NP MD

[Terrance]

Scuffling wrote:
> 
> That's Moby Dick!
> Has anything  been made of M&D/MD? I don't know if this account had been
> mentioned before on the P-List, but:
> 
> November 20, 1820: Whaling ship "Essex" attacked and destroyed by a whale
> 
> The whaling ship "Essex" sailed from Nantucket, Massachusetts to hunt
> for whales in the South Pacific.  On November 20, 1820, the prey
> turned hunter and the ship was attacked by an enraged whale, which
> rammed the ship twice and destroyed it.  The crewmen set off in three
> open boats, hoping to reach the west coast of South America, over
> 2,000 miles away.  Only eight of the twenty sailors from the Essex
> survived the desperate voyage, one of which published an account of
> the Essex tragedy.  That account was the basis for the final chapter
> of Herman Melville's novel "Moby Dick", in which a whaling ship is
> rammed and sunk by a White Wale.
> 
> An account of the whale's attack on the Essex:
> http://ucs.orst.edu/~gildenj/coffin/owencoffin.html
> 
> AsB4,
> 
> Henry Mu



Just a note, Herman Melville had a habit of covertly
satirizing the authors of the books, articles, accounts,
biographies, etc., that he most shamelessly plundered.
Moby-Dick,  Confidence-Man,  and all of Melville's works,
his books, letters, his sox and his shoes have been studied
by critics. The subtle, often ironic and parodic ways in
which Melville incorporates the works, lives, ideas, etc. 
of others into his fiction has much in common with the
methods of Thomas Pynchon. Here in V., we see that Thomas
Pynchon has a lot more in common with Melville than critics
have noted. While reading these first three chapters note
that Pynchon is not only making use of the "texts" of
Graves, Adams, Eliot, Frazer, Nabokov, Charles Lutwidge
Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), De Rougemont, Baedeker, Freud,
Jung, Ornette Coleman and the Downbeat Magazines, Kerouac,
Machiavelli, Rand, Dante, Plato, Augustine, Old and New
Testament heroes and gods, Wittgenstein, Weber, Shakespeare,
Detective and Espionage fiction, and so on and so on, ( a
very good study is Cowart, David,  Thomas Pynchon: The Art
of Allusion Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1980) like Melville he often satirizes the author's
themselves,  making jokes, again like Melville, often
blasphemous or in "bad taste", about their sexual
proclivities, politics, religious or scientific or social
scientific beliefs, literary or other relations, aesthetics,
etc. 

In the end we should question what all of these
extra textual facts, biographies, histories, and so forth 
tell us about the fictions and how they have been written
and read.  

In my opinion, for both Melville and Pynchon, these things
alone simply don't tell us a hell of a lot. It does tell us
that both authors have, at least as part of their target
audience, a critical, intelligent, scholarly reader 

(even if this reader is mocked, as Modernism is mocked in
Pynchon and American Literature mocked in Melville, the
scholarly reader
deliberately overwhelmed by the pedantic use of ideas,
language, etc., one of the essential elements of the type of
satire both men have written).  

However, the critical industries discovery of the source or
sources of what may be a critical chapter in their
respective texts, even when this chapter can be
deconstructed or shown to be palimpsest or a touched up copy
of the original, once integrated and amalgamated into the
texts take on a life completely independent of their
sources.

PS in The Confidence-Man Melville, in part, plays on the
protracted 18th century argument about human nature--
Hobbesian cynicism against Shaftesburyean (shows up in M&D I
believe)  benevolism, this debate of course was an important
structural device (satire/sentiment) of English picaresque
fiction. Of course, like Pynchon's V., Melville's C-M is not
picaresque fiction, it's Genre is and always will be I think
a matter of debate, but it is clearly satire (MS I'd say)
and it subsumes a whole bunch of genres including
picaresque.