posted
While vacationing in Charleston, SC (sidenote--if you ever need inspiration, go to an old city like Charleston, buy a guidebook, and walk around for a few hours looking at 300 year old houses. Amazing) I read, for the first time, Moby Dick.
It's amazing. It's also extremely difficult to come to grips with, since only maybe 30 of the 135 chapters advance the plot and the rest are contextual or thematic; and because the symbolism is woven so deeply into the story that if you miss the symbol, the plot doesn't even make sense. And, on a shallower level entirely, the Quaker dialect of nineteenth century Nantucket is just hard to read, particularly when rendered with some deliberate exaggeration.
Hard to read, and, from all advice I've read or seen, entirely unmarketable and destined to fail commercially. But, what power is in those pages! When insane Ahab takes insane Pip under his wing, just nigh the end, what a statement of the human condition, what an indictment of post-modernism! And the language, I mean--what modern work has anything Ahab's last words, "I grapple with thee to the end; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake, I spit at thee with my last breath."
The lion's share of the story's power comes from the things that would make it, according to experts, totally unsaleable in today's market.
The lesson: write the story that you need to write; don't write the one you think will sell. If Melville had prostrated himself for profit, American literature would lack one of its masterworks.
posted
I'm hard pressed to see how Moby Dick is an indictment of postmodernism. If anything, precursors of postmodernism populate Melville's body of work. Partly through the distinguishing self-aware art feature of postmodernism, I feel that Melville sought a height of literary accomplishment that he attained in "Bartelby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" but fell shy of in his other stories.
Setting sentiments supporting naturalism, realism, utilitarianism, human ennui and angst as symptoms of postmodernism aside, postmodernism is distinguished by art that is self-aware that it's art. Melville's "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" is decidely postmodern in my estimation. Moby Dick is to my thinking the first of literary novels that so thoroughly encompassed tropes and extended or overarching literary tropes that it's profoundly self-aware of its artistic qualities. Misapplied, postmodernism is a painful and disruptive authorial intrusion. As a precusor to postmodernism, Melville as writer of Moby Dick is brilliantly unobtrusive.
Where I feel Moby Dick falls short is how Melville tried to be all things to all readers. Popular appeal and artistic appeal; moral story, adventure story, historical narrative, nature story, travelogue, documentary, fable, at times all at once, at times one focal mode, the story as a whole is an ineffective synthesis of forms, modes, and genres. But that doesn't mean I'm not impressed by or don't like Moby Dick. Quite the contrary, Melville reinvented literature, co-invented the uniquely American voice of literature, along with Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Whitman, none of whom reached as high as Melville; none of whom compare.
[This message has been edited by extrinsic (edited September 29, 2008).]
posted
I'm not talking about the post-modern art form; I'm talking about post-modern philosophy. Although I would disagree with you about Moby Dick being a post-modern art form--I sincerely doubt Melville believed his non-ironic, non-humorous epic form to be insincere--that discussion isn't relevant to my point.
Pip and Ahab are the only two characters in the book who reason preferentially, rather than classically. They are also self-awarely insane. It's a powerful indictment of the idea that human will can be divorced from classical notions of the primacy of reason and morality.
posted
Postmodernism is not to my understanding in any form insincere. A usual recourse to misunderstandings is consensus or definitions. Postmodernism defies conventional defining in any of its myriad forms, let alone any kind of accepted consensus among more than remote subcultural enclaves. Self-awareness, a celebration of ever-changing relationships and interactions, both incorporated come close to a synthesis of postmodernism's definition. Self-awareness of the experiential nature of relationships in an ever-changing existential Cartesian reality comes closer perhaps, I guess, this next moment is a new universe of possibilities from the last one.
[This message has been edited by extrinsic (edited September 29, 2008).]
posted
Well, as I understood things, Moby Dick was, first, written on assignment, a chapter at a time...then, failed at the bookstores on first release...then, after Melville's death, was picked up by the literary establishment and exalted as an example of great American literature. Once a book gets taught in schools, the sales tend to increase.
It's hard to see Moby Dick as an indictment to postmodernism---as it was written before postmodernism was conceived of.
posted
Right you are, Robert, and I ought to clarify. I don't think Melville intended to indict a yet-to-be-coined philosophy. I do think that his contrasting characterizations of Ahab and Pip succeed in doing so, even though not expressly intended to.
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posted
Literature is contextual. Everything we write today has a place in (theoretically, if what we're trying to do is sell our work in the current literature marketplaces) today's culture and society.
What was written 20 years ago was written in a different culture, a different literary context.
What was written however many years ago that Moby Dick was written was done in that literary context.
Add to it that we're heavily influenced by the social environments we're in. I write in a way that is distinctly american, even distinctly midwest, where I have spent most of my life. I'm sure in the future some linguistic or literary anthropologist would be able to pinpoint my location on a map based on the way I talk (write) and put words together.
I'm talking around myself here, but my point is that part of that is that I'm a product of my social environment, the context where I am (and the people I know, the social circles I am in) and part of what I write is also determined by what I think will work with readers - be it a blog post or an article for a magazine or a short story. I'm not writing just for me (the stuff I write just for me is just for me, though I'd argue it isn't all that different than the rest of my writing.) I'm writing for a perceived audience.
I don't really know why Moby Dick is a literary masterpiece. Confession time: I've never read it. I probably never will unless my children have to and I'll do it in solidarity with them. It does not sound like the kind of fiction I enjoy. But add Moby Dick to a hundred other excellent works and I have to say I'm not really sure what makes some works last. That may be a good question here, rather than the lesson you have derived. What makes certain works of literature stick through the ages and still be viewed as excellent?
A while back we had a thread here where the question was - which would you prefer to be - a critical and literary genius who is lauded by rarely read/not financially rewarded, or a wildly successful popular author. You know - are you doing it for the art or the money?
May not surprise you to know I came up in the money camp. I love to write, it gives me joy, but I want to see other people enjoy what I write. To do that, I need to pay attention to the literary context that exists today, and more so to the specific context of the sci-fi market, the genre I prefer writing in.
I suppose it takes all kinds, and there are authors today who are working on those next masterpieces (hmm, I'd be curious what some current examples are. The only literary geniuses I can conjure up are long dead.)
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I love to write, it gives me joy, but I want to see other people enjoy what I write. To do that, I need to pay attention to the literary context that exists today, and more so to the specific context of the sci-fi market, the genre I prefer writing in. 
