depict a
free-floating paranoia as a product of the interest that
international capital has in controlling the production and
marketing of information, opinions, and goods and services.
In The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon proves more capable of
parodying and juxtaposing accepted narrative modes in order
to find a space of understanding between or outside official
systems of meaning. Pynchon’s pursuit of this satiric
strategy leads his narrative to a vision of an open-ended,
seriocomic apocalypse that is less embittered and less
isolated than Melville’s.

Why does Palmeri characterize Melville’s vision as
embittered and isolated? I did not attend the recent
Melville conference in Mystic, but I had a dream that
Melville’s ghost, like Woody Allen’s Mother in Oedipus
Wrecks, was floating above Mystic Connecticut like a balloon
with a grievance. Most people who read Moby Dick or Bill
Budd have no idea that one of America’s most cherished and
celebrated authors was a failure. That, although he was a
prolific writer (with the exception of Billy Budd, all of
Melville’s known prose fiction was written in an amazingly
short period of time) he was deeply troubled by financial
failures and the rejection of his art. After the failures of
Moby Dick and Pierre Melville attempted to change careers,
this too failed. Melville decided to write differently. He
would conform his fiction, on the surface at least, to
please the critics and the proprieties and ideological
beliefs of his readers. He would be careful, so as not to
openly challenge the moral, philosophical and aesthetic
values of the times. So Melville reached into an old bag of
tricks and played the Confidence Game. He knew that he could
not sell his books unless he appealed to the optimistic
beliefs of his puritanical, literal minded audience.
Therefore, he developed narrative techniques to conceal the
dark “mortally intolerable truth.” Melville’s fiction turned
black beneath a rich naturalistic surface. He began writing
complex ironic tales, and developed elaborate patterns of
imagery and subversive symbolism.  He experimented with the
complex relationships among narrative form, epistemology and
vision, unreliable narrators, and limited omniscient
narrators. He engaged the reader in detective work and toyed
with the mechanics of perception. He used sexual and
excremental puns and set up jokes directed at the reader’s
prudish idealism. He satirized every institution under the
sun and especially the conflation of Christianity and
Commerce, he scattered allusions and insults throughout his
texts. His confidence-man satirizes the social, political,
and economic systems of America. He modeled sympathetic
characters after Milton’s Satan. He incorporated other
Satires and Satirists into his stories. The literal minded
reader of the day was tricked into thinking he is reading an
allegorical tale that would confirm his American idealism,
but Melville’s satire reveals the war, the never ending war,
of men hunting men. Most of his characters lack depth and
are identifiable only as what they do in the war or in the
market or in the institution or are understood by the
complex allusions wrapped around their names. Men become
dogs, snakes, or fantastic shape shifters. I have no doubt
that Pynchon was highly influenced by Melville and that
Melville’s Confidence-Man is the clearest example of his
debt to his mentor. A confidence man takes advantage of the
increased need for trust in strangers as folks move to
cities. In America they pulled hoaxes as imposters, ripped
people off with fraudulent land deals, and used multiple
phony identities to trick people out of money. No
institution escaped the bitter ink poured from Melville’s
satirical pen—stock markets, labor markets, book markets,
healthcare, religion, philanthropy, governments, schools.
Melville would expose any hypocrisy and pull back the layers
of social veneer to reveal the truth no one wanted to hear,
like Racism on every corner, north, and south. The sacred is
profane and the profane sacred, Christ is the prototypical
confidence man. Characters are broken, scattered and
shattered, or crippled or blind or DODGS.
Oh yes, the dogs. In  The Confidence-Man the misanthropic
skeptics are associated with dogs, “since that is the name
for the philosophy of Diogenes and his followers comes from
the Greek for “dog.” But at least two of the operators also
share strong association with dogs: Black Guinea, because of
his canine fawning and insinuating. Thus, if the skeptics
are dog-like in their cynicism, the operators are canine in
their simpering approaches to their potential victims. The
word “dog” carries a comparable range of meaning in Timons
of Athens, according to William Empson, as a designation for
fawning courtiers at one extreme an snarling cynics at the
other. Melville’s text crosses literal and figurative
meanings by disturbing canine characteristics to both the
cynics and their antagonists, the con men. Now, I will
return to Melville’s “The Encantadas or Enchanted Isles,
Sketch Seventh. “Charles’s Isle and the Dog-King.”
http://www.melville.org/encant.htm

“I see books more as time bombs: once detached from the
author, they explode in the reader’s head.”
       --Gunter Grass, “Doblin, My Teacher”

We will notice many if the elements I have discussed and
others that invites comparison between these two writers.
The narrator was told this story by some on else; he cannot
even remember the name of the most important person in the
story. We have to look it up, check it out.  There is lots
of what Pynchon calls the strategy of transfer here.
Political, historical, even personal allusions that explode
in our minds as we read and look things up and take note of
how Pynchon and Melville and as I will discuss Grass and
Doblin shift and warp time and space to their purpose.

“There are books that open doors for their readers, doors in
the head, doors whose existence they had not previously
suspected.”
 --Salman Rushdie, Introduction to “Gunter Grass On Writing
And Politics 1967-1983”

BUT:

“Anyone who becomes involved with him and his mythical,
real, or visionary forests is ultimately in danger of
getting lost in a jungle wet, sweating, luxuriant trees, of
losing the author among books and theories that strive to
cancel out and refute one another.”
   G. Grass