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Welcome to Moby Dick Monday! This is where we read four pages a day and then post about what we’ve read. Consider it an adventure of sorts!

My Story Re-Cap:

After a lovely night at the Inn, Ishmael takes a stroll through New Bedford. Apparently, New Bedford is host to not only sailors but cannibals and savages alike. Ishmael is taken with the number of “green” Vermonters and New Hampshire men that arrive with the hopes of becoming whalers. Ishmael is amazed by this, yet this is his reason for being there as well.

As he wanders around, he visits a chapel where grieving families have congregated to mourn the loss of their family members. Father Mapple is giving the sermon which happens to be the story of Jonah. You remember him, he was the one that got swallowed by a fish. Anyway, what’s interesting about Father Mapple is that he climbs into the pulpit by way of “man ropes.” Ishmael finds this incredibly odd. Does he do this out of respect to the sailors that have been lost at sea? As Ishmael ponders this, he sees his friend Queequeg. As you may recall from last week’s post, Queequeg is Ishmael’s cannibalistic bed-mate. Ishmael sees Queequeg’s tender side as he mourns those lost.

Back at the Inn, Ishmael watches Queequeg enjoy a smoke and decides to join him. It is after this smoke, that Queequeg grabs Ishmael, leans his forehead against him and declares them married, which in sea terms means bosom buddies. It is after this little display of affection that Ishmael learns that Queequeg is actually the son of a King and comes from an island called Kokovoko, which is not noted on any map but click here for a good chuckle and a line right out of the book.

Ishmael shares his plan to board a whaling ship and Queequeg vows to join whatever vessel Ishmael is on.

My Rambling Thoughts:

This past week was a difficult one for reading with Thanksgiving and Black Friday and all but I did manage to get my pages in although this chunk was much more challenging than last week’s chunk. For one, the sermon (Jonah) was way, way too long and bored me to tears. I re-read that chapter three times trying to get through it. As soon as I got past, it all was well again. I am starting to get a feel for Melville’s writing which is making it easier to digest and I find myself going past the four pages a day, although not by much. I am looking forward to Ishmael and Queequeg actually getting on a boat.

Reading Along With Me:

Jill/Softdrink of Fizzy Thoughts
Jill of RhapsodyinBooks
Dar of Peeking Between the Pages
Eva of A Striped Armchair
Wisteria from Bookworm’s Dinner
Gavin from Page247 (will join us in mid to late December)
Claire from kiss a cloud (will join us in 2010)

For those that are participating, share your post links in comments. What do you think so far? Oh, and if anyone wants to join us just leave me a message below.

Moby Dick, or The Whale tells, among many other things, the story of Captain Ahab and his monomaniacal pursuit of a great white sperm whale named Moby Dick.  The whale chewed off his leg some years past, and he is going to get even or die trying.  Who was Ahab?  As with almost everything else in the book, there are biblical overtones, usually Old Testament ones.

The Reign of Ahab
Kings 1: 16

And in the thirty and eighth year of Asa king of Judah began Ahab the son of Omri to reign over Israel: and Ahab the son of Omri reigned over Israel in Samaria twenty and two years.

And Ahab the son of Omri did evil in the sight of the LORD above all that were before him. And it came to pass, as if it had been a light thing for him to walk in the sins of Jerobo’am the son of Nebat, that he took to wife Jez’ebel the daughter of Ethba’al king of the Zido’ni-ans, and went and served Ba’al, and worshipped him.

And he reared up an altar for Ba’al in the house of Ba’al, which he had built in Samaria.

Ahab married Jezebel, a foxy, pagan, princess from one of the neighboring non-Hebrew tribes that the Jews were always slaying and feuding with, and he was seduced into her ungodly ways.  He listened to false prophets, and imprisoned or executed the true ones, largely at the urging of Jezebel. The Lord was not pleased, and he dealt harshly with Ahab, his sons, and Jezebel, who ended up being shredded and devoured by dogs as predicted by Elijah.  Naturally, the crew of Captain Ahab’s ship, the Pequod, regarded him a bit warily.  Is he mad?  Money talks in the end:  Ahab nails a Spanish coin to the mast and gives the men a pep talk.

Whosoever of ye raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw; whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed whale, with three holes punctured in his starboard fluke — look ye, whosoever of ye raises me that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!

Being many things, the book is a meditation on death, and life, and the relationship between the two.  The entire crew dies in the pursuit of Moby, who shatters the Pequod as the whalers pursue him at the end.  Only Ishmael survives to tell the tale, quoting the bible, in this case, Job:

… and they are dead; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

In the midst of calm and peace, Melville can find chaos and terror, as in this passage about standing watch in the crow’s nest, high above the vast sea…

There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!

… and amidst chaos and carnage, he can find peace and the still point at the center of the universe, as in this passage where Ishmael describes being in the midst of a enormous pod of whales which the men are busily slaughtering – the water is remarkably clear, and looking down into it, he sees whales copulating, being born, nursed…

And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yes, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.

But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm. I like that line.  Amidst the torrent of events, there is a still center.  This leads us to today’s treat for you, oh reader!  A recovered fragment from the second known text, The Sailor’s True Binnacle, in the mostly lost series, The Wine of Life, authored by the unknown thinker, Lichanos, from whom I have taken my blog nom de plume.

A binnacle is a casing for a navigation compass which is non-magnetic, and allows the compass to move freely and to point the way.  It is mounted on gimbals so that it can remain steady and horizontal despite the tossing and rolling of the ship, and always pointed to north.  Calm center, within the storm.

Pauvre reader!  O poor lecteur!

How our Souls are all pitched and tossed about like the frailest shallop or jerry-built wherry upon the boiling waves!  What Trials we have known struggling against current and headwind, seeking only to be Sturdy Helmsmen as we pass between the Devil and the deep blue sea!

The Sailor guiding his vessel is blessed with two articles with which he may ply his rudder:  his binnacle and his compass.

[text lost]…Yet still the Gnashing, the Lamentation:  “Where is our binnacle? Where is our compass? The Answer to these soulful queries has been the quest of many great men, both Good and Evil.

[text lost]… Bewilderment, begone! … [text lost]… The mystery of the True Binnacle stands revealed.  To the compass of our minds is the Body our Binnacle, standing in its organic fleshiness impervious to the Magnetism which seeks etermally to deflect our inner Director from its true course.  Be not skeptical nor materialist, for Mind/Body are one, and through our Binnacle/Bodies are we led and do lead.  Truth once again arises from out of unity of Mind/Body, so that pleasures owing to one are not denied to the other:  they work in tandem, a mighty engine of enlightenment propelling our dynamo sense onward to that final effulgent union with the ground of all …[text lost]

Hi-ho! me buck-o’s, through our skin we will absorb the World and revel in the Universe, sailing through the placid lake of the firmament to our own Safe Haven.  Our Compass shall rock on its Gimbals of Life, and we will dirnk, as sailors we all are and are all wont to do, aye! we will drink the Wine of Life.

-Lichanos

We took a road trip to Western Massachusetts recently.  Highlights included a trip to Herman Melville’s house, where he wrote Moby Dick.

Mass Moca and the new Sol LeWitt Installation, on view now through 2033. (It feels weird to type 2033!)

and a trip up Mount Greylock, the highest peak in Mass during peak foliage.  Herman Melville could see this peak from his study, and took inspiration from it for Moby Dick because the snow covered profile reminded him of a Sperm Whale’s back.

All pictures from our trip are here.

Above you see Orson Welles in his ship pulpit in the 1956 adaptation of Moby Dick.

I’d enjoy having this pulpit in my home. I’d love to give a sermon from that pulpit.

Even better might be that pulpit hooked up to the back of a truck. I bet could draw some crowds.

What would I say? I’m sure I would come up with something.

Here is Welles delivering the sermon in this movie version Moby Dick.

At the beginning of the sermon the pastor refers to the parishioners as “shipmates.”

We are all indeed  shipmates in life on the Earth.

Here is the text of the sermon in Moby Dick.

Here is a review of Moby Dick from a modern reader. People still read this book.

Here is the link to Herman Melville.org.

Look at this fine event held each year in New Bedford, Massachusetts—

The Moby-Dick Marathon, a nonstop reading of the novel, will celebrate its Fifth Annual read, starting Wednesday January 3rd at 12 noon and ending Thursday January 4th at about 1 PM. The dates celebrate the anniversary of Herman Melville’s departure from the port of New Bedford aboard the Fairhaven whaleship in 1841. About 150 readers will take part, including several in non-English languages. If interested in reading, contact Laura at 508-997-0046 extension 34 or whaling@ma.ultranet.com“

That sounds like a fine event to attend.

A good book I’ve read about whaling is–Leviathan–A History of Whaling in America by Eric Jay Dolan.

Here is the link to the New Bedford Whaling Museum. On that site there is information about other things you can do in New Bedford.

New Bedford was the capital of American whaling.

I went to New Bedford a few times as a kid growing up in Rhode Island. But is has been so long I just can’t recall the town. I bet there is plenty of history well worth spending some time to see and investigate.

“Nunca se esqueçam, seus bois, que vocês são seres humanos.”

- O Capelão Otto Katz, numa das suas gárrulas homilias.

O Bartleby de Melville era um tipo tão honesto. Quando, um dia, o patrão lhe pede que realize uma tarefa, ele responde inesperadamente que “preferiria não o fazer“. Para além de ter inaugurado a modernidade dos nossos dias, esta resposta natural e desarmante simboliza a inatacável presença de um arbítrio honesto, simples, e atormentado pelos contornos do mundo exterior. Que se pode fazer contra isto? A posição de Bartleby é incómoda para que os rodeiam porque nele não existe uma camada adicional de intenções por detrás da apatia. Ele, genuinamente, preferiria não ter de fazer aquelas coisas.

Švejk não é muito diferente, embora seja inegavelmente mais alegre – para não dizer cônscio da “decadência feliz” que reinava no Império Austro-Húngaro a partir da viragem do século. Poderia até pensar-se, com muitos dos seus oficiais superiores, que Švejk não passaria de um pateta alegre, não fosse a honestidade calculada com que desempenha o papel de idiota chapado tão frustrante como as apatias de Bartleby.

Às vezes é preciso um idiota para mostrar o sentido do mundo. Quando Dostoiévski quis criar uma personagem jovial para O Idiota, viu-se forçado a conceber um palerma protagonista chamado Princípe Myshkin, em deferência à rígida plausibilidade dos costumes S. Peterburguenses. A ideia de honestidade e inocência sempre agiu como um espelho acusador – e esclarecedor – das maiores atrocidades e absurdos da época reinante. Assim mesmo, a candura desse “valente” soldado Švejk é como uma camada de bom senso num mundo que se proclamou ateu da sensatez.

