Jamie Gass writes often about classic literature and what it says to us today. In this post, he writes about the relevance of Moby Dick, which he thinks may be the greatest American novel ever written.
The nature of a classic is that it is always timely. It speaks to us at different times in our life, and we understand it in relation to who we are. As we change, our perceptions of the classic change.
I have read Moby Dick three times: once in high school, and it bored me. Once in college, and I began to understand it. And about three years ago, on a flight from New York to California. The last time was the first time I really understood it.
I had the same reaction to Silas Marner; in high school, it was dull (to me). When I read it as a mature adult, I was deeply moved.
Same book, different reaction.
Jamie writes:
American students should appreciate Melville’s magnificence. A full decade before the Civil War’s carnage, only a highly unconventional writer of profound depth could craft a poetic novel using an enlightened cannibal to devour America’s racial, nativist, and religious stereotypes. Truth-telling and genre-shattering to a fault, Melville never really earned a living as an author and died a forgotten customs house clerk in New York City.
“Who would have looked for philosophy in whales, or for poetry in blubber?” remarked an 1851 London book review of “Moby-Dick.”
As America’s cultural ship of state seems awash in crazy sea captains, ignoble savagery, and uncivilized oddities who offer more whale lard than illumination, maybe Herman Melville and his friendly cannibal Queequeg can help keep students intellectually buoyant in the rough seas ahead.
Jamie and I don’t agree on anything having to do with school reform, but I always enjoy his efforts to restore classic literature to its exalted station in our schools and our lives.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Yes. It is. Some advice to readers who have been put off by the gigantic sprawl of this novel. Leave it lying about. Put it in the bathroom next to the toilet. Pick it up from time to time and read a chapter at a time (these are quite short). You will be greatly rewarded. Here, from that whale of a novel, my favorite of many favorite passages–a passage that expresses one of the most profound truths I know, one that resonates particularly strongly during the presidency of Trumpus:
“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.”
The stillness at the center. Ah, yes, yes, yes! But it’s not just the idea that makes this wonderful. It’s also the perfect marriage of content and form: note the prosody of this, how the three strong stresses of “still bathe me” slowing the sentence down for the final statement, delivered in words filled with vowels of long duration–the e in ‘eternal,” the i in “mildness,” the o in “joy.” Like Whitman, Melville is known for the sprawl but is capable of crafting exquisite miniatures.
Another contender for this title of greatest American novel: The Grapes of Wrath. (Rest of world: forgive us; this is an essentially American activity, ranking things. Best pumpkin. Top three stupidest Presidents. Greatest guitarist ever–usually some drug-addled rocker who spent a lifetime doodling childishly on the same two pentatonic scales. I know; it’s childish–apples and oranges.)
“I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm.” The non-contingency of Being–the central teaching of the Buddha, of Epictetus, of Marcus Aurelius, of the Existentialists. Melville was way ahead of his time in grasping this, in his “genre-bending” experimentalism, in his radical tolerance. His far more conservative friend, Hawthorne, apologist for slavery and the Confederacy, recognized Melville’s genius but didn’t have the courage or the intellectual chops to go all the way with Herman. https://www.brainpickings.org/2019/02/13/herman-melville-nathaniel-hawthorne-love-letters/
Take a look at Frank Vignola. He’ll knock your socks off!
Oh, yes, yes, yes. Vignola is amazing. We are in the middle of a renaissance of guitar playing. The quality of instruction today is astonishing. Here, treat yourself and watch this: one of my favorite young guitarists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRlWfH455TQ
The girl playing here, Catalina Pires, is about 14 years old.
I just saw the exhibit Play Out Loud at the Met in NYC. It’s musical instruments (mostly guitars) of great rock and rollers. Eddie Van Halen taught himself guitar and broke the “rules” and invented new ways i
of playing guitar. It made me think that good teaching resides out there beyond the Danielson rubric. Greatness always is out beyond the boundaries.
Yes, and then there is Jimi Hendrix who knew how to play guitar when he came out of the birth canal and seems to play without even touching the strings.
And Robert Johnson, who learned from the Devil himself at the crossroads.
The Van Halen lick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRva-Iek5mw
I suspect that he learned this himself from flamenco guitarists. Leonard Cohen, btw, got everything he knew about songwriting from those folks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIR5ps8usuo
Ah, Jimi and Robert. Like every guitarist, I have studied at their feet. I play a few tunes by both. But there are elements of their work, like that of Django Reinhardt or Joe Pass or Paco de Lucia, that cannot be captured. I’m a pretty technically proficient guitarist. I can play their stuff well enough to wow a typical audience, but these five are at another level altogether–they went WAY beyond technical proficiency to a point where the instrument was a freaking extension of their souls.
Here, from a handout I prepared for my students of “Quotations from Moby Dick”:
“Call me Ishmael.”
“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”
“As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.”
“I try all things, I achieve what I can.”
“I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.”
“Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian.”
“Ignorance is the parent of fear.”
“Cannibals? Who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgement, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate de fois gras.”
“…and Heaven have mercy on us all – Presbyterians and Pagans alike – for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.”
“It is not down on any map; true places never are.”
“for there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men ”
“Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.
Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? 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 the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!”
“There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own.”
“Call me Ish Male”
Crazy captain
Great white whale
Others trapped in
Great travail
Living offa
Human flesh
Really awful
Quite a mess
Moby Dick
Is here today
Very sick
In every way
Call me, Ishmael. BR 5- 2105
LOL.
