/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.18225389]

How the fuck did he come up with Moby Dick? How the fuck can he write so well?
How the fuck was it not an instant bestseller?

[Anonymous No.18225444]

>>18225389
Rereading moby dick right now. His first two books were much more focused on adventure and whatnot. Moby dick has an extremely bizarre (but genius) narrative structure which is probably why it didn’t sell so well. I adore Melville though. Actually just had a dream last night that I was chasing him around a public park somewhere with a copy of moby dick in my hands yelling for him to sign it lol

[Anonymous No.18225724]

Is the /lit/ annotated Moby Dick project dead?

[Anonymous No.18225742]

>>18225389
All day one question has been in my mind: who is Herman Melville?

Literally, who? He wrote some adventure books, short stories, and then an extremely erudite book about the holy land.

But how did he manage to channel all of literature into one book and then go on as if nothing happened? I literally cannot understand. Shakespeare wrote masterpiece after masterpiece, but Melville just went back to writing nothing.

Did he sell his soul?

[Anonymous No.18225752]

>>18225742
moby dick was a failure. the simpler works made him much, much more money

[Anonymous No.18225790]

I think Melville is a fine writer when taking his other works into account, but the stars really aligned for Moby Dick.

[Anonymous No.18225817]

>>18225742
Clarel proves that it was not a fluke

[Anonymous No.18225822]

>>18225742
>extremely erudite book about the holy land.
Sounds interesting, what is?

Also, didnt he write another pretty good book, idk, didnt read it.

[Anonymous No.18225954]

>>18225389
>How the fuck did he come up with Moby Dick?
The old cliché: he wrote about what he knew. He went whaling and he probably read all about The Essex. The rest, of course, was artistic genius. He locked himself in his room for weeks at a time, refusing to come out, and his family was forced to leave his food outside the door and go away.

[Anonymous No.18225969]

Because he was based

[Anonymous No.18225989]

>pretending The Confidence Man isn't Moby Dick tier
Seriously nigs?

[Anonymous No.18226126]

>>18225752
Answer is simple: Moby Dick is overrated by pretentious pseuds

[Anonymous No.18226163]

>>18225742
>but Melville just went back to writing nothing

He wrote Bartleby the Scrivener, The Confidence Man, and Billy Budd after Moby-Dick, and all three of those are great. Maybe not AS great as Moby-Dick, but they're all quite amazing literature.

His Civil War poetry is also pretty good.

[Anonymous No.18226281]

>>18225389
He knew his Bible and his Shakespeare

[Anonymous No.18226524]

>>18225389
>How the fuck did he come up with Moby Dick?
Shamelessly copied Shakespeare's way of writing and all the "OH MY SHAKESPEARE!!" audience put him on a pedestal.

[Anonymous No.18226534]

>>18226524
If writers are gonna copy someone I'd much rather it be Shakespeare

[Anonymous No.18226549]

>>18225389
Why does Melville always draw out all the schizos

[Anonymous No.18226566]

>>18225389

>How the fuck did he come up with Moby Dick
He was a whaler at the time and Moby Dick, the whale, is based on a real big fucker Chad Sperm whale that got tired of the humans genociding his people with harpoons.

>How the fuck can he write so well?
He was a mad genius. This was his magnum opus.

>How the fuck was it not an instant bestseller?
Have not read it? It is an autistic masterpiece no doubt but autistic and and incredibly dense. It took me 5 attempts to finish it and it's one of my favorite books.

[Redberry pie c: No.18226922]

>>18225389
Thanks to "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" by Poe.

[Anonymous No.18228498]

>>18225724
Seriously. Good question. I have myself been wondering. The editing-anon went to work in December, wanted to have it finished by the end of that year; quite understandably it took longer. I asked a few months ago how it was going and heard it was taking longer than expected. But, no disrespecting to the editor, but now, compared to other /lit/ projects' editing, it should really have been finished. I hope it was not given up on - and I hope it shall see the light of day.

[Anonymous No.18228553]

>>18225742
I read that je had some friends who were novelists and right before he wrote Moby Dick he said that he wanted to write something really ambitious and grand which he had never really done before. So it wasn’t exactly an accident. It’s possible that after its relative flop, he just went back to doing whatever.

[Anonymous No.18228582]

>“Speak, thou vast and venerable head,” muttered Ahab, “which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world’s foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home.

[Anonymous No.18228612]

>>18225389
Moby Dick is trash. You all need better taste. It was a failure because good European society was unwilling to embrace homoerotic masturbatory garbage and instead read someone much more brilliant and innovative- Poe.

[Anonymous No.18228622]

>>18225389
>How the fuck was it not an instant bestseller?

Read 'Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews'. Many of his readers were literal retards.

[Anonymous No.18228668]

>>18228622
>at twenty-five cents, it might do to buy,, but at any higher price, we think it a poor speculation.
This didn't age well.

https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=30335393022

[Anonymous No.18228718]

>>18228668

RIP

[Anonymous No.18228766]

>>18228622
And people say today's critics are bad.

[Anonymous No.18228777]

>>18226524
>Shamelessly copied Shakespeare's way of writing
kek

[Anonymous No.18228806]

>>18228622
This sounds oddly close to some of the usual Moby Dick criticism you see on /lit/. Inb4 someone characterizes the above extract as "based".

[Anonymous No.18228968]

He had a natural aptitude for metaphor, yet he didn't knew he had it. When he discovered Shakespeare's work he realized what could be done with language. The blood of his imagination was sweetened and heated into foaming mulled-wine after reading Shakespeare.

It is as if he had discovered that angels exist and, in trying to sing like them, found out that his skin was also capable of blazing and that the freckles on his back could be inflamed into wings.

