>The greatest novel ever written is MOBY DICK
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>The greatest novel ever written is MOBY DICK
>The greatest novel ever written is MOBY DICK
It's All Fucked Shirt $22.14 |
Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
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Be that as it may, the greatest BIRD ever is the Turkey Vulture.
FALSE as it's the "Great" Egret for a reason
One of these days, I'll actually read that stupid book, but if it doesn't blow my fricking mind into the 54th dimension I'm going to hunt every one of you shills to the ends of the Earth.
The plot is barely there but the language is extremely beautiful. It's a prose poem taking many things from the likes of Paradise Lost, Shakespeare and KJV, Melville is one of the best prose stylists of the English language. It's also very symbolically and thematically rich.
As long as you don't expect a compelling plot or psychologically complex characters (with the exception of Ahab and maybe Starbuck) and are reading mostly for the prose/thematic depth you'll love it. Pierre; or the Ambiguities is almost just as good, though underrated due to its sheer difficulty.
What's the best edition that you recommend me to read?
Everyman's Library, Library of America and Norton Critical Edition are always solid choices. Or so I'm told, I never bought LoA, they happen to be mighty expensive where I live. Folio Society if you happen to have just robbed a bank. The IQfy annotated one is probably not a good idea for a first-time reader but can be very entertaining on a reread.
There aren't any major textual differences between the versions so pick whatever has the best quality paper/has the best annotations/is the cheapest, depending on what you value the most. Just pick something that looks nice and read it.
Don’t, it’s shit.
It's one of those books where, at first, you won't be that impressed during the actual reading of it, but when it ends you will start to look back and really appreciate the wholes thing. On second reading it becomes 2x as good. As to whether or not it deserves its reputation is entirely up to you.
It’s definitely a masterwork but the constant digressions about whale biology get a bit annoying
The best English-language novels are Imperial Palace, Confidence Man, The Shape of Things to Come, The Caxtons, Middlemarch, Marius the Epicurean, The Marble Faun, The Egoist, Loss and Gain, Joseph and His Friend, Hereward the Wake, Endymion, Our Mutual Friend, The Nemesis of Faith, Harvest, Parade's End, and The Golden Bowl
>Confidence-Man
>but no Moby-Dick and Pierre
Come on now. I like the novel, but those two clearly tower over it. Though I'd more than welcome if you could point me towards relevant scholarship that would convince me otherwise.
>Parade's End
I enjoyed The Good Soldier so I guess I'll pick it up one of these days.
>relevant scholarship
Do you really need books telling you why you have to like a book, I'm sorry, but if you need 'relevant scholarship' to like a fiction book, you are completely hopeless.
Confidence-Man is a specific case of a book where things are hidden behind several layers of obfuscation. Few readers at the time (and even during the Melville Revival) noticed that all the different characters appearing in the book are actually one character, and the Confidence-Man=Satan connection was discovered like a hundred years after the original publication. Pretty sure the same thing applies to Indian hating=being a good Christian.
You don't need scholarship to understand why Cervantes or Dostoevsky are relevant, but you absolutely need it (or at least a good write-up) for books like this one.
You'd be better off reading books from the general time period then some 'scholarly analysis' 100 years later, and if a novel's worth is determined by getting references it is in fact worthless.
The things I mentioned are not just some off-hand references that are added just for flavour, they're crucial for establishing the novel's allegory and its thematic depth. Without the connection with Christianity established by scholarship the book is just a series of vignettes in which random people keep talking about trust for seemingly no reason (there is, in fact, seemingly no overarching plot). I can read Dante's Comedy without bothering to understand every single saint or sinner he meets along the way, but if I fail to understand the significance of Virgil or Beatrice then my reception of it will be that much poorer.
>reading books from the general time period
The trouble with Melville is that he was, in a way, a proto-modernist. A pioneer who stands out from his time period, so merely reading literature that was contemporary to him is not quite enough, especially when his goal with Confidence-Man was to intentionally obfuscate its meaning, to become a sort of confidence-man himself in the eyes of his readers.
You genuinely have zero idea what you are talking about and are reiterating some banal academic consensus to make him a Modernist because DH Lawrence liked him and to justify liking someone who would be completely at odds with what modernism was. I mean it’s so blatantly stupid that Loss and Gain, Nemesis of Faith, Amours de Voyage, and Alton Locke were literally written the years prior to Moby Dick, Joseph and His Friend, and Joaquin Miller’s novel/long poems a few decades later and you call him unlike anything from the period. The New York circle of Julian Hawthorne, Markham, Richard Stoddard, and Stedman, and people who actually praised Melville like James Thomson, Robert Buchanan, and William Clark Russell shows he had at least like-minded contemporaries.
Also Confidence Man isn’t even obfuscated like Joyce, the novel is completely coherent lol, you’re just again searching for a hidden meaning to it all or haven’t actually read it. It is very straight forward, as is Clarel, as are his more esoteric later poems.
>you’re just again searching for a hidden meaning to it
That might just be the case. If you look back at my original post I was just surprised that you hold it in higher regard than Pierre and Moby-Dick. I view this particular novel as a sort of puzzle to be solved, so I assumed there must've been some particular piece I missed that you have. I suppose I'll just let the matter rest and chalk it up to the difference in taste.
>It is very straight forward,
I don't quite agree here, but I've already spoken of what I think of the novel at length in my previous posts.
>as is Clarel, as are his more esoteric later poems.
Haven't read those yet.
Higher is relative, I hold all 3 in high regard, Pierre and Confidence man being roughly my two favorites. I mean Moby Dick is what a Marryat/Cooper maybe Scott novel with more Hawthorne like digressions or a re write of Mardi and idk Clark Russell novels will do similar digressions afterward, Pierre is that Romance Disraeli-Dickens-transcendentalist perfect youth novel in decay as a picture of American Society snd playing on French exoticism like de Quincey or basically what Edgar Saltus later on does I know Melville loved Balzac, and Confidence Man is Love Peawiener novels, Landor’s Imaginary Conversations, and Irving’s Bracebridge Hall with an emphasis on American society, I mean the Emerson part is telling, when the Poe stand in holding Eureka is mocked, and Melville says it’s of any value to the transcendentalist pamphlets, and the cosmopolitan shoes away Thoreau as saying nothing, I enjoy how confidence man contains more shades of the period, the Indian killing as a Hawthorne type, the man with the weed as well as Hawthorne, the Missourian as fenimore, China aster as something similar to both bartelby and Israel potter playing on the didactic popular style of the times that eventually anticipated Dean Howells. I didn’t really see anything that obfuscated about it tbh, or intentionally hidden. Unsure who the poor elderly poet was, unfortunately
>I didn’t really see anything that obfuscated about it tbh, or intentionally hidden.
The obfuscation argument runs as follows - have you noticed how certain characters all try to wringle money out of people as a show or trust/confidence? From the Black Guinea to the Cosmopolitan they all want people to put their guard down and trust them. This string of characters all seem to know each other and are able to vouch for each other:
>“Oh yes, oh yes, dar is aboard here a werry nice, good ge’mman wid a weed, and a ge’mman in a gray coat and white tie, what knows all about me; and a ge’mman wid a big book, too; and a yarb-doctor; and a ge’mman in a yaller west; and a ge’mman wid a brass plate; and a ge’mman in a wiolet robe; and a ge’mman as is a sodjer; and ever so many good, kind, honest ge’mmen more aboard what knows me and will speak for me, God bress ’em; yes, and what knows me as well as dis poor old darkie knows hisself, God bress him! Oh, find ’em, find ’em,” he earnestly added, “and let ’em come quick, and show you all, ge’mmen, dat dis poor ole darkie is werry well wordy of all you kind ge’mmen’s kind confidence.”
Which is explicitly put into doubt:
>He can walk fast enough when he tries, a good deal faster than I; but he can lie yet faster. He’s some white operator, betwisted and painted up for a decoy. He and his friends are all humbugs.
And indeed, though they all swear that such-and-such is their good friend and that they're worthy of confidence, not once do we see them interact with each other - they're always isolated and trying to fleece money out of people. This, combined with the fact that one of the first things we encounter in the novel is a placard warning of an impostor (singular):
>he chanced to come to a placard nigh the captain’s office, offering a reward for the capture of a mysterious impostor, supposed to have recently arrived from the East; quite an original genius in his vocation, as would appear, though wherein his originality consisted was not clearly given;
Plus the fact that the cripple is suspected of being an impostor:
>This reverend gentleman tells me, sir, that a certain cripple, a poor Black, is by you considered an ingenious impostor.
And the novel's title is "Confidence-Man; his Masquerade" (singular) has led some to believe that this string of characters is in fact one character in different disguises, making the scenes of him vouching for his other disguises deeply ironic.
Though of course a white man disguising himself as a black cripple:
>“Well, he’s just what I said he was.”
>“A white masquerading as a black?”
>“Exactly.”
And all this assortment of different characters masquerading (even as a black cripple!) while not being discovered even once is highly improbable. However, there is an explanation for that - metamorphoses. One of the chapters is named "A metamorphosis more surprising than any in Ovid"
>“None of your why, why, whys!” tossing out a foot, “go to the devil, sir! Beggar, impostor!—never so deceived in a man in my life.”
>While speaking or rather hissing those words, the boon companion underwent much such a change as one reads of in fairy-books. Out of old materials sprang a new creature. Cadmus glided into the snake.
And:
>“Ah!” turning round disenchanted, “it is only a man, then.”
>“Only a man? As if to be but a man were nothing. But don’t be too sure what I am. You call me man, just as the townsfolk called the angels who, in man’s form, came to Lot’s house; just as the israelite rustics called the devils who, in man’s form, haunted the tombs. You can conclude nothing absolute from the human form, barber.”
May lay credence to the fact that the titular Confidence-Man is a shape-shifter - the devil in particular.
And other references to snakes and serpents:
>The butterfly is the caterpillar in a gaudy cloak; stripped of which, there lies the impostor’s long spindle of a body, pretty much worm-shaped as before.
>supposing, respected sir, that worthy gentleman, Adam, to have been dropped overnight in Eden, as a calf in the pasture; supposing that, sir—then how could even the learned serpent himself have foreknown that such a downy-chinned little innocent would eventually rival the goat in a beard? Sir, wise as the serpent was, that eventuality would have been entirely hidden from his wisdom.”
>“I don’t know about that. The devil is very sagacious. To judge by the event, he appears to have understood man better even than the Being who made him.”
Which is echoed in:
>as you hint, within that long interval, I must have had more or less favorable opportunity for studying mankind—in a business way, scanning not only the faces, but ransacking the lives of several thousands of human beings, male and female, of various nations, both employers and employed, genteel and ungenteel, educated and uneducated;
Plus other snake-like language (sliding)
>“Pray, now,” with a sort of sociable sorrowfulness, slowly sliding along the rail, “Pray, now, my young friend, what volume have you there?
>Confidence! I have sometimes almost thought that confidence is fled; that confidence is the New Astrea—emigrated—vanished—gone.” Then softly sliding nearer, with the softest air, quivering down and looking up, “could you now, my dear young sir, under such circumstances, by way of experiment, simply have confidence in me?”
It'd also explain why the Confidence-Man is going through all this trouble for what appears to be a measly few coins:
>For I put it to you, is it reasonable to suppose that a man with brains, sufficient to act such a part as you say, would take all that trouble, and run all that hazard, for the mere sake of those few paltry coppers, which, I hear, was all he got for his pains, if pains they were?”
>“You two green-horns! Money, you think, is the sole motive to pains and hazard, deception and deviltry, in this world. How much money did the devil make by gulling Eve?”
>“Confidence? Cant, gammon! Confidence? hum, bubble!—Confidence? fetch, gouge!—Hundred dollars?—hundred devils!”
In short, I view the entire novel as a riddle:
>Else you are like a landsman at sea: don’t know the ropes, the very things everlastingly pulled before your eyes. Serpent-like, they glide about, traveling blocks too subtle for you. In short, the entire ship is a riddle.
Which when solved (Confidence-Man = the devil) offers a wealth of other, richer interpretations. I see it as a satire on Christians who have lost their vigilance, who put their unwarranted trust in the modern, materialistic society which does not, in fact, have the best interest of their soul in mind. I find it very telling that the boat on which the action takes place is named Fidèle.
As for the elderly poet - I assume you mean the one in this paragraph:
>But here and there, with a curious expression, one is reading a small sort of handbill of anonymous poetry, rather wordily entitled:—
>“ODE
>ON THE INTIMATIONS
>OF
>DISTRUST IN MAN,
>UNWILLINGLY INFERRED FROM REPEATED REPULSES,
>IN DISINTERESTED ENDEAVORS
>TO PROCURE HIS
>CONFIDENCE.”
>On the floor are many copies, looking as if fluttered down from a balloon. The way they came there was this: A somewhat elderly person, in the quaker dress, had quietly passed through the cabin, and, much in the manner of those railway book-peddlers who precede their proffers of sale by a distribution of puffs, direct or indirect, of the volumes to follow, had, without speaking, handed about the odes, which, for the most part, after a cursory glance, had been disrespectfully tossed aside, as no doubt, the moonstruck production of some wandering rhapsodist.
The title of the poem echoes Wordsworth's Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. Whether this is enough to identify him with Wordsworth himself, I'm not sure.
>I see it as a satire on Christians who have lost their vigilance, who put their unwarranted trust in the modern, materialistic society which does not, in fact, have the best interest of their soul in mind. I find it very telling that the boat on which the action takes place is named Fidèle.
I forgot to mention that it would make it echo Hawthorne's Celestial Railroadand in fact the it ends on a steam ferry boat. The Vanity Fair also finds its parallel in the World's Fair. Melville would've surely been familiar with it.
And perhaps the materialism and progress itself is not the danger, but rather the American optimism of the time, particularly transcendentalism.
Frick off.
El hingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha > Moby Dick
I like it too.
Good boy!
good taste, mr Parrot
i didn't even know you could read