A única particularidade consiste no facto de Švejk não ser nenhum idiota – da mesma forma que Bartleby não era nenhum preguiçoso. O talento inaudito com que Švejk é capaz de representar esse papel atira-nos, no início do livro, para um registo humorístico ligeiro, repleto de piadas de caserna e episódios soldadeirescos tão bem conhecidos dos tempos de recrutamento obrigatório. O chico-espertismo dos alferes e cabos nunca desaparece completamente, mas cede o pedestal a duas outras camadas de humor, mais centradas nos vícios das personagens que atravessam o percurso de Švejk ou nas simples irrealidades da guerra.

Não me consigo todavia furtar a uma certa compaixão triste por Švejk. É certo que o homem vai sobrevivendo, mas só como o faria um destroço de madeira que se consegue manter flutuando, sacudido pelos vagalhões que rugem na cloaca maxima das hipocrisias beligerantes. Tal como tantos checos que foram resistindo ao longo do século XX, Švejk encerra uma lição de desintegração do ser e distensão da autonomia em nome de uma sobrevivência irrepreensível, talvez necessária. Mas tão lúgubre e insonsa…

Ein Update zu: Vor dem Mast und unter Segeln und: Mit Tschechow nach Marzahn

Vor dem Mast, ganz ohne schützende Kajüte, rackerte ich diesmal selber.

Vorletzten Dienstag, Berliner Tschechow-Theater in Marzahn.
Ich bin eingeladen. Ha, und Special Guest. Thema des Abends: siehe oben.

Vom Plattenbauhimmel regnet es Strippen. Wettermäßig also schonmal ein Minus für Feierabendkultur mitten in der Woche und für die Feuertaufe einer bestenfalls Backstage semibekannten Freizeit-Entertainerin. Ein Plus: die Reihe „Kultur der Welt“ ist etabliert und läuft regelmäßig, einmal im Monat. Noch ein Plus, das mindestens drei wert ist: weit und breit keine Konkurrenz.

Geplant ist… nun, sagen wir, eine literarische Reise durch Neuengland. Genau genommen geht’s eher an dessen Küste entlang: durch die einstigen Walfängerhäfen von Nantucket und New Bedford, ein bisschen Boston und Harvard, ein bisschen Geschichte der Indianer und der alten Pilgerväter; dann, wie es sich für eine Hexe gehört, rauf nach Salem zum ollen Nathaniel Hawthorne und zurück über Cape Cod mit einer Prise Seefahrerromantik. Im Gepäck Herman Melvilles dicken alten Wal und ein paar Bücher drumrum, zweidrei Rezepte zum Thanksgiving-Vogel und für das ungeschlagene chowderhafte Nationalgericht – das Ganze gut durchgerührt mit zwei Handvoll Walfängershantys.

Eine Stunde vorher da sein muss reichen für einen Schnelldurchlauf mit dem Techniker, der das Programm noch nicht kennt. Doch die Generalprobe fällt aus – meinen hergeborgten Laptop aus der Zeit der Erfindung des Morseapparates zum Pseudopowerpointpräsentieren zu überreden, kostet alles. Und der aufopferungsvolle Dompteur der Technik g i b t alles. Er umgarnt mich und und sich und die Bühne mit einem Gestrüpp aus Kabeln für Rechner, Beamer, Stereoanlage, zwei Leselampen und was weiß ich noch alles. Die Katastrophe scheint sich anzubahnen, als abenteuerliche Bildschirmzickereien mir meine im Akkord so wunderhübsch gebastelte Bilder- und Videoreihenfolge im Skript zerschießen und mein Helfer sich darin hoffnungslos verheddert. Na, das kann ja heiter werden!

Der Countdown läuft. Noch eine Viertelstunde… für angemessenes Hyperventilieren und Lampenfieber bleibt keine Zeit. Im Blick des braven Technikus die blanke Panik – als sei Moby Dick hinter ihm her. Das ist der Augenblick, in dem mich die Ruhe vor dem Sturm überkommt. Ich schenke dem Ärmsten mein schönstes Lächeln und mir den fälligen Herzkasper… setze mich hin und numeriere unsere zwei Achtseiten-Skripte per Hand neu durch.

Unser Theaterchen hat sich inzwischen gemächlich gefüllt. Nun ja, man will ja nicht grad behaupten, dass die Leut’ sich um die Tickets balgten an diesem verregneten Abend, doch das Publikum ist klein, fein und erlesen und die Stimmung an den Cafehaustischchen erwartungsvoll. Eine Dame wedelt aufgeregt mit dem Programm: sie wollte sich heute eigentlich irgendwohin „Flussabwärts“ treiben lassen, bleibt aber trotzdem. Im Parkett links (also von mir aus rechts) hat sich, wie mir von Frau Intendantin gerade gesteckt, als besondere Herausforderung eine Vertretung der Marzahner schreibenden Arbeiter oder wie die heißen niedergelassen. Ja, schlürft nur euren Schoppen, das macht gute Laune, und die kann ich heut wie nix anderes brauchen. Ich selber hab bloß ‘ne Kaffeeüberdosis und mein Hals ist ganz trocken.

Und dann geht’s los und es beginnt… nanu, nicht der Super-GAU? Wer hätte das gedacht. Dabei weiß doch jedes Kind, womit verhunzte Generalproben enden. Alles läuft super. Und das sogar trotz des alles entscheidenden Geständnisses gleich als Einstieg: Moby Dick kam nicht bis Massachusetts – schlimmer, die Reiseveranstalterin auch noch nie. Wenn man mal vom Schwimmen durch einen dicken Melville-Roman und das Internet absieht. Die geneigte Anwesenheit quittiert meinen Vorschlag, für einen derart riskanten Trip lieber das Eintrittsgeld zurückzufordern, mit einem Lacher statt allgemeinem Aufbruch. Na also, geht doch! Die Stimme räuspert sich frei und bei ihrem forschen Befehl zum Segelsetzen klettert das seefeste Publikum munter in die Wanten der Pequod und mitten hinein in den alten John-Huston-Schinken von 1956, den ich ja immer noch für den Moby-Film aller Filme halte…

Ungefähr anderthalb Stunden später gehen wir von Bord. Aufgekratzt schwatzend, vom Seewind gegerbt, mit schwankendem Matrosengang. Schütteln uns eine Zeitreise auf der alten “Mayflower” aus den zerzausten Haaren und jede Menge Seesand aus den Schuhen. Haben kichernd von Herrn Melville höchstpersönlich erfahren, dass die Nantucketer die Ostfriesen Neuenglands sind und wie wohlig Ismael und Queequeg beim Chowderlöffeln in Mrs. Husseys Kaschemme schmatzen. Wir mussten mitansehen, wie übel die ach so gottesfürchtigen Pilgerväter den gastfreundlichen Ureinwohnern mitgespielt haben. Durften den eigenen staunenden Augen trauen, dass ein unzufriedenes Filmvolk imstande ist, Father Orson Welles’ Mapples von der Regie erfundene Schiffsbugkanzel in eine reale Seemannskirche zu klagen. Wir wissen jetzt, warum dereinst hungrige Iren gen Amerika segelten, und dank einem schiffbrüchigen Seemann und einem seetüchtigen Literaten auch, wie ein echter Pottwal echte Schiffe versenkt. Wir haben uns in einem brodelnden Hafenbecken unter die Akteure der Boston Tea Party gemischt. Sind am Haus mit den sieben Giebeln des neuenglischen Schreibergottes vorbeigeschlendert, das immer noch steht in Salem. Und haben mit den daselbst ansässigen barfüßigen Hexen getanzt, die sowieso keiner vergisst, der das einschlägige Stückchen Kult-Zelluloid von anno dunnemals noch irgendwo im Hinterkopf hat.

Ach ja, fast hätte ichs vergessen, spontan wird auch ein Publikumsliebling gekürt: Ranzo, der Chanteyman von Massachusetts, samt seinem natürlichen und für Walfängerlieder gemachten Klangkörper. Der steht laut seinem Youtube-Profil auf harmony, dissonance, music, noise, rum, truth, tea & cookies, singt mit sich selber im Duett oder gar im Trio und avanciert einhellig zum Kuschelseebären des Abends. (Der Verwendung seiner Tonbeispiele hat er beiläufig offiziell zugestimmt.) Meine aus Zeitgründen vorgesehene Kürzung seines zurechtselektierten Repertoires wird von der virtuellen Reisegruppe mit grummelndem Protest bedacht und muss als Zugabe nachgereicht werden. Ist das nicht das, wovon man immer mal geträumt hat?: mit Leuten in einem Boot sitzen, die eine Wahl hatten… für das Boot.

Die Frage des Abends (aus dem Parkett links): “Aber Sie sind doch gegen den Walfang?”

Und was das Beste ist: mein finaler Werbespot für eine Fortsetzung der Veranstaltung – die für nächstes Jahr einzufädelnde Moby-Dick-Bloglesung nämlich – wird ebenso gefeiert wie die Aussicht, als Soundtrack dazu die süddeutschen Folker What about Carson in der Hauptstadt mal live zu erleben. Deren wieder mal passende und frechfröhlich über den Küstenhaken von Cape Cod lärmende Sally Brown überaus gut ankommt.

Fazit: Moby Dick kam zwar nicht bis Massachusetts. Den Leuten vom “Tschechow” ins Blut aber schon.

Bilder: Moby Dick: Via, bearbeitet. Mayflower: Stuff from Room 311.
Video: Selber gebaut – zu: Der Hund Marie: Moby Dick. Aus: Hooligans & Tiny Hands. 2006.

Heißen Seemannsdank nochmal an den Wolf, für die Hilfe beim Soundtrack.

Here’s a Black Friday deal that the big-box retailers can’t beat.  Buy the new album from the up-and-coming indie band Ezra Furman and the Harpoons and you’ll get a personalized song thrown in, for no extra charge.  Just send them a letter with your life story (or a condensed version, perhaps), and they’ll churn out a folk-rock ditty with your name on it.

Moon Face: Bootlegs and Road Recordings 2006-2009

Since coming together at Tufts University, Ezra and his band mates have written so many songs and played so many live shows that there were plenty of cuts left off of their first two releases.  Those songs find a home on Moon Face: Bootlegs and Road Recordings 2006-2009 — alongside that unique, personalized track.  There have been more than 100 orders in the first weeks since the album’s release, which means the band will be busy writing odes to its fans during any downtime on its current tour.  (Ezra plays a solo Thanksgiving Eve show tonight at the Lincoln Park Whole Foods in Chicago).

