From: msmorris@watsci.waterloo.edu (Mike Morris)
Subject: Re: Spoilers - more
Organization: University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario
Date: Sat, 25 Jul 1992 03:45:16 GMT


                                   Friday, the 24th of July, 1992

I said:
  I think the analogy with sex is apt because with sex there's also a
  common romantic notion that the ``first time is the best''. I think this
  notion is wrong, I refuse to believe the best is not yet to come.

Keith Morgan responded:
	Mike, you eternal optimist, well, even if the analogy is apt
  (and I don't agree that it is), there is still only one FIRST time.

There is only one, yes, but it can be (and often is I think) scary,
inept, and dysfunctional. This describes, by the way, my first and
(regretfully) only time through _Ulysses_. The Joyce prof
strongly recommended I use Harry Blamires' _The Bloomsday
Book_ (which is a straight crib) as a parallel supplement, but I,
in my youthful pride, decided against it. In contrast, when
I came to read _Finnegans Wake_, I did use Campbell and Robinson's
_Skeleton Key_, reading first a chapter of the _Wake_, then the
relevant section of the _Key_, then turning back to reread that chapter
of the _Wake_. As a result, I came out feeling like I had gotten to
first base with the _Wake_, and had struck out with _Ulysses_.
Consequently I am armed for my next time with _Ulysses_ with
Blamires, Gilbert, and two volumes of allusions.

Keith asks about my reading the intro to the Penguin volume of _Common Sense_:
	What did you learn about Paine? How can you tell that it was
  valuable before reading the book. Or, is it ALL valuable, which, of
  course, moots any discussion?

Actually it's a little hard for me to say what I learned, because I
read _Common Sense_ just after, or maybe while I was reading Dumas
Malone's six-volume ``Jefferson and His Time''. There was a lot about
Jefferson's dealings with Paine in Malone (most of it distinctly
unfavorable to Paine) and I wanted to learn more about Paine, so
I turned to _Common Sense_. Probably the most important thing the intro
gave me was a counterweight to the unfavorable impression of Paine
I was getting from Malone, a biographical sketch of Paine sympathetic
to Paine.

By the way, this makes me think that maybe I read _Common Sense_
as sort of an Appendix to Malone, which was sort of an Appendix
to reading Jefferson's writings in the Library of America volume.
Now, you may say that this is perfectly well and good, but why
do we need the modern editors to intrude?

I think the editorial comments in _Common Sense_ helped to give me
some clue of what the normative interpretation might be. That's
valuable in and of itself, I think. Or, come to think of
it, when I extolled the edition of Cortes' Letters that I read, it
was precisely because I was still in the afterglow of Prescott and I
was curious about how much of Prescott's
account modern historians buy. The critical apparatus surrounding
Cortes' Letters basically let me know that moderns are much more
skeptical about Cortes' motivations than Prescott was, much less
romantic about the Conquest, but that mostly Prescott's story survives
intact.

I said:
  But, my point about the history was that I think that
  the intervening history in this case would alter
  our reading more than any thinkable editor could.

Keith said:
	Yeah, but my point (oh, goody) was to question the necessity
  of bringing all that critical and editorial baggage to the work in the
  first place.

Well, ``necessity'', there's probably none. But I like it, I think it
adds, and in the case of _Common Sense_, again I think it perturbs
our reading away from authorial intent a whole lot less than intervening
history does. Heck, maybe it even helps to cancel some of the historical
perturbation for us. How do you measure these things?
  
Instead of a goal of naivete I offered:
  A different goal (mine in fact) would be to load myself up with the best
  and as many preconceptions as possible.

Keith questioned:
	What's the principle here? How can you tell what's the best,
  the truest, the most noble of these "preconceptions" if you "load up"
  on them before you read the work?

Well, you can turn to good editors, you can trust people who tell
you things about a book who have been borne out in your past
experience. But, even if they're bad preconceptions, they make
my reading therefore the more active as I use the reading to squish
them out of existence.

I said:
  Look, I actually agree with you that the editors should not
  have done this, that it would have been better if they had saved
  these comments for an Appendix. I just don't think it would be
  very important to how *I* would read either of these books.

