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Monday, May 23, 2005
Does Darwin Hate Iguanas? Does Melville Hate Librarians?
Acephalous has a whole bunch of great posts up. Funny + clever + long + I agree. First, he links to this site, containing illustrations for every. single. page. of Gravity's Rainbow. [Crikey.] And don't miss this moving and pathetic dialogue:
Iguana #2: Good Heavens! What are you... (thrown into ocean by Darwin)
Iguana #2: Why I nev... (thrown into ocean by Darwin)
Iguana #2: My Good Man! Why do you insist on throwing me in the ocean? How have I offen... (thrown into ocean by Darwin)
Easing into the serious stuff, there is "Everything and its Discontents". (Me? I want to write a paper called "Civilization and its Dissed Contents" - about the canon wars. But just to use the title. It is only my lack of interest in the subject that holds me back. File with my unwritten paper on the type-token distinction and linguistic convention-formation: "Token and Taboo".)
The serious stuff: the headless one diagnoses 'theory'-related pathologies of cultural and lit studies here and here. With the latter he basically starts our Theory's Empire round-table early, with a quote from Mark Bauerlein. I have too much to say about this even to start. Go read and discuss.
John Emerson freely translates Max Jacob on the manners of literary men and how they confound certain lines of - how to put it? - Gricean implicature. Emphatic or merely phatic, in Jakobson's sense? "It seems that I wrote that you bit a woman on the nipple and drew blood. If you think that I wrote that, why did you just greet me? And if I thought that you would do such a thing, why would I greet you?"
Emerson expands his persecution complex, which we have come to know and love in Valve comments, here. Turns out it isn't just the analytic philosophers who are out to get him (I kid, I kid) - it's Melville, Anatole France, Beerbohm, Hemingway and Flaubert as well, who are gunning for his sort. Let me argue that, to the contrary, Melville is not "unnecessarily mean" to the sub-sub-librarian when he writes:
The pale Usher - threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality. So fare thee well, poor devil of a Sub-Sub, whose commentator I am. Thou belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world will ever warm; and for whom even Pale Sherry would be too rosy-strong; but with whom one sometimes loves to sit, and feel poor-devilish, too; and grow convivial upon tears; and say to them bluntly, with full eyes and empty glasses, and in not altogether unpleasant sadness- Give it up, Sub-Subs! For by how much more pains ye take to please the world, by so much the more shall ye for ever go thankless! Would that I could clear out Hampton Court and the Tuileries for ye! But gulp down your tears and hie aloft to the royal-mast with your hearts; for your friends who have gone before are clearing out the seven-storied heavens, and making refugees of long pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, against your coming. Here ye strike but splintered hearts together - there, ye shall strike unsplinterable glasses! [from Moby-Dick]
Emerson thinks Melville is 'exorcising his inner pedant'. To the contrary, I think he is indulging him, genuinely consoling him by putting on a hyperbolic performance for his special amusement. Consider this letter Melville wrote to Hawthorne about his big whale book in progress:
If ever, my dear Hawthorne, in the eternal times that are to come, you and I shall sit down in Paradise, in some little shady corner by ourselves; and if we shall by any means be able to smuggle a basket of champagne there (I won't believe in a Temperance Heaven), and if we shall then cross our celestial legs in the celestial grass that is forever tropical, and strike our glasses and our heads together, till both musically ring in concert, - then, O my dear fellow-mortal, how shall we pleasantly discourse of all the things manifold which now so distress us, - when all the earth shall be but a reminiscence, yea, its final dissolution an antiquity. Then shall songs be composed as when wars are over; humorous, comic songs, - "Oh, when I lived in that queer little hole called the world," or, "Oh, when I toiled and sweated below," or, "Oh, when I knocked and was knocked in the fight" - yes, let us look forward to such things. Let us swear that, though now we sweat, yet it is because of the dry heat which is indispensable to the nourishment of the vine which is to bear the grapes that are to give us the champagne hereafter.
So Melville is the sub-sub, yes. And he wants you - or, more precisely - Nathaniel Hawthorne, to love the sub-sub. He hopes everyone is the sub-sub. (Tragically, Hawthorne probably isn't. But that's another story. Plus there's the sexual angle.) So Melville turns a triple verbal flip and clowns like a philosopher here, and at the end of practically every chapter. So you will be his friend. This all has to do with the tension - "the torpedo fish thrill" - that comes when the aristocrat of the mind contacts the worldly crowd. For "truth is the silliest thing under the sun". Example:
In reading some of Goethe's sayings, so worshipped by his votaries, I came across this, "Live in the all." That is to say, your separate identity is but a wretched one, - good; but get out of yourself, spread and expand yourself, and bring to yourself the tinglings of life that are felt in the flowers and the woods, that are felt in the planets Saturn and Venus, and the Fixed Stars. What nonsense! Here is a fellow with a raging toothache. "My dear boy," Goethe says to him, "you are sorely afflicted with that tooth; but you must live in the all, and then you will be happy!" As with all great genius, there is an immense deal of flummery in Goethe, and in proportion to my own contact with him, a monstrous deal of it in me.
Still, you should live in the all. That's all Melville means by ending every chapter with so much windy, hyperbolic metaphysics. He is saying: this is true. And: yes, I know it's flummery. But it's still true. Love me. He isn't mean to the sub-sub. He loves him. (I love Melville.)
Comments
if only the sub-sub employed to look over the lavish Library of America edition had loved Melville enough to ensure the author’s name was spelled correctly on every title page: the volume containing Pierre, the Confidence-Man, the Piazza Tales, and Billy Budd says “Herman Meville”
As I recently reminded someone else, around 1970 Melanie sang a great song “You gotta be One with the All.” (Not the title, but the memorable line). The feeling was a little bit like, “Black is THE color to wear this year.”
Regarding flummery, “flumming” is Swedish jive for “What hippies do all the time”. You can Google it.
It’s true that Melville’s levels of irony are a bit hard to disentangle at times. But my guess that the sub-sub was just thinking the genteel sub-sub version of “Fuck off, Melville, I got your goddamn citations for you”, because he just wanted to get back to his Dungeons and Dragons, Scrabble, Anime, or whatever.