"Not your grandfather's Moby-Dick"

Ahab. Illustration by Rockwell Kent for the 1930 Random House edition of Moby-Dick. Now: to see a film of Moby-Dick that looked like these illustrations . . .

"It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me." So says Ishmael of the titular character in Moby-Dick. But I can't say the following exactly puts roses on my cheeks:

Universal Pictures has made a splashy preemptive buy of "Moby Dick," a reimagining of the Herman Melville whale tale that Timur Bekmambetov ("Wanted") will direct.

Studio paid high six figures to Adam Cooper and Bill Collage to pen the screenplay.

The writers revere Melville’s original text, but their graphic novel-style version will change the structure. Gone is the first-person narration by the young seaman Ishmael, who observes how Ahab’s obsession with killing the great white whale overwhelms his good judgment as captain.

This change will allow them to depict the whale’s decimation of other ships prior to its encounter with Ahab’s Pequod, and Ahab will be depicted more as a charismatic leader than a brooding obsessive.

"Our vision isn’t your grandfather’s ‘Moby Dick,’" Cooper said. "This is an opportunity to take a timeless classic and capitalize on the advances in visual effects to tell what at its core is an action-adventure revenge story."

Sigh. I guess I see a different core.

Like anyone asked me about this. But if they had, I'd tell them they need Cormac McCarthy involved on this project (Moby-Dick is his favorite novel, and one way of beginning to think about Blood Meridian is to read it as a re-writing of Melville's novel. But what concerns me more is the shift in narrative structure. I do have to say that the addition of a sort of prequel showing Moby-Dick's destroying ships makes a certain kind of sense for American audiences: hours of showing a bunch of sailors introspectively staring off at the ocean while pondering the nature of whiteness might be fine for those dilettante European cineastes, but we Americans want blood! Wooden ships sinking! Iron men drowning! As little dialogue as possible (gotta think about the foreign markets)! So, probably, not a lot, if any, of the establishing of Ishmael's relationship with Queequeg; no processing of a whale; no Pip; and--it goes without saying--no lengthy meditation on the nature of whales. I mean, how would you CGI that stuff? Might as well go and film it in a coffee shop.

And that last leads me to say this: I think it would be a serious mistake to not convey Ahab's grand madness/mad grandeur. To make him merely "charismatic"--that is nuts. Otherwise, his desire to hunt Moby-Dick acquires a different spin: a simple ego trip, just as Starbuck senses, that it will be hard to feel much sympathy for. Perversely, it's precisely in Ahab's madness that we feel a connection to him. Who among us has not known suffering or seen others suffer for no reason that, God or no God, we can make sense of and felt either anger or despair or both because of that utter lack of an answer?:

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event--in the living act, the undoubted deed--there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principle, I will wreak that hate upon him.

Ahab is us. He's nuts, and we know it, but he is us. Most "charismatic" people, though, are not us--we're boring, dull--nor are most of them nuts. We kinda sorta wonder what it would be like to be them for a day or so. I have no desire to be Ahab, because I already am him in a very basic, fundamental way (minus, I think, the madness).

I wish these folks well. I certainly don't want them to make a hash of Moby-Dick, but I can't say as the description in Variety bodes well.

What say you?

Read More...

Summary only...

A stretch of river XLIV: Scruffy as Ishmael

Scruffy longs for ice.

"Call him Scruffy--I do. On several occasions this winter--never mind how many; I've lost count--having no money whatsoever in his purse, and nothing particular (aside from his leash) to interest him in staying on the banks of the Little Arkansas, he thinks on occasion he will suddenly lunge forth when there is ice on the river and visit our small watery-but-frozen part of the world."--from a (very very) false start by Herman Melville.

Now: Scruffy being some sort of terrier mix, you'd think water would be something of an antithesis to his nature. But the elements don't stand in opposition to each other--and, after all, ice is water's version of earth, sort of, if you squint just right and haven't had your coffee yet.

Or maybe one doesn't have to squint too hard after all. Have a look at some more of Melville's (very very) false start on his great whaling book, when the author was uncertain whether to make the narrator the very thing he himself would wind up hunting:

Etymology
(Supplied by a middle-aged Instructor in English)

"While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them how "Scruffy" is to be called in our tongue, leaving out, through ignorance, the letter C pronounced hard, which almost alone maketh up the signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true." --Middle-aged Instructor in English.

scruff·y (skrŭf'ē) adj. (scruff·i·er, scruff·i·est) 1. Shabby; untidy. 2. Chiefly British Scaly; scabby. [From obsolete scruff, "scurf," variant of scurf; see scurf.]

*****

scurf /skɜrf/ –noun 1. the scales or small shreds of epidermis that are continually exfoliated from the skin. 2. any scaly matter or incrustation on a surface. [Origin: bef. 1000; ME, OE < ON skurfa scurf, crust]

"Any scaly matter or incrustation on a surface," eh? Like ice, perhaps? Scruffy's abrupt strains on the leash are analogous to what Ishmael sees in the "story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. . . . It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life . . ." Scruffy sees himself (figuratively speaking, of course) in the ice? Crust you are, and to crust you shall return?

The saner among you will think about all this much like Starbuck does as he confronts Ahab on the quarter-deck of the Pequod: you too will think Scruffy "a dumb brute" and thus see this as silliness at best. You'd be entitled, too. All I know is this: This dog is obsessed with river-ice in a way he is not when the water is ice-free. As much time as I spend with this animal, as well as I know him, he remains, in many ways--and perhaps ultimately--as inscrutable as the White Whale.

It's weird, is all I'm saying.

Nay: it tasks me. It is a mask to strike beyond.

Read More...

Summary only...

The ousia of whales

I learn stuff whenever I visit Hank's site, A Lake County Point of View, and today was no different. It was there that I read a fairly recent post of his, "The Ousia of Snow I." It's a ho-hum sort of post for Hank, which is to say, as I've said many times previously, that there's no one else out there (that I'm aware of) writing posts with such energy and wit and love of learning. Hank doesn't so much follow a train of thought as he casts a net and hauls up whatever he catches on the deck that is his blog and reveals connections between things/people/places you and I'd never know or even suspected existed. This one, as I said, is pretty ho-hum: It "only" discusses the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Aristotle's categories, proto-Indo-European language, Shakespeare, Grimm's Law, language convergence and linguistic divergence, a fascinating-sounding book called Snow in America (about the function of snow in the products of American culture) . . . you get the idea.

And snow. And, um, ousia: what prompts this post. Well, that, and the bit of thinking about Moby-Dick I've been doing, prompted by my previous post.

More, such as it is, below the fold.

Hank asks (and answers) the question I had when I saw his post's title (what follows is cut and pasted from Hank's place; the Roman numerals refer to his bibliography for his post (yes--really!):

So... what exactly is ousia? I'm not exactly certain. Philosophers have been arguing about it for ages. "Martin Heidegger [sic] maintained that the original meaning of the word was lost in its translation to Latin and subsequently to modern languages. For him it meant "Being" and not "substance"; that is, not some other thing or being that "stood"(-stance) "under"(sub-)."[vii] At any rate, ousia translated to Latin as both substantia and essentia.[viii] Not being a philosopher, this is quite good enough for me.

The ousia of snow is, more or less, somewhere between it's substance and it's essence.

Indeed.

That reminded me of this passage from Moby-Dick, on the first page of "Etymology," by Hackluyt:

"While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue, leaving out, through ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh up the signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true."

One simple but (I think) useful way to think about Ishmael's post-Pequod quest in Moby-Dick is precisely the search for the H of the whale--that is, its ousia, if I'm understanding that term correctly. This is most evident in chapters 55-58, in which Ishmael examines various representations of whales and finds them more or less inadequate in their attempts to depict whales with accuracy. Here is the problem in a nutshell, as Ishmael takes it, from the last paragraph of chapter 55, "Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales":

[T]he great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like. And the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan. (emphases mine)

Ishmael is indulging in a bit of foreshadowing here, of course, regarding his narrative. But what's interesting to contemplate and speculate on a bit is that the very real dangers the whale poses to humans when alive and in his natural element may be at least part of his ousia. We cannot know him via paintings or sculptures, not even through his skeleton or his carcass, according to Ishmael; we can only know the H of the whale if we're willing to risk death.

In his post, Hank goes on at some length about the similarities among many different languages' words for snow; Ishmael's list of words for "whale" isn't as extensive, but it seems to make a comparable point:

CETUS, Latin
WHÆL, Anglo-Saxon
HVAL, Danish
WAL, Dutch
HWAL, Swedish
HVALUR, Icelandic
WHALE, English
BALEINE, French
BALLENA, Spanish
PEKEE-NUEE-NUEE, Fegee
PEHEE-NUEE-NUEE, Erromangoan

Death--or, at least, the very real possibility of death--is about as transcultural an idea as one is likely to find; and snow and whales have collectively led or contributed to the deaths of thousands of people over the ages. Surely that risk figures, however unconsciously, into people's pondering of an object's ousia.

Read More...

Summary only...

". . . though of real knowledge there be little, of blog posts there be a plenty . . . "

Once upon a time, a blogger strayed into waters he shouldn't have . . .
(Image originally found here)

This was going to be a silly little post about Melvil (born "Melville") Dewey and the fact that he was born on December 10, 1851, one month after the American publication of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. I was going to make a little hay of what I'd hope would be an entertaining if not humorous sort, imagining that his father, enamored of the writer if not of Moby-Dick, pre-destined his son to peruse Chapter 32 ("Cetology"), there note that Ishmael has categorized whales by size, just as books once were in many libraries, and set him on the course to devise the book-cataloguing system that now bears his name.

(For the record, I can't determine whether Dewey was named for the writer--all the more reason to make up something, right?)

But then I read this:

From childhood, Dewey was fascinated with books. In 1868, when his school caught fire, he rescued as many books as he could from the school library; but inhaled a great deal of smoke in the process and consequently had a cough that lasted for months. Told by his doctor that he would be dead within a year or so, he tried to make the most of what he thought would be limited time, according to the recent and fascinating biography by Wayne Wiegand. (emphasis mine)(from here)

Compare to the opening lines of Melville's novel:

"Etymology"

(Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School)

"Consumption," for those who may not know, is an old term for lung-wasting diseases such as tuberculosis, often marked by heavy coughing.

I don't know why learning this suddenly took the humor out of this little post for me, why Melvil Dewey suddenly, in my mind, took on more of Ishmael's doomed nature than I had anticipated. But he is also, curiously, Ishmael's social opposite: the Straight Dope site linked to above notes, "We feel obliged to note that Dewey was no saint. He was racist, antisemitic, anti-black, anti- everything not white male Anglo-Saxon Christian." Anyone who has read Moby-Dick knows this doesn't at all describe Ishmael, at least as regards his friendship with Queequeg.

Did Ishmael's novel-length meditation on The White Whale--and Ahab's obsession with him--become for Dewey the quest for an efficient way of organizing and cataloguing knowledge stored in books? So far as I can determine, no. But I do wonder, now, whether Melvil read Melville and in some way, shape or form saw looming out of those pages some inkling, some version of the life ahead of him . . . or, perhaps, the life he found himself in the midst of living out.

UPDATE: The curious may enjoy looking at this map of the voyage of the Pequod. Click on the image to enlarge and move about. Gorgeous in its mid-19th-century feel and in its attention to detail.

Read More...

Summary only...