Category Archives: reviews

suetonius, “the twelve caesars”

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Suetonius
The Twelve Caesars
(trans. Robert Graves, revised Michael Grant) 
(Penguin Classics, 1979)

This book I have something of a history with: in a particularly uncomfortable moment during the year I worked in Rome, I was once called in as a witness to ask someone being fired over a disagreement about the contents of this book, Italian, English, and Latin editions of Suetonius being brandished as proof. Which bit of imperial misbehavior was being argued about I don’t remember anymore – spectators being boiled alive by Caligula in the Circus Maximus, maybe. I picked it up again with the idea that the life of Septimius Severus was described here; it’s not, of course, but I always feel guilty about putting off the classics, and this seemed easily digestible and full of entertaining trivia, in the manner of Petronius or Procopius. My classical history seems to be weighted in that direction; this (along with, of course, my lack of Greek and Latin) is why I’m not a classicist.

Suetonius is pleasant, not least because of what he takes to be his work in writing this book. Most of the long chapters – Galba, Otho, and Vitellius weren’t in power long enough to make much of an impression – are effectively divided in half: the first half presents the notable deeds of the emperor before and after coming to power, while in the second half, Suetonius explains what the emperor was really like. While Suetonius has a grudging respect for at least Julius Caesar and Augustus, and he seems to outright like the short-lived Titus, none of the emperors is exempt from criticism. The lives of the first two emperors are told with quotations from original documents; those don’t generally appear in the later histories, ostensibly because Suetonius was kicked out of the archives. One wonders who this book was intended for; it seems hard to imagine such a scabrous book functioning as a widely-read history. The accuracy is hard to gage; at the very least, there’s a huge amount of second- and third-hand information; at least some is outright imagined. One ends up with something like Voragine’s Golden Legend, mostly nonsensical as history, but entertaining nonetheless. 

It’s hard not to enjoy the details, like the inadvertantly Joycean bit where Caligula calls his “great-grandmother Livia a ‘Ulysses in petticoats'” (p. 164). Most of the Caesars planned on staking out a month in the calendar; Claudius decided that he would improve the alphabet:

Claudius also added three new letters of his own invention to the Latin alphabet maintaining that they were most necessary. He had written a book on the subject before his accession, and afterwards met with no obstacle in getting the letters officially adopted. They may still be found in a number of books, in the Official Gazette, and in inscriptions on public buildings. (p. 210)

Claudius’s letters didn’t take; but they have, in fact, been added to Unicode: they are Ⅎ, Ↄ, and Ⱶ, and whoever added them to Unicode seems to have ahistorically created minuscule versions of them as well. Wikipedia’s story that Claudius was led to add new letters because of his mother’s taunting isn’t in Suetonius; however, Antonia does refer to her son as “a monster: a man whom Nature had not finished but had merely begun.” The young Claudius comes off as rather endearing, almost a young Prince Hal: his “reputation for stupidity was further enhanced by stories of his drunkenness and love of gambling.” He has questionable friends:

Some jokes exercised their wit by putting slippers on his hands as he lay snoring, and then gave him a sudden blow of a whip or cane to wake him, so that he rubbed his face with them. (p. 190)

What’s strange about this book as a whole might be how modern so much of it seems – the struggles for power and succession aren’t immensely different from anything that might be happening today – and yet how unthinkable so much of what’s described as daily life – even aside from the exaggerated excesses – seems to be. A paragraph from early in the story of Vespasian might illustrate this:

In Greece, Vespasian dreamed that he and his family would begin to prosper from the moment when Nero lost a tooth; and on the following day, while he was in the imperial quarters, a dentist entered and showed him one of Nero’s teeth which he had just extracted. (p. 282)

This is not a particularly odd moment in the narrative; indeed, this comes in the midst of a long sequence of auspicious signs that Vespasian noticed prior to becoming emperor. Sequences like this occur again and again in this book. How can we make sense of this? The rationalist approach would say that dreams don’t foretell the future, and that this is an ex post facto dramatization of what happened: Vespasian wanted to be emperor, Vespasian was handed a tooth, Vespasian explains that he dreamt he would be emperor when Nero lost a tooth. Presumably Vespasian is in Greece with Nero, though this is unclear to me. In a more horrific version in the previous paragraph, a stray dog brings a human hand to Vespasian while he’s eating breakfast; this is also a good sign because a hand is an emblem of power. Suetonius doesn’t seems to doubt these signs: he reports them as fact. Vespasian did become emperor, after all. But one feels unimaginably far from a world in which a dog bringing in a hand is regarded as a good thing.

The amount of casual violence is also staggering. Even apart from imperial excess, there’s the sense of life being astonishingly cheap. Regiments of the army are repeatedly decimated; minor crimes are given capital punishment; countless numbers of gladiators and prisoners die in arenas. The family trees of the Claudians and Flavians contain more unnatural deaths than not. Roman life expectancy wasn’t pretty, of course. But it’s almost impossible to imagine what it would have been like to live in a world where death was so inescapable; maybe arbitrary whims of gods make more sense.

andrew taylor, “god’s fugitive”

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Andrew Taylor
God’s Fugitive: The Life of C. M. Doughty
(Dorset Press, 1999)

I’ve acquired, somehow, something of a collection of the work of Charles Montagu Doughty: both the full-length and abridged versions of Travels in Arabia Deserta (which I’ve been dipping in and out of for a while), a print-on-demand facsimile edition of the first volume of his epic The Dawn in Britain, a copy of his verse drama The Cliffs. He’s one of those people who pops up in interesting places: Henry Green, Laura Riding Jackson, and Guy Davenport were all interested in him; The Dawn in Britain in mentioned somewhat dismissively in The Pisan Cantos. I had some idea of Doughty but wanted something more, so I found a copy of this relatively recent biography of him; D. G. Hogarth’s The Life of Charles M. Doughty, which I might yet track down, came out in 1928, but I wanted something a little more recent for perspective. This is a serviceable biography; at three hundred pages, it doesn’t presume to be exhaustive, but it does provide a reasonable introduction to Doughty’s life and work, which is mostly what I wanted.

Doughty (1843–1926) seems to fit nicely into the mould of Victorian eccentric: he started out in geology, the most happening subject when he arrived in Cambridge, though he didn’t get particularly far with that. Doughty’s most endearing traits is his astonishing stubbornness: geology interested him precisely because of its increasing conflict with his Christian faith. Being part of the impoverished gentry, he took up traveling; he wound up in the Middle East with the idea of visiting the lands described in the Bible and found it not at all what he was expecting (shades of Melville’s Clarel) but found himself drawn deeper and deeper into it. He set off into Arabia with vague archeological ideas after being impressed with Petra; he ended up wandering the country for a few years. It is a wonder that he was not killed: his travels are known almost entirely through his own accounts, but it seems likely that the Bedouins he traveled with took him for some sort of holy fool. He refused to pretend to be Muslim, much less convert; at the same time, he didn’t presume to proselytize. 

