Diplomat Ballroom, Omni Shoreham Hotel | February 3, 2011

Episode 29: Moby Dick's Descendants: A Cross-Genre Reading of Works Inspired by the Great American Novel

(Marci Johnson, Sena Jeter Naslund, Alan Michael Parker, Dan Beachy-Quick) Melville's Moby-Dick or, The Whale, considered by many to be the Great American Novel, has inspired numerous writers over the last 160 years. The three distinguished writers on this panel have each written works in conversation with Melville's: Dan Beachy-Quick's A Whaler's Dictionary, Sena Jeter Naslund's Ahab's Wife: Or, The Star-gazer: A Novel, and Alan Michael Parker's A Tale of a Whale. These novelists and poets will read and then discuss her/his relationship to the 19th century classic.

Published Date: August 31, 2011

Transcription

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the AWP Podcast Series. This event originally occurred at the AWP Conference in Washington D.C. on February 3rd, 2011. The recording features David Galef, Alan Michael Parker, and Dan Beachy-Quick. Now, you'll hear David Galef provide introductions.

David Galef:

This is Moby Dick's descendants across a reading of works inspired by the Great American novel. First of all, I want to apologize for the absence, I'm sorry, of Sena Jeter Naslund, who has taken ill and could not be here today. I also want to apologize for not being Marcy Johnson, an editor at Word Farm Press who is supposed to be today's moderator. I think we can promise you a good show regardless, or as my students tend to say, irregardless. My name is David Galef. I run the Creative writing program at Montclair State University. I publish all over the map, so the reasoning was that I might be applicable to this panel. I will be moderating. We do have two surviving panelists. Readers, I'll introduce them in a sec. They will each read from their work for a while as a proving ground, but then we will have, I hope, a provocative question and answer. Among questions that, at least, I'd like to ponder is, one, if Moby Dick is the Great American novel? What do we mean by the, great, American, and novel? Is this is a singularity?

Are there other novels? What anxiety of influence do these authors suffer or exult in? If TS Elliot said, "Mediocre writers borrow and great writers steal," what have they begged, borrowed or stolen? And I could go on about this, but I'd much rather go on to the two readers for today. I'm going to start with Dan Beachy-Quick, the author of four books of poetry, "North True South" ... Sorry, "North True South Bright", "Spell," "Mulberry," and "This Nest, Swift Passerine;" four chat books, "Apology for the Book of Creatures," "Overtakelessness," which is a great title, "Canto," and "Mobius Crowns," both written in collaboration with someone else; and a book of interlinked essays on Moby Dick, "A Whaler's Dictionary." He's a contributing editor for "The Journal of Public Space."

Let me just briefly say he's currently teaching in the MFA Writing Program at Colorado State University after other appointments, as well. "This Nest, Swift Passerine" was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award, the William Carlos Williams Prize, and the Penn USA Literary Award in Poetry. He's the recipient of a Lannan Foundation residency. He's taught as a visiting faculty at Iowa Writers' Workshop. In the spring of 2011, which is quite soon, Tupelo Press will publish a new book of poems, "Circle's Apprentice." And in fall of 2011, Milkweed Editions will publish a collection of essays, meditations, and tales, "Wonderful Investigations." Please welcome our first reader.

Dan Beachy-Quick:

Can everyone hear me all right? Okay. I guess what I am going to read from needs a bit of explanation. It is a book called "A Whaler's Dictionary," taking its title and, in some ways, its construction from that great 32nd chapter of Moby Dick, in which we are given the definition of whales according to their book binding sizes. And I took Ishmael's encyclopedic urge to classify this very unclassifiable creature to offer definitions that somehow are always undoing one another to form a book of interlinked essays that is itself somewhat like a dictionary.

So, there's over a hundred small essays, each with a term and a meditation that verges from the pseudo academic to the partially scholarly to the wholly creative that, then, think about this given term. At the end of every section, there's a list of cross-references that you can turn to so that, in many ways, the book isn't as a dictionary isn't meant to be read from a first page to the last. But every time one picks it up, the hope is that you, in some ways, read a different book form, a different series of connections of interrelated terms. And I'm just going to read a few of the shorter ones, some of which are connected, and some of which aren't. And I'll read the words afterwards that you could go to, but you can't.

But you could. Line, a meditation on the line. The whale line is only two thirds of an inch in thickness. At first sight, you would not think it is so strong as it really is. By experiment, its one in 50 yarns will each suspend a weight of 120 pounds so that the whole rope will bear a strain nearly equal to three tons. In length, the common sperm whale line measures something over 200 fathoms. Towards the stern of the boat, it is spirally coiled away in the tub, not like the worm pipe of a still though, but so asked to form one round, cheese shaped mass of densely bedded "sheaves," or layers of concentric spiralizations, without any hollow but the "heart," or minute vertical tube formed at the axis of the cheese. As the last tangle or kink in the coiling would, in running out, infallibly take somebody's arm, leg, or entire body off, the utmost precaution is used in owing the line in its tub.

