/lit/ - Literature

>>12590746

But it was Shakespeare who furrowed his soul. He could not believe, he wrote to Evert Duyckinck in February 1849, that he had lived so long without properly reading Shakespeare, who now seemed to him like Jesus: “Ah, he’s full of sermons-on-the-mount, and gentle, aye, almost as Jesus. I take such men to be inspired. I fancy that this moment Shakspeare [sic] in heaven ranks with Gabriel Raphael and Michael. And if another Messiah ever comes twill be in Shakespere’s [sic] person.” He was especially interested in madness and dark truth in Shakespeare.

(…)

During the time that Melville wrote Moby-Dick, he underwent a kind of insanity of metaphor. It was Melville’s love of metaphor that drew him ever further into “Infidel-ideas.” Metaphor, quite literally, bred metaphysics for Melville. His metaphor has a life of its own; it is not only Melville that is “growing,” it is also his language. Melville is the most naturally metaphorical of writers, and one of the very greatest. He saw the inside of the whale’s mouth covered with “a glistening white membrane, glossy as bridal satins”; the spouting jet of the whale made him look like “a portly burgher smoking his pipe of a warm afternoon;” and almost every page of Moby-Dick carries something like this. Melville drew on the example of late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century poetry and prose as naturally as if he were of that age and not a nineteenth-century American. He saw how metaphor domesticates and localizes (the whale as burgher) even as it enlarges. For with metaphor, as Sir Thomas Browne put it in Religio Medici (1642), “there is all Africa and her prodigies in us.”

(…)

>>12590753

Melville had a way of following metaphor and seeing where it led him. He wrote to Duyckinck, offering Mardi for his library, in the hope that it
“may possibly—by some miracle, that is—flower like the aloe, a hundred years hence—or not flower at all, which is more likely by far, for some aloes never flower.”
A year later, writing to Hawthorne, he used an image which has become celebrated:
“I am like one of those seeds taken out of the Egyptian Pyramids, which, after being three thousand years a seed and nothing but a seed, being planted in English soil, it developed itself, grew to greenness, and then fell to mould. So I. Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life.”
Both similes force Melville into dialectic. Having embarked on them, he must follow their life and then their death. His book is like an aloe; but some aloes never flower, and since he has mentioned the flowering of the aloe, he must also mention the aloe’s failure to flower. The second image is more striking, because Melville made this comparison at the very height of his creative fever, while writing Moby-Dick. At this pinnacle, he foresees falling into decline. And why? Because, having likened himself to one of the seeds from the Pyramids, he must follow his own metaphor, and record that these seeds “grew to greenness, and then fell to mould.”
No one is actually forced by metaphor, except a madman. Melville chooses the metaphors that then squeeze their return from him. He knows that the seeds from the Pyramids were not like other seeds, and that they “fell to mould.” But, of all writers, he understood the independent, generative life that comes from likening something to something else. Keats spoke of how language “yeasts and works itself up”—works itself. This was everything to Melville. Pondering Goethe’s advice that one must “Live in the all, and then you will be happy,” he writes: “This ‘all’ feeling ... . You must often have felt it, lying on the grass on a warm summer’s day. Your legs seem to send out shoots into the earth. You hair feels like leaves upon your head. This is the all feeling.” What Melville is crediting here is our power to create new life, a life that exists independently from us. And this is the life of metaphor. You live “in the all” when you feel metaphorical, when you feel that your hair is not your hair but has become leaves, your legs not your legs but growing shoots. And, once they are growing, who can stop them?

>>12590768

The theological implications of Melville’s ravishment by metaphor are immense. Metaphor carries something over, it changes. In his letters and in his fiction, Melville thinks through metaphor, uses it to sway his thought. He ends one letter by saying that he began his letter in a small way, yet “here I have landed in Africa.” Metaphor transports him, and is then called upon to give image to that very transportation. In his note on Milton’s “wanderings in religious belief,” Melville wrote that “he who thinks for himself can never remain of the same mind”—Melville wanders, via metaphor, out of “the same mind” into a different mind, out of sameness into likeness or difference.