Returning to England, he found that most people were uninterested in his travels or his discoveries; relatively uncredentialed, he needed a book. He set to writing Arabia Deserta; as his youthful enthusiasm for geology had worn off, he’d been taken with Chaucer and Spencer, whose works he’d read again and again on his travels. The English language, he was convinced, had fallen into decadence since Spencer’s time; his writing, he hoped, might revive it. (Doughty would certainly have nothing to say to Fr. Rolfe, whose life he overlapped; but one might imagine a certain kinship with Rolfe’s project of creating his own dictionary of macaronic Italian with which to write Don Renato.) Doughty’s reforming spirit was lost, of course, on the publishing world, as well as upon, eventually, the reading public; it didn’t help that the original Arabia Deserta was 1200 pages long. Doughty then abandoned the Arab world entirely for poetry, trotting out an immense epic of the British clash with the Romans (the 30,000 line The Dawn in Britain), dramas in verse with subjects both Christian and anti-German (Adam Cast Forth, The Cliffs, The Clouds) and finally, in 1920, Mansoul, another long blank verse epic describing the journey of the Christian soul. Most of these didn’t make it past a first printing. Wanderings in Arabia Deserta, an abridged version of his first book, eventually found him a small, but devoted, audience; he was befriended by the young T. E. Lawrence, who made sure that he didn’t die indigent. 

It’s hard to make sense of Doughty: he seems to have had a quarrel with the world, which makes his life entertaining reading. A reviewer suggested, for example, that The Cliffs might be derivative of Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts; Doughty wrote to a friend:

The writer knows to his small malicious satisfaction that I had copied something from a book with the strange title Mr Hardy’s Dynasts. Not moving in the Literary World, nor reading the Literary Periodicals, I had never heard of the book or the author, and remain in my ignorance till now, and shall continue to do so . . . (p. 302)

There’s something fantastic about his sheer pigheadedness: his determination that he was right and the world was at fault. An earlier letter to a publisher accompanying the manuscript of The Dawn in Britain explains how he saw the literary world in 1905:

Modern poets’ work has fallen into neglect, and perhaps it may be merito. Where is that sincerity, knowledge, and right inspiration, which is required even in the humblest work of art? Where is that intimate knowledge of language, without which there can be only deciduous handiwork? . . . To speak of the present manuscript. This book is my life’s work, a continuation of Chaucer and of Spenser, such as conceivably they might have written in the present . . . (p. 262)

Doughty’s stubbornness seems to have been a dissatisfaction with the world: unhappy with England, he left for the Europe and then the Middle East; unhappy with the writing of the present, he abandoned it for the past. Though religious to his core, he rarely if ever attended church. Taylor only sketches the personal life of Doughty, but these details further complicate his picture: a bachelor for forty years, he married soon after his return to England, and seems to have led a contented life with his wife and two daughters. It’s hard to blame Taylor for this: Doughty seems to have been thoroughly his own man, inscrutable from outside. One might wish, however, for a little more focus on Doughty’s literary works past Arabia Deserta. Maybe they need their own book.

maggie nelson, “bluets” / william gass, “on being blue”

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Maggie Nelson
Bluets
(Wave Books, 2009)

William Gass
On Being Blue
(David R. Godine, 1976)

I don’t remember why I picked up Maggie Nelson’s book sometime last year; someone had said something positive about it, and I always feel guilty about not reading enough contemporary work. But I took it home & made my way through the not inconsiderable credits at the back of the book & found myself losing interest, and I put it back on the shelf. It seemed odd, I thought, almost inconceivable, that someone would write a long essay (or a short book) about the color blue when William Gass’s perfectly nice On Being Blue existed in the world, and was still in print.

But I found myself thinking about Gass’s book when reading Thomas Browne in Libya: reading The Garden of Cyrus, it became entirely clear where Gass had taken his form for On Being Blue – starting with a concept, almost arbitrary; then moving through digressions to end up in an entirely different space. There’s something comforting about this: reading something and realizing that others that you know have been there before you. But with this realization, of course, there was the need to go back to Gass, to see how he’d changed since I’d last read him – I think I first read this book around 2001, though I could certainly be wrong – and whether the work holds up. And of course there was the Nelson book on the shelf, which I found myself resolving to be unfair to. 

And while reading Browne I found myself thinking about the color blue: at about the same time, we were spending a lot of time driving through the sand seas of the Sahara, and I found myself fixated on the line between sand and sky. Partly this is because the desert is aesthetically barren: there are only two elements, and the sky was uniformly blue, the sand was uniformly orange-yellow. As evening approaches, shadows appear, which change things; but until then, there is the horizon. Next to the sand, the blue of the sky pops in an astonishing way: it’s hard to imagine how any blue could be more blue. There was the urge, with a blue so intense, to capture it somehow; I was taking photos with my iPhone, which I knew very well does not take the best photos in the world, but it was hard to fight off that urge to capture that blueness. It’s hard not to have some sort of aesthetic experience in a space like that – in the same way that it’s hard not to when standing in front of Monet’s Water Lilies in the Musée de l’Orangerie. Blue summons up feelings of the infinite; one understands immediately why people feel the urge to write books about the color. Off the top of my head, I can think of Alexander Theroux’s The Primary Colors (which widens its interest to include red and yellow) and Joshua Cohen’s more narrow “Thirty-Six Shades of Prussian Blue” to stay outside of writing about the visual arts; Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art nails down his weird theory of precise meanings of colors and shapes; and of course there are Albers and Goethe and Wittgenstein, and we could go on.

But these two books about blueness, both collections of blue fragments, although they are arranged very differently. One finds Browne sneaking through them; he’s mentioned by name in Gass’s, of course, but one of the most famous passages of Religio Medici:

I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the world without this triviall and vulgar way of coition; It is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life, nor is there any thing that will more deject his coold imagination, when he shall consider what an odde and unworthy piece of folly hee hath committed; I speake not in prejudice, nor am averse from that sweet sexe, but naturally amorous of all that is beautifull; I can looke a whole day with delight upon a handsome picture, though it be but of an Horse.

In Gass, this is reduced further:

I should like to suggest that at least on the face of it a stroke by stroke story of a copulation is exactly as absurd as a chew by chew account of the consumption of a chicken’s wing. (p. 20)

Gass’s book is an argument about the relation between words and the world, the experience of blueness tying them together: depiction (like Browne’s portrait of a horse) is different from personal experience. Nelson’s approach to roughly the same subject is messier: in numbered paragraphs, she examines her personal experiences with blueness, drawing in a predictable series of artists and works as evidence (Yves Klein, Rose Hobart, poor old Wittgenstein), trying to discern why blue is important to her personally.

