NP Melville has never looked better

[Cat Hamilton]

This is one of my professors and he's great!  Nice to see him being quoted 
on this list.

--Cat

>From: Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
>To: "pynchon-l at waste.org" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: Re: NP Melville has never looked better
>Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2001 14:37:03 -0400
>
>Melville Has Never Looked Better
>
>By ANDREW DELBANCO
>
>NY Times Books
>
>In our own moment of horror
>and heroism, it is a book more
>salient than ever -- unflinchingly
>honest about the human capacity for hate and brutality, yet
>filled with an undiscourageable love of humanity. In its own
>day, it was received by many critics as a half-mad rant.
>
>According to a failed and now forgotten novelist, Henry F.
>Chorley, chief critic of The Athenaeum in London, ''Mr.
>Melville has to thank himself only if his horrors and his heroics
>are flung aside by the general reader, as so much trash
>belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature.''
>
>Initially, their tale is told by a young sailor
>named Ishmael -- a close relative of the sailor boys who had
>been in charge of Melville's previous books -- but the
>first-person narrative soon fractures into multiple voices
>contending with each other as if taking turns in a stage play.
>Littered with truncated episodes that Melville left in the final
>text as tantalizing fragments of what might have been,
>''Moby-Dick'' is a restlessly experimental book -- by turns
>playful, ironic, somber and uproariously funny, sometimes
>dropping into bawdy comedy, sometimes soaring into
>soliloquies worthy of ''King Lear.'' One of its themes is the
>overwhelming improvisational power of its author.
>
>Long before Joyce or
>Woolf made their formal innovations, here was a writer who
>jumped from omniscient to first-person to choral narration, who
>mixed the proper speech of well-bred officers with the obscene
>songs of illiterate sailors and, anticipating the modernist
>technique of stream-of-consciousness, wrote of repressed
>memory and sublimated desire as forces of the unconscious. By
>rendering in meticulous detail the art and craft of whaling, he
>paid homage to ordinary men engaged under duress in the
>dangerous work of cutting up majestic animals into
>commodities. Yet he also satisfied the human craving for an
>allegorical dimension to life -- for finding large meanings in
>small quotidian events -- without resting those meanings on
>religious beliefs that had become implausible already in his day.
>For modern readers, ''Moby-Dick'' forecast the future in which
>they found themselves living. Melville took as his subject the
>first international industry dominated by the United States, and
>thereby bore witness to the ''manifest destiny'' of a nation just
>beginning during his lifetime to grow from a continental into a
>world power. In recounting the love between an American boy
>(Ishmael) and a tattooed cannibal (Queequeg), he intimated,
>long before it was common to think so, that human sexuality
>ranges freely along a continuum of desire and cannot be
>contained within established norms. In his grisly account of the
>business of killing whales, he anticipated today's
>environmentalist indignation at people who have a purely
>instrumental relation to nature; but he also treated all pieties and
>pietists with proto-postmodern irony -- as when he asks, ''With
>what quill did the Secretary of the Society for the Suppression
>of Cruelty to Ganders formerly indite his circulars?'' And with
>eerie prescience, he foresaw in ''Moby-Dick'' the most
>gruesome phenomenon of modern times -- of which we have
>been so terribly reminded by recent events -- how a demagogue
>can fuse his personal need for vengeance with the popular will
>by promising his followers a huntable enemy in which evil was
>''made practically assailable.''


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