The New Lifetime Reading Plan

With a little judicious skipping, boys and girls can enjoy it as a thrilling sea story about a vengeful old man with an ivory leg pursuing his enemy, the White Whale, to their common death. Grownups of various degrees of sophistication can read it as a tempestuous work of art, filled with the deepest ques- tionings and embodying a tragic sense of life that places it with the masterpieces of Dostoyevsky [87] and even, some think, Shakespeare [39]. And no one at ali sensitive to our language can help being moved by its magnificent prose, like an organ with ali the stops out.

Moby Dick is not a hard book. But it is not a transparent one either. We ali feel that Ahab and the whale (and the other characters) mean more than themselves, but we may well dif- fer over what those meanings may be. For some, Moby Dick symbolizes the malignancy of the whole universe, the baffling inexorability of Nature, that Nature from which we, if we are sensitive and energetic of mind, somehow feel ourselves estranged. That dark Nature is always in Ahafrs consciousness. Indeed Moby Dick may be thought of, not only as a real whale, but as a monster thrashing about in the vast Pacific of Ahab's brain, to be exorcised only by his own self-destruction. Moby Dick is not a gloomy or morbid book, but you can hardly call it an argument for optimism.

Many years ago, writing about Moby Dick, I tried to sum- marize my sense of it. Now, rereading it for perhaps the fifth time, I find no reason to change my opinion: "Moby Dick is America^ most unparochial great book, less delivered over to a time and place than the work of even our freest minds, Emerson [69] and Whitman [85]. It is conceived on a vast scale, it shakes hands with prairie seas and great distances, it invades with its conquistador prose 'the remotest secret draw- ers and lockers of the world/ It has towering faults of taste, it is often willful and obscure, but it will remain America's unar- guable contribution to world literature, so multileveled is it, so wide-ranging in that nether world which is the defiant but secretly terror-stricken soul of man, alone, and appalled by his aloneness."

The long short story "Bartleby," published in a magazine two years after Moby Dick, could have been written only by the creator of that book. Even today, in a time more receptive to its dark atmosphere, perhaps Samuel Beckett [126] alone might find in Bartleby^ inveterate passivity something conge- nial to his talent. But in 1853 (Poe [75] died in 1849) no American writer but Melville could have even imagined the tale's subject. Indeed it does not seem to have been under- stood at the time; several commentators thought it a humorous work.

With his quiet "I would prefer not to," Bartleby—"pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn"—counters ali attempts at human contact. Problem: How to spin fifty pages out of pure negation? Somehow Melville builds a haunting narrative around a being, otherwise sane and well conducted, who confronts life with an Everlasting Nay—and this at a period when ali his countrymen were constructing a great nation with unprecedented energy and a positive passion for experience.

Using the modish phrase of our own day we may interpret "Bartleby" as a study, some generations before Freud [98], of the death wish. Or perhaps it belongs, like Conrad^ masterly "The Secret Sharer" [100], to the rich literature of the doppel- ganger—for are not poor Bartleby and his highly normal narra- tor eerily bound together? Or it may be a private allegory, hid- ing and revealing Melville's own loneliness, his remoteness from the roaring materialism of his day.

In any case, a story to trouble one's dreams.

C.F.

84

GEORGE ELIOT

1819-1880

The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch

It may interest only historians of literature, but there does exist a kind of shadowy stock exchange on which the reputations of established writers fluctuate, though not wildly. During the last fifty years or so the stock of Shaw [99] and Wordsworth [64] may have slipped a few points. That of 0'Neill [115],

Forster [108], Kafka [112], Donne [40], Boswell [59], and Tocqueville [71] has probably risen. With George Eliot the rise has been marked. In large part this is due to the advocacy of the formidable English critic F.R. Leavis as well as that of other scholars.

The common reader, recalling the high school infliction of Silas Marner—or possibly merely intimidated by the memory of the authors countenance, so suggestive of a sorrowful, though brainy, horse—still shies away from her. George Eliot is one of many writers handicapped by the existence of photog- raphers and portrait painters.