Some harpooners will consume almost an entire morning in this business, carrying the line high aloft and then reaving it downwards through a block towards the tub, so as in the act of coiling to free it from all possible wrinkles and twists. The line is slightly vapored with tar, which makes it compact, glossy, and dark. The line is loose on both ends. If a whale was struck and dove past the length of the line, and the line was attached to the boat, the boat would lunge into the depths and be destroyed. Before lowering the boat for the chase, the upper end of the line is taken aft from the tub, and passing around the loggerhead, there is, again, carried forward the entire length of the boat, resting crosswise upon the loom or handle of every man's oar so that it jogs against his wrist in rowing, and also passing between the men as they alternately sit at the opposite gun whales to the loaded "chalks," or grooves, in the extreme pointed prow of the boat, where a wooden pin or skewer the size of a common quill prevents it from slipping out.

Thus, the whale line folds the whole boat in its complicated coils, twisting and writhing round it in almost every direction. When the harpoon strikes the whale, the whale sounds. The line speeds down, with the whale at a speed that will sever a whaler's limb caught in a loop, or cut his skin as with the knife should it glance against the line. The line is kept cursive in a tub as ink is kept fluid in a pot. When the line is attached to a nib and the nib pierces its mark, the line quickens and grows taught. The line connects one to what one wants. The whaler wants the whale. When the line is in the whale, the whale flees. The tar dark line allows the whaler, once the whale has spent all his energy, to bring the boat to the body. But if the whale gains furious momentum enough, it empties the tub of line and escapes into fathomless depths. By the line, we know when we're attached to what we desire, and by the line we know when what we desire has escaped.

The line is the most basic unit of verse. A poem is a line winding from margin to margin until the poem is done. A book is composed of dark lines. A book pursues, in lines, the meaning it desires to understand or to convey. A metaphoric stretch can claim, for the poetic line, the same dangers as the whale line. The reader and the whaler are in the same boat. Euclid, a line as breathless length. Emerson, every opinion reacts on him who utters it. It is a harpoon hurled at the whale, unwinding as it flies, a coil of cord in the boat and, if the harpoon is not good or not well thrown, it will go nigh to cut the steersmen in twain or to sink the boat.

Etymology, a linen thread. Ahab, to the carpenter, "Dost thou spin thy shroud out of thyself?" The white whale is found upon the season on the line. The carpenter, on Ahab, "He's always under the line, fiery hot, I tell ye." Every book, unlike every whale hunt, ends in silence. The line runs out, becomes blank. All men live enveloped in whale lines. See also etching, expression, inscribe, loomings, skin, tattoo, writing. But we're not going to see any of those. Instead, I'm going to read a short entry called "Reading," and then, parenthetically, "Water."

A book is a depth that presents itself as a surface. The first page sits upon the future. The last page sits beneath its own history, a text that is a depth above it. The present tense of the open page is a surface floating between opposing depths, anticipation and memory. The boat and the book share a circumstance, as those who sail aboard a boat share a circumstance with those who hold a book. The boat rides the ocean's surface between an unknown depth and an unknown height. The whaler and the reader are subject to the weight of both mysteries. Those riding in the boat cannot see below the surface of the wave, and so must wait for a sign to emerge from the creature they hunt. They wait for a leviathanic revelation. The reader has a text, an object that bears a language from which meaning can be gathered.

The whaler has no text. The whaler hunts an object from which prophet can be gathered. Both meaning and prophet occur in depths that emerge on a surface. Both meaning and prophet can be lost. Whalers who sight the whale lower boats and row after it. The whale sounds down when it senses their approach. A whale breathes as men breathe with lungs. A whale rises to the surface to gather breath. The whalers look over the boat's edge for a sign. The ocean does not bear words as text upon it. Water dissolves ink. Water mocks legibility. The whalers do not look for a word, but for breath rising faster than the whale who exhaled it. Breath bears vowels. The first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, Aleph, is silent. It takes the sound of whatever letter it is next to. A breath is silent, but all words are born on breath.

A whaler that watches for the breath that pronounces the whale. It appears as a bubble that bursts as it meets its own element. On the page, it would appear as lightning, not a word, but the light by which a word is seen. See also, Aleph, inspiration, lightning, ocean, writing. Inspiration. A whale like a human has a heart. His heart is so large, a grown man can curl into one chamber and sleep. He would not be cold as he slept, for the whale is warm-blooded. The heart pulses and the blood surges through the whole beast. The blood moves through the veins and the whale's lung, and transports oxygen to the muscles. So works our body. The whale's blubber keeps it warm at the ocean's greatest depth as it sounds down until it begins to run out of breath.

