Posts Tagged Herman Melville

Why Read Moby-Dick?
By Nathaniel Philbrick.
144 pp. Viking Adult. $25.

If such a thing as the Great American Novel exists, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is almost certainly the finest example of the species—and not just because of its high quality. Moby-Dick serves as a model for the way that American writers of “literary fiction” see themselves, in that it was composed by an autodidact who had one foot in with the working class and one with high culture; that it supports dozens upon dozens of interpretive frameworks, including one that posits the book as the key to understanding America itself; and, of course, that it was (the story goes) widely hated upon its initial publication, only to be understood, accepted, and praised a full lifetime later. Most American writers of serious novels, I suspect, see themselves as heirs to this tradition.

Unfortunately, as Nathaniel Philbrick notes in his new apology for the novel,

Moby-Dick may be well known, but of the handful of novels considered American classics, such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby, it is the most reluctantly read. It is too long and too maddeningly digressive to be properly appreciated by a sleep-deprived adolescent, particularly in this age of digital distractions.

No Melville fan who has attempted to discuss Moby-Dick with nonbelievers will disagree with this statement. An otherwise educated and thoughtful person will twist her face into a grimace when you bring up Moby-Dick. “Oh,” she will say with a strange mixture of shame and disdain. “I’ve never read that.” And who can blame her? Moby-Dick is a glorious mess of a novel, pieced together from multiple drafts with little apparent effort to make its pieces cohere. My advice for those approaching the novel for the first time is always the same: Do not try to interpret every piece of it, and for crying out loud, don’t waste your time trying to figure out what the whale “represents.” You have to steer into the skid with Moby-Dick; submit yourself to its strange whims and demands, and you will emerge better for the experience. Try to fight it, and you’ll end up in a snow bank.

That’s not to say that interpretations of Moby-Dick have no value; it’s just that one can’t approach the novel with a scalpel. Some of the world’s greatest literary critics, from the early rediscoverers of Melville in the 1920s to Lionel Trilling to Andrew Delbanco, have written with great insight and originality on Moby-Dick, and we as readers are all better for it. Philbrick, for his part, does not seem to aim to join the ranks of academic scholars; in the afterword to Why Read Moby-Dick?, he cites Delbanco’s 2005 biography of Melville as a major influence but does not engage directly with any other scholars. Rather, this short, eminently readable book is aimed at a general-market reader who is otherwise educated but who might grimace at the mention of the novel. Philbrick does not “explain”; rather, he contextualizes and ultimately makes a fairly convincing case that every educated person should at least dip into the novel.

His approach is rather like that of the great “heroic critics” of the middle of the last century. While the book lacks a coherent message beyond “You must read this,” Philbrick returns again and again to the idea that

Contained within the pages of Moby-Dick is nothing less than the genetic code of America: all the promises, problems, conflicts, and ideals that contributed to the outbreak of a revolution in 1775 as well as a civil war in 1861 and continue to drive this country’s ever-contentious march into the future. This means that whenever a new crisis grips this country, Moby-Dick becomes newly important. It is why subsequent generations have seen Ahab as Hitler during World War II or as a profit-crazed deep-drilling oil company in 2010 or as a power-crazed Middle Eastern dictator in 2011.

It’s a good thing that Philbrick is writing for a popular, rather than an scholarly, audience, because this sort of grandiose language—intense fandom couched in the terminology of national history—is no longer permitted by the guardians of academic prose. (Delbanco is an exception to this and most other rules.) I will admit that Philbrick’s new heroic criticism appeals to me. When he says that “As individuals trying to find our way through the darkness, as citizens of a nation trying to live up to the ideals set forth in our constitution, we need, more than ever before, Moby-Dick,” I am inclined to agree—although I doubt that our politics would be made less odious by a national book club.

Philbrick goes into quite a bit of detail about the background, composition, and historical context of Moby-Dick, quoting generously from the letters of Melville and of his once-friends Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne. These details serve to make his appeals simultaneously specific and universal, concerned simultaneously with the importance of Moby-Dick to Melville’s life and with its importance to our grand national mythos. These two concerns occasionally sit uncomfortably next to each other, but that discomfort is entirely appropriate for a book about a book like Moby-Dick, where thousands of words on the practical issues of cetalogy sit wedged between chapters on philosophical idealism and bizarre Shakespearean playlets about monomania and power.

Indeed, Philbrick is savvy enough about the structure of Moby-Dick to make his book similarly fragmented and crooked. Like Melville, he utilizes a series of very short chapters. Each approaches the book from a different direction. In this way, Philbrick creates a pattern of thrusts and parries surrounding the interpretation of the novel. His major theme is his understanding of American history and myth through Moby-Dick, but his minor themes are legion: religion, homosexuality, race, politics, environmentalism, and so forth. The novel is not “about” any of these things in the sense that high-school English teachers sometimes tell their students that the white whale “represents” God or the id or the vanishing wilderness—but Philbrick is quite right in pointing out that it contains all of these subjects, and he writes about them thoughtfully and with gusto.

