Why not do a group read of THE great American novel? Moby-Dick?

[Joe Allonby]

The owners, captain, and sailors of the Pequod are not noble warriors
sailing against a national enemy. They are merchants seeking profit from
industry. There is adventure in that. Their foes are a mighty force of
nature itself and their leader's destructive obsession. There seems to be
something very American in those concepts to me.




On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 7:55 AM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:

> Why is Moby-Dick a Great American Novel? Honest question. I've never
> understood it as a novel that grapples with the Americanness of
> America the way so many other novels try to. The way M&D does, or so
> many of the others you list do. Moby-D is a frickin' GREAT novel
> written by an American. If I were one for leaderboards, I'd call it
> one of the greatest books ever written. But it's about the human
> condition as a crisis between epistemologies and ontologies, not what
> it means to be American, right?  But, not being an American, I may be
> missing something.
>
> And while I'd love a group read, we got about a quarter of the way
> through the last novel written by the feller we're all subscribed here
> for. The IV read at least managed to limp across the finish line; the
> AtD was a long march that lost many good soldiers by the way. None of
> this is a reflection on the books, just on the world of digital
> disengagement in which the Pynchon List is a Web 1.0 relic. We've been
> offered too many mindless pleasures to engage in the kind of deep and
> ongoing group read these volumes merit.
>
> Prove me wrong, kids, prove me wrong.
>
> On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 9:36 PM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Traditionally, though, the typical GAN candidate requires heft, range,
> > verisimilitude, and--lest we forget--popularity. While beautifully
> > written and constructed, both William Gaddis's demanding The
> > Recognitions and Peter Matthiessen's Faulknerian Shadow Country have
> > failed to drum up a widespread readership. Thomas Pynchon's Mason &
> > Dixon is, by most measures, a better attempt at a GAN than Gravity's
> > Rainbow, but the latter boasts a hundred times as many fans.
> > Similarly, works on the margin, no matter how fine or insightful about
> > American life, seldom make the grade. One could argue strong cases for
> > the GANship of John Crowley's Little, Big; John Sladek's Roderick, or,
> > The Education of a Young Machine; Thomas Berger's Little Big Man; or,
> > with just a slight stretch, Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My
> > Lovely--but, even now, they all remain tainted with the dread word
> > "genre." Yet if Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind can be proposed
> > for GAN honors, why not Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged? Not that I'm doing
> > so, by the way.
> >
> > http://www.vqronline.org/big-read-can-single-book-sum-nation
> >
> > On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 7:35 AM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >> Only problem is with the idea of the great American novel, a concept
> >> that has, if nothing else, made for pulp and grist to/for/from the
> >> mill, but it's difficult to dismiss Melville's great white whale as
> >> candidate, and for Pynchon fans, in the world of great books,
> >> Moby-Dick or The Whale is a great influence. The common whiteness
> >> theme alone needs further development, and, as Melville's monstrosity
> >> gained critical mass when the excesses of market capitalism capsized
> >> the nation and the world's economy, it's seem a revisiting Melville
> >> now makes much ado of something, though what that something is has yet
> >> to be defined, though some will name it and paint it in clear shades
> >> of blackness, it seems so  like the mysterious whale itself that
> >> smashes down on the masts of industry and greed, then suck all down in
> >> a Vortex to the bottomless perdition where God's foot weaves the
> >> tapestry, the mantle of Varo's Earth.
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
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