“A Classic”
A classic is old
As old as the sea
A classic, we’re told
Is great as can be
A classic is classic
With genius to boot
It’s also fantastic
To question is moot
Great post!
And an angel of God said to her, “Behold, you will conceive, and give birth to a son; you shall name him Ishmael, for God has heard your prayer. And he shall be a wild-ass of a man: his hand against everyone, and everyone’s hand against him; and over all his brothers shall he dwell.
Call us Ishmael.
How does one square loving literature, such as a novel in which just the first three words by themselves hold so many deep meanings, with working for the Center for School Reform at Pioneer Institute, pushing for high stakes tests presenting short snippets of text, usually about tech, without context, instead of whole works of literature? It baffles. I am both impressed and perplexed. I hope Jamie is able to reform his inner reforminess and overcome the whale of a problem caused by testing and charters.
Amen to that! What a terrible irony! And how destructive this Deforminess has been! It’s pretty much devastated ELA instruction in the United States. The Common [sic] Core [sic] gives lip service to the reading of great literature but has, in fact, led to this devolution of ELA into test preppy exercises on applying “skills” from the puerile, backward, ignorant and uninformed, curriculum-and-pedagogy narrowing, innovation-killing, vague-and-abstract-to-the-point-of-meaninglessness Gates/Coleman bullet list to isolated snippets of random text. I call this the “Monty Python ‘And Now for Something Completely Different'” approach to ELA. David Coleman’s New Criticism Lite–the “standards” that one would have got from having a bunch of small-town insurance agents get together to make up a list of “stuff to learn in English class” based on their vague memories of school back in the day. The ELA “standards” should have been laughed off the national stage a couple decades ago. It’s pretty shocking that they weren’t.
Literature that has been given lip service: liperature
Common Core is the main reason we pay for private school for child #2. This is his list of books for Sophomore year and I am quite impressed.
The Scarlett Letter
The Crucible
The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Grapes of Wrath
The Great Gatsby
A Prayer for Owen Meanie
Child #1 will be a Sr. in public school this year and has only read 2 of these books in GT and AP English classes in HS….very disappointing.
And just an FYI for you, it’s not just the ELA that is a common core disaster. The Math is just as bad. My son had Alg I in public school and will be taking Alg II this year and we knew we would have to review due to lack of Alg I skills. Boy were we wrong! He had very few Alg I skills and we have had to start at the very beginning. It has been a very difficult summer. We live in a high tax district and 60% of our taxes fund public education……I want a refund!!
In math, the Gates Common [sic] Core [sic] Thought Police basically picked up the NCTM math standards and added the idiocy of attempting to get kids at very young ages to have conceptual understanding beyond their cognitive developmental level–kind of like asking fish to climb trees. And, ofc, the grade-level requirements force kids who haven’t the prerequisite skills to plow ahead anyway. But there is a deeper issue–a crazy approach to mathematics described eloquently by Paul Lockhart, here: https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
While I have to agree somewhat with Lockhart’s Lament, we need to realize that 99.99% of the human population are not anything like a John Nash. Yes, The Maths are an art and a few people are gifted in that way, but the vast majority of people don’t see it this way. I sure do want the engineer building the bridge that I will be crossing to “know the math” AND the physics to go along with it.
Lisa, future engineers have to take English/literature classes, too. And if they are taught properly (not the common core way), that class, along with all the others, should be helping them develop their critical-thinking and problem-solving skills to go along with that math.
Ad for job at Pioneer Institute: primary qualification: ability to simultaneously support two diametrically opposed views.
And while we are on the subject of whales
A whale of a tale”
Dave came down from the mountain
With Common Core in tow
Drunk from the magic fountain
Which made the fiction flow
“Breech and Teach”
David Coleman was the mother
Of the Common Core
Billy Gates was midwife brother
Really nothing more
Birth was breech and babe was ill
But Coleman sent it school-ward
Under care of Midwife Bill
As only crazy fool would
Great books should be read in entirety with depth of understanding and rich context. That is how the mind weaves a quilt of understanding. Our testing obsession is shortchanging students.
The novel is alive and well in the United States. Here, one of the most gripping, powerful, and explosive reads I’ve had in a long, long time–a book sure to send some chills through any teacher: https://www.amazon.com/History-Wolves-Novel-Emily-Fridlund/dp/0802125875
Speaking of great books…I’m currently reading Ron Chernow’s massive biography of George Washington. It’s fantastic. A great read!!!
Thanks for the suggestion, Mamie!
Is there any better summation of the Trump misadministration than Melville’s “Ignorance is the parent of fear”? from Moby Dick?
If ignorance in the Information Age is the thing, then I’d turn to Marshall McLuhan for the emphases and reversals of social media, globalization and hate.
PS Trumplestiltskinhead wants to censor the internet.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.commondreams.org/news/2019/08/11/leaked-draft-trump-executive-order-censor-internet-denounced-dangerous%3famp
Trump has declared war on the media and on free speech. He and his buddies Vlad and Kim are on the same page, there. Another guy who routinely denounced “Fake News” before he got control of it: Joseph Goebbels.
I had the same experience with much classic literature. Having to read it in High School gave me respect for it, but little else. Dicken, especially treated me this way. Laborious when I was young, I now find Dicken’s writing worth reading even if taken sentence by sentence.
