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"It is at once imaginative and metaphysical- in short- Greek" , writes Melville to Himself
Thoughts on Melville & his book
- the biblical persuasion of meaning towards big textly heroes such as Innocence and Nature is conjured through a splintered lens-or-a-narrator, Melville Himself, who furthermore has a distinct personal gravity in the work inasmuch as any character in the story.
- Requiring sentences -as such would make one wish to be Melville Yourself making a story- to have any fun with dissection
- (As I am sure he did) there is a certain humor in the transient designation of either omniscience and polite secrecy with which the narrator plays rapidly. To these personalities : ‘their honesty prescribes to them directness, sometimes far-reaching like that of a migratory fowl that in its flight never heeds when it crosses a border’ (Melville Himself 31).
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- Furthermore on that page are descriptions of the glue sticking Starry Melville to Twinkly Vere
- Literally, no, literarily
- ( ‘lily,’ like his rumored Amor for the males he describes, aspiring towards (by including Himself in the actual construction of the story,) “ those exaltations of sentiment that a nature like” etc but never showing through except in either rose or in pallor-colored males he describes) (Melville 23)
- Irony is most potent in: “To deal in double meanings and insinuations of any sort was quite foreign to his nature”, while Billy Himself insinuates every single archetype of Innocence and Holiness
o Even (especially) in the way in which Billy was impressed into the World- lacking regular human parentage- leaves his background limitless, past plain holiness and into actual deification (Hercules, [Adam,] Achilles, Hyperion, various biblical agents)
- The use of non-rigid titles for characters -ex: A “Baltimore Negro, a Trafalgar man” [35, plus italics], or using both “Capitan Vere” and “the witness” to refer to the same-are small deviations that altogether serve an apology for the small deviations of narrative identity which are, admittedly, transgressions of logical storytelling on Melville (Melville Himself,
“if the reader will keep me company I shall be glad” 20
“his portrait I essay, but shall never hit.” 32
“through our new-made foretopman” (12 plus italics)
“In this particular Billy was a striking instance that the arch intereferer, the envious marplot of Eden, still has more or less to do with every human consignment to this planet of earth” 16
- EQUALS Two major themes:
§ ‘Consignment’ Impressment
· Impressement on board Life, (ironically bellipotent - how much death and violence stutters from the arms of innocents! -, and also departing from the ‘Rights of Man’. Taken literally? Figuratively?- plus the interesting commentary on the overall beauty/canine’s/hero’s aversion to irony- “the will to it and the sinister dexterity were alike wanting.” (11 plus italics).
§ Envy
· “…did ever anybody confess to envy? Something there is in it universally felt to be more shameful than even felonious crime”
· “felonious crime” equals “law of man”)
· going back to the “envious” marplot of Eden
· going forwards to Claggart being “like handling a dead snake” (82).
Et
Cetera
