This post was motivated by last week's reading, but I haven't managed to post it 'till now.
I've been thinking while reading about why Melville does what he does - why does he intersperse chapters that move the story forward with chapters about minute details of whaling, about whale anatomy, about whatever might be vaguely related to the story but not really part of it. I am sure there are many reasons, including making whalers of us landlubbers, as in Sara's post. So I don't claim to know the half of it. But certainly one of the effects of this slow unveiling of the story is to make us feel we are on the ship at sea with Ahab. As Eli mentioned, it must be an excruciatingly boring existence, being at sea for three years. After reading all these things, the general sense I get is that I've been on that ship forever waiting for Moby Dick to appear. It certainly hasn't been boring, but the sense of a very slow passage of time is certainly there.
You make a good point, T. I haven't read DFW's The Pale King, but I've read that it's purposefully tedious in parts, because he's trying to convey the tedium of work in an IRS office in Peoria.
ReplyDeleteI can't claim to be the only person who's made the connection between Melville and DFW. Here's the end of Tom McCarthy's review of The Pale King in the NYT:
"But there’s an older ghost haunting “The Pale King” even more, I think, one whose spectral presence combines both the political and metafictional ways of reading the book: Melville’s Bartleby, the meek and lowly copyist who cannot will himself to complete the act of copying — or, to put it another way, the writer who cannot will himself to complete the act of writing. In effect, all the I.R.S.’s clerical serfs are Bartlebys; through them, and through this book, he emerges as the melancholy impasse out of which the American novel has yet to work its way. America’s greatest writer, the author of “Moby-Dick,” spent his final 19 years as a customs officer — that is, a tax inspector. To research “The Pale King,” Wallace trained in accounting. We’re moving beyond haunting to possession here. Bartleby, of course, ends up dead, leaving a stack of undeliverable papers. This is the inheritance that Wallace earnestly, and perhaps fatally, grappled with. The outcome was as brilliant as it was sad — and the battle is the right one to engage in."
Oh, I forgot to mention that the "pulling back the curtain" moment is in Ch. 85 . It goes by quickly - see if you can spot it.
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