Then, at depth, the whale pivot swims upward and breaches the surface to take a breath. The whale emerges from unfathomable depths to take another breath. Men see her. Men take a breath and then they sing out. See also, brain, breath, thought, classification, definition, line, Orpheus. And the last one I read is also the shortest, and that is an entry titled, "Tongue." The sperm whale's mouth is large enough that a man can live within it, or so Ishmael claims. A sperm whale has no discernible tongue. A sperm whale swallows a prophet who will not speak. When the prophet leaves the whale's mouth, he speaks. A sperm whale swallows a prophet, and then he has a tongue. See also, expression, Jonah, prophet, scroll, silence, skin. Thanks.

David Galef:

Thank you very much. Our next reader, Alan Michael Parker, is the author of two novels, "Whale Man," from Word Farm, 2011, "Cry Uncle," University Press of Mississippi, along with seven collections of poems including the forthcoming, "Holier Than This," from Tupelo Press, 2012. His poems, his individual poems, have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Canyon Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Pleiades, and The Yale Review, among others, and are forthcoming widely, including the 2011 edition of Best New American Poetry. His prose has appeared in journals including The Believer, The New York Times Book Review, and the New Yorker. Since 1998, he has taught at Davidson College, where he's professor of English and Director of Creative Writing. He's also core faculty member in the Queen's University Low Residency MFA Program. Please welcome Alan Michael Parker.

Alan Michael Parker:

It's going to be an interesting conversation. My book is a very different book from Dan's, and it's a novel called, "Whale Man," and I'm going to read the first few pages, and then maybe, seeing the timing, a section from later in the book. There are three parts to this novel, and part one is called, "The Tomb of the Unknown Mother." In the dream, through the window of his late mother's house, Avi Heyer watched an older man, someone familiar and yet changed, pick up a hammer. The workman wore a tool belt, heavy soled brown shoes, and jeans torn at the right knee. Even from here, at a distance of more than 40 feet, the man seemed to be shining, deep in some kind of happiness, his gaze focused on nothing but the hammer and the nail and the board, his body synchronized with the rhythmic and musical pounding of the work. He struck, paused, wiped his forehead with the back of his forearm. In the dream, the moment changed.

The weather in the dream changed. The air abandoned to its powerful sense. The scene lined with memories like a book read once before. The workman laid his hammer on a table and climbed an enormous standing ladder, maybe 30 rungs in all, to the penultimate rung, leaned into the ladder for balance, and then reached upward with, first, the left hand and then the right to grasp one of the curved wooden beams. Once hanging fully, he kicked away the ladder, which fell like something mythic, slowly and without a sound. There in the unfinished building, the older man hung from a rib, a beam that now looked very much like a rib, and swung. He swung just a little, as though stirred only by an imperceptible breeze. Slowly, the swinging man increased his motion, pointing the tips of his worn boots forward, and then bending at the knees to curl backward, pitched maybe 15 or 20 degrees each way from his plumb lined weight.

As Avi, the dreamer, watched, he felt his emotions sway with the movement of the man swinging, and beset by a kind of anxiety that seemed, too, like envy. Avi, the dreamer, wanted desperately to feel with his body what the other man felt, pendulus, aloft, and at risk. Gravity softened. From the swinging man, his pockets turned out, floated a hammer, a handsaw, an electric screwdriver, its colors distinctive, bit whirring, more tools, a rasp, a file, and an awl deeply oiled with use. Then, a diaphanous chamois, too light and so fluttery.

Still he swung. Other objects appeared. The man's pockets were bountiful, but these weren't all tools, and they seemed not to fall, but to rise and to float into the rafters. A cricket cage missing its door. Loosed swatches of patterned cloth, a quilt undone. An old brown valise peppered with travel stickers and tied with string, the holidays of a previous generation, the memories in black and white. A bulbus copper lamp, the cord stretched out like a kites tail. A knobby bag of oranges, which burst, the oranges tumbling out and up into the air. Still, the older man swung and the oranges floated around his body like new planets.

Avi, the dreamer, could smell the oranges. It was a small smell, a peccant bite of citrus in which was caught a whiff of the Jersey shore and his own real childhood. He wanted one. He lifted one foot up, straddled the open window sill, climbed through, and touched down gingerly, and then fully, upon a raw wooden subfloor, the planks freshly laid. Above him, the arched and vaulted ribs of the building curved. The ladder was gone, but a ladder could be found. The other man was gone. Buried in shadow at the edge of the scene, stood someone else, another person. Avi, the dreamer, knew someone, the wrong age or just wrong, she shouldn't have been here. He felt a rush of feeling too much. Mom. His feet set firmly upon the wooden floor that throbbed with breathing. Avi, the dreamer, spread his arms and reached into the emptiness and up toward the ceiling of the structure where he couldn't reach. He was standing inside an enormous living thing, somehow wooden and alive, inside the belly of a whale. His mom was there, his mom was dead. His mom was there.