So it was that the fall of 2005, I decided that the copy of Moby Dick that had resided on my shelf ever since I found it for a song at a bookstore. A few days after I started it, I was somewhat shaken to learn that I was to become a father the following summer. So I began my voyage into parenthood, finishing the book as the nurses cleaned up my new-born daughter and my exhausted wife got some needed rest.
I am struck that Melville felt compelled to take long forays into scientific explanations of whaling. That was a bit unsettling, as if he got mixed up and put pages out of the article he was writing for national geographic into the novel by mistake. But I understand. I would not have understood without help if I had been forced to digest it without help in my formative years. Thus the problem. Students do not need to be reading great literature until they are ready.
I think I will someday read Moby Dick again. Maybe I will do it while I am crossing the Atlantic Ocean on a rowboat so I can be like Diane, who,apparently reads much faster than this ole,country boy. But first I am going to read Feudal Society, by Marc Bloch again. I bet I messed something.
I had a similar experience with Moby Dick. It was boring when it was assigned in school but enthralling when I read it as an adult.
I don’t recommend Moby Dick for high-school kids. But it’s in the nature of the novel that it can be taken in pieces that are self-contained. I like hooking them on short stories and high-interest, shorter novels and drama, with forays into the longer works so that they can pick them up when they are ready, later on. Here, a list of mind-blowing short stories for high-school kids. All will pass the high-school censorship test, though “The Lottery” is often challenged by fundamentalist crazies and so, once a staple of high-school lit texts, has now been expunged.
Asimov, Isaac. “The Last Question”
Atwood, Margaret. “Bread”
Benet, Stephen Vincent. “By the Waters of Babylon”
Benet, Stephen Vincent. “The Devil and Daniel Webster”
Bierce, Ambrose. “Chickamauga”
Bierce, Ambrose. “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”
Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Library of Babel”
Bostrom, Nick. “The Dragon Tyrant”
Bradbury Ray. “The Veldt”
Bradbury, Ray. “The End of the World”
Bradbury,. Ray. “There Will Come Soft Rains”
Chiang, Ted. “Story of Your Life”
Chopin, Kate. “Story of an Hour”
Crane, Stephen. “A Mystery of Heroism”
Du Maurier, Daphne. “The Birds”
Faulkner, William. “The Bear”
Gallico, Paul. “The Snowgoose”
Goldstein, Rebecca. “The Legacy of Raizel Kaidish”
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Rappaccini’s Daughter”
Hathorne, Nathaniel. “Young Goodman Brown”
Hemingway, Ernest. “Hills Like White Elephants”
Hemingway, Ernest. “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”
Hemingway, Ernest. “The Long Wait”
Liu, Ken. “An Advanced Readers’ Picture Book of Comparative Cognition”
Jackson, Shirley. “The Lottery”
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”
O’Conner, Flannery. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”
Poe, Edgar Allan. “A Cask of Amontillado”
Roth, Phillip. “The Conversion of the Jews”
Thurber, James. “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”
Thurber, James. “The Last Flower”
Tolstoy, Leo. “The Life and Death of Ivan Illych”
Updike, John. “A & P”
Updike, John. “The Music School”
Vonnegut, Kurt. “Who Am I This Time?”
Walker, Alice. “Everyday Use”
Wright, Richard. “The Man Who Saw the Flood”
Throw out your Common [sic] Core [sic] lit text. Most of these stories can be found online.
Each of the stories on this list raises profound issues for discussion.
Thanks. Imam going to copy this to my fellow English teachers.
How about Raymond Carver’s The Cathedral?
A magnificent story. But I guarantee you that the day after I had kids read it, I would have parents calling for me to be fired because I had had their students read a story with a) an atheist talking about whether there was a god and b) people smoking marijuana in it–as if there weren’t atheists and marijuana smokers in the world. So much that kids can learn about writing well from Carver–showing, not telling, economy and simplicity and significance of detail, revealing character through speech and action.
I had one parent, out of the 16 years I taught at the high school, pull her son out of my class for teaching “Of Mice and Men” because the “N” word was used and she did not want him to hear it.
Later, her son told me it wasn’t his idea and it didn’t bother him but he couldn’t convince his mother to let him stay in the class and read the book with the rest of the students.
Mamie. I would almost be willing to risk it, teaching that story. It’s so good. It’s like a mini course in how to write fiction and a display of great virtuosity. Oh, no prob, watch me through off a little Paganini while washing the dishes.
cx: throw off, ofc. LOL.
Looks like a great list, Bob. And, before most people can attack a behemoth like ‘Moby Dick’, they may need to cut their teeth on works like these, not quite as long, or as deep and convoluted, and closer to the immediate experience of the student. (I’d probably question your Tolstoy, although ‘Illich’ was my introduction, but as an adult).
Maybe so. I first read “The Death of Ivan Illych” at the age of 18. It had a profound effect on me. I had never really imagined what dying might be like, and Tolstoy’s portrayal was so stark and vivid that I thought that only someone who had actually experienced death himself could have written it! It’s a long short story–a novella–and won’t be everyone’s idea of a great time, lol. I hope that everyone will grow up to read Anna Karenina and War and Peace–both engrossing, breathtaking, profound.
Diane, having read Moby Dick three times and “getting what it meant” on the third time after you were a mature adult for some time sort of says that it might be a waste of time to force high school students to read this book because most of them are probably not ready.