Ezra (in the center of the frame) and the Harpoons

And speaking of harpoons, we’re serving whale for Thanksgiving this year in “Studio 360.”  You can hear all about the classic novel that Ezra’s band took as inspiration as we rebroadcast our Moby-Dick episode, the Peabody Award-winning installment in our “American Icons” series.  Guests include playwright Tony Kushner, artist Frank Stella, and science fiction writer Ray Bradbury.  Get hooked this weekend to find out if Herman Melville’s 1851 masterpiece still holds water. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

- Jordan Sayle

“For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all of the horrors of the half lived life”
Herman Melville (1819-1891)

Only if … that is a phrase that is heard often, only if I had ________________.     At the end of the day the energy just to get home from work may be all that is left.   You look at the scale; it’s not what you want to see.  In fact there are a lot of things that you are tired of and the weight of life is pressing down on you with a lot of force.   There is no time to be happy and there is no time to be sad.  There is no time to improve a relationship, there is no time to improve your personal growth, there is no time to understand who you are, there is no time to get healthier, there is no time to work on your career, and there is no time to time to relax.   That might be the description of a life that is being half lived.   What if there was a way to live life fully, with greater joy, greater happiness, greater results, and better outcomes?

Living a full and happy life is not something to dream about, it is something that be obtained.   If the dream has been put away then pull that dream back out, look at it, examine it and then work on it.

Imagine what it would be like to live in the place of your dreams.   Imagine the peace, joy and happiness that would find in that dream.   Imagine that your dream is coming real.

What does it take to make that shift?   It takes a shift in the energy level you have from a negative level to a positive level.  See yourself as the person creating your dreams.   See yourself living your dream.  Now, it isn’t quite that easy, but with some work it can be done.   Sometimes people just need some help identifying and then executing towards their new future.

Are you living your life full of peace and joy?

Hace 17 años debutó Radiohead con su single Creep, una canción emblemática que les abrió las puertas del éxito. Aunque no la tocaron en directo durante un tiempo como reacción al temido encasillamiento, está considerada como una de sus mejores composiciones. Muchos han sido los artistas que la han versioneado. He seleccionado dos de entre todos ellos para que la comparéis con la original. En el siguiente video la podéis disfrutar en un lugar exótico, en el MTV Beach House en 1994.

El neoyorkino Moby es uno de los que se han atrevido con la que es para muchos fans un himno. El bisnieto del escritor Herman Melville, autor de la novela Moby Dick de la que coge su apodo, la ha tocado en varios conciertos. En el video por ejemplo tenéis la brillante interpretación que hizo en el Festival de Glastonbury.

Chrissie Hynde y sus Pretenders la adaptaron en formato acústico para incluirla en su box set Pirate Radio del 2006. La maravillosa voz de la ex de Ray Davis (The Kinks) y de Jim Kerr (Simple Minds),  ofrece otra visión de la canción que la hace especialmente atractiva. No os arrepentiréis de darle al play.

Welcome to Moby Dick Monday! This is where we read four pages a day and then post about what we’ve read. Consider it an adventure of sorts!

My Story Re-Cap

Okay, so the book opens with Ishmael telling us how he has no inspiration to do any one thing so he decides to spend some time sailing. He’s apparently a drifter of sorts and much prefers being a sailor over being a passenger. Passengers have to pay for their passage and sailors get paid, so for him the decision is an easy one. A sailor he shall be!

Ishmael has a preference for boats heading out from Nantucket so he decides to bed down at an Inn nearby in an attempt to find work on just such a boat. The Inn passages are hilarious. When he arrives, the bar-man/landlord tells him that he can get him a bed, but that he’ll have to share it with a harpooner. Well, Ishmael doesn’t feel that it’s proper for a sailor to share a bed. Sailors do not share beds. They need their own space so he decides to camp-out on a narrow bench. After testing out the bench he decides that half a bed is better than no bed and tells the landlord that he’ll give the bed a shot.

Once in bed, Ishmael becomes pre-oocupied with his bed mate who has yet to arrive. The harpooner is out and about rather late and the landlord assures Ishmael that he is probably out on a bender and will not be back until morning. Ishmael is pleased to hear this because the bed will be his and his alone and after hearing that this ‘harpooner’ is out selling heads, yes…heads as in heads from people that have been beheaded, he really, really hopes that the harpooner doesn’t come back at all!

So he hits the sack and eventually falls asleep.

After much noise and stomping, in walks the harpooner. He is a large man, a savage for sure and Ishmael spends a good deal of time watching the man prepare for bed. The harpooner has no idea that he has a bed mate so when he hops into bed and finds Ishmael there, he has a bit of a hissy fit and so does Ishmael who ends up yelling for the landlord. After a brief, almost too brief conversation, the harpooner beds down for the night and Ishmael has the best night of sleep he’s ever had.

The next morning Ishmael realizes that the landlord used him to get a good laugh out of the situation but Ishmael takes it all in stride. He appreciates a good laugh, even at his own expense and decides to head out to breakfast. At breakfast, Ishmael sees the harpooner, Queequeg, using his harpoon to spear undercooked pieces of meat and he comes to the realization that no matter how social these sailors are on a boat, they are not social with one another while on land.

My Rambling Thoughts:

The first few pages were incredibly painful to read. It almost felt as if  some punctuation  was missing so I found myself going back to re-read paragraphs just to get the gist of what was being said. However, once I got to the Inn and the harpooner, things started to pick-up from there. Melville’s description of the harpooner (Queequeg) is quite vivid. I was able to easily picture this character in my mind and found him to be quite interesting.

Reading Along With Me:

Jill/Softdrink of Fizzy Thoughts
Jill of RhapsodyinBooks
Dar of Peeking Between the Pages
Eva of A Striped Armchair
Wisteria from Bookworm’s Dinner
Gavin from Page247 (will join us in mid to late December)
Claire from kiss a cloud (will join us in 2010)

For those that are participating, share your post links in comments. What do you think so far? Oh, and if anyone wants to join us just leave me a message below.

But one other point I’d like to make, the writing lesson that is probably worth more than any other: don’t be boring.

Now boring doesn’t mean that you should stuff every page with an explosion or a sword fight or a car chase (though, really, if you do any one of those, please feel free). Instead, I’m suggesting that you write in a way that (at least!) doesn’t bore the shit out of you. Do you know what I mean? There are times when I’ve been working on a story, a scene, a chapter, and no matter how much I stick with it I find myself completely uninterested. I’m writing it because it seems like I need it, but then my own internal editor is giving me a clear signal. The alarm is going off: BORING! BORING! BORING! And yet I ignore it. Why? Maybe because I feel like I’ve put all this time into the damn thing that I better get something out of it. Or, it’s because my favorite book has a scene just like it and if it was good enough for Jane Bowles (for instance) then it’s good enough for me. Or maybe it’s just because I can’t think of anything better to put in this section.

Obviously these are all terrible reasons for keeping it in there. And yet I still do it. I’m guessing you do too, from time to time.

-Victor LaValle.  Full interview here.  Horror movies, comic books, plot development, Herman Melville.  Writing.

Sereno Compares Dogcroc with Supercroc

Alligators and Crocodiles strike fear in people.  Can you imagine a 40 foot “SuperCroc?”    The Supercroc still holds the title as the largest known crocodile to roam the earth but who knows if there was a bigger one?   After all, University of Chicago palaeontologist Paul Sereno announced the discovery of the fossil remains of 5 ”new” species of crocodile that measure anywhere from 3 feet to 20 feet.  Today, crocodiles can reach as large as 20 feet but that still is but half of the size of the supercroc.  Some of these species are thought to have been able to eat other dinosaurs.    Another example of how mankind does not know everything and has a lot to learn and discover.  Remember that next time you hear of some scientific report that says something is “settled science” or there is a “consensus.”  That does not make it true.  One thing that is true is that at 9pm on Saturday November 21 the National Geographic Channel will be airing When Crocs Ate Dinosaurs as part of their Expedition Week.

A White Humpback Whale

Dano In The Right Stuff

The photo above is of course from the famous 1956 movie with Gregory Peck starring as Captain Ahab. It also has Richard Basehart and a cameo by Orson Welles as Father Maple. Another guy who shows up is Royal Dano who plays “Elijah” who was a drifter kinda guy who is pretty scary and prophesies to Basehart the the ship would be doomed by a great white whale. Later, Dano in the early 1980’s is the preacher in The Right Stuff who seems to represent death as he shows up at all of the funerals, test flights and space shots. One other interesting aspect of the movie: the screen play was written by Ray Bradbury and John Huston. Huston also directed.

Greenpeace in Battle

On a related note…on this day at this very moment, a small fleet of ships in a Japanese whaling expedition is on its way to the Arctic regions to hunt whales. They want to get 90 sperm whales among other specimens. I say specimens because whaling is banned world wide under an international treaty. But they can be hunted for research. The official mission of the fleet is for research. Yet, when they left port they left to great fanfare and people of small villages in northern Japan claiming they need to whaling so that they may carry on their thousands of years old culture. Greenpeace isn’t buying the scientific aspect and will attempt to thwart the harpooning of the great mammals. Perhaps Moby Dick will resurface and get a bit of revenge.

Tom Horn

On This Date in History: Tom Horn had worked as a US Army scout, deputy sherrif, and Pinkerton

Horn Looks A Little Heavier and Younger Here

Detective in the 19th Century. When General Nelson Miles had need of a “super-scout” to help track down Geronimo, he called on Tom Horn. It has been suggested that Horn even arranged for Geronimo’s surrender. Horn was no shrinking violet. While working for the Pinkerton Agency, he reported killed 17 men. His reputation was such that on one occasion he reportedly simply walked up to an accused robber and killer and announced that he had come for him. The man quietly surrendered rather than face Tom Horn. But, the detective business wasn’t exciting enough and Horn quit, saying, “It was too tame for me.”

In 1894 he was hired by the cattleman’s association in Wyoming to supposedly combat cattle rustlers but in reality was used as an enforcer against small ranchers and homesteaders who got in the way of the cattle barons. In effect, he was the law for the big shots and served as judge, jury and executioner receiving $300 to $600 for each man he took down. See, Horn didn’t see himself as murderer but instead believed that when men in authority, or even the law, hired him, he would be protected. It usually worked out that way. Horn said, “Killing is my specialty. I look at it as a business proposition and I think I have a corner on the market.” He usually lay in wait for his victim and then made his mark by placing a rock under the victim’s head.

Horn Making The Rope For His Own Gallows

But, the law caught up with Horn who was arrested in 1902 for the killing of a 14-year-old son of a settler the year before. In Cheyenne, the cattle barons paid for his defense and a sensational trial ensued with everyone thinking that he would be found not guilty. That was not to be the case. The prosecution had a legal reporter along with federal officer Joe LeFors and a deputy sheriff got a drunken Horn to supposedly confess to the killing. The “confession” was allowed in court and heard by a jury that was stacked with opponents of the cattlemen. Horn was convicted and on this date in 1903, Tom Horn went to the gallows after making the rope that was used in the hanging.