Can a person choose to dream to redream? Somewhere in the house, but certainly not nearby, a cell phone chirped, and Avi's thoughts rose to meet the sound. His dreams sinking slowly back into its ocean, mom and whale and oranges bubbling down into an unmemory, inaccessible for now. He was awake enough to consider finding the offending phone, not to recognize the little chirp, to want and have back the dream and to choose to lie still. "Dolly, get the phone," Avi muttered almost aloud to his dog, camped across the foot of the bed where she wasn't allowed, her bulk dominion. "Crap," he said to himself. The phone stopped ringing. Dolly gave a little sleep, "Woof." "Okay," she said in Doggish, although she clearly wasn't going to comply. In his new dream, when he sat upon the chair, Avi Heyer knew that the chair was unhappy. And not only the chair, the scarred table, the blue vase of lilies, the lovely meal steaming under its silver serving lid.

All the things of the material world had feelings, some happier than others. And he, himself, had none. Across the room, angled away from the table and hung too high to look into, the mirror might have something to add, but inside and outside were different. A hammering could be heard out there, someone fixing a roof. The dreaming man stood ready to investigate and began to search his pockets. Now, where did he put it? He had lost it. What was it? His hands went into his breast pocket, his pants pocket, and then his shirt, against his skin, and then his hands were rooting around inside his own chest. He reached in and felt through his skin.

Avi handled his own bones, his stringy arteries, and spongy lungs. The hammering, his heart. He touched it, tough and somehow both meaty and gelatinous, and drew back, surprised and ashamed. Above the sink, the open window filled with a stupendous animal eye, looming, wise, and gentle. Would the animal forgive him? In that moment, the dreamer wanted nothing else. Avi's hands were out of his body again, and now he was walking toward the window and the enormous intelligence of the animal. It was a sympathy for which he yearned some good grace from that profound being. He glanced to the side, cut his gaze to check how he looked in the mirror. He was there, but he could see through himself. He was gone.

"Wakey, wakey. He's awake," said someone. "You woke him, sister." "You told me to, sister," said the first voice. "I did," said the second. "Oh, sister," said the first voice. Avi opened his eyes. There were two young women in the bedroom, identical twins. "We've got your dog," said one of the twins. No, not identical, just similar. The two women were blonde, pig tailed, and dressed bizarrely in matching yellow sundresses festooned with large poppies. The twins might've been Avi's age. "What," he said. "What are you doing here? Get out of my house." Avi shook his head slightly [inaudible 00:24:38] and sat up, and then pulled up the sheet to cover himself. "We've got your dog." The other woman held up Dolly's empty collar. "See? I like you sister," said the first woman. "What? Where's my dog?" Dolly," Avi said. "Get out of here." "Woof, woof, woof, woof, woof." Dolly jumped onto the bed. "Told you. We've got your dog."

"Give me that," Avi said and grabbed for Dolly's undone collar. "No," said the woman holding the collar. "You don't have my dog. She's right here." The conversation was unbelievable, he thought. "You're an idiot," Avi said. Dolly was right here. Smack. Before he could react. One of the women slapped him. Damn, his face stung. "What did ..." Smack. She hit him across the other cheek. "Oh, sister," cooed the first woman. "My turn. My turn. You can bust him up later," the assailant said as she turned and patted her sister's shoulder. "Next time." And then, she returned to Avi. "Calling us names will hurt you."

David Galef:

Thank you both very much. We have a bunch of time to play with. Eventually, I want to, pretty soon, throw it in the floor to questions. But right now, I just have a few questions for both panelists, especially since this was billed as Moby Dick's descendants. I want to ask one flat out obvious question as a lead in for either of you, for both of you. And that is, first of all, why follow in the footsteps or flipper trails of Melville's Magnum Opus? Dan, why don't you start off?

Dan Beachy-Quick:

Well, for me, the work of, I guess any genuinely engaged reading on my part doesn't feel like a work of reading until it inverts in its curious way and becomes a work of writing. There is, in my reading life, no book that has affected me more, and continues to affect me more, than Moby Dick. And somehow, in an odd way, I feel a strange, almost personal, responsibility to, not simply read as a form of appreciation, but read in such a way that it calls me to a work that the book itself seems to demand, which is that you don't get to be outside of the boat. If you're a reader of this book, you're marvelously in the same condition as those whalers that fill it. And if you're a whaler when you're a reader, it means that in very deep, and, I think, astonishing ways, there's a work required of you in response to that sense, that activity. And so, I take that sense of needing to work in order to be honest to the experience of the book. I take it insanely seriously, and one result of that is this book.

David Galef:

Okay, Alan, I want to give you the same question. But, if you don't mind, could you tell the audience a bit more where the whale comes in your novel? It wasn't immediately apparent.