I say “forced” because that is the only way some high school students will read this book but when we force them, most of them will not be interested and will tune out. We can’t assign a book like this to be read at home, because most of the students will not read it.
Therefore, how should a teacher teach this novel in high school?
Suggestion:
Read the book in class for the first fifteen minutes every day while listening to an audio version. I just googled how long it would take to read “Moby Dick” and Audible Audiobook says the listening length is 21 hours and 19 minutes. Using Audible’s length, it would take a class about 85 school days to finish reading the book (half of the school year) Fifteen minutes is a good time period because that is the average attention span of a school-age child today. Longer than that and many of the students will tune out and their mind will not be focused on “Moby Dick”. After that fifteen minutes, teachers could switch to other lessons to teach whatever else the students should be exposed to and hopefully learn.
At the end of each chapter, the teacher guides a discussion about what that chapter is about and assigns an essay that asks students to make sense of the story by finding a connection to the child’s life in some way. By making the story up-close-and-personal, many children will feel more connected to it.
After finishing the reading/listening of the book, then watch one of the four films and/or one of the two miniseries followed by another discussion followed by a final paper and/or group project of some kind.
The teacher should know what it means to take the students “into, through and beyond” and know how to ask the right questions to lead them “into, through and beyond” the story. The teacher should never tell the students what it means. The students must arrive at that on their own. With discussions, essays, papers and/or a group project, students that cannot get the meaning on their own learn it from the students that do.
Without arriving at some level of meaning for most if not all of the students, then reading the book would be a waste of time.
The most important thing is NOT to have a test or quizzes to prove the students read the book or got it.
That’s a great description of teaching. Now here’s the Common Core “close reading” method: Students do a “cold read” of a snippet with no introduction or information other than a ten second teaser video that’s like an ad for a sitcom. Students circle a main idea sentence and underline two supporting details. They answer some multiple choice questions written by amateurs hired by the online textbook company. They watch another video about a literary device that the corporate amateurs wrongly thought was present in the snippet. They watch another video about a skill they’re supposed to have, like figuring out how mood and tone reveal “author’s purpose”. There is a list of verbs, possible authors’ purposes, all four of them. They read the snippet again. The ones who are still awake answer more multiple choice questions: mood, tone, author’s purpose. They write one to two formulaic constructed paragraphs about how characterization affects theme. The teacher is just there to click “assign to students”, “model” answering the first multiple choice question, turn the scores into grades, and grade the writing with a rubric.
Bill Gates has the intellect of a dilettante.
YUP. You pretty much nailed it. An entire generation of students now thinks that literature study consists of such exercises in vapidness and triviality. Oh, the cost!!! A lost generation!!!
Slither on back to Mordor, Lord Coleman.
NB: If you don’t agree with me, please do not say so and explain why. Instead, write a three-paragraph theme about how my use of figurative language affected the mood of my comment.
You are being generous giving Bill Gates even that much of an intellect.
You made me curious, Lloyd, so I did a bit of Googling myself. Moby Dick comes in at 206,052 words. By comparison, The Great Gatsby is 47,094, and War and Peace (I don’t know which translation they used), 587,287.
The event which inspired Moby Dick (the sinking of the Essex by a whale) is in itself fascinating.
The story of the Essex is told masterfully in In the Heart of the Sea.
The website for the film: https://www.warnerbros.com/movies/heart-sea/
It’s worth noting that ‘Moby Dick’ is an allegory. We know this because of a surviving letter Melville wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne complementing him on guessing the meaning. Sadly, the initial letter by Hawthorne to Melville is missing. We are left to guess…. And, the essence of great art is ambiguity, and an invitation to the viewer or reader to present a new interpretation. There is a difference between art and propaganda.
But, there are some hints in Moby Dick. First, the ship (decked in bones) is named after a small Native American tribe (the Pequot) exterminated by the Pilgrims. Next, the opening section (Etymology) points out the the ‘whale’ can mean ‘huge, round and rolling’, like the earth. Christopher Hichens points out that the number of crew members is exactly the same as the number of States in the United States at that time (I haven’t checked that). The skilled crew members, those upon the success of the venture depended, were African, Native American, and Asian. The ‘leaders’ were ‘Yankees’, and it was they who directed the disaster despite the obvious insight of
Queequeg. Ishmael only survived by floating on Queequeg’s coffin. And, whale oil was the source that lit our lamps in that time, so that boring chapter about the rendering of the whale suddenly takes on more meaning.
I once sat in a classroom where the Nobel Prize laureate Harlow Shapley was invited to comment on Moby Dick. Sadly, his assessment was that it was a ‘great adventure story about a white whale’, and he then proceeded to tell us about how his neighbor, Robert Frost, told him that he repeated the line ‘And miles to go before we sleep’ because it simply sounded good. This fed my adolescent hubris and disdain. However, I’m now old and think that Shapley was entirely wrong. Many a ‘genius’ has an area of expertise, and when they step outside it, they often prove to be inept (consider the sad case of inorganic chemist Linus Pauling).
Harlow did me a disservice, and it took a long time for me to recover. Now, however, I can see Moby Dick as being a truly great work of art, perhaps one of the best.
