the Merle center

[Michael Bailey]

hate to borrow from Bill Clinton, because his fund come from the World
Bank and you know those guys are Shylocks...

but it seems to me, you have to define what the word - in this case,
"moral center" - means...

now if alice were posting, I'd need to defend my notion that a certain
amount of subjectivity is ok - even ineluctable - here.
i.e. what am I looking for in a moral center?

Outside the academy, that is.  I'm actually rather conservative in
that respect: if there aren't agreed-upon conventions there, how can
we assign letter grades?  a-and without letter grades, how would
people know what career they want?

but I think you can formulate an individualistic read based on
criteria that you make up for yourself (or more likely, customize some
prefab ones for the purpose) and even write interestingly and possibly
even usefully thereabout.

So, I did Google moral center and skimmed a couple things.  But for my
purposes, the idea here of moral center that I will develop is
actually developed from Merle...

Basically, and this is an enveloping concept sans elaboration (just
throwing it out there), ie stepping back another remove so we have
text -> Merle -> moral center -> what I am looking for when I read AtD
or any novel

and that would be a notion of "what's going on" (in the world, in the
book, in the author's mind)

(actually could step back further but it's already going to be hard to
define moral center and suggest Merle in say 3 more paragraphs in a
post already uncomfortably long)

but this idea of reading to find out what's going on indicates a
liberal turn of mind, that is, I want a chunk of text artfully wrought
by someone of obvious intelligence, in order to ruminate and develop
my own ideas against and further develop my picture of what's going on
by either agreeing or disagreeing (or both) with what the writer is
driving at (goes without saying that trying to figure that out is part
of the fun) --

so, in AtD with its large cast of characters, the appropriate moral
center would be somebody who takes the appropriate position on all the
issues that arise --- the class struggle, revenge, technology, love --
by virtue of who they are...drawing from a blurb on the jacket of a
Camus book (which was the only thing I brought away from that book, I
humbly admit), somebody who impresses me with "the decency of his
impulses."

Merle's jib's cut, methinks, fills the bill.
a) class struggle - early on, the text talks about a professor for
whom Merle works as a lab assistant, referring to him as "his friend".
 Basically, naively, like pacifism, this is the only way to defuse
class hostility and survive -- to consider employers and employees as
friends.
b) revenge - in the absence of justice from the legal system, Merle
provides Frank with a snapshot of Deuce and some good, if obvious,
advice.  Like Lew in this respect, he throws in with the injured
parties to a very limited extent because of his own sense of justice.
c) now Mark has made some telling points w/r/t the destructive aspects
of technology, electric lighting, trains usw, but Merle uses
photography to consort with a naked lady in nature, adapts some retro
tech to make a nice rolling home for himself that travels on his own
timetable, isn't blind to the charms of wood- and herb-craft during
his ginseng gathering, and engages at every step with not just the
trappings of techno-capability but with the concepts behind technical
progress to develop his mind, conversation, friendships...
d) love - like Whitman, there are suggestions that Merle enjoys a
"jolly, bodily life" mostly in his younger days, with a variety of
partners, but he also extends his heart to commit to Erlys when she
needs it, and takes loving care of Dalley until she's grown up enough
to find her own way.  There is more than a suggestion in the book that
love includes the ability to let go, and this too he does when
appropriate.
In sum, Merle is the person in the novel whom I would most like to be.
(which is yet another stipulation for moral center that seems relevant
 To borrow from George Clinton (a more pleasant prospect), he's an
Atomic Dog, he gets up for the downstroke, he gets on the good foot...

addendum: Unfortunately, I'm a bit, well, considerably, more like Lew.
 I didn't start out industrious and make my own way, never looking
back, but instead have had conscience instilled in me gradually by a
series of fortunate associations.