OF A GOLDEN AGE

I realize that Edgar Allan Poe’s the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym did not likely have any ACTUAL influence on Moby-Dick, but the similarities are still striking to me. both have the same creatively inconsistent prose style — Poe with two narrators and a faux-journal structure, with brief interludes of incredibly tedious boat detail and quotes from existing texts on sailing; Melville with much longer interludes of a wider variety of strange and sometimes poetic nautical descriptions.

anyway, I liked the way Poe really drove the dagger into our ribs at the end of the book, saying that although Pym SURVIVED his foray into the strange gray land with the enormous chasm and the GREAT WHITE SAVIOR, he didn’t quite finish telling the story back in regular ol’ life before he died of some other more natural cause. aargh! you think you’re so clever, Edgar Allan. last night, a friend of mine came over to borrow a book and we were talking about gray areas, how they are the only thing I really believe in. and he said, “if you believe in gray areas long enough, eventually you’ll disappear in a cloud of gray.”

speaking of Melville, a good friend of mine is writing a paper on Billy Budd. his professor, a notorious crazy, is pushing a “secret homosexuality” reading of the book. I’d imagine this is supported by a significant portion of the modern critical circle, people like Camille Paglia who tend to draw out a lot of secret sexy stuff in almost everything they read. when it’s valid, it’s VERY valid, but when it’s a stretch, I think it’s more destructive to literary studies than most other irresponsible things. this particular professor seems to be grasping at straws to make it work. (as my friend said, the word “ejaculate” clearly used to have a different or at least broader meaning: the OED says “to utter suddenly.”) but I remember our discussion of Moby-Dick in terms of “homosocial” behavior, which in my mind is a completely different and more valid angle to take.

I really enjoyed the Poe novel. his grasp of uncomfortable, desperate, and frightening situations is remarkable.

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