Melville was as profound a trickster as Joyce and Pound and Derrida were, and there are layers upon layers in this book, including ones where he comments the book itself, in a metafictional way, and on the making of allegory and of literary art in general. I think that sometimes these great literary geniuses long for a single vessel into which they can pour all their art and everything they have known, felt, experienced, learned (Finnegan’s Wake, Pound’s Cantos). Yes, it is possible to read a great many works as allegorical–but solely doing that debases and lessens them in the same way that reducing a great poem to some blithering generality does (e.g., “It means, life is transient, so enjoy it while you can”). Nabokov’s horrific humbug Humbert Humbert represents cultured but decadent and sick Europe, and Dolores Haze represents young, beautiful, brash, but callow and ignorant America. But that’s not THE sole or even major meaning of the novel. It’s simply one of the currents of meaning that runs through it. Same, I think, with Melville. See, for example, his chapter on “The Whiteness of the Whale,” which suggests–how many?–a hundred (?) ways of reading just that!!! The chapter reminds me of the great monologue in Cyrano de Bergerac in which someone insults Cyrano’s nose, and Cyrano responds with a long, hilarious catalogue of insults that this person could have proffered had he wit enough. I’m satisfied to glean some of the leavings of Melville’s teeming brain! Yikes, I am mixing my metaphors (hee he, as both Melville and Shakespeare, contra your high-school English teacher, were won’t to do).
Bob,
I agree that many books can be read as allegories. That’s one of the characteristics that make them art, not ‘maths’. The goal of art is to elicit a response from the viewer, a new interpretation and, perhaps, a new work of art building on the old. The goal of ‘maths’ is to impose an understanding of a deductive logic system which is not open to interpretation.
All artists are tricksters. (I can’t comment on Derrida, since I haven’t read him… I only listened to a lecture about him and came away with the impression that he was not trying to create art).
Some works were intended to be read as allegory, and others simply elicited that response. We do know that when Hawthorne informed Melville of the allegory he saw, Melville wrote back a letter saying that Hawthorne had ‘guessed’ the meaning (or at least one of the meanings) that he had intended to be seen. Therefore, reading ‘Moby Dick’ as an allegory (whichever one you choose) is entirely appropriate.
The fun is that no teacher knows what allegory Melville had in mind, and so nobody knows the ‘right’ interpretation.
Let me range a bit further, Bob. My background is in Astronomy and Physics. The ‘STEM’ acronym drives me nuts. the ‘M’, as I said, is pure deduction (manipulating given truths according to given laws). The ‘E’ uses the same given truths to supposedly create a ‘practical’ result. the ‘T’ is indistinguishable from the ‘E’. But, the ‘S’..
Well, the big lesson of the history of Astronomy and Physics is that we don’t know any ‘truth’. Ptolemy, Kepler, Newton, Einstein, the fluid model of traditional thermodynamics, the quantum model of Planck, the ‘tunneling’ of Brian Josephson and so on… We simply try to do our best with our mental models to predict and describe the next impact upon our nervous system, but each historical change was so radical as to teach that the ‘Truth’ evades us like Plato’s shadows in a cave. Pushing the boundaries of scientific ‘understanding’ must involve encouraging iconoclasm, a new personal interpretation from a somewhat naive source. Rather like the artist, eh?
Science has far more in common with art than it does with ‘TEM’. Yes, science currently used mathematics as a tool, just as writers use ink and painters use pigment, however that doesn’t put the ink-maker and the writer in the same basket.
You won’t get this impression of uncertainty from most High School ‘science’ teachers, of course. Most think that they ‘know the answer’ because they haven’t actually engaged in either the study of history or actual scientific research. But, there are thoughtful ones out there, and they differ radically from those teaching math and engineering.
reading ‘Moby Dick’ as an allegory (whichever one you choose) is entirely appropriate. (Agreed. However, the novel is so rich, so complex, that even if its author intended some overall allegorical reading, such a reading wouldn’t capture it; and it’s altogether possible that Melville was simply flattering the much more established and successful Hawthorne, who wrote more conventionally allegorical work like “Young Goodman Brown”).
I can’t comment on Derrida, since I haven’t read him (Derrida often doesn’t repay the work it takes to penetrate his purposefully obscure prose; he was a trickster and iconoclast thumbing his nose at all human pretensions while being, himself, the greatest pretender of his day—the monkey king of monkey island; however, there are some useful takeaways from him. Here: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/03/18/from-notes-to-krystalina/ )
Let me range a bit further, Bob. (So glad you did, Daedalus!)
Well, the big lesson of the history of Astronomy and Physics is that we don’t know any ‘truth’. Ptolemy, Kepler, Newton, Einstein, the fluid model of traditional thermodynamics, the quantum model of Planck, the ‘tunneling’ of Brian Josephson and so on… (I have been rereading Einstein and Infeld’s The Evolution of Physics. This is one of the themes of the book. My own suspicion is that we are barely beyond the level of those who thought that the sun was a fiery chariot being driven daily across the sky. You will, perhaps, appreciate this: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/03/27/the-vast-unseen-and-the-vast-unseeable-2/ ).
We simply try to do our best with our mental models to predict and describe the next impact upon our nervous system (Oh, my Lord, that is so, so BEAUTIFULLY put!!!!)
Rather like the artist, eh? (Oh, yes, yes yes!)
You won’t get this impression of uncertainty from most High School ‘science’ teachers, of course. Most think that they ‘know the answer’ because they haven’t actually engaged in either the study of history or actual scientific research. But, there are thoughtful ones out there, and they differ radically from those teaching math and engineering. (I have been fortunate to know quite a few of these!)