Sometimes, in fact, he writes with a little too much gusto. Early in the book, he attempts to take on Melville’s authorial voice in a discussion about—of all things—clam chowder. The results are decidedly mixed: “Remember this, all ye modern-day clam chowder makers, forgo the cloying chunks of needless potato and go with the biscuit bits!” The sentence is going along fine until Philbrick slips in the modern slang “go with,” at which point the effect is ruined.

But I’ll take a cheerful if unsuccessful attempt at talking like Melville over Philbrick’s occasional lapses into a more conversational tone. The worst of these occurs in his discussion of Melville’s filthy joke in “The Cassock,” chapter 95 of Moby-Dick. Something about Melville’s vulgarity turns Philbrick into the smirking frat boy in your American literature survey: “Ishmael begins by describing how the mincer, the sailo who cuts up the whale blubber into thin pieces known as bible leaves, secures a very special coat made from—get this—the foreskin of a sperm whale’s penis…that’s right, the foreskin of a whale.” These lapses are, thankfully, rare, and most of the time Philbrick treats his readers like adults.

These are minor complaints, of course, and they don’t really mar what is on the whole a delightful apologia for a Great Book that many know only by reputation. I do wonder how many non-readers of Moby-Dick will be readers of Why Read Moby-Dick?; I suspect that, despite Philbrick’s noble efforts, the people who have been scared away by the length and opacity of Moby-Dick will not want to read a book that attempts to change their minds. I hope I am wrong.

Philbrick, for his part, attempts to keep his expectations modest at the outset. “I am not one of those purists,” he says, “who insist on reading the entire untruncated text at all costs. Moby-Dick is a long book, and time is short. Even a sentence, a mere phrase, will do.” This is a profoundly stupid thing to say. Very few people will insist on anyone reading every word of Moby-Dick; I have been through it four or five times now, and I am certain there are paragraphs I’ve never read. But a sentence? A phrase? Be reasonable.

Besides, Philbrick contradicts his magnanimity in the very next sentence: “The important thing is to spend some time with the novel, to listen as you read, to feel the prose adapt to the various voices that flowed through Melville during the book’s composition like intermittent ghosts with something urgent and essential to say.” Philbrick does not say how he thinks a reader will be able to hear these “various voices . . . with something urgent and essential to say” when he stops at “a mere phrase” of the novel. We do not need people who read a tiny fragment of Moby-Dick any more than we need people who read a tiny fragment of the Bible. The same is true for any great book with something to say.

So my advice is to ignore Philbrick’s advice and instead watch the way he actually reads the book—watch him rhapsodize and puzzle and swoon over Melville’s prose and ideas. Why Read Moby-Dick? doesn’t break an inch of new ground in Melville scholarship, but it serves as a useful guide for laymen and, perhaps, a reminder to scholars of why we loved the novel in the first place.

General Introduction
- What is a triptych, anyway?
- We stand outside of time
- What’s on the blog?

Euripides the Man
- What do we know?
- Making fun of Euripides
- Misogynist
- Troubled loner
- The “happy plays”

Hippolytus
- His unfortunate story
- Other sources for the myth
- Euripides’ first version
- Those amoral gods!
- Who’s really to blame here?

The Deus Ex Machina
- Petty yet ultimately vindictive behavior
- Aphrodite as metaphor
- Being kind to Aphrodite

Hippolytus’ Suffering
- For what does he suffer?
- Plato’s criticism of Euripides
- The realistic turn
- Absence of hamartia
- Hippolytus’ modern heirs
- Immoderate celibacy
- Misogyny

Medea
- Her long, troubled fate
- Never give a witch an inch
- Is she a proto-feminist or a monster?
- Medea’s original reception
- Rapidly changing characters
- Aegeus’s cameo
- How does it compare to Seneca’s version?

Euripides’ Influence
- Medea as godly woman
- Euripides and Paul’s advice
- The dark side of paganism
- Melville’s quarrel
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
Aristophanes. The Frogs and Other Plays. Trans. Shomit Dutta. New York: Penguin, 2007.

Aristotle. Trans. Joe Sachs. Newburyport, Mass.: Focus, 2005.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. New York: Norton, 2005.

Euripides. Alcestis and Other Plays. Trans. Philip Vellacott. New York: Penguin, 1974.

—. Medea and Other Plays. Trans. John Davie. New York: Penguin, 2003.

McIntyre, Alasdair. A Short History of Ethics: A History of Moral Philosophy from the Homeric Age to the Twentieth Century. South Bend, Ind.: U of Notre Dame P, 1998.

Melville, Herman. Pierre; or, the Ambiguities. New York: Penguin, 1996.

Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. New York: Penguin, 1998.

Murray, Gilbert. Euripides and His Age. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2011.

Ovid. Heroides. Trans. Harold Isbell. New York: Penguin, 1990.

Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. New York: Hackett, 1995.

—. Republic. Trans. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic, 1991.

Seneca. Six Tragedies. Trans. Emily Wilson. New York: Oxford UP, 2010.

Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. New York: Arden, 1997.