While most writers that become enthusiastic with Shakespeare's angelic fire can at best become fireflies, at most create a little bit of luminous butter to comb their hair, Melville has really managed to dress himself in lightning. Other poets drew a little inspiration to cover one or two teeth with gold, but Melville created canines of thunder.

There is an article by James Wood that details a little of how this happened:

https://newrepublic.com/article/122388/all-if-james-wood-life-herman-melville

Some excerpts:

"Between 1847 and 1850, Melville majestically discovered three things: metaphor, metaphysics and Shakespeare. These were the years in which he grew into the labor of writing Moby-Dick (which was written between the winter of 1850 and the summer of 1851). "

(...)

"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."

cont

[Anonymous No.18228986]

>>18228968

More from James Wood:

"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.”"

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.”

cont

[Anonymous No.18228991]

>>18228986

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?

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.

cont

[Anonymous No.18229009]

>>18225822
Clarel. Read Canto XIII in part 1. Right now.

[Anonymous No.18229013]

>>18228991

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?

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.

[Anonymous No.18229016]

>>18229013

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.”

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.

cont

[Anonymous No.18229019]

>>18229016

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.

Moby-Dick is, then, a Messianic text, and Melville may have become another Messiah in writing it. Master of meaning, he is the real “great democratic God” to which Ishmael is pledged and by whom he is predestined. But to be a literary God is not to get closer to an actual God, and Melville, who could not entirely release the monitor of God from his life, surely knew this.

[Anonymous No.18229049]

>>18225389
>How the fuck did he come up with Moby Dick?
It’s based on a true story

[Anonymous No.18229751]

>>18225389

bump

[Anonymous No.18230924]

>>18228968
>>18228986
>>18228991
>>18229013
>>18229016
>>18229019

Thank you

[Anonymous No.18230940]

>>18229009
ok.

[Anonymous No.18230978]

>>18226524
if you don't think moby dick is beautiful then you aren't human

[Anonymous No.18231043]

>>18226566
must be fun to be a whale and get pinged by sonar all day

[Anonymous No.18231051]

>>18228968
>https://newrepublic.com/article/122388/all-if-james-wood-life-herman-melville
i learned today

[Anonymous No.18231065]

>>18228968
>Moby-Dick went largely unappreciated, that in 1876 only two copies of the novel were bought in the United States, that in 1887 it went out of print with a total sale of 3,180 copies, that these and other neglects narrowed Melville into bitterness and savage daily obedience as a New York customs inspector

fate is a cruel bitch

[Anonymous No.18231089]

I read a pirated edition of Moby dick on my e-reader, but some hacker must have messed with the file and added a bunch of boring stuff about cutting up whale meat

[Anonymous No.18231448]

>>18225742
yea dude he got that pill from Limitless. but he only had one and he used it to write moby dick.

[Anonymous No.18231511]

>>18231448
lmao

[Anonymous No.18231553]

>>18230978
It is. Thanks to Willy Shakes

[Anonymous No.18231690]

>>18225389
moby dick was based on real life. the whale was based on real life mocha dick, a giant albino sperm whale. melville read about him in a newspaper article. the sinking of the pequod was based on the sinking of the essex, melville interviewed and befriended that captain of the essex. queequag was based tupai cupa, melville read about him in "the new zealander".

[Anonymous No.18231698]

>>18231089
Filtered

[Anonymous No.18231708]

>>18231698
baited

[Anonymous No.18231766]

>>18231708
But were you really bored by the whaling details?

[Anonymous No.18231794]

>>18231766
no, i am not the guy that made the b8 post though

[Anonymous No.18231841]

>>18225724
>>18228498
what do you mean by annotated? like adding footnotes to help the reader or enhance the text? or people putting in dumb memes?

[Anonymous No.18231851]

>>18231841
little column a, lotta column b.

[Anonymous No.18231856]

>>18231766
If you weren't then there is some problem with you

[Anonymous No.18231872]

>>18225389
>hurr durr big fish bad

It's not rocket science.

[Anonymous No.18231878]

>>18226126
Fuck your self, landlubber.

[Anonymous No.18231919]

>>18231856
Melville always finds some unexpected way to make it beautiful

[Anonymous No.18231922]

>>18231872
>big fish bad
i'm going to physically strangle you in real life

[Anonymous No.18232053]

>>18225389
He was a whaler himself. He just put all the sea stories he learned into a single plot narrative.

[Anonymous No.18232230]

>>18231851
Do you have a link to the project?

[Anonymous No.18232496]

>>18232230
here's the drive link from the archive
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rbY7SQNd1-T15L89XyOVk0Ekm6gQz_rI4UFCPyVO-Jo/edit?usp=sharing

[Anonymous No.18233631]

>>18225724
>>18231841
I feel like this should be brought to the /lit/ community's attention.

[Anonymous No.18234604]

bump

[Anonymous No.18234624]

He had genius, which is never recognised in its own time...

[Anonymous No.18235951]

>>18226566
I read it in 5th grade and it’s to date the hardest thing I ever read

[Anonymous No.18236443]

>>18226566
>5 attempts
>>18235951
>the hardest thing I ever read

moby dick is not difficult kek

[Anonymous No.18236590]

>>18231089
how can you pirate moby dick its public domain

[Anonymous No.18236691]

>>18231043
Active sonar is very rarely used. And use is avoided in certain areas and at certain depths in consideration of wildlife.

[Anonymous No.18237800]

>the chapter where stubb makes the negro cook yell at the sharks
:(

[Anonymous No.18238038]

>>18237800
>mfw don't have my own negro cook yelling at sharks

[Anonymous No.18238048]

>>18225389
How does /lit/ feel about Benito Cereno?