233°C

The other night I was lying in bed listening to a radio dramatisation of ‘Fahrenheit 451’ on my Walkman using earphones when Sarada came in, and as usual I couldn’t hear what she was saying properly because of them. Ironically, if it’s true, the very part I was listening to was the scene where Guy Montag enters the bedroom to see his wife Mildred lying comatose on the bed with the “seashells” in her ears “listening” to the radio. This was not only not lost on me but in fact I had wanted it to happen. The invention of wireless earbuds, which these weren’t because I can’t get Bluetooth to work properly and don’t approve of having basically disposable batteries in devices which in any case only last a couple of years, so I’ve heard, but they do nevertheless resemble Bradbury’s “seashells” and their use. However, Ray Bradbury said he was in the business of prevention rather than prediction but it seems someone stepped on a butterfly.

Having looked at ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, and a few years ago ‘Brave New World’, it seemed about time I looked at a third classic dystopian science fiction novel. I don’t know if it makes sense to rank these things, but if the first two count as being number one and number two, Bradbury’s novel surely belongs somewhere in the top half-dozen. Were it not for Zamyatkin’s ‘We’ and Kazuo Ishiguro no ‘Never Let Me Go’, it might even deserve an undisputed third place, though it seems quite crass to do that to these works. Nonetheless, I’m sure it often finds itself onto high school reading lists almost as often as the others I’ve mentioned, and in fact probably more often than ‘We’ in fact, which is relatively unknown. Ray Bradbury, though, differs from the other authors in being a genre sci-fi author. Of a kind, anyway. Kazuo Ishiguro ga now has tendencies in that direction but his stories haven’t always been like that. Bradbury also wrote mainstream fiction: ‘The Fruit At The Bottom Of The Bowl’ comes to mind, and is a wonderful study of misplaced guilt which calls Lady Macbeth to mind.

In general, I find Bradbury a slightly odd author and I can’t put my finger on why. As I understand it, he’s usually considered one of the Big Four: Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke and Bradbury. The Big Three, however, doesn’t include him. He differs from the others in having a much more mainstream literary approach and despite his successful efforts to produce absolutely classic science fiction works such as ‘A Sound Of Thunder’, which seems to be the origin of the idea of the butterfly effect, he doesn’t really feel like a SF writer at all even when he’s writing absolutely classic stories. He characterises and uses elaborate imagery and turns of phrase, and whereas that’s admirable it also makes his prose feel foreign to the genre. To that extent, it seems inappropriate to think of his inventions as predictive or worth considering in itself. Science fiction is substantially two things: fiction whose plot depends non-trivially on the setting and fiction where ideas play the role of characters. Bradbury’s work is less like this than most SF. New Wave clearly is not like that, but that was still several years off when he was at his peak. It’s been said that he’s more a fantasy and horror writer. He’s also respectable enough for my third year English teacher (the folk singer, not the guy serving time) to have us read his 22-story anthology ‘The Golden Apples Of The Sun’, although I’d already read most of them.

The second story in that collection, 1951’s ‘The Pedestrian’, is one of the sources from which ‘Fahrenheit 451’ is taken. Depending on who’s reading this, my introduction to it may be from one of you, who described its plot to me in about ’79, before I read it, although by then I had already seen the Truffaut film, which was apparently his only English language production. The other source is the longer story ‘The Fireman’, which I haven’t read. I can identify quite strongly with the main protagonist in ‘The Pedestrian’, who is in the habit of taking long evening walks about the city. He is stopped by an automated police car and asked to justify his actions, which he does but is assessed as mentally ill by the AI and taken to a mental hospital. This very much accords with the pedestrian-hostile nature of many US cities, many of which are apparently not walkable, and jaywalking had been made an offence from 1925 on. I myself spend a lot of time walking the streets for exercise and mental health, and just to get places, and I can’t imagine how that would go in the States. One thing this story does illustrate, though, is Bradbury’s strong attachment to nostalgia.