(Thank you, Daedalus, for this wonderful note. Do you teach? If not, I dearly wish that you would.)
I have a longer response to your wonderful note, Daedalus, which is in the weird WordPress random moderation. I have in my recent retirement been pondering returning to mathematics so that I might learn enough to follow some of contemporary physics, but I must say that I am daunted by the undertaking, which would take much time away from my writing. I am envious of those who have kept the math up and can follow the conversation there. In Language and Silence, the polyglot literary critic George Steiner laments the fact that there was a decisive break in the ability of the literate person to follow all fields of knowledge when science–physics in particular– became PRIMARILY mathematical, and the math became too difficult for most to follow.
Well, Bob, I think Penrose wrote The Road to Reality for you.
Yeah. I would love to have a beer with Mr. Penrose!!!
And thanks for the recommendation, Mate! I really enjoyed The Emperor’s New Mind.
Oh my Lord. Thanks, Mate!!! Yeah, he must have had me in mind when he wrote this. LOL.
The difference between The Road to Reality and the other Penrose books is that it does teach you all the math needed for 20-21st century physics.
I think, though, Susskind’s The Theoretical Minimum books are easier to understand, especially since there are corresponding videos on youtube.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theoretical_Minimum
I just recently purchased The Theoretical Minimum. Thank you, Mate!
And I am watching one of the videos now at 3am since I cannot sleep due to my jetlag. 🙂
I had a friend my age that wanted to keep up with math, too. What he did was to audit UCLA math courses he was interested in. Taking the classes without the benefit of a grade or credit for the course allowed him to learn without doing all the work and saved him a lot of time.
I’d be careful learning math without doing “the work”.
My friend was a retired physicist. When he was working, he worked on classified government projects for the DOD. The math classes he was auditing focused on, I think, chaos theory.
A favorite among authors.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/278861/
And the reason we call it Starbuck’s coffee.
Sometimes a metaphor is about metaphor itself, the creation of metaphor, its medium, the author, the workings of the mind or all of the above.
What a beautiful essay! Thank you for sharing it!
Let me point out that no person who had read Swift would ever name a web platform ‘Yahoo’ (and why would such a person use such a platform?). Something tells me that the brand name wasn’t concocted so as to entice the readers of Moby Dick. Seems like a poor business model to me. I don’t recall Melville’s ‘Starbuck’ drinking coffee. Perhaps I missed that bit.
I am reminded of David Wallace’s comment that those who started the Super 8 motel chain probably didn’t know that the verb suppurate means “to discharge pus.”
Word is that it was almost called Pequod!
https://www.google.com/amp/s/m.economictimes.com/magazines/panache/did-you-know-starbucks-got-its-name-from-moby-dick/amp_articleshow/66357305.cms
I guess that would be Starbucks’ coffee, or Starbucks Coffee’s coffee?
And there is woman, the logo, originally a mermaid associated in some way with an island called Starbuck Island, among many other names. And, a captain named Starbuck is involved in its name.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.designhill.com/design-blog/starbucks-logo-overview-of-design-history-and-evolution/amp/
Or two people, according to Wikipedia: Valentine and Obed Starbuck, a master and a captain.
According to this site, Valentine was also a captain, of a whaling ship.
http://www.janeresture.com/kiribati_line/starbuck.htm
Great novel but perhaps not for highschoolers. There are thousands of other books more school-age appropriate.
Yes.
Agreed entirely, though I did have one kid do an independent study research paper on it year before last. This one is for people with a little more life experience behind them.
Yep, Mate….
Not only more ‘age appropriate’, but time appropriate.
The essence of ‘education’ is to lead the student from where he or she is into a new place. Therefore, one needs to start with a small step, not a giant leap.
I love ‘Moby Dick’, but it’s nonsense to think a high school student will get much more out of it than the Disney cartoon version (without, of course, a huge amount of patient teaching over months not possible in highschool).
I think the novel so interesting that it deserves it’s own college course, perhaps in graduate school.
These ‘Moby Dicks’ pushing this stuff down the throat of high school students have no interest in literature and have not interest in education. Bill Gates dropped out of college, for example. These guys just want to make money.
“it deserves it’s own college course.” There are, ofc, graduate seminars that do precisely that.
When I was in high school, my English teacher very briefly mentioned iambic pentameter at some point before we began A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I think. It may have been on the very first day of class.
What I ‘heard’ was that there was a very important poem with the intriguing title: I Am The Pentaminer (or Contaminer) which somehow is the key to Shakespeare.
The reality was such a letdown.
ROFLMAO!!! Aie, yie, yie.
Which brings us the question: Does Shakespeare belong to high school? If yes, which one of his works.
I have had GREAT experiences teaching Shakespeare in high school, and with younger kids as well. My advice: don’t have them read him, first. Have them watch plays AND, importantly, perform in excerpts. It needs to come alive for them first. Which plays? Well, the standards in the lit texts have LONG been a) Romeo and Juliet in grade 9, b) Julius Caesar in grade 10, and c) Macbeth (or, occasionally, Hamlet) in grade 11 or 12. Some also do Midsummer Night’s Dream. These are great choices. I edited editions of all of these for high-school kids, and also of The Tempest. (I didn’t bowdlerize them in my editions.) Teachers should avoid like the plague the versions printed in the standard high-school lit anthologies, which are HEAVILY bowdlerized. As much as a third of Romeo and Juliet is typically cut from the literature text versions of the play, as if kids raised on Kodak Black would be scandalized by anything they came across in Shakespeare. High-school kids can also get a lot out of selected sonnets by Shakespeare. But it’s important to get past the language. The No Fear Shakespeare texts are great–these are dual-language versions. The thing about having the kids jump into watching and performing the plays is that they don’t get hung up on the language differences from the get go. Some catch the bug for Shakespeare and THEN are ready to do the work to read him later on. A good intro to his language, for young people: lists of Shakespearean insults. I also recommend having them memorize passages–they hate it at first, many of them, but then are very proud of what they can do. Whenever possible, it’s a great idea to get them into theatres to see the plays in performance.