He must have regretted it for the rest of his life, but J.D. Salinger perfectly encapsulated the deep affection a reader develops for an author. “What really knocks me out,” Holden Caulfield announces in the third chapter of The Catcher in the Rye, “is a book that, when you’re done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.” Herman Melville would certainly have known how Holden felt; his most famous piece of non-fiction, after all, is “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” an effusive sixteen-page paean to the older writer that he was somehow able to parlay into a genuine and intense–though regrettably brief–friendship. Their relationship soured after a few years, for reasons that aren’t quite clear today, but the connection between Hawthorne and Melville was, while it lasted, undoubtedly the most important friendship in American literary history.

When it ended, Melville destroyed every single letter that Hawthorne ever wrote to him, so Hawthorne’s best and most interesting thoughts on the author of Moby-Dick come to us from his notebooks. (The best of these thoughts–and probably the most insightful thing anyone will ever write on the subject of Melville’s religious life, is, “He can neither believe nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.”) As it happens, however, Melville’s letters to Hawthorne don’t tell us nearly as much as “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” and almost everyone who wants to write about the relationship between the two men starts with this essay.

I am less interested, however, in what Melville has to say specifically about Hawthorne than in what he has to say about writers and writing in general. “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in-between its perhaps too eager praise for Hawthorne and its patriotic dismantling of the literary canon and Shakespeare’s place at the center of it, manages to hit the major notes of one of the biggest critical revolutions of the twentieth century. What’s more, Melville finds a middle ground between the two camps, decades and decades before one of them had even been founded.

The first major blow against the idea of the author as ultimate arbiter of the written text came in the essay “The Intentional Fallacy,” written by William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley in 1946. Wimsatt and Beardsley argue persuasively, if drily, that extratextual intent on the part of the author of the poem is beside the point in any act of interpretation. For one thing, those intentions are very rarely available to us as readers, but even when they are, they just get in the way. Instead, “Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work.” To deal with biography or authorial intent is nothing but a romantic fantasy, part of “a discipline which one might call the psychology of composition” that must be kept quite separate from literary criticism proper.

Wimsatt and Beardsley–and the New Criticism with which they are associated–put the locus of authority on the text. As they put it, once a poet sends his poem out into the world, “The poem belongs to the public. It is embodied in language, the peculiar possession of the public, and it is about the human being, an object of public knowledge.” They do not mean by this that the public is free to interpret the poem however it wishes, any more than the public is free to assert with impunity that the sun revolves around the earth or that Portugal perpetuated the Holocaust. Rather, there are certain objective facts about the meaning of a poem, just as there are ostensibly certain objective facts about the natural world. Furthermore, we discover these facts by the same method: empirical observation. The scientist/literary critic must comb through the material world of the text without reference to the “supernatural” world of the author.

These religious metaphors are only implicit in “The Intentional Fallacy,” but they become central in the next generation’s volley, Roland Barthes’ 1968 essay “The Death of the Author.” Students of literature have traditionally encountered this essay during the first year of graduate school, and the effect is typically galvanizing; Barthes gives the literary critic carte blanche to do with the text as she pleases. “Once the Author is removed,” he announces, “the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.” It’s a given that the author doesn’t matter; Barthes pushes it forward to the point where Wimsatt and Beardsley’s objective/scientific meaning is also lost. The power of the critic is simultaneously expanded and diminished: No longer must the critic bow to outside forces that would determine “correct” interpretation–but neither can she assume that her interpretation is binding for anyone, including herself. The death of the Author results in the birth not of the Reader but of readers, plural.

Barthes’ purposes here are rather explicitly (anti-) theological. The lack of a final or ultimate meaning in his system of criticism corresponds to a parallel lack of final or ultimate meaning in the world itself. And, as Barthes notes, “to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases–reason, science, law.” Barthes may ultimately merely take Wimsatt and Beardsley to their logical conclusion; to disregard the Author is, after all, to suggest a lack of teleology in the text; as Pope puts it, “Whatever is, is right.”

The limitations of the New Critical and poststructuralist approaches to interpretation are apparent with a little further investigation. The New Critics, for their part, collapse wholly into the body of the text, close their eyes, plug their ears, and refuse to look beyond the printed page. Wimsatt and Beardsley use mechanical language to describe what they do; John Crowe Ransom, who coined the term “The New Criticism,” says outright that “Criticism must become more scientific, or precise and systematic.” Problem is, criticism depends on literature, and literature isn’t in any important sense exactly; it’s always written by a messy and unmechanized human being into a specific social and historical context that will pull the critic further down the rabbit hole so long as he is honest enough to follow the trail. A scientific criticism is possibly only if the critic pretends the part of the iceberg that touches the air is the only part of the iceberg.

Barthes’ poststructuralist alternative, which seemed so promising and exhilarating when I was 23, leads to a different sort of philosophical dead end. Instead of disappearing into the ink on the page, Barthes-as-Critic slides into himself. His 1973 book The Pleasure of the Text demonstrates the endgame of criticism without teleology. The joissance referred to in the French title is the pleasure of orgasm, and Barthes seems to conceive of literary interpretation as a sort of intellectualized auto-erotic asphyxiation. “The pleasure of the text,” he says, “is like that untenable, impossible, purely novelistic instant so relished by Sade’s libertine when he manages to be hanged and then to cut the rope at the very moment of his orgasm, his bliss.”

