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

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Melville, and here especially (but not only) Moby-Dick, have always 
fascinated political extremists in Germany. Rosa Luxemburg read it in 
prison. Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt read it in 1941 and corresponded 
about its diagnostic significance for modernity as it had revealed 
itself in World War II. And the leftist terrorists from the Rote Arme 
Fraktion, in their high security prison in Stammheim in the 1970s, not 
only studied the novel closely, they also took the names to cover 
certain communications from the authorities: Ahab was - of course - 
Andreas Baader. In the reception of German political extremists, Ahab 
comes off much better than in the average reading. Why? Now, his 
"destructive obsession" does not - as you, Joe, seem to suggest - go 
along with "seeking profits" yet works actually against them. And in his 
gnostic rants one can hear an authentic voice against the pitfalls of 
globalization. Carl Schmitt had an even greater interest in the novella 
Benito Cereno (which I haven't read yet); in the title figure he 
self-apologetically recognized his own fate as a constitutional jurist 
in Nazi Germany. Sounds strange? It definitely is. Here's an article on it:

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/smr/summary/v042/42.2beebee.html

"Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), specialist, as he tells us in the epigraph, 
in public and constitutional law, remains the most controversial figure 
in the history of German legal scholarship, and one of the few 
right-wing intellectuals to continue attracting interest from a variety 
of political spectra (Müller 272). He is also the most literary 
political thinker of the twentieth century, one who allowed myth and 
fiction to shape his ideas about law to create a unique "political 
theology," or, to use Ellen Kennedy's term, a "political expressionism" 
("Politischer Expressionismus" 233–51). Kennedy has also suggested, 
controversially, that Schmitt's thought had a far-reaching influence on 
the theory of the Frankfurt School ("Carl Schmitt"). Nikolaus 
Müller-Scholl suggests that several early plays by Bertolt Brecht were 
meant to exhibit the aporia of state order that Schmitt theorized and 
that led to Nazi totalitarianism (supported by Schmitt at least through 
1936) as its answer. Together with his friend Ernst Jünger, Schmitt read 
the American authors Herman Melville and Edgar Allen Poe as prophets of 
the global situation of World War II and of the postwar period, 
including, as the epigraph points out, the waning of the epoch of 
national sovereignty. Schmitt's student Armin Mohler claims that Schmitt 
cited Herman Melville's novella "Benito Cereno" more than any other work 
of world literature. Mohler states further that the title character of 
the novella "hat C. S. aufs intensivste beschäftigt" (Mohler and Schmitt 
153 n. 74). Two paradoxes accompany these facts: the first is that 
Schmitt, a German nationalist, would use an American piece as his 
personal motto; the second is that, despite his fascination for the 
story, Schmitt never published a complete essay on the novella, as he 
did on Theodor Däubler's /Nordlicht/, Shakespeare's /Hamlet/, and other 
works. Schmitt's reading of "Benito Cereno," or, more accurately, his 
use of "Benito Cereno" as a political and legal allegory and as a 
persona, does not find incorporation into a single treatise, but rather 
emerges indirectly from a series of reflections and diary entries and as 
an influence on Schmitt's treatment of the law of the sea."

In the correspondence with Jünger, Schmitt first writes about Melville 
on 4. 7. 1941 (which, as I now realize while typing this down, was 
independence day). There he ascribes to Melville the power for the 
objective, elementary and concrete situation which, says Schmitt, makes 
Benito Cereno more important than other literature from the 19th 
century, including the great Russians and Poe; and as an epic of the 
sea, Moby-Dick can, according to Schmitt, be compared only to Homer's 
Odyssee; through Melville the sea itself as an element becomes 
comprehensible (which was important for Schmitt's research on the 
genesis of maritime law and its polit-economical meaning): " ... 
Melvilles, dessen unvergleichbare Größe die Kraft zur objektiven, 
elementaren und konkreten SITUATION ist. Benito Cereno ist dadurch 
größer als die Russen und sämtliche andern Erzähler des 19. 
Jahrhunderts, sodass neben ihm auch Poe anekdotisch wirkt [Jünger, whose 
favorite piece of US-literature was Poe's A Descent into the Maelström, 
strongly disagreed. kfl], und Moby Dick ist als Epos des Meeres nur mit 
der Odyssee zu vergleichen. Das Meer als Element ist nur durch Melville 
fassbar zu machen. Ein sehr aktuelles Thema." In the final years of the 
war Schmitt also analyzed the juridical consequences of air warfare and 
came to the conclusion that the Luftkrieg and then the rocket technology 
had dissolved what was left of European international law and that a new 
Nomos of the earth is needed. A screaming comes across the sky ...


On 12.04.2014 15:19, Joe Allonby wrote:
> 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 
> <mailto: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 <mailto: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 <mailto: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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