Alan Michael Parker:

Yeah, it's not immediately apparent. This guy builds a 64-foot-long and 16 foot high wooden whale on the lawn of his dead mother's house. And the building of that wooden whale is at the center of this book called, "Whale Man." The novel is comedy. His mother is dead. That part's not funny. That was comedic. You're okay. It's okay. And the abiding image of the whale seemed to me something that was, in terms of the literary legacy, impossible. And, as a result, I felt like I had to try writing it. I'm interested in doing work that defeats me. I think that, in the ways that Ahab has taught me about defeat, I could learn more about defeat in the writing of this novel. And the legacy of Moby Dick, you can wrestle with it a number of ways. You can think of it as literary context, as influence, as interpolation, as an active reading, as Dan has talked about.

And, for me, the most active element of the thinking about writing my novel, with the specter of Moby Dick haunting me in this way, was thinking about acts of heroism. And my protagonist undertakes an act of what, for him, is heroism. And that is specifically not the comedic element, but grief and mourning his mother. And what constitutes for him testimony to his grief, they were estranged, he didn't know her, he's coming to terms with that, is the building of this whale. So, he builds, as the first section in states, the tomb of the unknown mother.

And so, there are other lessons available from Moby Dick, and some of them are textual for me, and the influence is here in my book. There are quotations from Moby Dick. I cheated. My guy has never read Moby Dick, and that let me off the hook, sorry, a little bit. He's read other important texts. He knows Jonah. That's helpful, but it was a way for me to have other people say to him, "You mean, like Moby Dick?" And he would say, "No, no, that guy dies, doesn't he?" And so, I was able to position him in a place of ignorance that helped me not have to write a book that would be so overshadowed by Melville, actually. So, I was cheating a little.

David Galef:

Okay. I just have two more questions, and then I'd like to entertain others. Moby Dick is about a number of different themes. You can keep on pulling them out. But one thing it seems incontrovertibly about is about obsession, and I think that frankly applies to both your works. But I'd like to hear you say it and explain it better than I can.

Dan Beachy-Quick:

Well, explain obsession?

David Galef:

No, your take on it. How it figures into "A Whaler's Dictionary." Such as someone compiling entry after entry after entry.

Dan Beachy-Quick:

One of the things that seems of the nature of obsession is that the things you're obsessed by, you have almost no ability to discuss the nature of that obsession. In part, because I think one of the qualities of obsession, and I certainly am obsessed with Moby Dick, or possessed by it, in a way, is that you never find an outside from which you get to judge the nature of your own compulsion. You spend all your effort actually being compelled.

And I suppose that somewhere in my ceaseless need to continue to return to this particular text is that it was, for me, as a young poet, the book that opened up what the work of writing and all its impossible, endless complexity might be. And it shattered for me, I think, and still does, easier ambitions by putting me in the face of extraordinarily difficult ambitions, which is how can a book matter? How can it matter to the self? Matter to the self struggling with the difficulty and damage of being in a world? How can one find a graceful way, as Ishmael, one could argue, does through utmost difficulty. Is there a way to see Ahab as sharing, although in a very different outcome, a similar effort? How does Ishmael's writing a book about this experience make me, as a writer, think about the necessity of writing anything? It is obsessive because every question I know how to ask, in part, I know how to ask because this book has asked it for me.

David Galef:

Michael?

Alan Michael Parker:

Alan Michael.

Dan Beachy-Quick:

Ah, whatever.

Alan Michael Parker:

It seemed to me that we're all here because we're obsessed, and how we manifest that on the page or as readers is part of the journey. And that journey need not be epic or external. And, for me, it's five years in the writing of the novel. And I think that that lesson in my obsessive behaviors that relate to my writing life are also available in Moby Dick. So, they're available in other books. I am not laying claim to a privilege, although I think, and we haven't yet talked about this, it might be the great American novel. I suspect it is, in part, because I can't think of a better book.

As I lay dying, some would argue Gatsby. But I grew up in the town where it's set, and so I've got feelings. So there are different kinds of arguments to be made. But, by way of the obsessiveness of the work, I didn't need to lose a leg to figure out how writing a novel is obsessive work. And the many, many drafts and the ruthlessness with which one treats one's own material and the sense of surrender, ultimately, to the material, which I find necessary to revision. So, those lessons seem to be patent.

David Galef:

Okay. Leaving the issue of Great American novel to the audience. This is my last question before I will shut up for a while, and that is both of you are poets, perhaps, in fact, better known for your poetry. What do people mean when they say, "This is a poet's novel," or, "This is poet's prose?" And what do you do with that, what is often, semi accusation? We'll start off with Alan Michael Parker this time.

Alan Michael Parker:

Well, I'll start by saying something rude, which is that there's a poet and novelist whose work I admire very much named Michael Ondaatje, and I am a big fan of a number of his books, but less so a book called, "In the Skin of the Lion," which is a book that, for me, is where he learned to write fiction as a poet who was moving across that genre boundary. And that book takes place in 30 page bursts of astonishing lyricism. He throws a nun off a bridge, it's 30 pages, it's spectacular. They go ice skating in the dark on the frozen river. It's spectacular. And I don't think that book has a shape as a novel. And I felt like, as a poet, who my MFA's in poetry, who I've been writing fiction teaching fiction for a long time, but I was trying to figure out what a novel is, that I was trying to learn my lesson, in part, from that novel and from my reading of that novel.

Now, I may well be, and certainly probably am, wrong. He's Michael Ondaatje, and I'm better known for my poetry apparently. So, the poet's novel, to me, is one that doesn't have shape. It resides in its lyricism. The sentences tend to trump the character development. We're nowhere near Heraclitus, "Character is fate." It's a book that's built out of and defaults to its language at the expense of its architecture. And my novel writing career, and this is my second in print with three other failed novels I consider my MFA, my novel writing career has been the auto-didacticism of figuring out what I mean by shape and architecture when it comes to what the novel is as a form. And I love experimental novels. I'm not talking about the arc of the plot or Freytag. I'm talking about, for me, what is possible as the shape of a book. So, if you're poets and you're writing novels, I would say study the novel. It seemed, to me, that's the best lesson.

David Galef:

I'll go over to Dan in one second. I might point out that, of course, people have made these accusations about Moby Dick, about the long expository, but brilliant Whitman-esque passages and the slight lack of character development. In any event, yeah.

Dan Beachy-Quick:

I would agree with much of what Alan says, and maybe only add to it a couple of thoughts. One of which comes from a philosopher, actually, Wittgenstein, who says that, "Philosophy asks a question by which it brings itself into question." And it strikes me that one of the characteristics of the poetic activity, the poetic work, the poetic mind is that a poem is always asking a question that torments itself into questioning itself, which is to say that, somehow, it seems deeply embedded in the work of poetry to undermine the certainty by which a poem, say, knows that it's a poem. It creates doubt, it can't help but create a doubt. And the poem is both the expression of that doubt and, in its formal life, the furious reaction against it.

And it seems to me that Moby Dick is absolutely always asking a question that undermines its own solidity as a novel, as a story, as a book, that it's always doing this work that is somehow undermining an easier way of going about telling a story about an insane captain that's chasing a white whale. And the way in which, then, Ishmael has to find, quite literally, find a name to speak with a voice. And that voice is the voice that builds the novel into the book that we read, that we feel ourselves so in the face of the most basic crisis, a poetic voice, which is against a blank page. One has to find a word and, after there is a word, to establish from that word and entire world. And Moby Dick does that more gloriously than any other thing I know. And that feels, to me, like poetry's work.

David Galef:

Okay, thank you very much. I, as moderator, of course, have plenty of other questions, but we'd much rather hear from you. So, yeah.

Speaker 5:

I wanted to ask Dan, how do you characterize difference between [inaudible 00:41:23] ?

David Galef:

Did everyone hear that? All right, the question was how do you relate the work in "Spell" in contrast to what you read from today?

Dan Beachy-Quick:

Yeah, speaking of earlier the question on obsession, this isn't the first book I've written about Moby Dick. I also wrote a book of poems about Moby Dick called, "Spell." And that book, the writing of the poems, which happens in all of the major characters' voices, but also in meditations on the whale, looking at the author/poet/speaker's own obsession with the book as a concern, writing that was the discovery of the way in which reading could be a valid consideration for poetic activity. And I hadn't thought that before. I started writing that when I was in graduate school. I wouldn't show it to anyone in the workshop because I had grown very dubious about the workshop as a model of what is accepted as the topic for a poem, when, really, what I wanted to do was I wanted to use a poem to think about a book that I didn't know how to think about without writing the poem.

But the other lesson of writing "Spell" was that, at some point, I realized it had to be a book of poems. It had to function as a book of poems. And that meant that my original idea of just thinking about Moby Dick and poems wasn't enough somehow. "Spell" couldn't survive as a book with that as its only concern. And so, I made myself a character in it, and I added in these other strands to make it function as a book, basically. And I always felt that, in some ways, I had behaved irresponsibly in doing that to my initial intent, that in wanting to think about Moby Dick and ending up thinking about how to make a book of poems about Moby Dick, I'd somehow betrayed the very thing I didn't want to betray, and I wanted to rectify having done that. And so, I wrote this, where I thought, "Okay, I'm going to write every single thought I've ever had about this book down, and completely insane and obsessive and excessive and see what happens." And this is what happened.

David Galef:

There was another hand? Yeah.

Speaker 6:

As Moby Dick relates to the Great American novel, or at least a novel that sums up American experience, it seems like the biggest knock that I've read against that would be that Moby Dick doesn't directly discuss or bring up race in America like, say, Uncle Berry. I just wanted ask either of you, or all of you, whether you feel that the Great American novel need to discuss race, and Moby Dick's [inaudible 00:44:34].

David Galef:

The question is whether Moby Dick needs to bring up race to qualify as one of the Great American novels. Alan?

Alan Michael Parker:

Race is the great crime of American history. Racism is the great crime of American history. So, depending upon what's axiomatic for you politically, then the answer might be yes.

David Galef:

The whale is white.

Alan Michael Parker:

But it also doesn't bring up gender. And it also has been turned into a cultural cartoon by way of the family romance of son, father, and Phallus. So, I'm not sure that it needs to be all encompassing to be the Great American novel. I'm a little skeptical of that idea. However, if that's the claim that it would seem to me that "Huck Finn," or "Absalom, Absalom," or "As I Lay Dying," would be better choices, depending, again, upon what is axiomatic for you, as a reader and as a political thinker. I think, formally, the claim, the criticism laid against Moby Dick just has to do with the dig aggressiveness. And, at least in my edition, I don't get a whale until page 408. So, there are formal challenges that the novel presents, too. The fact that we know in the way that. Actually David and I chatted about this briefly earlier.

I know no spoilers here, but I know they're doomed when I'm reading Moby Dick because he tells me this in the way that we know Oedipus is not going to have a good day. Now, how he executes, quite literally, how he executes his characters, and how he plays with this notion of the determinist cosmology that that novel presents is, for me, the brilliance of its artifice. And I have to say I love that. But you could also argue that there's not a lot of free will in the novel as a result, because who chooses? How much agency is there among the characters? And in the "Twice Told Tale," Ishmael's retelling of a story, there are all sorts of things that you could levy as charges against the novel formally, politically, socially. But I'm not sure still, again, that I've read a better book written by an American.

David Galef:

Dan, do you have a spirited defense?

Dan Beachy-Quick:

Yeah. I would say that actually Moby Dick might be one of our earliest and finest novels that presents a multicultural society. The harpooners are Native American, Peloponnesian, and a former slave African-American, Daggoo. Pip is a central character, the little black boy who plays the tambourine and holds on to Captain Ahab's heartstrings in ways. Ahab can barely stand to be around Pip, in part because he sees in Pip, the great hero Ahab, sees in Pip a person who has suffered the same damage that he, himself, has. And in this novel we see radical lines of equality drawn where we would not expect to see them.

I'm thinking here, not only of Ahab and Pip, but the parallel relationship of Queequeg to Ishmael, in particular that chapter, "The Monkey Rope," where they're tethered together by this one rope while Queequeg is down working on the head of the whale. And the only thing that's keeping him from plunging wholly into sea is a cord that's also wrapped around Ishmael, and it's wrapped around Ishmael. And it's wrapped around Ishmael because if Queequeg falls into the ocean, then Ishmael will follow suit, and they'll both die together, which is to say we also have a remarkable chapter about the absolute necessary responsibility we have to those who aren't ourselves.

You can look at a chapter, like, "The Quarter Deck," in which, in a very surprising way, suddenly, we're in the midst of a play. But the nature of that play is that every single character on that boat, from the most minor to the most major, gets to speak in his own voice, so that we also see, and this I think is entirely related to the issue of race in this country, that you find in a book where Ishmael himself says, "Who ain't a slave," if you remember, says that every single person on this boat has their own voice. I have to hear that voice. I have to give them that voice. I have to recognize, not simply my single person perspective on what their reality is, but, as Ishmael is always doing, subverting his ability to say I, as the ultimate authority in what he's saying, and give to others a greater reality than he has himself. And that makes Moby Dick a remarkably ethical book, and it's ethical in ways that is also considering race quite deeply, I think.

David Galef:

Thank you. Yes, gentlemen, back there.

Speaker 7:

[inaudible 00:50:08].

David Galef:

I mean, having a narrator who's not himself the hero or protagonist?

Speaker 7:

[inaudible 00:50:13].

David Galef:

Do you want to talk about the peripheral reality of that?

Alan Michael Parker:

And I'd add a heart of darkness, and I'd add any number of-

David Galef:

"Wuthering Heights?"

Alan Michael Parker:

... "Wuthering Heights," in which the focalization is, in part, the narrative device through whom we see constructs a telling of the notion of hero. I don't know. I think the trick is to keep your hero off-stage, in part, so that, instead of putting at risk the reader's affections for the foibles and, even, for the tragedian's sense of character development, that instead the hero becomes mythologized by the telling of the hero. So, I think that's part of it. It's not something I'm doing, so maybe I am lying. But at least, by way of thinking of those books together, there is a refraction of that other figure, and it does mythologize the figure for us.

David Galef:

Dan, did you have anything to add?

