Musings on Moby-Dick, Part 3: Meeting Ahab

September 11, 2013September 10, 2013 / Carolyn O / 4 Comments

(Chapter 28, if you’re counting.)

I’d wager that a person who hasn’t read Moby-Dick, but who’s heard of it, can tell you one thing about Ahab: he has a peg leg, made of whalebone. However, for Ishmael, Ahab’s “grim aspect” is so engrossing that “for the first few moments I hardly noted that not a little of this overbearing grimness was owing to the barbaric white leg upon which he partly stood.” In other words, Ahab’s missing leg is not his defining physical feature, at least to the men he works with.

The ship’s mates are uncomfortable too, for “moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe” (135). Indeed, Ishmael’s first impression is similar to the impression of torment given in this passage; at first glance, Ahab “looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness” (134).

I find this juxtaposition of images — the Christ-figure crucified and the heretic at the stake — intriguing, especially since my first reading of the stake comparison relied on my image of Joan of Arc — until I realized that she wasn’t canonized until 1920. With these two images, Melville and Ishmael provide us with a foreshadowing of Ahab’s later character development; we’ll find him to be brave, stoic, even, but also possessed with the pursuit of unrighteous revenge.

I’ll leave off my musing with another contrasting set of images: Ahab as a tree.

In the first, his scarring (which happened before his encounter with the white whale) is compared to the mark of a lightning strike on a great tree, in such a way that I thought of Ahab as nature’s inertia embodied, markable but not really changeable in essence (was his monomania brought on by Moby Dick’s attack, or was the capacity for madness always lurking within him?).

In the second, the possibility for softness in Ahab’s character emerges without diminishing his otherness from his fellow men.

(1)

[Ahab’s scar] resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded. (134)

(2)

For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods, even the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants; so Ahab did, in the end, a little respond to the playful allurings of that girlish air. More than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile. (136)

What do you remember most about Ahab?

Feeling Restless After The Ten-Year Nap

September 4, 2013September 3, 2013 / Carolyn O / 5 Comments

The Ten-Year Nap finds four friends, women who live in New York, contemplating the choices they made about parenting and professions. The four all gave up their careers about ten years ago (hence the title), and some regret the decision; others are comfortable with the lives they’ve chosen.

It’s a testament to the talents of Meg Wolitzer that even thought I didn’t care for this book, I still borrowed two more of her novels from my local library. She’s very, very funny — keep an eye out for Amy Lamb’s reaction to her son’s favored reading material.

The novel follows all four women, plus one more character who drives the plot, and then veers off to show vignettes in the lives of women related the main characters. I felt that the novel never settled, as if Ms. Wolitzer couldn’t decide which person she was most interested in exploring; there’s fodder here for two or three novels.

Another aggravation for me was the jacket copy (no surprise there), which described the characters as middle class. Um, no. Maybe two of them are middle class by New York standards, as my friend Katie pointed out, but by any other standard these women are wealthy, wealthy, wealthy, with the luxury of choosing whether or not to parent their children at home.

Occasionally they glance at the lives of the less fortunate. Roberta, for instance, flutters in and out of left-wing activism; at the private boys’ school attended by three of the friends’ sons, poor children of color are invited for a yearly visit that is halted after an incident (there’s not too much plot to give away here, but nonetheless, I refrain.). Even Jill, whose adopted daughter comes from an understaffed Russian orphanage, spends her mental energy focused on herself, without much thought for the other children left without adoptive parents. I found these women unlikable, but I suspect Ms. Wolitzer is trying to point out foibles that we might find in ourselves: a tendency, no matter our political leanings, toward self-centeredness. We draw back from the world we see out the window.

The Ten Year-Nap also made me uncomfortable because it hits close to home. I’m the at-home parent to our son, and though he’s too small for school now, I do wonder what I will do, how I will feel, when he’s ten, or twelve, or fifteen. Even if I wanted to enter the workforce right now (I’m ambivalent, given H’s age), or go back to grad school to finish my PhD, we couldn’t afford it. Yes, you read that right. Daycare is so expensive here that it’s cheaper for me to stay home than to work as a teacher. And for other women the situation is reversed: they can’t afford not to work. As I often explain, it’s a complicated calculus, one that will probably hold for the next few years, though I hope not forever. I love my child and will do my best to see that he arrives safely at adulthood as a kind and loving person, and I think that’s a worthy goal, a worthy and difficult occupation. But I want to contribute something more to the world —not necessarily something better, just something more.

To me, The Ten-Year Nap implies that the women it follows had done something wrong, some disservice to themselves, by parenting their children at home. Even the title is diminutive, implying that the women are childish (not a rest or a sleep, but a nap). Maybe it’s the suggestion that these women are asleep to themselves that I find annoying; why can’t one be oneself and an at-home parent too?

Have you read the novel? What did you think?

“My last things will be the first things slipping from me”; RIP Seamus Heaney

September 3, 2013September 2, 2013 / Carolyn O / Leave a comment

Maria Popova has put together a beautiful tribute to Seamus Heaney, and I cannot improve upon her work and Seamus Heaney’s own words. However, I can recommend that you seek out one of his books as soon as you can. I like to read the poems in spring, when it’s lightly raining and I can imagine that the earth and the grass I smell are really in Ireland.

This week, in honor of Mr. Heaney, I’m reading his poem “Mint,” from The Spirit Level (1996), included in the collection Opened Ground. It’s not about the fresh smell of the herb, or the glorious color; this mint, in the speaker’s childhood yard, appears “like a clump of small dusty nettles” (l. 1). From this opening, the speaker projects into the future; these early memories will be the last to slip away from him at the end of his life. The turn into the final stanza is so unexpected — I hope you’ll read it for yourself.