His love of metaphor leads Melville marvelously astray, theologically. His “wandering” love of language breaks up his God, and he encourages this; his love of language bribes him against that rival, the Original Author. An example: in Judea, in 1857, Melville was put into a cold trance by the rockiness of the landscape. “Is the desolation of the land the result of the fatal embrace of the Deity?” he asks in his journal. The land, he feels, must have produced the religion: “As the sight of haunted Haddon Hall suggested to Mrs Radcliffe her curdling romances, so I have little doubt, the diabolical landscapes [sic] great part of Judea must have suggested to the Jewish prophets, their terrific theology.” What is terrific is the almost casual blasphemy of the metaphor. Ann Radcliffe wrote Gothic romances. Yet it is because Melville cannot resist the impulse of likeness that he is drawn into comparing biblical theology to a Gothic romance.

Moby-Dick represents the triumph of this atheism of metaphor. Or, perhaps, this polytheism of metaphor. For it is a book in which allegory explodes into a thousand metaphors; a book in which the Puritan habit of reading signs and seeing stable meanings behind them is mocked by an almost grotesque abundance of metaphor. In this book, meaning is mashed up like a pudding. The Godhead is indeed broken into pieces. Truth is kaleidoscopically affronted. The whale, which poor Ahab chases, is likened to everything under the sun, and everything under the moon, too—a portly burgher, an Ottoman, a book, a language, a script, a nation, the Sphinx, the Pyramids. The whale is also Satan and God. The whale is “inscrutable.” It is so full of meanings that it threatens to have no meaning at all, which is the fear that Ishmael confesses to in the celebrated chapter called “The Whiteness of The Whale.” Critics who persist in seeing in Melville an American Gnostic do so because the whale is a demiurge, a bad god. But what, Melville asks, if the whale means nothing? What if, at the very heart of the sarcophagus, there is absolutely nothing?

>>12590777

By late summer, 1851, it was over. The book was done. Parker is right to call Moby-Dick “the most daring and prolonged aesthetic adventure that had ever been conducted in the hemisphere in the English language.” Melville had asked the question: How does an American writer make tragedy worthy of Shakespeare’s without setting the story in the remote past? He answered it by making his novel a historical novel whose epoch is the whale—thousands of years old. As Walter Scott filled his novels with the dust of medieval France or Scotland, with clothes, dates, battles, so Melville filled his book with the clothes, dates and battles of the whale. The whale is a country and an age.

How easily it might not have worked! The power is all verbal. Without the language, the metaphysics would be just grain. Although one remembers the rhapsodies of poetry, one forgets how precise, how grounded, is the language, with what vernacular swing it moves.Melville Americanizes Shakespeare, gives it tilt. Where Shakespeare has an Antony like a dolphin, showing its back above the element it lived in, Melville has a democracy of porpoises, tossing their backs to heaven “like caps in a Fourth of July crowd.” Queequeg, the cannibal, can go anywhere: “Transported to the Indies, his live blood would not spoil like bottled ale.” Not for nothing does Ishmael pray to “the great democratic God.”

Again and again one is thrilled by the teeter of metaphor, watching it almost fail, and then take like a skin graft. There is a mad persistence to this metaphorizing, a fiery pedantry. There is the noise the whale makes, “an enormous wallowing sound as of fifty elephants stirring in their litter”; the harpooners turning their harpoons in the very quick of the beast, and yet delicately, “as if cautiously seeking to feel after some gold watch that the whale might have swallowed.” There is Pip, the little Negro boy, who falls into the water “like a traveler’s trunk ... . Bobbing up and down in the sea, Pip’s ebon head showed like a head of cloves.” There is Ahab’s soul, “a centipede, that moves upon a hundred legs.” And at last, the final chase, the whale sliding like metaphor itself through its fluid of meanings: “on each bright side, the whale shed off enticings.”

>>12590783

This carnival comes to a chill rest in the chapter called “The Whiteness of The Whale.” Here Ishmael asks if it is the whiteness of the whale that torments. For whiteness may signify many things (sanctity, purity, superiority) or it may signify nothing. It “stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation ... . Whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour, and at the same time the concrete of all colours ... a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink ... .” Here, in whiteness, is the end of allegory, and therefore the end of metaphor, and therefore the end of language. It is silence, and it sits in the book like some unnamed sea, ready to suck down all who come upon it.

Moby-Dick is the great dream of mastery over language. But it also represents a terrible struggle with language. For if the terror of the whale, the terror of God, is his inscrutability, then it is language that has partly made him so. Language does not console, is not another religion. It is Melville’s abundance of words that is constantly filling everything with meaning, and emptying it out, too. Language breaks up God, releases us from the one meaning of the predestinating God, but merely makes that God differently inscrutable by flooding it with thousands of meanings. Metaphor insists on relationship, but to compare one thing with another is also to suggest non-relationship, for nothing is ever like anything else. Melville’s metaphors resemble the medieval preference for describing God by His attributes, by indirection. But, when you have done this, you have described God but you have not exactly known Him, and perhaps you have only aggravated the difficulty. Language is a voice that does not help us get any nearer to the silence of God; it is its own voice.

>>12590746
I agree, and anyone wanting to write like him should really read the great essayists of the 16th-19th centuries, Francis Bacon, Thomas Browne, De Quincey, Carlyle, Montaigne, and then along with Shakespeare of course, but he really drew a ton from the prose of the 17th-18th centuries

Cringe. Moby-Dick was genre fiction before genre fiction was even a thing, escapism and power/intelligence fantasy for brainlets.

It's badly written, the author clearly couldn't decide if he was writing a connected or a collected story. The whole thing is at times a mess; full of bad rhetoric, involved syntax, stilted sentiment and incoherent English. While sometimes good, the author has us endure a lot of carelessness and bad taste in his writing, as he is either unable to learn or disdainful of the craft of an artist. Also being an euphoric atheist against organised religion doesn't help.

Worst of all Melville is a master of making you think he's saying something profound, when in reality he's just hanging vague, idea shaped hints around the poor whale. It's clear that he's read up, but also clear that it's all just for show in the annoying pseud fashion. When you read him you might feel like you're thinking, like you're about to discover something important and profound; when in reality there is nothing.

Melville never writes naturally. His sentiment is forced, his wit is forced, and his enthusiasm is forced. It's hard to say what was the real intention of the author, but if you compare the first third of the book with the last, it's clear it's never even been carried out. There is a reason it didn't sell at all, and it should have remained forgotten.

>>12590873
Who are your favorite authors? The ones you think are better than Melville?

>>12590873
>Worst of all Melville is a master of making you think he's saying something profound, when in reality he's just hanging vague, idea shaped hints around the poor whale. It's clear that he's read up, but also clear that it's all just for show in the annoying pseud fashion. When you read him you might feel like you're thinking, like you're about to discover something important and profound; when in reality there is nothing.

see:

>>12590783
>How easily it might not have worked! The power is all verbal. Without the language, the metaphysics would be just grain. Although one remembers the rhapsodies of poetry, one forgets how precise, how grounded, is the language, with what vernacular swing it moves.Melville Americanizes Shakespeare, gives it tilt. Where Shakespeare has an Antony like a dolphin, showing its back above the element it lived in, Melville has a democracy of porpoises, tossing their backs to heaven “like caps in a Fourth of July crowd.” Queequeg, the cannibal, can go anywhere: “Transported to the Indies, his live blood would not spoil like bottled ale.” Not for nothing does Ishmael pray to “the great democratic God.”

>>12590873
>Melville never writes naturally.