Pleasure, by its very nature, belongs to the individual, so Barthes’ moving the act of reading and interpretation from the realm of truth and ideals into the realm of pleasure (“the whole effort [of the book] consists in materializing the pleasure of the text, in making the text an object of pleasure like the others“) is ipso facto a retreat into utter solipsism. Interpretation is a form of masturbation, performed not to get at any grand or even small truth but to bring pleasure solely to the interpreter.

I’ve come a long, graphic way from “Hawthorne and His Mosses”–or maybe not. Melville is famously fond of ambiguously sexual imagery–Barthes must have loved him if he ever read him–and this essay is no exception. As Melville puts it toward the end:

But already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further, further, shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul.

The orgasm metaphor remains, but it is the author’s, not the reader’s, and it is not at all masturbatory. Clearly we’re dealing with something quite different from Barthesian joissance here.

But neither would Melville be interested in joining those who would claim–even after Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, and the others who in their various ways pronounced the Author dead–that authorial intentionality is the most important ingredient in literary criticism. (These folks do still exist, though maybe not in large numbers in the actual Academy.) Early on in the essay, Melville wishes aloud “that all excellent books were foundlings, without father or mother, that so it might be, we could glorify them, without including their ostensible authors.” He sounds an awful lot like Wimsatt and Beardsley here, eager to put biographical criticism to bed once and for all, eager to praise the text and nothing but the text.

But the subjunctive mood in that sentence says it all. Melville would like to live in a world of texts without authors, but that world does not exist–or at least it is not our world. He is drawn throughout the essay to Hawthorne the man, at times almost the extent of fetishizing his physical body. He says at one point that Hawthorne is “content with the still, rich utterances of a great intellect in respose; and which sends few thoughts into circulation, except they be arterialized at his large warm lungs, and expanded in his honest heart.” At times, he takes a proto-New Critical turn in his skepticism about the ability of biography to aid literary criticism. (“Whether Hawthorne has simply availed himself of this mystical blackness as a means to the wondrous effects he makes it to produce in his lights and shades; or whether there really lurks in him, perhaps unknown to him, a touch of Puritanic gloom–this I cannot altogether tell.”) But then he turns around and expresses better than anyone until Salinger the reader’s deep-seated need to know the author: “No man can read a fine author, and relish him to his very bones, while he reads, without subsequently fancying to himself some ideal image of the man and his mind.”

Melville’s combination of draw toward the great author and skepticism that the author can say anything the text doesn’t creates a tension, one that we might productively compare to a more traditional tension in American literature: that between the personal/individual and the universal/social. For if the New Critics are right, the text is an objective sign that anyone with the proper training can read correctly. If the romantics and biographers are right, the text is a pure expression of a great individual genius, who controls the interpretation and meaning of it. (If Barthes is right, of course, all interpretation is at best the blind leading the blind.) At times, Melville seems to think meaning is personal; other times, he leans toward a universalist interpretation.

In the end, I think, he affirms both by rising above the dichotomy. Shortly after he longs for a text without an author, he makes the following statement:

The names of all fine authors are fictitious ones, far more so than that of Junius–simply standing, as they do, for the mystical, ever-eluding Spirit of all beauty, which ubiquitously possesses men of genius.

Melville very nearly affirms Emerson’s Over-Soul here, with the caveat that it is essentially hierarchical, that only “men of genius” belong to it. But it allows him a way out of the quagmire of author-text/individual-universal divide. To praise the text is, in this line of thinking, to praise the author, and to praise the author is to praise the “Spirit of all Beauty” off in the ether somewhere. The author’s biography, like his visage, is encoded into the text, so whether you seek it in other places scarcely matters; it’s coming out, and you’re drawn to it because to be a human being is to be drawn to other human beings. At the same time, the text connects to that higher Spirit of all Beauty and thus moves far beyond authorial intent. One may feel free to say more than the author could have imagined–and simultaneously to avoid the worst excesses of the New Critics and the poststructuralists.

BLOOPBLEEPBLURGH

General Introduction
- What’s on the blog?
- The feud continues
- Polymathery

Cybernetics as Governance
- Not a portmanteau!
- Getting organized as a spiritual gift
- Rudder-steerer
- Modern definition
- Military purposes
- David Grubbs’s computer-programming past
- Feedback loops and exploding robot heads
- Cyborgs vs. androids

The Myth of Theuth
- Writing and memory
- Dialectic as a cure for writing
- The irony of the Phaedrus
- Writing as technology
- How providential is the time of Christ’s coming?
- (The use and misuse of providence)
- What are we giving away?

Cultural Cyborgs
- How the Tin Man became tin
- Blade Runner complicates memory
- Poe tries to get funny
- Cybernetics, villains, and disability
- Are children afraid of Darth Vader?

Heidegger: The Video Game
- Is the Guitar Hero stage part of Dasein?
- The appeal of video games
- Expanding the world
- Heidegger’s hammer and the physical world
- Entering into stories

The Technological Classroom
- Look-up-ability
- Memorizing facts to connect facts
- Spell check—quelle horreur!
- Phone numbers and birthdays
- Our limitless memories
- Nathan’s inability to memorize Bible verses

Where Do We Draw the Line?
- Are eyeglasses cybernetic?
- Resisting technology
- Why you never shed human limits
- Technology is part of humanism
- Breaking cell phones

The Takeaway Point
- Humanity doing its job
- Avoid idolatry
- Grace and avenues of it
- Breaking the mind/body dualism
- Be willing to change your anthropological model

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abe, Kobo. The Box Man. New York: Vintage, 2001.