Keith responded:
	Of course it wouldn't matter to you. I imagine that you'd be
  reading the Appendix first anyway.

:-)

I said:
  Again, maybe I'm an impoverished reader therefore, but there seem
  to be so many counterexamples in which I do get caught up in plots
  even though I know them already (very familiar stories, historical
  narratives, etc.) that maybe my mind really does practise an
  unconscious version of Fiona's ``willful forgetting''.

Keith responded:
	I'm far too polite to take a club to the opening you've given
  me here; however, I would *gently* note that perhaps imagination and
  attention have *something* to do with this. 

I was counting on your politeness. I gave you the opening, however, because
I was thinking out loud, because this whole thread for me is partly an
inquisition of myself as a reader. That is, you are providing me an occasion
to ask myself if I am hyper-rational in my approach.

Keith:
	Why, indeed, did Melville write chapters on "whiteness", on
  "cetology"? Could it have any relation to the fact that one of the main
  characters is "white" and a "cetacean"? But then if you don't consider
  Moby Dick to be a whale, then you can hardly consider _Moby Dick_ to
  be a "story".

This insistence on the ``story'' in _Moby Dick_ seems particularly
strange to me, Keith. That is, I understand it much less than I do in
Austen and Eliot. I read _Moby Dick_ late. And I was motivated strongly
by a loved high-school English teacher who first turned me on to reading
good stuff and who raves about Dante and Melville. OK, so that probably
means I was primed to find more than a whaling story in it, but
I still think that it *blew me out of the water* with how un-story-ful it was.
I think I was expecting symbolism to add something, but there
nevertheless to be a ripping tale in it. What I found had a ripping tale
in it, certainly, but that tale could have been told in a tenth the volume.
What I found was positively Joycean in its attention to language and
mythical expansiveness. No wonder lots and lots of students get
bogged down in the book wondering where in the heck is the exciting story
they've been led to expect. Those chapters on cetology and whiteness
trap many I think precisely *because* they aren't story. I forget,
is it a hundred pages before they even get out to sea?

By the way, I do consider Moby Dick to be a whale, Keith. I should have
called you on the allegory earlier. I think there's a difference between
allegory and symbolism, between what's going on in Narnia (mayhap Lewis'
and Susan Gere's protestations to the contrary notwithstanding) and what's
going on in _Moby Dick_. In the former, it's like a simple substitution
code, where the story is dictated by the referent story beneath the alias
(that's the *only* possibility, I think, for explaining the whole
sacrifice of Aslan sequence, which is otherwise so absurd). In the
latter, the story alludes to a thematic level of interpretation that is,
in itself, not necessarily a story at all.

(By the way, my teacher friend thinks my interpretation of _Moby
Dick_ is exactly opposite to what is the case. But, he's Christian
and I think he is simply appropriating Ishmael's benevolent
qualities as ``Christian'' virtues, when they are rather just
virtues, and perhaps he is taking the book to be a dismissal of
an Old Testament conception of God. I think, on the other hand, that
the problem of monotheism---there is evil in the world, either God makes
it which is blasphemy because this ascribes evil to God, or He doesn't
make it which is blasphemy because this denies God's omnipotence---why
I consider The Book of Job to be so profoundly religious and why Job is
so important a source for _Moby Dick_---is an essential inheritance
of Christianity. I am pleased to find some support for my point of view
in _The Oxford Companion to English Literature_'s entry on _Moby-Dick_---
shameless, aren't I, Keith?---,which claims that Melville wrote it ``inspired
by his friend Hawthorne to say `NO! in thunder' to Christianity''.)

Finally, I am in agreement with your summary, Keith, that a reader should
be allowed to (try to) experience what the author intended as first-hand
as he thinks he can. I would also agree that it is a fine thing to read
for ``the story'' and no one should be denigrated for choosing to do so,
or denied the option.

(Though, as I've been arguing, I don't believe that ``the story''
and ``what the author intended'' are necessarily the same thing.)

                   Mike Morris
              (msmorris@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)


Xref: sparky rec.arts.books:13144 alt.books.reviews:18