He was a prose-poet writing a modern epic, not a realist like Tolstoy. Two very different things.

>>12590746
pretty good read, thanks, m8.
>>12590873
yikes!

>>12590873
>Moby-Dick was genre fiction before genre fiction was even a thing
Then it wasn't genre fiction.

> not wanting to read Harold Bloom talk about how Falstaff reminds him of himself in an essay on an unrelated text while uttering words like "agon" and "misprision"

step up, nigga

>>12590938
>> not wanting to read Harold Bloom talk about how Falstaff reminds him of himself in an essay on an unrelated text while uttering words like "agon" and "misprision"

You described his style perfectly. I dont know how this man became so famous as a critic.

>>12590746
Excellent article. One of the best I've read from James Wood.

>>12590873
weak bait.

>>12591000
>weak bait
>not only responds, but is the 5th person to do so
you're just mad

>>12591011
when I responded it hadn't updated.

>>12591011

Not him, but I am honeslty curious: what kind of poets do you like? What kind of writers?

I do not intend to mock your favorites or anything, I am just trying to figure out what makes your aesthetic sense so different from mine. It seems to me that you are Virgil, Dante, Sophocles, Jane Austen, Henry James kind of guy.

>>12590746
This reads like it was written by a failed novelist.

>>12591044
this

>>12590886
>>12591018
Authors? Lot of good ones, lot of good ones, I don't even want to mention anybody cause I'm afraid to leave somebody out. Who do I like? I like Art Vandelay - he's an obscure write;, beatnik, from the village.

>>12591044
holy shit now it clicks, all that pretension, that tryhard bloated style

>>12591061
>liking the beatniks
Opinion discarded, then.

>>12591153
>not liking art vandelay

Moby Dick changed my life. What do I read now?

>>12591168
probably finish your highschool math textbook

>>12591061

Why dont you talk seriously? It's obvious from your first post that you are not simply trolling: you clearly know Melville's style and don't like it. I am really curious to know what is your ideal of beauty in writing.

>>12591168
Start with the Greeks.
Read Melvilles other works.
Read some gnostic or eastern texts.
Read Milton.
Reread Moby-Dick.

>>12591306
oh yeah read Shakespeare too

>moby dick
typical middle-brow incel literature

>>12592222

He might not be as great a novelist as Tolstoy, but Moby Dick is probably the greatest poetic novel

>>12592222
>describing a well-established classic as "incel"
Consider suicide.

>>12592399
no, I'm describing the people who fanboy over it on 4chan as incels

>>12592222
weak bait

>>12590873
>never writes naturally
>sentiment is forced
>wit is forced
>masterful in making you think you're reading something profound

All of these criticisms literally summarize my own writing to a tee. Can any give me tips on how to improve on it? I'm quite a poor writer compared to the average, and I'm not very intelligent either. But I enjoy writing, and would like to improve, and am herein seeking advice on how to. Please halp, thx.

>>12591168
Joseph Conrad and Faulkner

>>12593527
Are they both all that interesting? I fell for the Nabokov meme, his disdain for the two has kept me from actually getting to read their work.
I only read Sanctuary and couldn't get into it all that much, the colloquialism didn't do it for me.

What should I read next, any recommendations, anons?

>>12594498
>Are they both all that interesting?
Yes I think so, Victory, The Secret Agent and Lord Jim by Conrad are all great reads and less of a downer than Heart of Darkness.

As for Faulkner his Snopes trilogy is probably my personal favorite of his novels, but it's my opinion (for whatever it is worth) that Faulkner was a much better short story writer than novelist. So maybe check out
Collected Stories or The Portable Faulkner first.

>>12591061
>Vandelay breaking from the composition of Venetian Blinds after an all-night writing session. 1956, colorised.

>>12594648
Thanks anon! I've been craving short stories lately, it might be the right path to get reconciled with Faulkner, I'll give that a shot :)

>>12594730
finally, a well-read individual

>>12590746

Great article