Steve McQueen’s 2nd to last movie was a biopic called Tom Horn with

McQueen Was a Great Tom Horn

Linda Evans, Slim Pickens and Richard Farnsworth. I guess the moral to the story is that no one is above the law and even if you get convicted of something you didn’t do, perhaps it is a justice of nature for all of the things that you did do but for which you were never caught. You may think that this held true for a certain Heismann Trophy, NFL Hall of Famer who is now in prison in Nevada.

A long bio of Horn. A shorter bio of Horn.

Weather Bottom Line:  Weekend looks great, but seasonably cool.

By Cara Nicoletti

In the opening chapters of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Ishmael spends his final nights before setting sail aboard the Pequod at the Spouter Inn preparing for his years-long journey at sea. Part of such preparation includes readying oneself for the inevitable periods of dullness and isolation from the rest of the world’s news, finances, friends, and families. This feeling of isolation in which “you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves” can prove so intense that “everything resolves you into languor.” It is not so bad, though, this whaling existence, for “a sublime uneventfulness invests you.” Simple thoughts of what to prepare for dinner are burdens spared the sailor–they have other things to dwell on–since “all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable.”

Perhaps it is because of this dullness—a dullness that extends itself specifically to food—that the only meals mentioned in detail throughout the entire novel are meals eaten before the crew even steps on board their ship. It is at the Spouter Inn the night before setting sail that Ishmael eats a bowl of clam and cod chowder so good, four entire pages are devoted to the experience.

“Oh, sweet friends! hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazelnuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut up into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt. Our appetites being sharpened by the frosty voyage, and in particular, Queequeg seeing his favorite fishing food before him, and the chowder being surpassingly excellent, we despatched it with great expedition: when leaning back a moment and bethinking me of Mrs. Hussey’s clam and cod announcement, I thought I would try a little experiment. Stepping to the kitchen door, I uttered the word “cod” with great emphasis, and resumed my seat. In a few moments the savory steam came forth again, but with a different flavor, and in good time a fine cod- chowder was placed before us.”

Whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my father’s soul (or just a damp day outside), he likes to make a heaping pot of his famous chowder. Although we’re from New England where chowder is traditionally made with heavy cream and clams, my father’s recipe calls for a thinner broth and the rich flavor of of salt pork and spicy Portuguese sausage. It is the best I’ve had, and I’d certainly prefer this chowder recipe to any other before three deck-swabbing years fueled by moldy biscuits and watery beer.

CLAM CHOWDER FOR WHALING
WITH SPICY PORK SAUSAGE

Serves 8 people (+/- depending on how much milk or cream you add)

INGREDIENTS:

• 2 medium Vidalia onions, diced
• 2.5 pounds Yukon Gold potatoes (half a 5 pound bag…duh), chopped into half-inch cubes
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 2 quarts steamer clams with snouts
• 2 cups of linguica (This is a spicy Portuguese sausage. If you can’t find it go with chorizo, but do try to find the linguica. There is no flavor comparison between the two.)
• 2 ears sweet corn (Frozen corn is fine.  My dad won’t use it because of many a truly horrifying childhood dinner involved cans of creamed corn, but good fresh corn is nearly impossible to come by this time of year so we’ll make do). If you use frozen corn add about 2 cups.
• Dash of thyme
• Dash of cayenne
• Generous amount of ground black pepper
• Sea salt
• Parsley
• Whole milk
• Light cream
• Flour (Only if you want a thicker New England style broth—I say go without.)
• Oyster crackers

DIRECTIONS:

1. The hardest part of this recipe is getting the clams clean. Nothing will take your appetite away quite like biting down onto a sandy clam, though, so the labor of cleaning them is worth it. Throw away any clams with shells that are closed tightly or cracked. Submerge the clams in a pot of cold water and let them soak. Continue to change the water over a period of about 3 hours until the water you dump into the sink is running clear. If they’re especially tricky you may want to try adding black pepper to the pot to make them sneeze the sand out (really!).
2. Once the clams are clean, bring the water and the clams to a boil, then turn off the heat. The shells should all be open by this time. If not, continue boiling.
3. Take the clams from the water, and save the water. Remove the clams from the shells and take off the sheath that covers the snouts. Put clams to the side.
4. Boil the cubed potatoes in the clam broth until half cooked (still a bit firm—don’t overcook!). They will cook some more once in the stock.
5. In a large pot, sauté the linguica in the butter and olive oil. Remove from pan when brown and crackly—put aside for later use. Cook the onions in the pan drippings from the pork until they are translucent. Drain off some of the remaining grease.
6. Add onions, clams, and some of the pork cracklings, the corn, salt, pepper, cayenne to the pot with the stock and potatoes and bring all the ingredients to a boil. My dad likes to then put the chowder into the fridge and let it sit for a few hours before serving so that all the flavors really marry together, but if you don’t have the time it’s no big deal.
7. Heat milk and cream in a separate pan (equal parts according to how many bowls you’ll be dishing out). Reheat the stock and ladle into individual bowls, adding the milk/cream mixture as desired. Top off with pork cracklings and parsley and serve with oyster crackers (N.B. if you do desire a thicker soup add flour to stock to taste, but again, I recommend not doing this, I think the flour dulls the flavor).

Sarebbe inutile, probabilmente, cincischiare con l’indimenticabile trasposizione visiva melvilleiana di John Huston, a maggior ragione se ci si schiera con coloro che ne innalzano la semantica a ben più che mera novella scolastica e/o classicista. Al contempo si rischia di giocarsi l’arringa decantando le lodi di un romanzo epocale, finendo con l’incensare il film solo per dovere morale. In questo senso, la storiografia cinematografica gli è grata, perchè concomitanze favorevoli – la sommità di Gregory Peck, un Ray Bradbury in veste di sceneggiatore, la credibilità all’apice di Huston, il cammeo magnetico di Wells – consentono di archiviarvi sugli annali una squisitezza senza tempo, inossidabile anche sforzandoci di scordare la possanza impenetrabile – e in un certo senso infilmabile – della Storia con cui si cimenta: allo stesso modo in cui quella di Cesare Pavese ne rimane la più appagante traduzione nostrana, così il cinema trova nella lettura di Huston – ben noto per le velleità grafomani – la sua più compiuta versione. Non è che sia particolarmente esclusivo o palesemente epicheggiante e metafisico; la forma e il ritmo precorrono la tensione narrativa di vent’anni dopo, che avrebbe reso incassi milionari a Spielberg e alla sottocategoria marina del genere avventura; è risaputo, nondimeno, che nel caso-Melville la novella marinaresca sia leggera allegoria per uno scope ben più sotterraneo della lapalissiana letteratura d’evasione: così, il sinodo Achab/Moby Dick finisce col rappresentare un conflitto puro, il pugno di ferro dell’uomo monomane ben stretto sulla causa umanista atta a reprimere un pantocratore indifferente, beffardo nel nascondere la sua vera natura, almeno nella misura in cui la foggia blasfema del capitano si esplica e scevra di ogni immaginabile reticenza, cementificandone la risolutuezza nello scovare “quella cosa  malvagia che perseguita l’uomo dalla notte dei tempi”; la nevrosi pompa l’emoglobina da quei morsi che l’incedere degli anni riesce malapena a cauterizzare; Achab è dannato, signori, e gli strali di presagi neri ammantano la ciurma incosciente/inconsapevole, tessono l’insania riscattatrice covata tra le traiettorie segnate dai rintocchi insonni sul pontile, e fanno degli arponieri primigeni dei fistoli sgrananti un trittico letale di ganasce temprate. Vetusto e supponente finchè si vuole, il concetto si cristallizza in parabola (anti)religiosa sui tre quarti e i primi piani di un uomo aggrumato ed ipnotico, un Gregory Peck gonfio di carisma aureo, che getta iridescenza sulfurea sul legno e sulle pupille vitree, e che sputa al cielo, maldicendo qualunque pretesa ieratica. Con la sopravvivenza di Ismaele, un incarnato di Giona come un altro, si compiono la volontà divina, il testamento e il monito per l’umanità intera a non ripercorrere i sentieri claudicanti e diabolici di un uomo, Achab, punito solo per aver scagliato la pietra della ribellione. Che egli passi, dunque, solo per rigor di cronaca.

New York Times, 8/26/86, I.23

Bookes into Dragon’s Teeth

How was it possible for Henry A. Murray or Charles Olson or Jay Leyda (all father-figures to many New Left intellectuals) to have read Melville as Hitler, as Jew, as White-Jacket, or Ahab, or Margoth?  How could this organic conservative be anathematized by other organic conservatives?  Melville was accused of exaggerating the suffering of sailors and other workers, hence lending the prestige of an upper-class witness to their grievances; and moreover he refused to turn ruthlessness into Christian charity: though Might was forced by circumstances to be harsh, that didn’t make it Right; authority was demented if it thought otherwise.  Anyway, the more alert members of the lower orders  saw through their double-talking; obscurantist “doctors” and philanthropy were too weak a remedy to correct the inhuman character and the violence of early industrialism and the newspaper-reading “mobocracy.”  It was Melville’s insistence that Christian morality be lived out in everyday life along with his refusal to idealize either leaders or the led, that made him a Jew to “pragmatists” patrolling the perimeters of dissent, spotting possible defectors to another class, escapees who had the self-assurance to lead meaningful reforms.  His darts at confidence-men pierced the very heart of the corporatist liberal project and its attempts to turn the stony prisons of class into sunny meadows.

     Melville’s reservations about democracy as it existed during his lifetime (1819-1891) did not deviate from those of Thomas Paine or of Thomas Jefferson, Abigail and John Adams in their correspondence during the early national period:  There could be no informed political choice without universal training in critical thought; the press would be a negative influence insofar as it spread rumors and libels with no equally accessible corrective institutions to challenge them; Catholic immigrants, they feared, inured to obedience to the reactionary church, would undermine rational political processes; similarly Americans should not impose their system of democratic republican government upon foreign peoples (e.g. Spanish-speaking America) still in thrall to autocratic rule; the love of money would doubtless undermine the civil liberties they had fought so hard to establish; it would take hundreds of years for democracy to take hold and there would be periods of regression, but literacy and the presence of mass-produced books would prevent a thoroughgoing return to the Middle Ages.  Such were the fulminations of Hume’s “fanatics”: Lockean radical puritans and deists assessing the obstacles to a fully realized popular sovereignty; with Melville, neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but realistic.[1]

Părinţii şi-au poreclit fiul când era un prunc. Numele scurt i-a prins bine ca artist. Stră-stră bunicul lui Richard Melville Hall, Herman Melville, era autorul nuvelei Moby-Dick.