Translate, reduce, rewrite… It sounds like real Shakespeare is not exactly for high schoolers, more like an introduction to Shakespeare is appropriate. In any case, 4 plays plus sonnetes and whatnot may be an excessive focus on a single person given the vast choice of other writers and poets.
More like an introduction to Shakespeare IS appropriate. I agree entirely.
My 5th-6th graders have had great success performing such Shakespearean plays (cut down to about one-half of their original length– but with original language used) as Romeo & Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet and Midsummer Night’s Dream
Many people consider this WOMANLESS novel great, but I never could. It takes Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel to do it justice, but this is the ultimate example of the early nineteenth century ideal of Men Going Their Own Way – away from woman and all the entanglements and responsibilities that she represents. A very prescient novel in many ways.
Wow!!! What an insightful, interesting comment!!!! Now I have to rethink this book again by the considerable light you have just shed on it!!! The insane consequences of that–what men do in a fantasy world without women (without the motherly strictures/guidance from the woman as spiritual glue of the home as preached by hundreds of 19th-century tomes). Thank you, Abby!!!!! All particularly interesting because of Melville’s clear position on the more homosexual side of the homosexual . . . heterosexual continuum.
One note: we all start out female in the womb. By “womanless” I assume that you mean the deeper, contemporary understanding of sex as biological inheritance and gender as cultural inheritance.
Camille Paglia strongly recommended it, along with Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death (a little dated, but the section on Protestantism originating in the latrine is priceless!) and of course, Mc Luhan’s Understanding Media as the most important North American books published in the last century. Can’t argue – all were fascinating.
On the subject of Protestantism originating in the latrine: Martin Luther suffered terribly from constipation. In the days leading up to his ordination, he couldn’t make himself believe that he was good enough to stand before God and be cleansed by any sacrament. And so he developed his theory of salvation, through grace, of those not worthy of salvation because of their abominable Original Sin. If Luther had had a less compromised physical makeup, perhaps Europe would have been spared the rivers of blood that flowed as a result–all under, ofc, the banner of the Prince of Peace. But North America, then, would have been a vastly different place.
Well, I don’t share your enthusiasm, Bob, about the comment. Where are the women from Old Man and the Sea? Where are the African Americans, the disablled, the gays from these works?
Through a PC glass, we can discard 99% of literature and art.
I agree. But here’s the thing: This isn’t an attack on the work. Far from it. It provides an interesting lens through which to view it. What do men do, for good and ill, when they are out from under women’s guidance and direction? But your comment is, of course, spot on in general. I remember when a Texas legislator called for excluding gay writers from literature textbooks. The great American and English literature textbooks would be mostly blank. LMAO!!!!
And, ofc, Moby Dick is one of the great screeds against intolerance of racial and ethnic and religious diversity. Melville and Hawthorne could not have differed more, there. I still teach Hawthorne, even though he was a racist pig. Censorship is not an acceptable answer, in general. At the time when Hemingway wrote Old Man and the Sea, he was clearly freaking nuts. Still a great, great book.
“At the time when Hemingway wrote Old Man and the Sea, he was clearly freaking nuts. Still a great, great book.”
It was mandatory in 8th grade for us in Hungary. In my class, most liked it a great deal, so I assume it was age appropriate. But then again, we had a fantastic literature teacher.
Mate,
imagine if you were forced to read books that only related to female characters and feminine issues. No doubt you would be bored out of your mind. I can’t blame you. Now consider the half of the class that has to read Moby Dick — not just that book but any book by Twain, Fennimore Cooper, most of Hawthorne, We ask ourselves: where the heck are we except as maidens on pedestals or evil temptresses-if we exist at all!
Just ordered a copy of the Fiedler book. Thanks for pointing me to it!
Mate:
I understand your point of view; but imagine that as a student you were forced to read novels about nothing but women and how events affected them. After a while you would be like,”what does this have to do with me and my reality?” You would be completely correct. The answer is — probably nothing.
This is OUR reality.
Moby Dick is one of the greatest works ever written about the evil and stupidity of objectification and narrow, tribal self-identification, evils that take these many forms–sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, classism, speciesism, and so on. In this sense, it is a PROFOUNDLY FEMINIST work, even if it is almost free of women characters. That it is should be expected, given the topic–19th-century whalers.
I do agree that it is probably America’s best novel – but that is the starting point for WHY it is. I found no pleasure in reading this novel. I found nothing to which I could connect my experience. I felt throughout Melville’s idealization of what we can call “that pure love of David and Jonathan.” I mean, reread the chapter where Ishmael and Queegueg are married. Read again the chapter on the Maids of Tartarus. What is the ultimate point of this novel?? If I am wrong, please feel free to correct me. Like Fiedler, I am left wondering why is there no American Anna Karenina, no American Emma Bovary, no American Jane Eyre?