—. The Face of Another. New York: Vintage, 2003.

Barrie, J.M. Peter Pan. New York: Henry Holt, 2003.

Baum, L. Frank. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. New York: North-South, 1999.

Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.

Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Oxford UP, 2007.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie. New York: Harper, 2008.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.

Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Christopher Rowe. New York: Penguin, 2005.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Man That Was Used Up.” Poetry and Tales. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn. New York: Library of America, 1984.

Postman, Neil. Technopoly. New York: Vintage, 1993.

General Introduction
- Do suits make you smarter?
- Pardon Michial’s head cold
- A plug for the CWC

The History of the King James Version
- And the Bibles that preceded it
- The battle over footnotes
- The Geneva Bible
- A unity text

The KJV’s Influence on English-Language Literature
- Emerson and the prophet books
- Melville’s Shakespearean Bible
- The influence of Pilgrim’s Progress
- Twain eviscerates the Book of Mormon
- Walt Whitman the thundering god
- The KJV and the 19^th-century cult
- Byron’s libertinism and guilt
- The Divine Voice in J.B.

Literalist Translation
- What does it mean, anyway?
- Dynamic equivalence and formal equivalence
- The Jehovah’s Witnesses and the English-Greek code
- Use of older translations
- The lost Revelation
- Explaining the metaphor

The KJV-Only Controversy
- Deconstructing King James inerrancy
- The manuscript view
- A new kind of Gnosticism?
- Jerome’s riot

The Poetic Virtues of the KJV
- A merit beyond the literary
- Self-conscious archaism
- Leaving the poetry intact
- David Grubbs: a man of many machetes
- What do we use the KJV for?
- Reading the Bible

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blavatsky, H.P. The Secret Doctrine. Los Angeles: Tarcher, 2009.

Bunyan, John. Pilgrim’s Progress. New York: Penguin, 2009.

Byron, George Gordon Lord. The Major Works. Ed. Jerome J. McGann. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.

Carson, D.A. The King James Version Debate: A Plea for Realism. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 1978.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays and Lectures. Ed. Joel Porte. New York: Library of America, 1983.

MacLeish, Archibald. J.B. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1989.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York: Norton, 2001.

Newbrough, John B. Oahspe. Seattle: BookSurge, 2009.

Twain, Mark. Roughing It. New York: Penguin, 1981.

White, James R. The King James Only Controversy: Can You Trust Modern Translations? Bloomington, Minn.: Bethany House, 2009.

Whitman, Walt. Poetry and Prose. Ed. Justin Kaplan. New York: Library of America, 1996.

• How Moby-Dick prefigures Nietzsche.
• Alasdair Macintyre criticizes Research-I universities for not really being universities.
• Jay Bennet, Super-Calvinist, says, “Get the Christ out of Christmas!”
• A Message from your University President (parody or prophecy?)
• James K.A. Smith on the Secularization of Thanksgiving (a couple weeks late)
• John Milbank connects the secular, mediation, and the global Pentecostal movement.
• Is it bad that this article fills us with schadenfreude?
• Reading the Bible: to discover truth or to proclaim truth?
• How Zemeckis’s Beowulf should have ended (yes, it’s becoming a theme, but they’re funny!):
  

General Introduction
- Hey, there’s four of us!
- A needless interruption
- What’s on the blog?
- David pleases the king

Background
- A little-read Great Book
- Spenser’s social climbing
- The messy composition
- Disillusionment in the second half?
- Personal and civic virtue

Let’s Talk Carla
- The broad strokes of Carla’s thesis
- Female disappointment
- Does Britomart ever find satisfaction?
- Unspeakable disasters
- The block of the patriarchy

Let’s Talk Britomart
- Is Britomart a feminist?
- Self-hatred
- Gender bendin’ with Queen Elizabeth I
- The Ally McBeal of the 16^th century
- An endemic problem to Renaissance epic?
- What did Spenser intend?

Period Resonations
- Nathan brings his dissertation into it!
- Religious tensions of the era
- The sacramentality of marriage
- Milton’s gender division
- Boethius and the Fortunate Fall

Book One
- The only thing you’ve read: Admit it!
- Which church are you part of?
- The Catholic scarlet woman

The National Epic
- A New Kind of St. George
- Gloriana, the Faerie Queene
- Prince Arthur
- The anxieties of the empire

Allegory and Critical Theory
- Michial wrongly anticipates a cage match
- Why allegory confuses Britomart
- How emotion breaks it down
- Allegory as inherently limiting
- Authorial intent
- Did Spenser fall backwards into a great book?
- Allegory that creates a surplus of meaning
- Back to the Holy Grail!
- Is there a point of arrival?

