Not Drugs The Anatomy of Melville's Melancholy (Thoreau: "when men are prepared for it")

[alice wellintown]

You are doing a great job. boyz. Don't listen to that Monroe; he has
no nose for a grave argument and anything too ponderous will break his
other limb.

It's absurd to dismiss a Puritanical reading of the greatest
post-modern Romantic writing in American Eglish. Absurd to knee-jerk
after Doc strikes and kills or to flap about on the decks of the
Pequad like a protected and privleged dolphin caught in  the net of
what Poe called God's conspiracy. Absurd to disregard or dismiss,
withouit serious critical evaluation, the deep and abdiding tradition,
the strain of Puritan and Enlightenment pragamtism, and of
Transcendentalism and Dark Romanticism, that is spun, as from the loom
at the bottom of the sea where only God's foot may push the pedal,
into the fabric of Pynchon's tapestry.

Would that a reader understand not drugs and the foolishness of
youthful experiements that crack and chip away at the indoctrinated
exceptionalisms and predjudicial pedantries of the privleged college
crew who may choose to discover the class issue in their own slow
learner yarns by jolly jack tarrying, wondering in the towers of
scholars, touring the ghetto, chatting with volubtuous feminist, and
reading Resistance to Civil Government or Civil Disobedience

 I heartily accept the motto,—"That government is best which governs
least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and
systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I
believe—"That government is best which governs not at all"; and when
men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which
they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most
governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes,
inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing
army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also
at last be brought against a standing government. The standing army is
only an arm of the standing government. The government itself, which
is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will ,
is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act
through it. Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively
a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for in
the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure.


The British edition, entitled The Whale, had appeared the previous
month, but through a sequence of error, poor judgment and bad timing,
it had a rearranged and incomplete ending. This set off another
sequence of error, poor judgment and bad timing, this time involving
not the publishers but the critics, who looked upon the botched ending
as the last straw in a book already too unusual and obscure. The
upshot was that Melville's masterpiece, the book he was counting on to
rescue his reputation and his finances, was so belittled and slandered
in the crucial first weeks following publication in America that it
never had a chance.

As told in Hershel Parker's monumental biography (two 1000-page
volumes, 1996 & 2002), this turning point in Melville's life had the
shape of Greek tragedy: the confident and euphoric Melville at his
cigar-and-port dinner with Nathaniel Hawthorne on or about publication
day, unaware that the British edition was out, or botched; the British
reviews describing his novel "as so much trash belonging to the worst
school of Bedlam literature" winging their way to Boston by boat that
very minute; the U.S. papers about to quote and re-quote the British
press, showing not just a similar lack of insight but that they had
not read the book, as the American edition was different, and not
botched. The long-term personal and professional impact could not have
been greater: "Taken all in all," writes Parker of Nov. 14, "this was
the happiest day of Melville's life."

Some of those who found Moby-Dick "an absurd book" of "ravings and
scraps" wanted a straight-ahead adventure tale from Melville, such as
his Typee. Tales of a killer sperm whale destroying its attackers were
not commonplace, but in a coincidence that would get any publisher or
author excited, reports of such an event hit the east coast papers
just several weeks before the American publication date. Melville had
in fact based some of his book on a memoir written in 1840 by a
survivor of another such attack, and he seems to have taken his
whale's name from an 1839 magazine article about the capture of "Mocha
Dick," a whale infamous among whalers for its violent attacks -- the
whale getting "Mocha" for having been sighted near that island, and
"Dick" where it might have gotten "Tom" or "Harry." And Melville had
other choices and models, some of whom he invokes in Chapter 45:

. . . Was it not so, O Timor Jack! thou famed leviathan, scarred like
an iceberg, who so long did'st lurk in the Oriental straits of that
name, whose spout was oft seen from the palmy beach of Ombay? Was it
not so, O New Zealand Tom! thou terror of all cruisers that crossed
their wakes in the vicinity of the Tattoo Land? Was it not so, O
Morquan! King of Japan, whose lofty jet they say at times assumed the
semblance of a snow-white cross against the sky? Was it not so, O Don
Miguel! thou Chilian whale, marked like an old tortoise with mystic
hieroglyphics upon the back! In plain prose, here are four whales as
well known to the students of Cetacean History as Marius or Sylla to
the classic scholar.