I believe that this is the great American problem – and as JB Priestley very astutely pointed out:
“If (American) women become aggressive, demanding, dictatorial, it is because they find themselves struggling to find satisfaction in a world that is not theirs. If they use sex as a weapon, it its because they so badly need a weapon. They are like the inhabitants of an unoccupied country. They are compelled to accept standards and values that are alien to their deepest values.”…..”Woman is compelled to appear, not as her true self, but as a reflection of a man’s immature, half-childish, half-adolescent fancies and dreams.” Defeated woman strips and teases. That is what we are left with now.
No doubt, while the US has been the leader of the Capitalist World, socially it has been lagging behind Europe, especially Western Europe, and this has been reflected in the Arts too. So there is catching up to do, but I think the future is promising. Just think about the fact that the leader of the crucial movement to save public education is the owner of this blog.
Abby,
Perhaps our different reactions to literature reflects our different ages. My literature teachers in school were all female but they taught the classic literature in which women seldom appeared, never as central characters. They taught, and I learned, that great literature is universal. Back long ago, we read only dead white nen writers. Since then, I have read literature of and about African American writers, and I read it as universal, even though I am white. I bring the same sensibility to reading writers from other cultures and nations. Jane Austen has many female characters, but that’s not why I consumed all her novels (long after finishing college). The ideas in great literature transcend gender, race, ethnicity, time and place.
Of course, students are not forced to read only novels about men. For my daughter’s sake, I do seek out movies and books with strong women in them. There are plenty.
I think it’s a mistake to discard literary or art woks just because they may have nonmodern views. In general, I think it’s a mistake to extend political or social expectations and views to art. On the other hand, political and social documents, such as the Constitution, need to be modernized much more frequently than it’s currently done in the US.
Abby, what do female students learn by reading the speeches and letters of Dr. Martin Luther King? Anything?
Abby “After a while you would be like,”what does this have to do with me and my reality?””
It’s entirely allowed to be disappointed in Moby Dick for the lack of women in it, but then the relation of this to reality in gender relations can be taken to be that we are in the middle of changing times in the US, and this could be perceived as more exciting than maddening. At least this is how our grand children will look back to 2025, the first year when 50% of US senators would be women, and they will be proud of their grand parents for achieving this. .
A fascinating response, Abby. And yes, it is extremely important that we put good fiction by women into the curriculum. We happen to be living in the midst of a sort of Renaissance of fiction writing by young women in the United States and around the world. I mentioned, above, Emily Fridlund’s breathtaking History of Wolves–one of the best debut novels ever written, IMHO. I’m a big fan of The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger and the late Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the short story collection Strange Attractors from Rebecca Goldstein and most anything by Amy Bloom and Jennifer Roy’s Yellow Star and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News and Carolyn Chute’s The Beans of Egypt, Maine. And then there are the classics that are widely read by kids in school, like To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee; The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros; and Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, as well as, by a non-American woman writer, the powerful, gripping classic Wuthering Heights, by Charlotte Brontë. There are, ofc, loads and loads of non-American female novelists that are just amazing. I recently finished reading, with great enjoyment, the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah. Some teenaged girls these days are reading The Handmaid’s Tale, by the Canadian Margaret Atwood, which is an altogether good thing. And finally, I wish that Annie Dillard’s breathtaking nonfiction Pilgrim at Tinker Creek would become a staple of US high-school curricula. Interestingly, the novel readers in the US, these days, are mostly women, and that’s what I’ve seen in high school, too–that it’s mostly the girls who are reading on their own for pleasure.
NB: I do NOT recommend History of Wolves for high-school kids.
Diane,
I am absolutely not saying that any speech or novel written by a man has no meaning to me as a woman. Far from it! My great experiences as an adolescent were formed by Goethe, Dostoyevsky, Camus, Thomas Hardy, Montaigne, Oscar Wilde, Shakespeare and so many other great male writers. The problem that I have with many American writers is the one drawn out by Fiedler and also Thomas K. Whipple in his very insightful book Study Out the Land (you can download as a pdf). Our pioneer past still infects this country in so many unconscious ways, and much of the American experience is Men Going Their Own Way away from the female and toward nature and the dusky other male who represents that utopia. The one female character best fleshed out in our classic novels is probably Hester Prynne – a mature and sexually fully developed woman who in the end had to go “abroad” to find what American men could not provide for her. Many people in Europe and other countries wonder why American women are so angry and frustrated – I hope that JB Priestley’s quote above helps to explain that.
Seeing all the interesting comments in this thread, I think it may be appropriate to rethink what kids read in K-12. It may very well depend on where the school is—and it may also change with time. What is the kids’ best interest (and not various groups of adults’ and their opinion) ? Can this interest be formulated well enough to be translated into concrete literary material?
In math, btw, I believe the kids’ best interest can be formulated and translated into concrete material to be learned, and this seems to be independent of the school’s location. But in this, I think math is a much simpler subject: there is a clearly identifiable core material, and it’s also quite easy to detect (and hence discard) the undue influences of adult groups such as reformers or profs.
This post about Moby Dick was the topic of a great conversation among us teachers during lunch at school today. Much praise. Thank you.
I just reread the first chapter of Moby Dick for the first time since high school. It took me almost an hour. I had to stop and ponder at each paragraph. My goodness.