Dan Beachy-Quick:

Sure. Well, I would say, I'm not sure how parallel that comparison is, in some sense, between Gatsby and Moby Dick, although they are always brought up in terms of both being representative of the Great American novel, whatever that might mean, which I don't know. Ishmael is as much a hero in Moby Dick as Ahab is. It's just that it's a heroism of a different nature. Ahab's heroism leads him to always move past the limits of the world and to some knowledge that seems to exist outside of it. And Ishmael's heroism is to create a world, to create a world that's tangible, that's physical in which people can recognize each other in the way that we talked about before. It's also a very strange voice that Ishmael has. It's his and not his. It's singular, and then it's multiple. That's almost the only comparison I can find is, let's say, the chorus from Greek tragedy, where he seems to be speaking in one voice out of many heads at the same time, or maybe the images reversed.

But the nature of the way in which, and complexity in the way in which Ishmael speaks, it's astonishingly difficult and strange and beautiful, I think. And I don't feel that level of complexity in the narration of Gatsby at all. It's a much more simple foil. I mean, we have to remember that the only way we hear what Ahab says is that Ishmael says what Ahab says, and he says what Ahab says when he has no ability, as a first person narrator, to necessarily have heard what Ahab says. He is able in the way in which he says I, or says me, as it might be the case. It's a different voicing, much different voicing of the self, I think.

David Galef:

Other questions? Comments? Yeah.

Speaker 8:

How did you experience Moby Dick for the first time?

Alan Michael Parker:

I didn't read it in college. That's how I experienced it. I got about a third of the way through, and then fudged an exam and tried not to write about it on whatever test that was in American Lit when I was 20. And then, as part of whatever I might call my conscience, eventually reread it. And then, in the writing of this novel, when I knew that I had a whale and that it was going to dominate the literal landscape of my character's life for a period of time, I reread Moby Dick, and then stopped again. And some of that is my unconscionable thievery as a writer, which is that I will steal until such time as it suits my own purposes, and then I'm off in my own head. And so, when I stopped reading, it was because I was writing too hard. And then, I went back and I reread after the draft of my book was done, and then I reread for this panel. So, I've read it a few times fully and never when anyone told me to.

David Galef:

Where did you start?

Dan Beachy-Quick:

Well, I graduated as an English major without ever having read Moby Dick, and I thought that this was a real sign of my ignorance. And I was working at this job, worked at a cafe, a barista, but it was really a small place and there was no one, like a manager, to watch me. And so, I basically brewed myself coffee and read Moby Dick. People would come in, I'd say, "Help yourself." I was eventually fired. But it was, in some ways, the very first book I read without any of the support one has in college or a class by which to deal with reading an extraordinarily difficult book. Whatever meaning that book was going to have for me, I had to make that meaning myself. And it was, in many ways, the first genuine reading experience of my life, I think.

Alan Michael Parker:

Are you recapitulating that in the writing that you're doing, do you feel like? Is that part of what is what you're doing in "Spell" and "Whaler's Dictionary?"

Dan Beachy-Quick:

Yeah, trying to recover that space in some ways or refuse to. I guess what I doubt about, and one might call "A Whaler's Dictionary," especially, a book of criticism, in a sense, or academic in a way, is that I do find myself wholly distrusting of an approach to literature that steps back in order to analyze that which can be seen when everything about Moby Dick says, "The only honest way to judge something is to step into the squall." And so, the way I've learned to do that in my reading and writing life is I write in order to get in towards closer proximity of the book rather than to step back and find a way to know what it is I'm talking about. I'm not too interested in knowing anything. I'm not good at it, especially.

David Galef:

Other questions or comments? Yes.

Speaker 9:

Dan, could you describe the relationship [inaudible 00:57:38] Ekphrasis and criticism in terms of what you're doing?

David Galef:

The question was, sorry, Ekphrasis and criticism.

Dan Beachy-Quick:

Well, certainly this book has a Ekphrastic nature in that it's taking one of the ways in which Ishmael tries to categorize the nature of his experience and, in a way, imitates that at the level of a book making this dictionary. But at another level, one of the things that's very curious to me in poetry and the writing of poetry is the way in which a poem can make of itself an effort not to mean and not to be, but to do. A form of enactment, in a certain sense. And more than any notion of Ekphrasis as a description in one art of another art, it feels something even stranger than that to me, an effort of the poem to imitate in such a way that it threatens to become the thing that it's keeping as its consideration. And it's at that deepest formal level where the urge isn't just to describe, but to become that I find myself filled with curiosity.

Alan Michael Parker:

That was a great answer.

David Galef:

Reaching not quite the end of our time. We have a little bit more, if there are other questions. Last call for questions? Thank you all very much for coming.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for tuning into the AWP Podcast Series. For other podcasts, please tune into our website at www.awpwriter.org.

 


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