Byte. Nu există nici o legătură între povestea balenei şi colaborarea scurtă şi punctuală a lui Moby cu formaţia Flipper.

In my reposted blog on panic attacks http://clarespark.com/2009/11/16/panic-attacks-and-separation-anxiety/, I mentioned the use by Eric Gill of Durer’s famous image (umlaut over the “u”). Here is the image as drawn by Eric Gill’s son-in-law Denis Tegetmeier for Gill’s book Unholy Trinity (1938). Opposite the illustration is this text by Eric Gill:

pastiche of Durer's Melencolia I by Denis Tegetmeier

MELANCHOLIA—This is a very gloomy picture, and quite right too. There is no remedy for our troubles. The sick ‘old lady’ has got to die someday. I think any kind of mass conversion–as when Ninevah repented with three days of sackcloth and ashes–is not to be expected. Perhaps some kind of healthy barbarism will follow the war, pestilence and famine which are upon us. That is very likely. Nations and states go through a life cycle just as humans do, and though many will endeavour to soften our last days—it is astonishing how we cling to the deception that horrid things only happen to other people & not to us—we must today recall the words of St John in the Apocalypse:

   ‘Thus with violence shall that great city Babylon be thrown down, and shall be found no more at all. And the voice of harpers and musicians, and of pipers, and trumpeters, shall be heard no more at all in thee. And no craftsman, of whatsoever craft he be, shall be found any more in thee; and the sound of a millstone shall be heard no more at all in thee; and the light of a candle shall shine no more at all in thee; and the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride shall be heard no more at all in thee; for thy merchants were the great men of the earth’ . [end Gill, there is no more text on the page]

    Is there not a popular Hollywood genre of the apocalypse brought on by those commercial values foisted upon the world by merchants (a.k.a. Marx’s Jewish hucksters)? Would there have been a Renaissance, or an Age of Discovery, or the expansion of the West without them? Would we have great cities of the type anathematized by such as the arch reactionary Eric Gill without these dread traders? How much has this antimodern narrative penetrated into the popular consciousness to the detriment of mental health? And to what extent did the genre of film noir reflect such fears? Or such recent films as Revolutionary Road?

     In my view, we neglect such questions to our peril. If we cannot recognize “progress” where it has actually benefited humankind, how can we even begin to talk about appropriate remedies for emotional distress (depression! anxiety!), let alone public policy in such crucial matters as health care reform?  Just asking. For more on the popularity of “Melencolia I” in the last two centuries see the passages on James Thomson (“B. V.”) in http://clarespark.com/2009/10/23/murdered-by-the-mob-moral-mothers-and-symbolist-poets/ , part one of a two-part essay that shows the links between antisemitism, misogyny, and antimodernism.

[Added in the early evening, submitted to one of the H-Net discussion groups:] 

     I want to launch this hypothesis: that antisemitism, like sexism, is underweighted as a cause of social malaise or what used to be called ”neurosis/neurasthenia.” Those who subscribe to the History of Antisemitism list have done decades of work on the history of antisemitism, yet if it is taken up at all in the media, some crucial facet of it is neglected. Why?  Here are some suggestions:

 1. Probably most of the Left does not want to admit that Marx was anti-Semitic in his early essay “On the Jewish Question.” Taking that further, the very notion that “capital” is inherently exploitative would seem to come from the old and incorrect notion that Jews loved money more than their neighbors. (Were there bitter Jews who fit the stereotype? Why would there not be? But if we reject the idea of race and national character, it is insane to attribute such avarice and heartlessness to all Jews who ever lived.)

 2. The New Left and the counter-culture of the 1960s defined themselves against the soul-less cities (see the blog), celebrating rootedness and other tropes of the agrarian ideology. Remember the class base of utopian socialism in the 19^th century? It was not the working class, but would-be patricians of the kind once identified as aristocratic backwoodsmen by G. C. Webber in his book on right-wing factions. Do I detect the color Green in their vaporings?

 3. The Jews, in league with certain Scotsmen, are blamed for the disenchantment of the world. This was brought home to me by the J. C. Squire papers at UCLA. (Squire, a Tory poet, traveled from Fabianism to support for Italian Fascism. He was part of the English Melville revival.) It is also spelled out in Herman Melville’s sketch of a Dissenter in his late poem, _Clarel, a poem and pilgrimage in the Holy Land_ (1876). These works build upon the pervasiveness of the mad scientist in popular culture, made famous in spin-offs of Mary Shelley’s _Frankenstein_.  The best book I ever read on the subject of disenchantment was Tillyard’s short work, _The Elizabethan World Picture and Shakespeare’s History Plays_. As the Biblical higher criticism proceeded in the 19^th century, Melville nervously complained about the loss to imagination by historical analysis of the Bible. His despair reflected that of James Thomson, author of _The City of Dreadful Night_ . We are back again to Dürer’s Melencolia I and the panicky reaction by Church and King to the advent of the scientific revolution, the Reformation, and other seemingly apocalyptic events. If the Jews are constantly seen as the vanguard of modernity (either implicitly or explicitly: think of the diabolic trinity of Marx, Einstein, and Freud), they get the blame. And a scientific outlook becomes “reductive” and an abomination.

 4. If one is an upwardly-mobile assimilationist Jew (on the lam from mom?), it is probably little comfort to acknowledge the persistence of genteel antisemitism in the canyons of Manhattan, or in the heart of the non-Jew one has snagged. This hardly needs elaboration. Better to repress the entire subject.

     If we underweight antisemitism as a destructive force in the human psyche, imagine how bad is our underestimation of the power of sexism and patriarchy. To what lengths will the ‘feminist’ ‘anti-imperialist’ go to minimize the desire to control women and mothers in particular, and not just in the Muslim world? I will not belabor this point here, except to note that for Eric Gill,  Melencolia is a sick old lady who would be better off dead than modernized/urbanized. History for these antimodernists is not susceptible to human understanding and agency, but is a subset of “natural history.” When we understand that, there might be some progress in the teaching of the humanities.

This blog begins with an eighteenth-century prescription for neoclassical “balance” and ends with the victory of Jung over Freud. Has our society been lobotomized since the late 1930s?

Walter Freeman's "cases" and a lonely American princess

[Lessing, quoting Winckelmann, Laocoön, p.7]  “As the depths of the sea always remain calm, however much the surface may be agitated, so does the expression in the figures of the Greeks reveal a great and composed soul in the midst of passions.  Such a soul is depicted in Laocoön’s face–and  not only in his face–under the most violent suffering….However, this pain expresses itself without any sign of rage either in his face or in his posture.  He does not raise his voice in a terrible scream, which Virgil was doing; the way in which his mouth is open does not permit it.  Rather he emits the anxious and subdued sigh described by Sadolet.  The pain of body and nobility of soul are distributed and weighed out, as it were, over the entire body with equal intensity.  Laocoön suffers, but he suffers like the Philoctetes of Sophocles; his anguish pierces our very soul, but at the same time we wish that we were able to endure our suffering as well as this great man does.

     Expressing so noble a soul goes far beyond the formation of a beautiful body.  This artist must have felt within himself that strength of spirit which he imparted to his marble.  In Greece artists and philosophers were united in one person…Philosophy extended its hand to art and breathed into its figures more than common souls….”

 [Eleanor Melville Metcalf, writing to boys and girls and published by the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union: The Horn Book, 1927:]  “My grandfather was a pilgrim by land and sea–not an adventurer gone out to see the world, but a pilgrim in search of the Regal Soul.”

 SOUTHERN DOCTORS The night after the Southern Medical Association began its annual meeting in Baltimore last week there was not a respectable hotel room for rent in the city. Doctors with pocketbooks filled and minds agog commuted from Washington 40 miles away. No medical meeting had been so well attended since the 1920s.

     Well rewarded were the troubled Southern doctors by two medical diversions at the convention: 1) an operation by which Drs. Walter Freeman & James Winston Watts of Washington actually cut the ability to worry out of the brain; 2) operations by which Dr. Hugh Hampton Young of Baltimore remodels anal, urinary and genital defects. Psychiatrists and brain surgeons stormed at each other concerning the good sense of Drs. Freeman and Watts’s work.

     Lobotomy. Dr. Freeman, a poetaster in his spare time, was nervous when he rose to tell a fascinated audience how he and Dr. Watts ameliorated chronic anxiety, insomnia, and nervous tension in six patients during the past two months. In addition the patients were relieved of various “disorientations, confusions, phobias, hallucinations, and delusions.” …All six Freeman-Watts “patients have become more placid, more content, more easily cared for by their relatives.”…Dr. Freeman withstood all heckling, asserted: “Our patients were treated by seasoned psychiatrists.  Then they came to us. The results are permanent, apparently, and not temporary…We have not removed the idea by this operation.  The idea is still there, but it has no emotional drive…I think we have drawn the string, as it were, of the psychosis or neurosis.” [1]

 MOBY DICK A Reflection EARL HENDLER The pure and sacred evil that was Ahab/ split up the snapping seas. So absolute/ his pride, from pole to pole no whale could hide./ Another’s commerce, full of oil and drab,/ would never play his line strung like a lute/ with notes of harpoons struck in the whale’s white side.

A spout from Moby’s brow spilled some salt tunes/ that jarred his metaphysics to the point/ where God Himself could speak but in typhoons./ His world, lopsided, hobbled on one joint./ A lunatic’s integrity that fails/ on fish must justify itself to whales/ of meaning larger than the simple quest,/ and so his Pequod sailed abstractly West. [2]

 EXPLORERS OF THE BRAIN  Quackish as their system of feeling bumps on the head and thus judging human capabilities, F.J. Gall and J.C. Spurheim, founders of phrenology, had the sound conception of a brain in which traits of ability and what we call character were realized. Since their time, every nook and cranny of the brain have been poked into, dissected, examined. The brains of animals have been electrically stimulated in spots and the areas and centers thus discovered that control movement, seeing, hearing, swallowing, winking, breathing, sweating and other functions. One of the bold explorers who discovered some of the brain’s correlations with bodily functions and explained why some of the functions are supposedly instinctive is Prof. Walter Rudolf Hess, director of the Physiological Institute at the University of Zurich.

     The information that such explorers as Hess, Harvey Cushing, Walter Cannon and others clicked together about 1935, when the International Neurological Congress was held in London. Among those who attended was the Portuguese neurologist, Dr. Egas Moniz.  After listening to the papers that were read he decided on his return to Lisbon that the time had come to cut worry, phobias, and delusions out of the brain. He induced his surgical colleague, Dr. Almeida Lima, to bore through the skull and cut the connections of the prefrontal lobe with the thalamus, which is the seat of emotions and which lies deep in the head.  This sensational operation justified itself.  Hypochondriacs no longer thought they were going to die, would-be suicides found life acceptable, sufferers from persecution complexes forgot the machinations of imaginary conspirators. Prefrontal lobotomy, as the operation is called, was made possible by the localization of fears, hates and instincts.