Now for the novel itself. Guy Montag, a fireman in a futuristic world which has banned books, has a job whose main activities are tracking down people who own books and burning them, and yes that does sometimes mean the people. He meets a teenager called Clarisse whose experience of the world is more holistic and authentic than he’s accustomed to, which opens his eyes to the possibility that books must hold much of great value in view of the fact that some readers are prepared to die rather than relinquish them. In the meantime, his wife Mildred is an avid TV watcher, televisions having now become wall screens which can even be tiled to cover the entire parlour, and drifts into taking an overdose of sleeping pills which is remedied by a couple of technicians coming over and changing her blood. After he begins questioning the book ban, he begins to surreptitiously collect books himself, notably a copy of the King James Bible, and throws a sicky to stay off work. His boss Beatty then visits him at home, explains why books have been banned and hints that he knows his secret and that other firemen always do it once but surrender the book within twenty-four hours. There’s also a robot dog which hunts down miscreants and kills them, and seems also to “know” something about Montag, either automatically or through having been programmed to suspect him. At some point, Clarisse dies in a car accident and Mildred is completely emotionally detached about it, as opposed to her interest in something on TV called ‘The Family’. Montag recalls an incident when he met someone called Faber in a park who was a retired English professor, makes contact with him and goes to see him. Faber decries his cowardice for not doing more to stop the anti-intellectual drift of society for standing up for literacy and books and reveals to Montag that he has a two-way radio system which he uses with Montag to offer him guidance. Montag returns home to find Mildred has gathered with some of her friends and he tries to have a serious conversation with them which turns out to be futile. He then shows them a book of poetry, which Mildred excuses by making up a story that it’s a ritual firemen perform once a year to show how ridiculous books are. He then goes back to the fire station with a decoy book which Beatty discards and reveals that he was once an avid reader himself. Montag is then called out to a house which turns out to be his own and is ordered to set fire to his own books with a flamethrower. Mildred has reported him, but is distressed by the destruction of the parlour screens and walks out on him. He then burns Beatty alive with the flamethrower and is pursued by the hound, which injects him but he destroys it with the aforesaid flamethrower. He flees another hound and this is publicised on TV as a major spectacle, but escapes by crossing a river so his scent can’t be followed, and escapes to St Louis where there’s a rural community of people each of whom memorise a particular book. In a culmination of the aerial manoeuvres which have been going on in the background throughout the novel, his home city is destroyed by nuclear weapons but the community survives and returns to the city to re-build society.

Right, so what do I have to say about this? Well, it is considerably dated in a somewhat peculiar way and I have the strong impression that Bradbury isn’t that articulate about what he’s trying to defend. The general idea of the novel is that social and technological change have led to a general dumbing down and flatness to society, relationships and personalities because of the inconvenience of individuality and passion, which leads to life not being worth living because people drift zombie-like through it. Mildred seems to take the overdose accidentally, but she doesn’t really value her life as such so it doesn’t matter whether she lives or dies. Instead, she’s mesmerised by her TV soap opera and radio station and nothing else is going on in her life. She’s also treated like a machine, by non-medics, when she takes the overdose. It’s like changing the oil in a car – I should point out here that I have no idea what I’m talking about because I know nothing of internal combustion engines. The technicians are impersonal, callous and accidentally brutal. Mildred is really the Everywoman of that society, and this is where I start to worry and think it shows its age.

Yes, Guy Montags wife is the Everywoman. She doesn’t seem to do any paid work and it seems that whereas men have jobs, her life is vacuous because domestic labour has been rendered obsolete, but instead of it being replaced by a role where she goes out and participates in the labour market she is left without a role. What, then, is she supposed to do? Montag, the firemen and other men have that option but apparently she hasn’t, and Bradbury criticises her for it. It’s like she’s trapped in the stereotypical place of the ’50s housewife and lacks any inherent impetus to break out of it. Then there’s Clarisse. She’s been interpreted as a manic pixie dream girl, i.e. she’s only there to allow Guy Montag’s personal growth. In more detail, the manic pixie dream girl is said to be an eccentric young woman with no internal life, often seen as wish fulfillment by a lonely male writer. The other women protagonists are less significant. I find both significant women in this book problematic and unsatisfactory, which is not surprising as it was published in 1953.

