Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 2 Portrait of Thomas Carlyle by James Albert McNeill Whistler
This week: Chapters 69-74, “The Funeral” through “The Sperm Whale’s Head.”
By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger
Chapter 69
The final sentence, “There are other ghosts than the Cock-Lane one, and far deeper men than Doctor Johnson who believe in them,” makes me think of William Blake’s line,
“May God us keep
From Single vision & Newtons sleep”
Wikipedia says, “The Cock Lane ghost was a purported haunting that attracted mass public attention in 1762.”
Chapter 71
I don’t know what to make of “A long-skirted, cabalistically-cut coat of a faded walnut ting,” worn by the man who calls himself the angel Gabriel. It makes me think of Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (“The Retailored Tailor”) which shows up repeatedly in Finnegans Wake. The Wake itself features a sailor who becomes a tailor, an s-t transformation suggesting Einstein’s space-time transformation. It also makes me think of Oscar Wilde’s essay “The Truth of Masks” which on the surface talks about costumes in Shakespeare, but Bob Wilson saw it as an essay about the masks oppressed people wear: gay people in Wilde’s London, colonized people, etc., and about the masks we all wear metaphorically. Living through the Covid-19 pandemic, I also think of literal masks. This brings us back to Melville’s “All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks.” (I read that line in a beatnik voice, man.) I find it an interesting coincidence that this chapter deals with an epidemic.
Gabriel’s refusing “to work except when he pleased” makes me think of Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener.”
Chapter 73
"So when on one side you hoist in Locke’s head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant’s and you come back again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! Throw all these thunder-heads overboard, then you will float light and right."
This rejection of Enlightenment thinkers Locke and Kant seems to go along with the rejection of Dr. Johnson a few chapters earlier. I find it interesting that the TV series Lost included characters based on Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, David Hume, and Rousseau, as well as Richard Alpert and Mikhail Bakunin. The series also had an acknowledged Robert Anton Wilson influence.
Chapter 74
“Why then do you try to ‘enlarge your mind? Subtilize it.” I find it interesting that the second quoted sentence does not end with an exclamation point.
Next week: Please read Chapters 75-81, “The Right Whale’s Head” through “The Pequod Meets the Virgin.”
No comments:
Post a Comment