     It is fitting, then, that the Nobel Prize in Medicine should be shared by Hess and Moniz. Surgeons now think no more of operating on the brain than they do of removing an appendix. Hess, Moniz and Cushing before them taught us to look with less awe on the brain. It is just a big organ with very difficult and complicated functions to perform and no more sacred than the liver.[3]

 [Political scientist/New Critic and 1960s hero, John Schaar; 1979:]  What does that balanced character and outlook look like: earlier…I suggested the formulation, “pessimism of intelligence, optimism of the will.”  It is something like the temperament of the person touched by grace, as the Puritans understood that: the one who has the almost divine or supernatural ability to hold incompatible qualities in harmony; the one who lives in the world fully and caringly, and yet with “weaned affections,” neither wildly raised up nor woefully cast down by victory or defeat but hewing to the middle line.  To try another formula, perhaps the right temperament for action is a stoicism blended of equal parts of self-assertiveness and self-denial: an assertiveness which gives one the resoluteness to act and accept responsibility; a self-denial which enables one to subdue one’s personal pain in a compassionate awareness of the general human lot, which is mainly a condition of shortage and failure.  If I read Melville correctly here, his real hero Jack Chase and his fictional hero Captain Vere most closely resemble this standard of the whole man and actor. Delano and Cereno represent crippled halves of the whole. (p.81.).

 [Psychosurgeon Walter Freeman worries about excessive lobotomies:]  We are whittling down the ego-ideal.[4] 

   ” No one pays to hear a bitter kvetch.” Man up!  Given the political context met by the academic Melvilleans, writing, like Melville, in an age of revolution and counter-revolution that was devastating man and nature alike, it would be surprising had Melville scholars not choked off the passionate curiosity of Ahab/Pierre and Isabel, elevating Captain Vere in their stead, for they were dependent upon institutions that had either caused wars or were impotent to stop the killing.  A Lessing-style Laocoön was needed in a postwar world shrieking with “shell shock” and other forms of human misery, with mutilated veterans demanding to be seen and heard, their sacrifices vindicated by the able-bodied.[5]  If Melville’s façade of classy stoicism (as Vere) were to prove only a false front, his usefulness to conservative nationalists wanting a solid monument linking democratic Greece and democratic post-war America would be negated.  As Lessing wrote of the need to suppress the scream in art,

“ When a man of firmness and endurance cries out he does not do so unceasingly, and it is only the seeming perpetuity of such cries when represented in art that turns them into effeminate helplessness or childish petulance.  This at least, the artist of the Laocoön had to avoid, even if screaming had not been detrimental to beauty, and if his art had been allowed to express suffering without beauty.” [6]

 ”I retch in private….”  With the exception of  Raymond Weaver, Melville’s revivers have generally minimized the permanence of his rage and suffering (the “insanity” read perhaps as a female complaint), generally limiting his spells to the mid-1850s, while contradictory textual facts and other inescapable biographical materials encroached upon their favored formulations.  It is an inside narrative.

     Melville’s wished for mastery over his feelings, the artist fully in control of his materials, attests to the legitimacy of ruling elites, in this case their superior endurance in the face of adversity or upsurges from below.  But his outbursts (veiled or not) on behalf of the unjustly imprisoned and oppressed call forth answering murmurs: As their own words have testified, Ivy League professors are not leisured aristocrats in an exclusive club but servants of powerful interests, operatives in “a badly run factory,” complained John Dewey in 1917; they were no less in thrall to the big money than their parents, the workers or small businessmen they had left behind.  They do not command their own labor; their virtue has been pasted on, not somaticized through battle with ignorance.  They tingle with Melville as he turns his back on commercial success and easy fame; he has lapsed into “silence” while the blazing eyes remain fixed on illegitimate authority; he is able to write without plaudits.  A crescendo of indignation has shattered the illusion of academic rectitude and self-mastery; parts of themselves love this artist, but they do not follow his example.  Shadowed by Pierre’s surveillance, a grand national monument morphs into Isabel; cornered sculptors perform a witch hunt energized by vulnerable positions in middle management: beneath brave and placid surfaces, their deepest feelings toward their subject and each other marry fear and resentment: they cannot merge with their subject, will not know something definite of that face.  For a period, Melville’s famous manliness shores up the ruins of class identity, recomposes the disintegrating helplessness and petulance of Melville’s academic readers as the facts of their limited autonomy inevitably return.

      Locating the systematic censorship of crucial facts in Melville’s life and art, I have proposed that the deepest layer of repression responds to the ideological imperatives of postwar corporatist liberalism, the vital center yet to be understood fully and repudiated by New Left intellectuals.  Social psychologists disassociated childish “romantic yearning” and “sentimental culture” from the critical realism of eighteenth and nineteenth-century bourgeois art.  Though fascists and New Deal liberals similarly viewed themselves as progressives and centrists, “fascism” became synonymous with extremism as American “moderates” increasingly distanced themselves from “the Far Right” and from Hitler and Mussolini, figures who were acceptable to upper-class policy-makers in the West until the late 1930s.  We have seen that the Bad Mother directed the sentimental family ever leftward; her red consummations and her consumerism were diagnosed as the source of totalitarianism; pre-war and postwar Melville scholarship connected with the grandeur of the corporatist liberal project, as lobotomists, by disconnecting Melville along with the rest of the critical thinkers, cutting the ties that bound analytic thought to feeling, then to (appropriate) corrective action.  Melville’s conservative characters and the corporatist liberals I have studied speak with one voice as they evacuate materialist “exotics” in the name of wholeness and integration.  Of course the Melville who mocked such antics as Plotinus Plinlimmon-ish “virtuous expediency” remains at large.  I have summoned him, the deconstructive psychologist, to help me understand his own mental processes and those of his champions who, ironically, identify most strongly with the bound, unfeeling parts of himself that his better angel passionately rejected.

 [Dr. Kik meets Jeannie:]  There was a high table, like an operating table, and she knew she was supposed to get up on it.  She got on it and the woman with the silly voice fussed around her.  This woman was in an R.N. uniform and the room had somewhat the appearance of an operating room.  I’d forgotten I was to have an operation. You don’t eat before an operation, of course.  I should have remembered.  I wonder what I am being operated on for.  What haven’t I had removed?  I believe I still have my gall bladder.

   “Well, Jeannie.  And how is Jeannie this morning?

   It was he, the Indefatigable Examiner, come out of the bushes.  He was wearing a white coat.  He had blue eyes and a hawkish nose, and very slender face and his hair was fair and curly, like Grace’s, only shorter.

     “And did you enjoy being outside in the park yesterday? He said this with a heavy accent that you have never been able to place.  It wasn’t German, French, Italian or Scandinavian. Polish perhaps…Now the woman was putting clamps on your head, on the paste-smeared temples and here came another one, another nurse-garbed woman and she leaned on your feet as if in a minute you might rise up from the table and strike the ceiling.  Your hands tied down, your legs held down.  Three against one and the one entangled in machinery.

     She opened her mouth to call for a lawyer and the silly woman thrust a gag into it and said, “Thank you, dear,” and the foreign devil with the angelic smile and the beautiful voice gave a conspiratorial nod.  Soon it would be over.  In a way she was glad. [7]

     After the second world war, Ahab returned as Freud, that foreign devil who looks like mother, the Indefatigable Examiner Dr. Kik; no longer the antipuritan libertine who, at times, had fascinated 1920s bohemians.  Freud’s ideal of autonomy and the critical awareness that never stops, made explicit in The Future of an Illusion (1928), and Moses and Monotheism (1939), was turned on its head by outraged aristocratic radicals; it is Jung’s concept of individuation that now informs moral relativists and multiculturalists. Why can’t Freudians and Jungians get along?    For Freudians, the neurotic in treatment retrieves and historicizes immemorial faces, becomes aware of the inflated primitive imagos that have unconsciously ruled his actions and made him anxious and overly defended; now consciously aware of his self-destructive impulses and, restoring proportion to parents and their mightily looming surrogates, he may be more self-possessed, his perceptions of other human beings are less distorted; he may evaluate ‘universalist’ ethics with less of an irrationalist undertow; he may imagine institutions and cultural practices that could uplift, instruct, and heal suffering humanity, that do not not merely serve the selfish interests of the golden few; as a tactician for change, he will think twice before he subordinates means to ends as an excuse to act out volcanic rage (rage which, at first glance, may look like sex); and most certainly will he not follow idealized leaders.  He is not perfectly free from suffering, perhaps he remains anxious, but he knows the multiple sources of his feelings, for he is an indefatigable self- and social examiner, separating objective from neurotic anxiety. Such nice distinctions confer balance.

     But Jungians, for purely political reasons, adapting to amoral, pragmatic institutions, associate Freudian scrupulosity with the repressive Mosaic code, with “pathological puritanism” and “narcism” (Murray) and it is Jung, not Freud, whose archetypes inform the cultural histories of “the New Left.”  For Jungians, the restored son escapes Amerika (the switching mother’s Hebraic influence, embodied in Freud or the Mother State, healthy only in war) to merge with the racial group and its particularistic interests: he finds golden nuggets of creativity and liberation in the racially-specific unconscious: he finds out “who he really is.”  That individuated face is definitely not Hitler’s. [8]

                [2] Commentary, Jan. 1949, p.44.

                [3] Editorial, New York Times, Oct.30, 1949, IV, p.8.

                [4] Quoted by Jack Pressman, UCLA, Nov.4, 1989.

                [5] Bromberg, Psychiatry Between The Wars, 1918-1945, pp.5-7, makes the overly simplistic but not uninteresting claim that the millions of “insanities” created on the battlefields of the Great War were the impetus for the mental hygiene movement which followed and which shaped the course of twentieth century psychiatry.

                [6] Lessing, p.20.

                [7] Mary Jane Ward, The Snake Pit, 1946, 42-44. Is Dr. Kik[e], the Indefatigable Examiner, Moses/Freud, and is Jeannie the genius of Christianity?

                [8] Academics should reassess their professional responsibilities, putting emancipation from unnecessary mental illness and other forms of preventable suffering on the academic agenda as professional objectives and standards of performance.  See Peter Loewenberg, De-Coding the Past (New York: Knopf, 1982) on graduate education, specifically the pretense that students and professors are “equals.” Cf. Pierre’s mother has mystified authority by encouraging the conceit that she and Pierre are brother and sister; this seems more illuminating than talk of an “Oedipus Complex.”