Part of my problem with Nelson’s book comes down to a personal distrust of those writers whose confessions aren’t oblique: those who tell all the truth, but don’t tell it slant. When one gets to the end of On Being Blue, it’s possible to say, really, only two things about the physical existence of William Gass: first, that he saw a particular photograph when young that affected him, an experience he talks about in some detail; second, that he’s married. One knows, of course, that he’s read a lot of books, many of which are mentioned or quoted from; and the reader has a distinct feeling for Gass’s sensibility: what he finds interesting and why, how he thinks about the world, at least the tiny chunk of it that he’s encircled in On Being Blue. The reader has a conception of the author; but the reader is held at arm’s distance. The beginning of the final section of Gass’s book explains this:

It is not simple, not a matter for amateurs, making sentences sexual; it is not easy to structure the consciousness of the reader with the real thing, to use one wonder to speak of another, until in the place of the voyeur who reads we have fashioned the reader who sings; but the secret lies in seeing sentences as containers of consciousness, as constructions whose purpose it is to create conceptual perceptions – blue in every area and range: emotion moving through the space of the imagination, the mind at gleeful hop and scotch, qualities, through the arrangement of relations, which seem alive within the limits they pale and redden like spanked cheeks, and thus the bodies, objects, happenings, they essentially define. (pp. 86–87)

In Bluets, Nelson writes off Gass’s book as “puritanism, not eros,” declaring

I will not choose between the blue things of the world and the words that say them: you might as well be heating up the poker and readying your eyes for the altar. Your loss. (p. 25)

Because Nelson’s book is constructed aphoristically, she moves on; this is frustrating, because this isn’t really an argument so much as a stance of defiance: her blue is entirely hers, and there’s little space in her book for the reader. 

julien gracq, “the opposing shore”

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Julien Gracq
The Opposing Shore
(trans. Richard Howard) 
(Columbia University Press, 1986)

This novel is one I that I return to; this is my third time through. Julien Gracq was one of the writers the Surrealists wanted but they couldn’t get (like Roussel and De Chirico); his work shares something with their aesthetic, but it’s very much his own. This particular novel hasn’t attracted much attention in English; Columbia released it in 1986, Harvill seems to have put out a British edition in the late 1990s, and since then nothing. The Pushkin Press has been reissuing out-of-print editions of Gracq (most recently A Dark Stranger; Turtle Point Press has been very slowly publishing untranslated works by Gracq. This book has so far been left out; it’s a shame, because it’s one of his most accessible works.

When Gracq published the novel in 1951, it was given the name Le rivage des Syrtes; I don’t know whether the change of the English title was Richard Howard’s or not, but it’s an odd one. “Syrtes” in the novel is the southern-most region of Orsenna, a country that seems to be a stand-in for a pre-Risorgimento Italy where there seem to be cars but no electricity, ruled by a city of the same name which seems to be, but isn’t quite, Venice. Almost all the characters in the novel have Italian names. There isn’t an exact correspondence: Venice still exists in the novel, and the Catholic church is present but inwardly directed and apolitical. Orsenna has been at war almost indefinitely with Farghestan, the desert country across the sea to the south; Farghestan, with its two main cities on the coast and endless deserts seems a great deal like Libya. There have been symbolic exchanges in Gracq’s book: Mount Etna moves to Libya and becomes the Tängri; the ruins of Sabratha leave Libya for Italy and become Sagra, where spies from Farghestan enter the country of Orsenna. And of course Sirt goes to Italy and becomes Syrtes. 

Which brings us back to the name of the novel: “Sirt” (in French “Syrte,” in Arabic “سرت”) is the name of both a town in Libya (most prominent now as the birthplace of Qaddafi) and a gulf directly north of it, the Gulf of Sidra (the Arabicized version of the Latin Syrtis Major). Gracq’s choice to write about a conflict between Italy and Libya is not as disinterested as it might seem: from 1911 to 1943, Libya had been an Italian colony; Libya become independent in 1951. Mussolini declared Libya to be Italy’s fourth shore (the Quarta Sponda); his bloody history in Libya is by and large forgotten, but he was busy using tanks against civilians, setting up concentration camps, and building a 168-mile-long barbed wire fence to control an insurgency; maybe half the population of Cyrenaica died under Italian occupation. F. T. Marinetti and the Futurists rushed out manifestoes in favor of the war on Libya; Marinetti went to go see the bombardment of Tripoli as a correspondent for the French press.

How then should Gracq’s novel be read? Generally this book is presented as being in the tradition of Kafka, like Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe, with which it shares a premise; certainly the French title of Gracq’s book can simply be read as a pun. It’s entirely possible, maybe even likely, that I’m reading too much into this book. Politically, it’s hard to charge Gracq with anything: he split with the Communists on the point of the Stalin-Hitler pact and was thereafter uninvolved. Gracq did, however, teach history and geography: presumably, he knew exactly what he was doing with his allusions to Libya. 

Farghestan, in the end, is purposefully unreal: the “secret powers of the city” that Aldo discovers when he leaves Syrtes for Orsenna are using the pretense of a war with Farghestan to whip up nationalist patriotism. Aldo, the protagonist, realizes that he’s been used, both by his lover and by the state; Danielo, one of the masters of Orsenna, explains how Aldo’s actions have proven useful:

When you rule, nothing is worse than losing hold. Once the Thing came to me, it was a strange discovery to realize that this was the only way to hold on to Orsenna. Everything that focused on Syrtes again,everything that led to the renewal of your . . . episode made the old gears turn with almost phantasmagorical ease, everything that failed to concern it met with a wall of inertia and unconcern. The Thing took advantage of every instance – the gestures to accelerate it and the gestures to slow it down – like a man sliding down the slope of a roof. Once the question was raised – how can I put this to you? – everything was mobilized of its own accord. (p. 284)

Orsenna, the final chapter makes clear, is about to descend into fascism: war with Farghestan, however, unlikely, is a convenient excuse. A deep dreaminess pervades this book, maybe the reason I find myself coming back to it; the politics, however, remain as timely as ever.

orhan pamuk, “my name is red”

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Orhan Pamuk
My Name is Red
(trans. Erdağ Göknar) 
(Faber and Faber, 2002; originally 2001)

I picked this book up at the airport in Istanbul, trying to spend the last of my Turkish lira. I don’t know why it took me so long to get to this book; I’d read Pamuk’s first book, The White Castle, and thought it was pleasant if slight. Maybe it was the overwhelming Orientalism of Chip Kidd’s cover to the American edition; more likely it’s because at the ALTA conference around the same time this book came out, an award was given to a new translation of Bilge Karasu’s The Garden of Departed Cats, a novel that sounded interesting (though it seemed to receive precisely no publicity) and that I was told was a major influence on Pamuk, but which I then forgot to read, though it kept me from buying more Pamuk. I dip into Pamuk’s essays occasionally and find them nice enough. But I did finally get around to picking up My Name is Red, which in this edition benefits from being pocket-sized: it feels like a book you’d read on an airplane, rather than a work of capital-L Literature. (It turns out that this book has just been admitted to Everyman’s Library in hard cover; this seems like awfully fast turnaround, but maybe that’s the way the world works; it turns out that it was released simultaneously with an edition of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels. I understand Everyman’s Library even less than the Library of America.)

