Christopher’s Comments (group member since Mar 05, 2009)

Christopher’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Kerry, Kerry, Kerry...the white whale will haunt you yet.

I'm torn about Revolutionary Road--some people rave about it but it sounds like such a downer.

I read Moby-Dick in high school. For summer reading. Needless to say, I skipped many of the whaling chapters. Some of the scenes were riveting, but there were all these LONG digressions and Ishmael related every effing thing to whales. I mean, geez, Melville, get a life.

When I was 28, I got one of those Easton Press editions of Moby-Dick--the giant leather-bound editions with gold-edged pages and illustrations--for about $5. It was such a beautiful edition that I decided to re-read the novel. Pretty soon I was besotted. There are all these intricate digressions that go off on quirky little paths, and Ishmael relates every effing thing to whales. I mean, my God. It's brilliant.

My ardor has cooled a bit, but I still love Moby-Dick. And part of the reason I love it is that I was forced to read it in high school. Otherwise I would have been a lot less likely to read it later in life.

Being an English department chair, I think many high school English programs still assign classics like Gatsby because they want to expose students to some great works. There are other reasons, too--thematic/historical (if you're gonna teach American Lit, it's kind of hard not to teach Gatsby), familiarity ("I've taught it since '72 and it was fine then and it's fine now"), brevity and complexity (lot easier to teach Gatsby than, say, The Sound and the Fury).

Kerry wrote: "Boy, your slutting around has wrecked my affection,
you've become a disgrace to our friends.
You dried my hull for a while. But I've slipped out of the squall
and found a port as night came on.
..."

That one and the blacksmith one are also awesome.

One day I may have to use one of these as an epigraph.

Haven't read this yet, although it's definitely on my to-read pile. Anybody want to lead us through it? Ben?

All that stuff about how to take the blubber off the whale and process it does get numbing, not to mention that those chapters have a habit of turning some of my students into Greenpeace members. However, buried in that stuff are some great moments, like "The Try-Works." That image of the "burning" ship plunging through the darkness and the waves is haunting, as are Ishmael's warnings about staring into flames.

Glad you've made it through, Dan. Queequeg's coffin is the start of the end.

No worries, shipmates. I'll wait a few days to post more thoughts.

If you gut it out for 50 or so more pages, you'll enter the final sweep to the end, which is pretty darn good. Stick with it, Dan!

Okay, Ahab.

Pre-modern meets modern. Blood revenge + master of industrial technology (ship, sea charts, whaling in general) = bad.

If Ishmael is all about reciprocity, new perspectives, inclusivity, Old Thunder is about isolation, black-and-white power struggles, a single fixed purpose that cannot swerve. Ahab either has power over something or he is unmanned. (And at one point we are told that he was injured and nearly gored in the groin by his ivory leg.) "I'd strike the sun if it insulted me," he insists to Starbuck, which is one of the nuttier things he says.

Ahab is Macbeth, Othello, and Lear all rolled into one. He is not quite as magnificent as those creations, but he approaches their greatness. I think about Macbeth, how what makes him so engrossing is not his nobility--he's the least likable of Shakespeare's major tragic figures--but his will, his indomitable will. He murders Duncan and then his best friend, knowing all the time that what he is doing is evil, yet he chooses to continue doing it. "I am in blood stepped so far," he tells his wife, "that to return were as tedious as go o'er." This is Ahab, although one might substitute "revenge" for "blood."

And Ahab's speech to Starbuck and the crew in "The Quarter-Deck" chapter where he talks about the pasteboard masks of the world is all kinds of awesome.

He's an excellent example of how we each choose our White Whales, our nemeses. In John Gardner's Grendel, the dragon tells Grendel how men don't shake a fist at the universe--they select a neighbor and knock him down. The White Whale is Ahab's choice, his neighbor, his enemy. In the "Moby Dick" chapter of Melville's novel, the narrator states of Ahab:

The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil; -- Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred White Whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.

Damn.

And how. Talk about an entrance, as you so aptly describe it above.

Have to go get mulch in-between rain showers. More later.

I'm going to make some comments about Ahab soon. In the meantime, if you've got any thoughts about the one-legged whale hunter, sing out.

"I'd strike the SUN if it insulted me!!!" Great quote, hammily acted by the mayor of "Spin City."

This looks so bad it might be good.

This just looks all kinds of awesome:

http://www.theasylum.cc/product.php?i...

Maybe even better than that Lee Majors movie "The Norsemen" back on the "Long Ships" thread. I mean, it's got Barry Bostwick in it!

I always wondered if Ishmael's ready acceptance of Queequeg (after the initial, and rather hysterical, fumbling about in the dark bedroom) played a part in MD's failure to sell. Today it's easy for us to see Ishmael's openness and objectivity as mirroring our own (romantic) view of ourselves. I imagine this was rather different in 1850.

And the whole "George Washington cannibalistically developed" line cracks me up. Imagine if Huck had looked at Jim and thought that his profile reminded him of Abraham Lincoln.

Kerry, imagining you standing in a whalebone wigwam on a ship, telling some jacked-up Quaker bitch of a captain to fuck off...well, let's just say I came close to snorting with laughter.

And Dan, Stubb is a good antidote to Ahab's moody monomania. He and the cook Fleece have an interesting back-and-forth. I was scarred by an early exposure to Jim's dialect in Huck Finn, so when I first read Fleece's speech ("When dis old brack man dies") I cringed. But now I kind of like it--especially when Fleece delivers the benediction to the sharks: "Cussed fellow-critters! Kick up de damndest row as ever you can; fill your dam bellies 'till dey bust--and den die."

I remember talking to a colleague who has since retired--30+ years experience teaching in public and private schools--about teaching MD. I had already taught it one year and I was debating whether or not I should continue doing it. I told my colleague that I had had to read MD for summer reading in high school and had generally disliked it, but ten years later I had picked it up and loved it. "Maybe some books are just meant for slightly older readers," I said.

My colleague nodded. "I understand that," she said. "But you might never have gone back to that novel if you hadn't been exposed to it in the first place."

I've been teaching MD for six years now. My students feel like they've crossed some sort of threshold simply by reading it. I know I felt that way. And it's worth re-reading--I find something new every time, and rediscover half-forgotten things, especially Ishmael's tangential comments that approach a kind of philosophy.

Les, not at all--if I sounded defensive or anything, that was totally not my intention. You weren't in any way being demeaning, nor did I take it that way. No apologies necessary at all.

Shel, thanks very much--lots of ideas taken from John Gardner and Hovde and a few others.

Kerry, you wish. ;) (Ask my AP students in a week when they're well on their way through MD and they might tell you something different.)

Les, I am a high school English teacher. Not a prof--just hung out with a lot of them in grad school. Some of the brightest people I've met teach high school.

Okay (clearing throat and looking slightly embarrassed)...back to the novel.