A few weeks back, I mentioned my hate/hate relationship with Moby Dick and how for some reason I feel compelled to read it, even though I have attempted to do so repeatedly and failed each time. You can read about it here.

Anyway…in an attempt to finally put the matter to rest, I will be reading four pages a day (beginning tonight) and then each Monday I will post my thoughts on what I’ve read. A few others have decided to brave it with me:

Jill/Softdrink over at Fizzy Thoughts
Jill over at RhapsodyinBooks
Claire over at kiss a cloud (she will be joining us in 2010)
…and one other blogger who shall remain nameless as she did not want to commit as of yet.

If you have a copy of Moby Dick lying around collecting dust, then dust it off and join us. My copy is the Borders Classic version with 602 pages but some of the others are even listening to it on audio so be flexible with it.

Não passasse o Niágara de uma catarata de areia, viajaríeis mil milhas para vê-la? Por que o pobre poeta do Tennessee, ao receber inesperadamente dois punhados de prata, hesitou em comprar um casaco, de que ele tristemente necessitava, e gastar seu dinheiro numa viagem a pé à praia de Rockaway? Porque quase todo rapaz robusto e sadio, de alma robustae sadia dentro dele, numa ocasião ou noutra fica louco para ir para o mar? Por quê, em vossa primeira viagem como passageiro, vós  mesmos sentistes uma vibração tão misteriosa, quando vos disseram pela primeira vez que vós e o navio já não podíeis divisar a terra? Por que os antigos persas consideravam sagrado o mar? Por que lhe atribuíram os gregos um deus especial, o próprio irmão  de Jove? Por certo tudo isso não deixa de ter sentido.  E ainda é mais profundo o sentido daquela história de Narciso, que, por não poder pegar a imagem atormentadora e suave, mergulhou nela e afogou-se. Mas essa imagem, nós mesmos a vemos em todos os rios e oceanos. É a imagem do inegarrável fantasma da vida; e esta é a chave de tudo.

Trecho de “Moby Dick”,  de Herman Melville, em homenagem aos copos de água destes finais de semana cada vez mais abstêmios.

Foto de http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevewall/

Se disparó el arpón: la ballena herida voló hacia delante; con velocidad infamadora, la estaca corrió por el surco, y se enredó. Ahab se agachó para desenredarla y lo logró, pero el lazo al vuelo le dio la vuelta al cuello, y sin voz, igual que los silenciosos turcos estrangulan a sus víctimas, salió disparado de la lancha, antes que los tripulantes supieran que se había ido.

Y otra noche más creyéndome el Capitán Ahab. Se acabó la miseria, voy a escribir mi segunda reseña literaria para Los Efectos Secundarios, Y NADIE VA A PARARME. Ayer por la noche mi querida madre me preparó una cena deliciosa: pescado, patatas cocidas, queso y pan. Me emocioné porque llevaba como siete meses sin probar NADA de pescado y es que las latas de atún, el salmón ahumado o las anchoas son sucedáneos marinos radioactivos que deberían estar prohibidos por la Convención de Ginebra. Ese amor materno de sábado por la noche TAN explícito y directo despertó mi instinto maniaco-acuático-marítimo y he decidido escribir un texto bastante BUENO sobre un libro, no sé si lo conoceréis, que se llama algo así como Moby Dick. No sé si es por la sala de conciertos. De hecho, hace tres o cuatro años estuve una noche en esa sala de Madrid. Acababa de salir de un concierto de Quique González en el Palacio de Congresos  -un concierto genial, por cierto- y estuve por allí para echarme unos bailables. El alcohol era caro, la música era mala -chundaquetechunda- así que me compré un sandwich en el Opencor -aka Pequod- de enfrente y me fui a dormir a casa. Años después -no importa cuánto tiempo pasó exactamente- allá por marzo de 2009, leí el libraco de Moby Dick porque, como dice AC “si es rápido y es gratis, entonces why not?” Seré muy breve. Cuenta una historia común, muy sencilla (hombre se enfada con X, hombre va a por X. X le dice “¿pero qué me estás contando?, X mata a hombre y sigue con su rollo). X es Moby Dick, la ballena entrañable. Hasta aquí todo más o menos bien. PERO es que el hombre no es una persona cualquiera, es el mismísimo Capitán Ahab. ÉL representa la valentía en la literatura. Por supuesto, al final le dan de hostias, por imbécil, por irse de listo, por creerse vasco siendo de Burgos. En el fondo, Moby Dick es un rollo de libro y tienes que estar realmente INTERESADO para poder leerte con atención -y disfrute- las quinientas páginas. Resulta OBLIGADO ir al grano y saltarse las infinitas descripciones en cuarenta líneas que hace Herman Melville sin un sólo punto sobre los distintos tipos de ballenas. No es que desconfíe de Melville, es que no me fío de un tipo que dice que una ballena es un pez. Qué pasa, ¿Melville no sabía lo que era un editor? Leer Moby Dick es como ver una película cultureta en La 2 un sábado por la noche. La empiezas a ver, todo va bien, te han dicho que es muy buena, un poco lenta Y LARGA, pero así es el cine post-moderno sueco de la escuela de Ingmar Bergman,  luego empiezan a poner anuncios sin parar sobre ballenas, mamíferos sin patas traseras, te cagas en todo, te olvidas de lo que estabas viendo, apagas la tele, te fumas un cigarro en el balcón y te vas a dormir desconcertado. Pero, queridos amigos, la sociedad actual pide a gritos que la gente bien piense que Moby Dick es un libro buenísimo (es un gran libro para poner en la mesa del comedor) y que Stieg Larsson es una puta mierda. Y estoy completamente de acuerdo. Odio a los chicos de 24 años que llevan zapatos náuticos por el tramo Alberto Aguilera-Carranza-Génova en Madrid y a la gente que lee LOS HOMBRES QUE (ODIABAN) NO AMABAN A LAS MUJERES en la línea 4 del metro de Barcelona entre las estaciones de Joanic y Bogatell.

William Blake, Laocoon

What follows is an excerpt from chapter 7 of my book, Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival (Kent State UP, 2001, 2006).

[Revolutionary Radicalism, “Epilogue”:] In this rapid survey of a new and important educational idea we have carried Marja, the immigrant girl, from king and caste-ridden Europe to America, the land of hope and opportunity. We have seen her struggle with an unknown tongue and with ways of life unfamiliar to her. In the end we see her transformed, reborn–no longer foreign and illiterate, but educated and self-respecting. Later she will marry and her children, though they may have traditions of another land and another blood, will be Americans in education and ideals of life, government and progress. It was been worth while that one man has broken through this barrier and made the road clear for others to follow.

All real education has the development of discipline as its basis. Poise, self-control and self-esteem are characteristic of the well-ordered mind, and the growth of these in the industrial worker makes for efficient service and better wages. Gradually there is an awakening of social consciousness–the awareness of one’s place in society and the obligations such membership entails upon the individual in respect to the group or racial mass, with a constantly developing sense of one’s personal responsibility in all human relationships.

In conclusion, the higher significance of this work means that we must descend the shaft and share the lives of those that dwell in the lower strata–the teeming populations that never see the stars or the green grass, scent the flowers or hear the birds sing–the huddled, hopeless foreign folk of the tenements. We are living in the Age of Service, and are growing into a conviction that life is not a matter of favored races or small, exclusive social groups, but embraces all humanity and reaches back to God. To those of prophetic soul comes a vision of the day that haunted Tennyson when

“The war-drum throbbed no longer and the battle flags were furled/ In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World.” [i] 

 [Marianna speaking, in “The Piazza,” 1856:] “ …An old house. They went West, and are long dead, they say, who built it. A mountain house. In winter no fox could den in it. That chimney-place has been blocked up with snow, just like a hollow stump.”

       Laocoön sighs softly, advised Lessing. Conservative social theorists responding to the Age of Revolution formulated a model of reason and balance that was objectively mad in its project to impose order upon the doubly bound; for James Madison “popular government” was both there and not there. Were the non-propertied interests to become the new majority, “the spirit and form of popular government” would be preserved even as the wicked majority was “dispersed” by rational and virtuous citizens better attuned to “the public good.” Speaking through Isabel and Marianna,[ii] Melville had identified authority as strange and wandering; his literal history of a permanently wounded, wild and wooly psyche was intolerable; Melville could not be a quasi-lunatic fending off madness fostered by mixed-messages, but the prophet of social dissolution.

      Disillusion with the idea of Progress supposedly explains Melville’s sudden acceptability in the twentieth century; it was Melville’s all-too-graphic disintegration, though, that frightened his critics. His (apparent) corrective flights to corporatism were promoted by Nietzschean radicals such as Van Wyck Brooks or Lewis Mumford defining themselves against a mechanistic and alien mass culture. In concert with the Frenchman Gustave LeBon, Dr. Wilfred Trotter (1872-1939) had earlier laid out the premises and ambitions of a rectified Freudian “mass psychology” that could intervene in the headlong rush to oblivion, for “the so-called normal type of mind” “being in exclusive command of directing power in the world, is a danger to civilisation.”[iii]

    Trotter’s influential essays, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, first published in Sociological Review in 1908 and 1909, were updated and reprinted to comment upon the Great War in 1919, then brought out by Macmillan in fifteen printings by 1947. Freud, according to this “sometime Honorary Surgeon to the King,” though the architect of “a great edifice” was bringing “a certain harshness in his grasp of facts and even a trace of narrowness in his outlook” along with a pervasive and repellent “odour of humanity” (78, 80). “The Freudian system” had developed “a psychology of knowledge” rather than a “psychology of power”; what was needed was an unveiling of “the sources of a director power over the human mind” so that “the full capacity of the mind for foresight and progress” could be developed (93, 94). Trotter addressed an elite audience sharing his belief in instincts and will power, understanding that war is “a contest of moral forces” and heeding his call for a “practical psychology,” mobilizing “science” to achieve “a satisfactory morale…[which] gives smoothness of working energy, and enterprise to the whole national machine, while from the individual it ensures the maximum outflow of effort with a minimum interference from such egoistic passions as anxiety, impatience, and discontent.”

    Methods and standards of elite recruitment and performance would have to change; old leadership “types” of “a class which is in essence relatively insensitive towards new combinations of experience” were unfit and obsolete (56); radical doctrines could be redesigned to fit new conditions:

[Trotter:] “If the effective intrusion of the intellect into social affairs does happily occur, it will come from no organ of society now recognisable, but through a slow elevation of the general standard of consciousness up to the level at which will be possible a kind of freemasonry and syndicalism of the intellect. Under such circumstances free communication through class barriers would be possible, and an orientation of feeling quite independent of the current social segregation would become manifest (269-270).”

Thus “true progress” will replace “oscillation” and wars will cease:

[Trotter:] The only way in which society can be made safe from disruption or decay is by the intervention of the conscious and instructed intellect as a factor among the forces ruling its development…Nowhere has been and is the domination of the herd more absolute than in the field of speculation concerning man’s general position and fate, and in consequence prodigies of genius have been expended in obscuring the simple truth that there is no responsibility for man’s destiny anywhere at all outside his own responsibility, and that there is no remedy for his ills outside his own efforts. Western civilization has recently lost ten millions of its best lives as a result of the exclusion of the intellect from the general direction of society. So terrific an object lesson has made it plain enough how easy it is for man, all undirected and unwarned as he is, to sink to the irresponsible destructiveness of the monkey… No direction can be effective in the way needed for the preservation of society unless it comes from minds broad in outlook, deep in sympathy, sensitive to the new and strange in experience, capable of resisting habit, convention, and other sterilising influences of the herd, deeply learned in the human mind and vividly aware of the world (my emph., 6, 7, 266, 267).”

    For Van Wyck Brooks, Melville was a fog-horn, not a role-model for Trotter’s New Mind-Manager; that honor went to his best friend Lewis Mumford, the source of “human renewal” poetically aligned with William Morris: “He had caught in England the last rays of the morning glow of William Morris’s poetic socialism, and he was to remain a vitalist in a world of mechanists, behaviourists, determinists, Marxians and so on.” Melville’s appeal to youthful cynics of the “lost generation was limited” whereas

“Lewis… knew that the optimists of the machine had forgotten that there was madness and night and that mankind had mystery to contend with, coexisting with universal literacy, science, and daylight, and why, because they ignored the darker side of the nature of man, they had been unprepared for the catastrophe that followed. He could see why it was that a grimly senescent youth confronted the still youthful senescents of the older generation, and having, along with Emerson and Whitman, read Pascal and Saint Augustine, he was fully able to enter their state of mind. Writers like Melville and Dostoievsky, with their sense of the presence of evil, had fitted him to grasp the post-war scene, the disintegrated world in which humankind, convinced of its inadequacy, ceased to believe in its own powers of self-renewal…[W]ith his feeling for the inner life, he was convinced that the problem of our time was to restore the lost respect for this. For Western man had forgotten it in his concentration on the improvement of the machine. In a world obsessed by determinism, the human person must come back to the centre of the stage, he said, as actor and hero, summoning the forces of life to take part in a new drama.”

Mumford had deepened his prewar “liking for brass buttons, music and drums” with “the consciousness of evil”; newly balanced he could steer clear of shallow optimists and sour apples alike, the latter including Melville and “Wilson, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Hemingway and Cummings”: no vitalist renewal in either corner. It was Mumford and his circle, less innocent, but no less confident, who had guided orphans through the mine-fields of modernity; Melville, however salutary as a corrective to rationalist naiveté, was not a proper dramaturg, but an Isabel: the madness, night, and mystery “humankind” (imagined as one organism) “had to contend with.” Brooks distanced himself from his Harvard teacher Irving Babbit’s bullying, negativity, sectarianism, and disdain for “the desire for the masses for their place in the sun”; still, Brooks was grateful that Babbitt and Harvard had introduced him to “the writings of Renan, Taine, and above all, Sainte-Beuve, who had almost all the qualities I admired so greatly…How enlightening were Saint-Beuve’s phrases about the master faculty,–the ruling trait in characters,–and families of minds, with his “group” method in criticism and his unfailing literary tact, his erudition subdued by the imagination. How wonderfully he maintained his poise between the romantic and the classic. [iv]“

Similarly, Floyd Dell, novelist, poet, and associate editor of The Masses, was appalled by “intellectual vagabondage,” a symptom of “shell-shock” that followed the collapse of idealism after the war. Hoping to clear away the rubble of ugliness and chaos he saw in modernist renderings of “the unconscious” drawn from Freud, Dell recommended [ego psychology] as a new source of order:

“The scientific activities of mankind, unlike its imaginative activities, have not suffered from shell-shock; and we do not find the students of the human mind rejoicing in the chaos of the “unconscious” as an excuse for their failure to form a good working theory of it. On the contrary, we find that the “unconscious” is to them no chaos at all, but a realm in whose apparent disorder they have found a definite kind of order; in fact, they have been enabled by what they have found in the “unconscious” to correlate and explain all sorts of bewildering and painful discrepancies in outward conduct, previously inexplicable; they have created an intelligible and practically demonstrable theoretic unity out of just those aspects of human life which have for fictional and other artistic purposes seemed in the past a hopeless jangle of contradictions. And finally, they actually undertake therapeutically the task of bringing harmony, order and happiness into inharmonious, disorderly and futile lives. The imaginative artist need not be asked to “believe” in this; it may appear as alien to his own tasks as belief or disbelief in the new theory of electrons. But it is significant that such fiction as has undertaken to use these new concepts in the interpretation of life has met with no wide response from the intelligentsia–while on the contrary such fiction as has enriched its data with mere confusing and terrifying (one might say “bloody and stinking”) disjecta membra of psycho-analytic research, has had the reward of our enormous applause and admiration. It is evident that we, at this moment in history, do not want life to seem capable of being interpreted and understood, because that would be a reproach to us for our own failure to undertake the task of reconstructing our social, political and economic theories, and in general, and in consonance with these, our ideals of a good life.[v]“

   The moderated neo-classicism of New Humanism was growing in influence in the late 1920s; its practitioners were viewed by left-liberals as allied to political fascism, not just the “literary” variety.[vi] In the case of radical Floyd Dell, we see an abuse of scientific method typical of the conservative “Freudians” I am discussing: “the unconscious” may not disclose ugliness and chaos, the “bloody and stinking” gobbets of memory that revolted him. Science and art are good only when they order and fully explain experience, building morale for social reconstruction: axe the pessimists. Dell does not ask whether the “vagabonds” he criticizes are accurately depicting economic contradictions (which may or may not be relieved), but blames the victims for childishness and social irresponsibility, as if the eternal conflict between “the individual” and “society” were the sources of “romantic” pain and ambivalence, not revulsion against hypocrisy and the quietism of upper-class allegiance. The “disillusionment” theory for the Melville Revival seems part of the arsenal of conservative mind-managers defending themselves against history, materialism and critical Reason by promoting mystical notions of national character and group mind, with passions of “egoism” (i.e., distance from “the folk”) postulated as the source of social friction and decay.

     The aristocratic radicals were responding to the Bolshevik Revolution, an undeserved triumph perpetrated by returning exiles, intellectuals opportunistically seizing power amidst the chaos of impending defeat. And wars are made by hidebound and greedy old fogies who misshape the national character by enforcing state worship: “War is the health of the state,” as Randolph Bourne famously protested. Brooks, Mumford and Murray, writing in this great tradition of Progressive reproach, were pasting a piece of Melville to their projects while lengthily railing against the evils of “machines.” Like Trotter, they believed (mechanistically) that a tiny elite of Supermen could rescue the masses from themselves.[vii]

[ii]               14. Marianna is the sad seamstress (another Isabel) who tells the narrator of “The Piazza” that her “strange fancies” (as the narrator defines them) “but reflect the things.” The Jungian critic E.L. Grant Watson, a contributor to London Mercury, inverted Isabel’s identical point in “Melville’s Pierre,” New England Quarterly 3 (Apr. 1930): 195-234, praising Pierre as HM’s greatest book; I know of no correction to this revealing gaffe in the Melville scholarship, though Watson is frequently mentioned. On p.207 Watson characterized Isabel’s “collective unconscious” as transmitter of the “strangely demented people” that Melville’s Isabel clearly identified with real world authority during her stay in the [unnamable institution/asylum]. Stanley T. Williams was an editor of NEQ.

[iii]              15. Wilfred Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 94. The scientistic “Publishers’ Note” to the 1947 edition reads: “The aftermath of the Second World War, bringing with it the application of Atomic Energy and the need to prevent aggression (an indulgence now realised to have within its reach the power to do even greater harm to civilisation)–these are the considerations either at the front or the back of everyone’s thinking. In Europe they apply to the Peace Settlement yet to be made with Germany, and the future part to be played by her strange and able people…[Trotter’s] conclusions can be tested by the evidence of two great wars. Incidentally, they offer one explanation of the German political and social mentality which the British and the American mind find so incomprehensible.” The O.S.S. explanation for the rise of Hitler, as purveyed by Murray, for instance, was rooted in a similar organicist theory of history, with its notions of national character and group mind. Trotter’s publishers, Macmillan, avid disseminators of Anglo-American culture, also published Richard Chase’s Jungian study of Melville in 1949. Other publishers of Trotter’s book include T.F. Unwin, The Scientific Book Club, and Oxford University Press.

[iv]              16. Van Wyck Brooks, An Autobiography, Foreword by John Hall Wheelock. Introduction by Malcolm Cowley (New York, Dutton, 1965), 407-410, 125-26. See Meyer Schapiro review of Mumford, The Culture of Cities, “Looking Forward to Looking Backward,” Partisan Review (June 1938): 12-24, for analysis of Mumford’s reactionary organicism.

[v]               17. Floyd Dell, Intellectual Vagabondage (New York: Doran, 1926), 247-249 (Doran published Weaver). See Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left (New York: Oxford Univ. Press paperback, 1977), 102-107 for discussion of Dell’s and Joseph Freeman’s critique of bohemian symbiosis with puritan middle-classes, the babyishness of the bohemian rebel. Such magisterial critiques of romantic infantilism ignore the real hypocrisies and incompatible demands and expectations that have driven “bohemians” into flight and withdrawal. Dell’s interest in Nietzsche, Ignatius Donnelly, G.K. Chesterton and Ezra Pound bears looking into.

[vi]              18. Daniel Aaron, Writers On The Left, 233-243. And see photographs at UCLA Special Collections of D.H. Lawrence and Frieda in the Southwest, 1922-1923: Lawrence in tie and (usually) three-piece suit, Frieda above him, framed in a black window; elsewhere always dressed in ethnic clothing, Indian or Mexican, earth mother and duende, i.e., Isabel.

[vii]             19. See The Van Wyck Brooks-Lewis Mumford Letters: the record of a literary friendship, 1921-1963, edited by Robert Spiller (New York: Dutton, 1970), passim. Henry A. Murray said he hoped that I would be able to solve the problem of violence and war, since he had failed (Interview, Nov. 4, 1987). Matthiessen denounced the Nietzschean Superman as protofascist while maintaining his reverence for the genius of poets who would, through adherence to organicist aesthetic theory, revitalize and unify culture; see discussion of American Renaissance, below, keeping in mind the taming of “Marja.”