That’s one problem. Another way it dates itself is in the rationalisation for the firemen’s roles. The backstory on their development is that houses are now fireproof and there are simply no more domestic fires. Although this has led to a dystopia, this sounds initially like a positive thing. With hindsight, we are now aware that making a house completely fireproof would have trade-offs. Given that it was written in the 1950s, asbestos would almost certainly be involved. A more recent approach is to use flame-retardant chemicals, which are toxic and environmentally harmful. This is what we’ve actually done, and the consequences are that our homes are still at risk of fire, though less than previously, but are more likely to give us cancer or harm us and our surroundings in other ways. It seems characteristic of the mid-century that problems would be solved with no downside, as expressed in Donald Fagen’s ‘IGY’, a song I used to find very irritating until I got it. All that said, Bradbury does portray the disadvantage very clearly, and this again relates to gender roles.

The firemen lost the purpose of their work. This is a bit peculiar as it seems to suggest that there are no industrial or forest fires or other disasters such as rescuing people from road traffic collisions, and this is too shallow for me. But it also feels like they found a new role substantially because they were underemployed, and rather than simply dispensing with the role of the firefighter, they had to find a new function. It’s almost as if the vacuum of having no station had to be filled. I very much doubt that this is the intention, but it’s productive to read that into it. Whereas the women are left with nothing to do but fill their lives with fatuousness rather than finding other niches, the men for some reason have to be given something else to do, no matter how destructive, which they have to be paid for and which has to have meaning.

There’s also an elusive issue which arises from books themselves and Bradbury’s attitude to them. It feels like he has accepted that there’s value in them without fully understanding what that value is or allowing it to inform his writing. He defends the idea of books as good for the soul and recognises that they do things like deepen thought and improve empathy and emotional intelligence, but he himself doesn’t seem to have undertaken that journey. Even at the end of the novel, the people left behind have undergone something like rote-learning without profoundly internalising the content. The defence is symbolic. We should have a right to emotional complexity and pain even though Bradbury may not recognise all that implies. I hope I’ve captured that.

Beatty’s defence of the society’s position is very clear. His view is that books are contradictory, complex and cause pain and conflict. This is where the most difficult aspect of the entire novel comes to light. Beatty traces the history leading up to all books being banned as originating in anti-racism, and for me this makes for very uncomfortable reading. He outlines a process where the offensiveness of books to certain marginalised groups expanded until it was forbidden even to offend people such as dog-walkers, bird-lovers and cookery writers. Whereas it’s easy and valid to portray this as bigoted, it is true that one may need to be offended from time to time and that hurt is an important part of life. The problem, however, is that Bradbury doesn’t seem to have any sense of either immutable traits being in a special position or of the idea of punching up versus punching down. He seems to have a view of society as it had been as fundamentally equal or merit-based with the marginalised in essentially no worse a position as anyone else for some reason. On the other hand, this view is being expressed by someone in 2025. Perhaps I’m being confronted with something which makes me uncomfortable today but something valuable may have still been lost. However, I simply cannot get on board with the idea that active racism is okay.

Salvaging something from that, though, Beatty seems to be saying that the process got beyond the political realm and started to be about not making anyone uncomfortable, which meant never being provocative. It’s tempting to see a parallel between the trend he describes and the trend towards supposedly being “right on”. This is surely something the Right would agree with nowadays, perhaps disingenuously, and it makes me wonder if Bradbury is essentially conservative. After all, nostalgia is about yearning for things to go back to how they used to be and there’s a strong element of that in his writing. Nevertheless, it still feels like something can be salvaged from this.

Beatty makes a couple of other points. He draws a connection between population growth and the loss of tolerance because people have little choice but to invade each other’s space. The idea of overpopulation being a problem is now thoroughly dead, so whether or not this could be a factor is now moot. Yet again this is a sign of datedness.

Then there’s the question of technological change. There’s plenty of vapidity nowadays in online coverage of books and book reviews, and that’s just about the ink and paper version. The books themselves can also be very much of low quality. Books also compete with videos, web pages, audio books and e-books, whereas Bradbury had only identified radio and linear broadcast television as a problem. For example, he didn’t seem to anticipate video recording. On the other hand, he did anticipate the shortening of attention span and the rise of ever shorter summaries, a tendency I probably find just as horrifying as he.