I’m not being fair. Maybe it’s worth trying to parse out why it is that I feel suspicious of a book of this type, and what precisely a book of this type means. It’s the kind of book that’s deemed high literature, but that also isn’t so complicated that it can’t be brought over into other languages. García Márquez might be seen as a starting point for this (one could maybe go back further to Hermann Hesse) though I’m really talking about books from the past twenty years: Milan Kundera might fit in here, though he might also be more of a father figure, Salman Rushdie’s output for the past twenty years certainly does, Umberto Eco to an extent but more someone like Alessandro Baricco. Paulo Coelho doesn’t quite fit into this as he’s not quite high art enough. Saramago and Coetzee probably don’t quite fit in here, though a case could be made for them. But what I’m getting at is the highbrow that’s not particularly taxing: these books are working in established forms. There’s a touch of metafiction, but not enough to undercut the reader’s immersive experience; there’s a strong belief in the power of literature.

The sources of this particular book aren’t particularly hard to guess at: there’s Borges, of course, and Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, where this book’s narrative strategy (each chapter gets its own first-person narrator) springs from. There are hints of Nabokov’s Ada; there’s a fair amount of Milorad Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars, with the presentation, then reinterpretation, of story after story. The Italo Calvino of Mr. Palomar and Invisible Cities can be found here. I would be interested to know if there are Turkish sources for Pamuk’s narrative strategies: there’s an offhand (and rather funny) mention of the Thousand and One Nights, but Pamuk’s style seems to be an amalgamation of American and European styles.

So this is a book that seems to me more derivative than not in terms of how it’s done; that said, it’s still a pleasant enough book to read. Pamuk’s subject, the world of Ottoman miniaturists in the late sixteenth century, is still unfamiliar enough to feel fresh, even if it seems strange to depict this world in such a contemporary way. This is germane to the art crisis at the center of the book: Western perspective vs. the Ottoman tradition: we see the end of Ottoman tradition through Western eyes; we know, of course, how this is going to end. Maybe the trick of doing each chapter from a different character’s perspective is designed to emulate the Islamic tradition of depicting each person or object perfectly (something like a Platonic ideal); but it comes off more as Faulkner than anything else. 

This is a book of ekphrasis, and in that it succeeds: it’s about the pleasure of looking at pictures. The sort of pleasure depicted here is one very different from what we’re accustomed to: the miniaturists create masterpieces for sultans, but when these masterpieces are given to the sultan, they end up in the treasury, unseen by anyone. (Sultans are invariably depicted as boorish and not interested in anything but their own glory; they will not look at the pictures.) The great masterpieces of the past, then, can only be imagined; they are immune from the plague of criticism. The miniaturist’s career, at least in Pamuk’s version, always ends in blindness (one of the most explicitly Pavić-like elements), but this can be read as the apotheosis of looking at pictures: the blind miniaturist knows enough about illustration to never need to see them again. The masterpiece is unattainable; the viewer is almost incidental. There is, of course, the hint that painting is a stand-in for writing: the main character of the novel is not a miniaturist, but a man hired to write narratives to go with illustrations; he has a stepson named Orhan. This isn’t intrusive; nor is it conclusive.

The cover of this book, done by Pentagram, might be thought about, simply because it’s not really explained. We see a window frame; through the window, we see what seems to be an Ottoman miniature, one man stabbing another with a dagger. The window frame comes from Robert Campin’s St. Barbara, in the Prado from 1438; it’s the window in the background, which has been reversed to better fit the cover. I don’t know where the miniature comes from; the credit says “British Museum,” which seems a bit lazy. This is an unexpectedly smart cover for the book: an Ottoman past seen through a Western perspective, manipulated through Photoshop.

thomas browne, “major works” / “selected writings”

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Thomas Browne
The Major Works
(ed. C. A. Patrides; Penguin Classics, 1977) 
Selected Writings
(ed. Claire Preston; Fyfield Books/Routledge, 2003)

Thomas Browne has been an acknowledged hole in my reading for a while; I was reminded of this during my last reading of Moby-Dick. I’ve had the Claire Preston selection of Thomas Browne’s work on my shelf for a long time, but couldn’t, for whatever reason, find a way in; acquiring the C. A. Patrides compilation of his writing for Penguin, a bigger book, was an incentive, and I read the two against each other during boring stretches of highway driving in Libya; lack of distraction helped a great deal. I’m not sure why I should associate the desert with the baroque, but they do work well together.

Patrides provides the complete text of Browne’s major works (Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, The Garden of Cyrus, A Letter to a Friend, and Christian Morals) along with a decent chunk of Pseudodoxia Epidemica, as well as some odds and ends. There’s a fair amount of repetition in this (most notably between A Letter to a Friend and Christian Morals), but it’s useful to be forced to re-read: Browne’s prose is slow and ruminative, and one invariably misses a great deal. After finishing sections in this, I turned to the Preston Selected Writings: Preston has included only Urn Burial in full, and elsewhere split Browne’s writing into stretches of a few pages, which are divided into thematic sections (“Religion,” focusing on Religio Medici; “Error,” from Pseudodoxia Epidemica; “Antiquarianism,” “Natural History,” “Signatures,” “Medicine,” “Advice”). There are some more entertaining selections from PE and some from Browne’s correspondence that aren’t included in the edition Patrides. (One is left wishing for a complete edition of Pseudodoxia Epidemica that isn’t a terrible Project Gutenberg text; an annotated edition would be ideal. Certainly other people must want this?) Preston’s notes aren’t quite as good as those of Patrides; and presenting Browne for short-attention spans seems to miss a good deal of what makes him interesting. But as before, it’s useful to re-read Browne, and going back and forth between the two editions was useful to me. 

It’s hard for me to know what to make of Browne. The progression of works in the both of these edition (starting from Religio Medici, moving into Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or “Religion” to “Error” in the Preston) makes it clear that Browne was a devout Christian, who was using his religion as a base from which to try to understand the world. This is more clear in the Patrides, where the whole of Religio Medici is included: it’s not as abundantly clear from fragments of the text how seriously it seems to be intended. Pseudodoxia Epidemica almost seems a more recognizable text: Browne considers various popularly held errors and explains why they are wrong, though he clearly enjoys the erroneous stories more than he should; this, of course, is what makes the work interesting today. William Gass has been making the point for a while that when we ignore religious writing (baroque sermons, in particular), we miss a great deal of good prose; the point holds here. Browne’s specific religious beliefs are not especially interesting; but the way that he arrives at them still is. The essay’s rough going, as Browne works through his thought; but by the second half, when Browne turns in on himself, it becomes luminous and weirdly modern:

11. Now for my life, it is a miracle of thirty years, which to relate, were not a History, but a peece of Poetry, and would sound to common eares like a fable; for the world, I count it not an Inne, but an Hospitall, and a place, not to live, but to die in. The world that I regard is my selfe, it is the Microcosme of mine owne frame, that I cant mine eye on; for the other, I use it but like my Globe, and turne it round sometimes for my recreation. (Patrides, p. 153)

The same voice comes up in Hydriotaphia when Browne considers death; again it builds to a climax. I found myself strangely taken with The Garden of Cyrus, which makes only a minimal appearance in the Preston book: it’s not really a text which can be excerpted meaningfully. Browne starts with the idea of the quincunx; but the quincunx seems more a useful excuse for digressions than the mystical pattern he promises at the start. It’s a pleasant essay if one’s willing to wander along behind Browne; reading this, one immediately realizes from where Gass found his form for On Being Blue.

On the whole, I preferred the Patrides to the Preston; though the Preston includes excerpts from Browne’s correspondence that don’t appear in the Patrides. Here, for example, he instructs his son in how to care for an ostrich:

I believe you must be careful of your ostrich this return [of] cold weather, lest it perish by it being bred in so hot a country and perhaps not seen snow before or very seldom; so that I believe it must be kept under cover and have straw to sit upon and water set by it to take of both day and night; must have it observed how it sleepeth and whether not with the head ounder the wing, especially in cold weather; weather it be a watchful and quick-hearing bird like a goose, for it seems to be like a goose in many circumstances. It seems to eat anything that a goose will feed on, and like a goose to love the same green herbs and to delight in lettuce, endive, sorrel, etc. You will be much at a loss for herbs this winter, but you may have cheap and easy supply by cabbages, which I forgot to mention in my last . . . . (Preston, p. 134)

This Polonian voice doesn’t really appear in the Patrides collection (though it does include Samuel Johnson’s biographical sketch of Browne); the stridently casual tone nicely offsets the more measured voice of his essays. It makes me feel sorry that I didn’t start reading Browne long ago.

hermann broch, “the death of virgil”

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Hermann Broch
The Death of Virgil
(trans. Jean Starr Untermeyer)
(Vintage International 1995; originally 1945)

I’ve had this book on my shelf for a long time – since December 2001, I think, when I bought it with a copy of The Sleepwalkers, which I read much more promptly. I found The Sleepwalkers through Gaddis’s J R, which repeatedly references that book; I remember reading it on a trip to Chicago and being astounded by the way Broch’s novel unfolds, starting prosaically and becoming increasingly lyrical across all three sections. Somehow The Death of Virgil seemed imposing and I put it off, the same way I put off Proust at that point; I did find a copy of The Guiltless and enjoyed that as well, though not as much as The Sleepwalkers. Broch’s two volumes of non-fiction didn’t do quite as much for me, especially Geist and Zeitgeist; a couple years ago, I found an old copy of The Unknown Quality and found that I disliked it: Broch seemed disdainful of his characters in a way that didn’t seem artistically productive at all. In the meantime, I’d finally read Robert Musil, and decided that I liked Musil’s open-ended approach to The Man without Qualities better than what Broch had been doing. Last year I intended to re-read The Sleepwalkers to see if the book had changed; but I didn’t get around to that. Packing for Libya, I realized that I’d have an increasingly valuable chance to read without interruptions; so I threw my long unread copy of The Death of Virgil in my bag. But I also went into this book with the feeling that I was reading something that was good for me that I didn’t especially want to read. And another caveat: my experience with Virgil is dusty. I read a decent chunk of the Aeneid in high school, but I’ve forgotten most of whatever I knew. I did some poking around online after getting an Internet connection back, and at some point I’ll get around to re-reading the Aeneid; but for the present reading, my lack of knowledge was embarrassing.

The Sleepwalkers has a reader-friendly arc: it starts out normally and becomes more and more lyrical. The idea of progress can be read into Broch’s style. The Death of Virgil is more difficult, as it starts in the same mode that ends The Sleepwalkers. The reader can work out what’s going on easily enough, but the effect is to make the book daunting to the reader, who hasn’t been eased into it. The sentences go on and on; there are few paragraph breaks, and it serves as a stream-of-consciousness record of sensation of the titular Virgil, who is, as promised, dying. The Death of Virgil is divided into four sections; the third section, where Virgil is talking to Octavian and his friends, deviates from this formula by bringing in much more dialogue. Most of the book, however, is from the perspective of Virgil; not all of Virgil’s interlocutors actually exist.

There are passages here that are immensely beautiful. A sentence from an early section where Virgil considers hands:

Oh, unbridled became the desire to stretch out the hand toward those still so distant shores, to reach into the darkness of the shrubbery, to feel the earth-born leaf between his fingers, to hold it tightly there forevermore—, the wish quivered in his hands, quivered in his fingers with uncontrollable desire toward the leafy branches, toward the flexible leaf-stems, toward the sharp-soft leaf edges, toward the firm living leaf-flesh, yearningly he felt it when he closed his eyes, and it was almost a sensual desire, sensually simple and grasping like his masculine, raw-boned peasant’s fist, sensually savoring and sensitive like the slender-wristed nervousness of this same hand: Oh grass, oh leaf, bark-smoothness, bark-roughness, vitality of burgeoning, in this branching out and embodiment ye are earth’s darkness made manifest! oh hand, tingling, touching, fondling, embracing, oh finger and finger-tip, rough and gentle and soft, living flesh, the outermost surface of the soul’s darkness opened up in the lifted hands! (p. 18)

This goes on – this is only the first quarter of the passage, in the middle of a four-page paragraph – and it builds as it progresses. The insistent repetition is part of what makes this works: “leaf” throbs through, as does the modulation of “sensual” through “sensually” to “sensitive” and then “slender.” Broch’s style is maximalist: the pile of gerunds (“tingling, touching, fondling, embracing”) is typical of the book. The “ye” in the apostrophe in the second half seems to be an off note in the English, maybe pushing things too far; a dozen pages later, a passing peasant is overheard to say “Dat kind charm you’ll get from me” which reminds the reader the book was translated in 1945. There’s a 1946 essay about the translation of this novel in Geist and Zeitgeist; it’s rendered slightly hilarious because Broch evidently wrote it in the voice of his translator (“I simply want to tell you some of my experiences in translating The Death of Virgil and give you some of the ideas that came out of this, particularly from conversations with its author, Hermann Broch”); Untermeyer evidently refused to read it as her own. It’s not an especially helpful essay – Broch never inserted the demonstrative passages he intended to – but it does present the idea that the strange style of The Death of Virgil is in part related to bringing German sentence structure into English. I don’t speak German; to me, the book’s style reads as incredibly baroque in a way that doesn’t generally exist in English. (It might be worth noting in passage that Joshua Cohen seems to have borrowed the style for his earlier novels from Broch, which might explain the strange feeling of the prose of those books.)

The plot of the book, such as it is, hangs on Virgil’s deliberations about whether or not to burn the Aeneid before his death. Whether this would actually efface his work is left unclear: the text makes it clear that earlier sections of the book have already been copied, which makes it seem like Virgil would be choosing to leave the Aeneid unfinished rather than destroying it. That doesn’t make as nice a plot, of course. Virgil’s friends (perhaps intentionally similar to Job’s counselors) appear to try to convince him not to destroy the book; the third section is a long dialogue with Octavian, to whom the book is dedicated, who would like the book as tribute to his empire. Virgil doesn’t come off especially well (I’ll confess that I’ve always thought of the Aeneid as a cut-rate copy of Homer conceived to glorify an empire), and I’m not tremendously convinced that the argument is interesting. But the final section, where Virgil finally dies, is lovely; though weirdly here and elsewhere in the book, Virgil is made into the precursor of Christ that he was in the Middle Ages.

For me, the book survives on style: it’s a beautiful book, even though there are hints that the politics are a bit strange. I don’t know that I love it – I suspect I’ll go back to The Man without Qualities before this one – but this is a nice book to get lost in.

muammar al gathafi, “the green book”

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Muammar Al Gathafi 
The Green Book
(revised English edition; translator unknown) 
(World Center for the Study and Research of the Green Book, 2009; originally 1975.)

There are not a great many interesting souvenirs available in Libya, which is not, perhaps, surprising. But you can buy copies of Qaddafi’s The Green Book in many places, in many different languages, for very little money (5 Libyan dinars, around $4), which is how I came to have this. This edition is a hardback published in 2009 by the imposing-sounding “World Center for the Study and Research of the Green Book”; it’s a short book, 96 pages long, and the back explains that it’s been “republished in a new translation,” but I don’t know if this means that the text has been changed since the original. I am not, of course, any sort of expert on Libya or political systems; I was in Libya largely because I wanted to see the Roman ruins on the coast. My opinion is of course that of an amateur; but Libya is an interesting country, bearing little resemblances to most American preconceptions of it, and a good part of that is due to the idiosyncrasy of Qaddafi’s ideas.

Qaddafi came to power in 1969 in an officer’s coup; a week later, he seems to have emerged as the leader, improbably, as he was only a colonel. (The idea floats around Libya that the coup, and Qaddafi’s rise, was American-sponsored.) but by 1975, Qaddafi had codified his ideas about how the state should be run in this book, which announces his “Third Universal Theory”. The first and second theories were democracy and socialism; the third builds on these to create an elaborate systems of people’s committees which report back and forth and thus govern the country. The first third of this book announces “the solution to the problem of Democracy”; the second, “the solution to the Economic problem”; the third, “the Social Basis of the third Universal Theory”. Green marginal notes (often in the form of slogans, some incomprehensible (“No representation of the people representation is a falsehood”) appear to the left of the text; some of these also appear on billboards in the country.

Qaddafi begins with a discussion of political systems; he sees flaws in democracy, as popularly practiced, and socialism. While his criticisms often make sense (representational democracy isn’t as particularly representational as you might hope), he jumps to conclusions:

Political struggle which culminates in the victory of a candidate obtaining 51 per cent of the total votes of electorate, establishes a dictatorship in the seat of power garbed in the guide of democracy. It is in fact, a dictatorship because 49 per cent of the electorate would then be governed by an instrument of government they did not vote for, and which has been imposed upon them. This is the essence of dictatorship. (pp. 7–8)

One wonders if something has been lost in translation: he doesn’t seem to be using the word “dictatorship” as it’s usually received. There’s something that’s right here, of course; he does astutely note that what works for campaigns isn’t necessarily what’s right for government. Or his thoughts on referendums:

Referendums make a mockery of democracy. The people who respond with “yes” or “no” are not actually expressing their will, but rather are constrained to respond as such because the concept of modern democracy so dictates. They are only allowed to select one of two words: either “yes” or “no”. Referendums represent the most extreme repressive dictatorships. Individuals who respond with a “no” should be able to state their reasons for this response and why they refrained from responding with a “yes”. Similarly, individuals who respond with a “yes” should be given the opportunity to justify their consent and explain why they did not choose to give “no” as an answer. Each should be able to speak out and give the reason for agreement or disagreement. (pp. 19–20)

(This is glossed as “Referendums make a mockery of democracy” and “Individuals must have the opportunity to justify opinions”.) He’s right to point out that there are problems with referendums (cf. California’s governments); however, his response is puzzling. The problem is with democracy; he solves this by redefining democracy to mean People’s Congresses and People’s Committees. Here’s how:

Firstly, the people are divided into Basic People’s Congresses. Each of these selects its own secretariat. The secretariats of all the People’s Congresses together from (sic) Congresses other than the Basic People’s Congresses. The masses of the Basic People’s Congresses will then select administrative People’s Committees to replace governmental administration. From then on, all public institutions will be run by People’s Committees which act answerable to Basic People’s Congresses whcih dictate policies and oversee their implementation. Thus, both the administration and supervision become the people’s responsibility and the outdated definition of democracy – democracy is the supervision of the government by the people – is finally done away with. It is replaced by the true definition: democracy is the supervision of the people by the people. (p. 23)

This is glossed “Committees everywhere”. A rather complicated chart attempts to explain the interrelations of the various committees and congresses but leaves me entirely confused, as does how this theory actually relates to practice, if at all. Qaddafi’s word for this is the neologism jamahiriya (جماهيرية), a derivation from the the words “republic” and “masses”; maybe in English you could call it a “repeoplic.”

The second section of the book attempts to explain economic theory. To summarize by its glosses:

  • Wage earners are a kind of slaves, even if their wages improve.
  • The ultimate solution is to abolish the wage system.
  • In need no freedom indeed.
  • Masters in their own homes.
  • Land is no one’s private property.
  • The legitimate objective of the individual’s economic activity is solely the fulfilment of their material needs.
  • A house should be serviced by its occupants.

Qaddafi’s reasonable progressive here; he explains that it’s very important that everyone should have their own home, but everyone should only have one home, because that’s where trouble starts. One should also have a vehicle. Domestic servants lead quickly to slavery. 

The third section of the book explains his social thought; here, the book becomes itself. The family and religion are at the center of Qaddafi’s world; everyone should have both. The family is extended to the tribe, which perhaps makes sense in Libya, but which makes one a bit wary. From the tribe springs the nation (“a large extended family that has passed through the tribal stage – the tribe, then a plurality of tribes, that have branched out from one common source”). Next there’s a section on women; Qaddafi is paternalistic (“Women, like men, are human beings”) and almost buffoonish (“According to gynaecologists women, unlike men, menstruate each month”), but he comes to the conclusion that although women and men are separate they should be equal. Nurseries are tyrannical; motherhood should be respected as work. Some questionable science comes into play (“The male in the plant and animal kingdoms is born naturally strong and striving, while the female in both kingdoms is naturally born beautiful and gentle”), echoed in the Lamarckianism in the section on music and art:

If a community of people wears white on a mournful occasion and another dresses in black, then each community develops particular attitudes towards these colours: one community would like white and dislike black and the other like black and dislike white. Moreover, this attitude leaves a physical effect on the cells as well as on the genes in the body. This adaptation will be transmitted by inheritance, and the heir would come to dislike the colour disliked by his parents, as a result of inheriting their feelings. Consequently people only relate to their own arts and heritage. Due to the factor of heredity, this feeling of harmony eludes them when they come into contact with the arts of others who differ in heritage and yet speak a single common language. (pp. 88–89)

This is, of course, ridiculous; the book is finished with a section on sports and horsemanship, where Qaddafi comes out against public spectacles (unbecoming in a democracy) and for private practice. There are now, however, soccer teams in Libya, as well as increasingly visible private corporations; it’s hard to tell how seriously the Green Book is taken now. 

Qaddafi seems to have followed Duchamp’s lead in following up his Green Book with a White Book in 2002, but the White Book seems mostly inaccessible (save for a pile of Spanish translations I found in the gift shop of the Libyan airport). One can, however, read the White Book in the Green/White Book Room in the new hi-tech Museum of Libya in Tripoli; the White Book is smaller than the already small Green Book, and seems to contain Qaddafi’s proposed solution to the Israel/Palestine problem (one state, to be called “Israstine,” based on the model of Lebanon. See his op-ed from 2009 in the NYTimes.

Qaddafi’s hope with the Green Book seems to have been to export the jamahiriya elsewhere. This doesn’t seem to have gone very well; it seems possible that the reason he’s done as well as he has in Libya is that it’s a small country, population-wise: around 9 million people, the majority of them clustered around Tripoli; there’s also a huge amount of revenue from oil. How well this works in the future is a good question.

elizabeth hardwick, “new york stories”/”sleepless nights”

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Elizabeth Hardwick
The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick
(New York Review Books, 2010)

Elizabeth Hardwick
Sleepless Nights
(Random House, 1979)

Two books by Elizabeth Hardwick, both rather small. New York Stories is a posthumous compilation of Hardwick’s short stories involving New York: while this appears to be the first collection of her short stories in book form, I’m not sure offhand how complete a collection of her stories this actually is. At 200 pages, it’s a thin book. Sleepless Nights is a short novel from 1979; while it’s been reprinted by New York Review Books fairly frequently, my copy is an old hardback. Part 8 of this novel, first published in the New Yorker, also appears in The New York Stories under the name “The Faithful”: there’s almost the feeling that that book needed padding, that it might not have appeared substantive enough without more pages.

New York Stories is an oddly structured book. The earliest story here is from 1948; six are from the 1950s, and then there’s a twenty-year gap before “The Faithful” appears. There are three stories from the 1980s, and the last from 1993. The first half of the book, then, might be described as New Yorker-style stories from the 1950s; the second half deals with the fractured New York of 1980. Her novels seem similarly disjunct: The Ghostly Lover appeared in 1945, The Simple Truth in 1955; both of these, which I have not read, seem to have been out of print for a while, but maybe NYRB will get around to them. There’s no great secret for the gap in her fiction: in between these two periods, of course, Hardwick was busy founding, editing, and writing for the New York Review of Books.

The stories from the 1950s are good for what they are; I should admit that the American short story from that period isn’t a form of which I’m particularly fond, perhaps a myopia. There is sociological interest: Hardwick is a good observer, and her characters are sharply drawn. Here, for example, she delineates a professor seen at a dinner party: 

Clarence, a bachelor and only thirty-eight, was nevertheless a lover of things as they once were. Everything seemed to him to have been subtly degraded, from the quality of bread to the high-school curriculum. Violent feelings of disappointment, exhausting worries about the future of culture, had a fierce dominion over Clarence’s existence. He was so fully and abjectly under the tyranny of these feelings that the feelings themselves were in his own mind mistaken for “work.” When he was angry with a colleague, defeated in a committee meeting, dismayed by the poor preparation of the students, these experiences seemed to him to be his job. They were much too devastating and severe for him to take lightly. In judging his extremity of emotion, he found it simply an example of his greater diligence and dedication, his superiority to the mechanics being turned out by the graduate schools. Clarence cared, he suffered, he worried. Nesbit’s Under-Secretary of State airs and his desire to be an important figure in the intellectual world seemed to his critic, Clarence, to be a slighting of the great career of education. (“The Classless Society,” pp. 93–94)

This story, as far as I can tell, is not a New York story at all as it takes place at the University of Chicago; although it might be argued that the characters behave much more like they would in New York than they might in Chicago. Hardwick’s interest is the intellectual set; artists and bohemians behave like artists and bohemians, people complain, inevitably, about how the Village isn’t what it used to be. My failure to engage with these stories isn’t because Hardwick’s writing is bad – it certainly isn’t, and it obviously wasn’t her job to please me at this date; rather, it’s because all of this seems so familiar. 

When Hardwick starts writing again – both in the later stories in New York Stories and in Sleepless Nights – one almost senses that Hardwick herself might have been bored with what she was doing before, or realized that she’d run into a dead end. Sleepless Nights bears a certain stylistic similarity to Renata Adler’s Speedboat, which would have come out a few years before. In comparison to her earlier stories, Hardwick’s fiction from 1979 on seems decidedly more invigorated, with a new sensibility to the potentials of form; but it does come off as ineluctably dated, in the same way that color film can be pinpointed to the 1970s by that particular fade. Narration shifts to the first-person, of course; the protagonist of Sleepless Nights is named Elizabeth and is from Kentucky; the prose is considerably more fractured, and more explicitly literary: in a single paragraph early in the book, one finds reference to Pasternak, Leconte de Lisle, Hugo, and Ibsen. 

Modernism has been taken into account in Sleepless Nights, as it isn’t particularly in Hardwick’s stories from the 1950s. Sleepless Nights largely dispenses with plot; there’s a central consciousness, Elizabeth, but the narrative shuttles back and forth across time and space (a central focus being New York around 1973), and each of the ten sections could function individually. Secondary characters come and go, generally not making it across the section dividers; the one stable character is an M., to whom Elizabeth writes letters included in the text, but it’s unclear whether these letters have been written to be sent. The language feels more free than in Hardwick’s earlier stories: compare another passage describing a party:

This is what I heard in the evening. At the party everyone was intelligent and agreeable, but not particularly good-looking. No person of talent had brought along a new, beautiful, young girl, who being new and not knowing all the names would seem rude and superior, thus sending arrows of pain into the flesh of the older people who were known for something. Eyeglasses glimmered. Academics, like old barons of the Empire, coughed out their titles and universities and yet quickly the badges dimmed and their faces returned to the resignation brought on from too many lectures, and the docile, not-quite-interested smiles of students. (p. 48)

This is more interesting to me than the prose of the earlier stories: there’s distance implied. It’s unclear from this party whether the narrator was at the party in question or heard this description from someone else (this is left vague in the broader context that this passage occurs in); but it implies an individual consciousness having digested experience in a way that’s more subjective than the omniscient third-person in “The Classless Society”: Elizabeth the narrator is tired of this sort of party.

For me, Hardwick’s fiction remains secondary to her criticism, though I probably would pick up her two earlier novels if I came across them. With a Harper’s account, “The Death of Book Reviewing” can be read online; she’s still right, of course, about the mediocrity of the NYTimes Book Review.

herman melville, “moby-dick”

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Herman Melville
Moby-Dick
(Penguin Classics, 1987; originally 1851)

It’s been a long time since I sat down and read Moby-Dick: I vaguely recall doing that sometime after arriving in New York, and certainly I’ve picked through the book for important passages. But it’s been too long; with the end of the year coming on, it seemed a good time to go back too see what’s changed there. This Penguin Classic seems to be the version on the shelf at home; in college I had a cheap Signet that we probably got rid of when K. & I combined our books. The inside front cover bears a dedication “to ‘Poop Deck’ Bowen / a mighty sailing man / from / Corona Dan / your matey / Merry Christmas / 1987”: those two don’t seem to have written anything else in the book, though one always wonders how many copies of Moby-Dick have been read at all. The introduction and notes of this edition, done by Harold Beaver in 1972, are extensive but a bit too jocular & Joycean (back cover copy of this book compares Melville to Nabokov, ), yet seem to neglect whatever it is that I really want to find out. Obviously, it’s my own fault for not having a Northwestern-Newberry edition, which came out a year or so after this book, and which Penguin seems to have picked up for later editions of this book; this edition clocks in at just over a thousand pages, a good chunk of it notes and explanatory material, and one feels a little bad for poor forgotten Harold Beaver.

This book can be counted on for the kick of strangeness, which comes quickly: this threat buried in “Extracts” among the other quotes about whales from literary history still has a kick:

“If you make the least damn bit of noise,” replied Samuel, “I will send you to hell.” 
Life of Samuel Comstock (the mutineer), by his brother, William Comstock. Another Version of the whale-ship Globe narrative.)

There’s something to still being able to be surprised by a book. It’s still there, even in the second paragraph of the first chapter, a description of Manhattan “belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs – commerce surrounds it with her surf”. The preoccupation with economics comes back on a personal level: the narrator explains that he goes to sea as a sailor rather than as a passenger because of the difference between paying and being paid:

And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid, – what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition! (“Loomings,” p. 97)

The notes to this edition don’t point out that the “two orchard thieves” are Adam and Eve, which is vexing. But this is a strange idea, of course: to link the fall in the Garden with the necessity of capitalism. Melville does this later, in “The Paradise of Bachelors” and “Bartleby,” I think – but it’s strange to see the morality of capitalism turning up so quickly in the book; it’s something that recurs, of course. 

The way this book is structured is also strange: the first 25 chapters are the narrative of Ishmael, who is soon joined by Queequeg in what almost seems a buddy comedy (or, by the notes of this edition, a gay romance) where they learn the limits of tolerance. Then they board the ship, and Queequeg takes his ranks among the mates and harpooners; Ishmael seems to disappear entirely, dropped by the narrative voice as a useful device. Perhaps the changeover happens in Chapter XXIII, “The Lee Shore,” in which the character of Bulkington, previously set up to be important in the narrative, is disposed of; Ishmael also seems to disappear here. The next chapter sets out with the words “As Queequeg and I are now fairly embarked in this business of whaling”; but this “I” doesn’t really seem to be Ishmael any more; it seems to be the author, who can pull up references from other books – as the narrator does in chapter XXIV – rather than the entirely undistinguished-seeming Ishmael, unlikely to provide such exegeses. But the split is never made clear: Melville seems uninterested in such niceties. Certainly by the last paragraph in the same chapter (source of the title of the C. L. R. James book) it is not Ishmael speaking: 

If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased, among them all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall touch that workman’s arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread a rainbow over his disastrous set of sun; then against all mortal critics bear me out in it, thou just Spirit of Equality, which hast spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out in it, thou great democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the pale, poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne! Thou who, in all Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from the kingly commons; bear me out in it, O God! (p. 212)

Soon after this, the narrator will be reporting conversations between other people that Ishmael can’t possibly have heard; while occasionally the narrator makes reference to being a sailor on the ship, it’s hard to say anything substantive about what Ishmael does on the Pequod aside from his link with Queequeg. Ishmael is an unlikely character, seemingly too well read: it’s hard to imagine why someone who was ostensibly once a common sailor would be as well-versed in Paracelsus and Thomas Browne as the narrator is. Melville, of course, fits this description; but Ishmael as authorial surrogate is even more confusing, as Melville seems to be going out of the way to efface himself from his narrative. 

I’ve spent more time with Pierre and “Bartleby,” the works Melville wrote after Moby-Dick since my last reading of this book; what strikes me about Moby-Dick is how comparatively baroque the language is. It’s almost frightening, looking back, to realize how quickly these three works were composed; but with Moby-Dick, Melville seems to be enthusiastically throwing everything at the book, following every digression and having fun doing it, something that he doesn’t do as much in the following works. The germs of both Pierre and “Bartleby” might be found here; the aforementioned self-effacement leads to “Bartleby”; Ahab’s ambition foretells Pierre’s self-destruction. Clare Spark has argued that Melville intended Ahab to be seen as a hero rather than the anti-hero we usually see him as: read with this in mind, it’s hard to tell who, if anyone, the reader is meant to identify with among the characters if not Ahab.