Lightning Round
- What else in The Faerie Queene is worth your time?
- Sir Guyon discovers the limits of classical virtue
- The first buddy cop movie
- False Florimell’s phony romance novel
- Pyrochles sets himself on fire
- The adventures of Belphoebe and Amoret
- The Salvage Man’s nasty habits

Why Should You Bother and How Should You Proceed?
- The power of the poetry
- A shameful reminder
- Intangible meaning and beauty
- Understanding the historical roots of our modern beliefs
- Read it in a group
- Positive frustration
- C.S. Lewis’s strange mother issues
- Stuff for the 11-year-old boys in our audience
- White is a color, too—and the ambiguity of virtue
- Another tiresome comparison to Moby-Dick
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ariosoto, Ludovico. Orlando Furioso. Trans. Guido Waldman. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.

Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1995.

Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Trans. Victor Watts. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Candler, Peter M., Jr. “The Anagogical Imagination of Flannery O’Connor.” Christianity and Literature 60.1 (Autumn 2010): 11-33.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York: Norton, 2001.

Milbank, John. Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. New York: Norton, 2004.

Shakespeare, William. Othello. London: Arden, 1996.

Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. New York: Penguin, 1979.

Something about nineteenth-century America made great novelists shoot for immense public success by eliminating what it was about their writing that made them great. The most obvious and egregious example is Herman Melville’s follow-up to Moby-Dick, 1852′s little-loved Pierre: Or, the Ambiguities. The official story is that Melville had set out to write a sweet and light domestic novel–he referred to it, in a letter to Sofia Hawthorne, as “a bowl of milk”–then got the negative reviews for Moby-Dick, at which point Pierre became a dark Calvinist beast of a novel: ugly, misanthropic, and terribly plotted.

There is reason to doubt the official story. John Updike explains:

[T]he reviews [of Moby-Dick] weren’t all that bad. Not as bad, certainly, as those which had greeted Mardi two years before. . . . Even those with strong reservations about Moby-Dick spoke respectfully of the author’s talent, and a number of early enthusiasts for this willful and extravagant work were among the reviewers. It is true, Melville did not receive what might have been psychologically useful at this time–a fully generous public salute from a high-minded peer, such as he had given Hawthorne, or as Emerson was to give Whitman (in a private letter that became public) upon receipt of Leaves of Grass. . . . Melville’s critical and popular position after the publication of Moby-Dick was still high; he was commonly written of as a genius, and, in a London New Year’s survey of new presences in American literature, ranked with Hawthorne and the now forgotten Richard Burleigh Kimball and Sylvester Judd. There is nothing in his situation like the obscurity in which, at his age, Hawthorne and Whitman labored, or for that matter in which Joyce, Proust, and Kafka secreted their modern classics.

So much for that excuse, then. But that means we still have to figure out why Pierre took such a dark and disturbing turn. For a clue, I suggest we turn to Stephen Crane’s second follow-up to The Red Badge of Courage, the nearly forgotten The Third Violet. Crane apparently began writing this novel a mere two months after the release of Red Badge, justly one of the most-celebrated books in American literary history. The acclaim was nearly universal and immediate–the novel went through two printings in less than five months, and reviewers fell over themselves praising it on both sides of the Atlantic.

Not so The Third Violet, which flopped like a beached whale in the bookstores and which American critics, anyway, detested. British critics were substantially more positive, but I am not enough of a scholar of late-19th-century England to know why–perhaps realism and naturalism had not gripped Britain as strongly as they had America. The hatred is understandable. The Third Violet is a radical shift from The Red Badge of Courage, which anticipates Hemingway in its understated brutality and misanthropy. (Hemingway would later call Red Badge the finest war novel ever written.)

The Third Violet, on the other hand, at least flirts with every conceivable trope of romantic and domestic novels. Two young people, one (of course) an artist from a poor background, the other an heiress, meet on vacation and fall in love. Fate intervenes to keep them apart, and both return to their wildly disparate lives in New York City, until Fate intervenes once more to bring them together. It could be Pride and Prejudice or Jane Eyre–less favorably, it could be The Minister’s Wooing or The Wide, Wide World. Katherine Heigl and Ryan Reynolds would star in the movie adaption, which your mother would see in the theater and recommend to you for three months.

The novel is as bad as the movie adaptation makes it sound. Its first half, the vacation scenes, work all right if you pretend the author is someone other than Stephen Crane, but things go south very quickly once everyone hauls it back to Manhattan. The Third Violet isn’t as fantastically bad as Pierre–but it’s much less interesting as well. As Cameron Crowe points out in Elizabethtown, a trainwreck in its own right, “There’s a difference between a failure and a fiasco. A failure is simply the non-presence of success. Any fool can accomplish failure. But a fee-ass-scoe, a fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions. A fiasco is a folk tale told to others that makes other people feel more alive because. It. Didn’t. Happen. To. Them.” (Full disclosure: While I saw that movie, I’m taking the general idea of failures vs. fiascos from Nathan Rabin’s excellent “My Year of Flops” series over at The AV Club–now available in book form!) Pierre is a fiasco. The Third Violet is merely a failure. I can’t imagine teaching it except in a class that taught everything Crane ever wrote, or perhaps one that sought to determine the real difference between realism and romanticism.