I’m so grateful that poets and poetry are part of our world.

Musings on Moby-Dick, Part 2

August 30, 2013August 29, 2013 / Carolyn O / 6 Comments

William Giraldi’s essay on Herman Melville-as-reader has been making the rounds on the web this week, appearing first in the LA Times and then elsewhere (Maria Popova tweeted about it; A Piece of Monologue ran it), including Salon, which is where I ran across it.

It’s a good piece, though I could do without the put-downs of genre fiction and some of the vitriol (Mr. Giraldi is known in literary circles for his excoriating review of two Alix Ohlin books. His point in this essay boils down to: The drivel that’s published these days flows from the keys of those who do not read (Mr. Giraldi’s closing line is “So put down your pen awhile. Pick up Moby Dick [sic].) Melville, like other great writers, stood on the shoulders of giants. In order to write well, one must read well, and often, and deeply. (I’d make the same argument about living well, but that’s for another time). He points to Milton, one of those authors Melville grapples with most intensely, and rightly so. Earlier this week, though, I was thinking about another kind of literacy, or literary awareness, as I read Chapter 9 of Moby-Dick (“The Sermon”).

Though I’m not a believer, I’m grateful for an elementary education that gave me familiarity with Bible stories and concepts. It’s incredibly helpful, in all kinds of contexts, to understand references to Judith and Holofernes, for example, or the wedding feast at Cana.

Or Jonah and the Whale. Without the background music of Biblical phrasing in mind, it would have been difficult for me to appreciate just how brilliant this chapter is. Father Mapple tailors his sermon for the sea-going folk and sea-watchers in his congregation, conjuring up the details of Jonah’s cabin (“a swinging lamp slightly oscillates in Jonah’s room” [50]) to make the text come alive. In embroidering an old tale to reach a new audience, he becomes a figure of the novelist. And when he ends his sermon, he’s shaken by his awesome responsibility.

Here’s a little gem from the sermon: “But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep” (54).

“Days are where we live.”

August 27, 2013 / Carolyn O / Leave a comment

In a recent post on The Poetry Foundation’s website, Caitlin Kimball calls British poet Philip Larkin “that crown prince of misanthropic, socially awkward poet-librarians,” which is probably the best, funniest summation of Larkin’s whole ethos I’ve ever read. For me, reading Larkin’s poems are like sucking on lemons (I know, I know: terrible for one’s teeth. But I do it anyway.). There’s sourness, sure, but it only serves to highlight the brightness of the fruit, the taste like color.

Image courtesy of Pixomar / Freedigitalphotos.net

In this poem, “Days,” it’s the turn that twists the knife; the first stanza lulls the reader into a little thought experiment, asking her to consider day as a place rather than as a time: “Where can we live but days?” Ay, there’s the rub.

Here’s the second and final stanza.

Ah, solving that question

Brings the priest and the doctor

In their long coats

Running over the fields.

Musings on Moby-Dick

August 23, 2013August 23, 2013 / Carolyn O / 7 Comments

Here’s a little story about me and Moby-Dick. (Since Ahab’s Wife is up next in the Literary Wives series, I thought I should probably have a look at Moby-Dick; it’s been a few years. I’ll be posting about it every once in awhile as I go along.)

Yes, I know this is a Maine lighthouse, but I don’t have any recent pictures of harpooned whales or peg-legged ship captains.

Now, there was a time when I hated Moby-Dick with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. That was when I was about eleven.

You see, my parents were and are big believers in reading aloud. My Mom read aloud to us when we were little, and when she went back to work and Dad started staying home, he read aloud individually to us until we left for college (though less in high school when extracurriculars took up more of our time). He chose books in consultation with us, so my brother might be listening to Ivanhoe an hour after Dad read “The Twin Brothers” to our younger sister.

It was a delightful tradition. We’d settle into the comfy chairs in the living room, and Dad would read in his perfectly cadenced voice while I listened, sometimes working on whatever craft project I was trying out that week (never with success, I might add). When I was about eleven, we decided to settle in for a challenge: Moby-Dick.

We hated it. We hated the chapter on Cetology and the long philosophical disquisitions and the drawn-out plot. For years we said it would have been a great story if it had been fifty pages, not the 500 of our hardcover version. We hated it so much that eventually we decided to finish it just so we could say we had done it — we had killed Moby-Dick.

To this day, of all the books Dad read to me, it’s the one I remember best, the one we joke about the most often. Dad gave me the Cliffs Notes to the novel as a Christmas present one year, even though I hated the book so much that I avoided any American Lit course that mentioned it in the course description — and I was an English major!

And yet, something in the back of my brain needled me, like a tooth-pick-sized harpoon. What if I hadn’t given it a fair shot? What if I was too young when I read it? Why did other people (including one of my uncles, a brilliant English teacher) like it so much?

So, more than ten years after I’d read the book with my dad, I tried again. And I loved it. Because it’s musical. Because it’s exciting. Because it’s funny.

No, really. It is.

Consider the very first chapter. We all know the famous first three words, but what follows is a riot. Ishmael decides to put to sea not because the ocean calls to his soul (that bit comes later), but because he’s hilariously, hyperbolically depressed:

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 (3).

See? Told you it was funny. Now if only I could convince my dad.

Blackout Books

August 16, 2013August 14, 2013 / Carolyn O / 2 Comments

A friend reminded me that the Northeast blackout of 2003 happened ten years ago. My parents lost power in northeast Ohio, and I was a long way away scheduled to fly home and completely panicked that I wouldn’t make it home (I did). Several tubs of ice cream were eaten, several games of Scrabble played, several novels read, and luckily, that was the worst of it for us.

So, I wonder: when the lights go out, what’s the book you reach for in candlelight?

(Mine is The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay)