AtD Re-Read

[alice wellintown]

I am re-reading AtD now. Half way through it a second time. I have
been checking the P-L Archives and the AtD Wiki for support and help.
I'm convinced that it's worth the time and effort. Of course, I have
the time to do it now. Come September, I'm back to work; I'm a
one-armed wall-paper hanger.  No interest in any deep reading of
Inherent Vice. I am diving with the Chums.

I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it
takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more; & if he
don't attain the bottom, why, all the lead in Galena can't fashion the
plumet that will. I'm not talking of Mr [Pynchon] now -- but of the
whole corps of thought-divers, that have been diving & coming up again
with bloodshot eyes since the world began.  --Herman Melville's Letter
to Evert Duyckinck, March 3 1849

Henry James, as far as I know, never read Moby-Dick. Had he, we can
expect that he would not have approved of it as he generally did not
approve of the American-Romance. But HJ is more an American-Romantic
writer than his critical essays and his brazen claims about the craft
and art of prose fiction  might lead us to believe; his latter works
are quite experimental and the flicker of machine manners so essential
in Fitzgerald's poetic vision, not to mention those Mid-western
virtues,  is also there in late HJ. Surely, HJ would never abide the
lack of life as it is lived by real flesh and bone people, even those
with black hearts. Surely the lack of continuity, that is the loose
fitted or disjointed connection of scenes, events, and the characters,
and their conscious awareness of the scenes, events and so on ...
would not appeal to James. But the paranoia or self-consciousness of
narrators and characters is akin to what James admired in realist
fiction as "our apprehension and our measure of what happens to us as
social creatures." The American-Romance, even in the age of postmodern
perspectivism and the secular god is dead cultural climate maintains a
"rich passion for extremes," an essential element of the
American-Romance. As are the "intellectual energy" and the deep-diving
profundity. Melville described it in his famous Hawthorne and his
Mosses after reading Hawthorne's tales. He wrote this at the manic and
hysterical heights of composing his masterwork, Moby-Dick. And it this
blackness of darkness that is so present in AtD. And the light. The
work is an intrepid and haunting dialectical vision that hovers on the
edge of determinism and penetrates the gloom with blinding brightness
only to expose a skeptical view of questioning it all.