But there’s the rub. Paul Sorrentino argues (quite convincingly, I think) that The Third Violet is one of the very best places to go to find the tension between literary romanticism and literary realism–the former was mostly dead critically but remained popular among the masses for…well, to this day, and the latter was well into its ascent amongst “serious writers.” The Third Violet reflects this conflict–but not where Sorrentino thinks it does. His mistake is in identifying Crane with the main character, a painter named William Hawker; in fact, Crane’s biography echoes more strongly with the novel’s chief author character, Hollanden.

Hollanden is a distinctively American character type: the artiste who has completely sold out but is aware of it and thus maintains his charm for the reader. As he says to a group of fawning vacationing women,

Well—you must understand—I started my career—my career, you understand—with a determination to be a prophet and, although I have ended in being an acrobat, a trained bear of the magazines, and a juggler of comic paragraphs, there was once carven upon my lips a smile which made many people detest me, for it hung before them like a banshee whenever they tried to be satisfied with themselves.

The naturalist author is meant to be a prophet; he is meant to convict society of its sins. But instead he becomes a clown, doing tricks for them. Surely Crane feared that’s what was happening to him as he wrote The Third Violet, which is so different in tone from Maggie and The Red Badge of Courage.

It’s important to note, by the way, that Hollanden’s self-description echoes Crane’s interview with the godfather of American realism, William Dean Howells: “Ah, this writing merely to amuse people—why, it seems to me altogether vulgar. A man may as well blacken his face and go out and dance on the street for pennies. The author is a sort of trained bear, if you accept certain standards.” The naturalist self-critique here is quite clearly intentional and significant.

The question thus stands: If Crane was so aware of the loathesomeness of the Third Violet project–it would be like Martin Scorsese directing a movie based on a Nicholas Sparks novel–why didn’t he complicate the plot? The novel has a standard romantic ending. The two leads get together and live happily ever after. The answer seems to be that Crane was interested in a more subtle problematizing of the romance genre, thus Hollanden’s bitter self-critique.

Thus also the frequent demonstrations of the difficulties of being the friend or lover of a naturalist artist. At one point, the female lead (and Hawker’s love interest), Miss Fanhall, says to Hollanden, “And yet you—really Hollie, there is something unnatural in you. You are so stupidly keen in looking at people that you do not possess common loyalty to your friends. It is because you are a writer, I suppose.” Indeed, it’s not easy to have a relationship with someone who sees himself as a prophet, much less a fallen one. Hawker seems to agree; he says to Miss Fanhall, “You know what a bear I am sometimes. Hollanden says it is a fixed scowl from trying to see uproarious pinks, yellows and blues.” To tell things as they really are, one apparently must see people mostly in terms of their composition.

It could be, then, that The Third Violet is Crane’s attempt to integrate with the rest of society–his attempt to move beyond ugly but prophetic naturalism and to make nice with the rest of the world. He recognizes that this attempt is selling out to the magazines and the best-seller list, but part of him obviously thinks it worth the danger. That he sold out without the result achieving either artistic or commercial success must have pushed him permanently back into the naturalist mode.

But as I said, The Third Violet is a failure, a bad novel in a rather uninteresting way. Pierre is a much worse novel in a much more interesting way. There’s an odd twist midway through the novel, which begins as a domestic fantasy and ends in death and destruction: the titular Pierre suddenly becomes a professional writer, albeit a failure. Critics have traditionally seen the point at which this subplot is introduced as the point at which Melville began to read the reviews of Moby-Dick. But if Updike is right and those reviews weren’t all that bad, we need another explanation.

Enter The Third Violet. What if, as I want to suggest, the ugly turn in Pierre has less to do with the world outside of Melville’s house than the world inside his own head? What if Melville genuinely wanted to write the sort of novel Sophia Hawthorne would have liked to read, a sunny domestic caper but part of himself wouldn’t let him? What if the Calvinist God Melville hated and feared had placed in his soul the ability only to write of the dark and angry underbelly of human existence?

My suggestion–and I’m going to have to leave it at a mere suggestion, which is why I’m glad this is a blog entry and not an academic paper–is that Melville began Pierre as a domestic fantasy but that part of him wouldn’t let himself complete it that way. The dark turn in the novel, along with the strange and ineffective authorial subplot, comes from the same place in Melville as Hollanden’s self-critique comes from in Stephen Crane. Something about these authors won’t let them write outside their milieus.

The real question is: Would we have been better off if they hadn’t tried?

Our theme music this week is Ted Leo’s “The Sons of Cain,” from 2007’s Living with the Living. Does it remind anyone else of Hey Dude for some reason?

General Introduction
- A month of Christian
Humanists
- What’s on the blog?
- Nathan axe crazy
- Like us on Facebook!

Cain, the Sons of Cain, and the Lex Talionis
- Cain takes his revenge
- Cain fears his revenge
- The Mark of Cain
- The mercy of the Law
- The days of Lamech
- Orestes and the Furies
- The city of refuge

Achilles’ Revenge
- Revenge within revenge
- Humiliation atop revenge
- Plato’s Christian Bookstore
- Euripides and Seneca get ugly

Jesus Throws It All Off Balance
- But first, Paul quotes Leviticus
- Purification ritual or apocalyptic cruelty?
- Interpreting Matthew 5
- Pacifism? Law? Ignoring insults?
- What do the Anabaptists say?

Christians Breaking the Rules
- Grendel stands with the sons of Cain
- Mrs. Grendel takes revenge
- Beowulf as divine avenger and magistrate
- Stiletto heels for a proper vendetta
- Seeking revenge with Arthur’s knights
- Good revenge and bad revenge
- Explaining Monty Python

The English Renaissance
- The Seneca revival
- Shakespeare’s balancing act
- Why your high-school English teacher was wrong
- Claudius’s bedroom prayer
- F.O.B.

A New Kind of Revenge Tale
- Spoiler alert
- How Dimmesdale ruins Chillingworth’s revenge
- Who’s the protagonist?
- Updike’s twisting of the already twisted
- Captain Ahab’s quixotic revenge quest

Pop Cultural Manifestations
- Why do Christians get more uneasy about revenge in some genres?
- Dream time
- Justice vs. Achillean rage
- The racial component
- How explicit is it?
- The Biz Never Sleeps
- Where’s the critique?
- A tale of two Eastwoods

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aeschylus. The Oresteia: Agamemnon; The Libation Bearers; The Euminides. Ed. W.B. Stanford. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 1984.

Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. New York: Penguin, 1997.

Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. Trans. Seamus Heaney. New York: Norton, 2001.

Euripides. Heracles and Other Plays. Trans. John Davie. New York: Penguin, 2002.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2010.

Homer. The Iliad. Trans. E.V. Rieu. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Kyd, Thomas. The Spanish Tragedy. New York: Book Jungle, 2007.

Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte d’Arthur. New York: Norton, 2003.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York: Norton, 2001.

Plato. The Republic. Trans. Desmond Lee. New York: Penguin, 2007.

Seneca. Six Tragedies. Trans. Emily Wilson. New York: Oxford UP, 2010.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. London: Arden, 2006.

Updike, John. A Month of Sundays. New York: Ballantine, 1996.

—. Roger’s Version. New York: Ballantine, 1996.

—. S. New York: Knopf, 1988.

Music this week is “Isn’t That What Friends Are For?” from Bruce Cockburn’s 1999 album Breakfast in New Orleans, Dinner in Timbuktu.

General Introduction
- What’s on the blog?
- All hail Craig Farmer (no relation)
- Old Man Gilmour tells us all to get off his lawn

Friendship in the Ancient World
- Aristotle’s friendship between equals
- Can friendship exist without sexual contact?
- Cicero’s common pursuit of good things

David and Jonathan
- David Grubbs’ personal connection
- Why were David and Jonathan friends at all?
- (LACUNA)
- The “homosexual” reading of David and Jonathan
- (Please pardon our oscillating fan during this segment)
- Exploding the dichotomy of sexual identification
- In which we cast David and Jonathan in a Judd Apatow movie

Christ and His Friends
- Nathan gets technical
- Jesus shakes things up
- A new kind of philia and agape

The Friendship of the Inklings
- Michial admits that he ripped this episode off
- Who were the Inklings?
- The friendship of common interests
- When friendship gets brutal

Michial Extemporizes About Existentialism
- Seeking a jingle for this segment
- The glory of the isolated individual
- Why is hell other people?
- How religion solves the problem
- Buber’s I and Thou, and Marcel’s testimony
- Let’s get linguistic

Literary Friendships
- Jeremy Irons speaks some sense!
- Achilles and Patroclus
- Watson makes Holmes more human
- Tolkien’s interracial friendships
- American literature and friendship
- Ishmael drops Queequeg
- Huck and Jim vs. Marlowe and Lennox

Ephemeral Friendships
- MICHAEL W. SMITH LIED TO US?
- Grubbs invokes Old English (as usual)
- Do you have real friends in high school?
- The we and the that
- (Sorry—I can’t make this edit sound natural. Blame Skype!)

Friends and the Internet
- Michial’s 221 Facebook friends
- No offense if you like The Matrix
- Mutual pursuit of intellectual excellence
- The illusion of mutuality
- Getting rid of Aristotle
- David endorses South Park blanketedly

A Specifically Christian Friendship
- Let’s talk ecclesiology
- Radical inclusivity
- “In Christ There Is No East or West”
- “What a Friend We Have in Jesus”
- “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood”

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. W.D. Ross. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1984. 1729-1867.

Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Touchstone, 1970.

Chandler, Raymond. The Long Goodbye. New York: Vintage, 1988.

Cicero. Laelius, on Friendship and the Dream of Scipio. Trans. J.G.F. Powell. Oxford: Aris and Phillips, 1991.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2010.

Homer. The Iliad. Trans. E.V. Rieu. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Lewis, C.S. The Four Loves. New York: Houghton Mifflin-Harcourt, 1991.

Marcel, Gabriel. The Philosophy of Existentialism. Trans. Manya Harari. Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel, 1956.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York: Norton, 2001.

Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Complete Works. Ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997. 506-536.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel Barnes. New York: Washington Square, 1956.

—. No Exit. Trans. Stuart Gilbert. No Exit and Three Other Plays. New York: Vintage, 1989. 1-46.

Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2011.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. New York: Harper Collins, 2002.

Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Norton, 1998.