Viewing Beatty’s exposition alongside the possibility that the firemen are engaging in malignant busywork, it begins to look highly insincere. Beatty has changed from a surreptitiously well-read younger man to a self-justifying thug. Has he maybe been brutalised by his work? I feel this takes things beyond the confines of the story.

But the book is not a lost cause by any means. It still has a lot to say about the dumbing down of culture, mob rule, shortening attention spans and the dangers of veering away from emotionally difficult and troubling themes and explorations. If the reader can look past the awkward social conservatism, it’s still possible to salvage something from this, and it is the case that with the constant use of smartphones and constant shallow entertainment, we are currently seldom left with our own thoughts uninterrupted and undistracted. Finally, in my defence I’ve been doing something like this at night since 1980 and it hasn’t fried my brain yet. And finally finally, it really ought to be 233°C, not Fahrenheit 451!

‘Moby Dick’ – My Nemesis?

This is going to have to be a personal post rather than purporting to be a more abstract lit crit or review of said novel. I want to start more generally. A-levels seemed to be structured in an interesting way from an external perspective, that at some point they would confront the student or pupil with a particularly challenging, testing incident which almost seemed designed to force them to make a decision regarding their possible future or otherwise in that field. This may of course be paranoia, but if it is, it might still make a lot of sense to do this. For me, both English Literature and Biology seemed to do this, actually at the same time, although RE didn’t so far as I can tell, unless there’s something about my approach to such a subject, which after all has similarities with Philosophy, which meant that I breezed through whatever it was supposed to be. It may have been Biblical criticism. Alternatively, maybe it’s just that exposing oneself to a rigorous, wide-ranging and relatively advanced area of study just will tend to test one and is simply more likely to provide such hurdles. I’ve mentioned in passing that my experience at Pegwell Bay was nasty enough to persuade me that marine biology was not my future, but I won’t dwell on that because I want to focus more on what was happening at the same time and my response to it.

The Pegwell Bay experience was in fact linked to the ‘Moby Dick’ one. Since I was busy away trying to do fieldwork in a muddy patch of beach over in Thanet, I didn’t get informed of the summer reading for A-level English Literature. It wasn’t all bad by the way: there were cuttlefish eggs washed up on the beach containing fetuses which changed colour according to their background, and it may also have borne in certain facts about me to one of my biology teachers which were helpful when he became year head for writing my reference for UCCA. However, a couple of things came together, one of which was that I totally failed to read the set novel for the summer, Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’. I also failed to read James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’, but that was easier to remedy because it’s an anthology. ‘Homage To Catalonia’ was also involved now I come to think of it, and I managed to bluff my way through that quite effectively. The same was unfeasible for Melville’s brick of a novel. I haven’t re-read it for the purposes of this blog, but I have listened to Melvyn Bragg and guests going on about it and other things, and one comment made on it is ironically probably true of my life. The reviewer said that reading that novel was likely to completely change one’s life and attitude towards literature. Ironically, that’s entirely true of me because what it did was persuade me not to want to have anything at all to do with mainstream literature ever again, and this has been a major theme in my life ever since, with one exception in the form of considering writing my MA dissertation on the pauses in Samuel Beckett’s plays, which I didn’t follow through, and thereby hangs another unrelated tale too boring to relate here.

I first heard of ‘Moby Dick’, probably in November 1975 when David Attenborough mentioned it on ‘Fabulous Animals’ as a story where a white sperm whale is pursued by the one-legged Captain Ahab who dies holding on to the harpoon impaled in their side. It seemed to be some kind of sea story, something on which I was quite keen on at the time – Flannan Isle comes to mind, and the mysterious fate of the Waratah. There was nothing in my experience which should’ve put me off it, although I never considered reading it back then. And of course I unfortunately never considered reading it when I was supposed to either. It’s a dramatic life change to shift from being so enthusiastic and engrossed in mainstream novels to being utterly hostile and disillusioned about them. Some of this is undoubtedly due to the sheer length of ‘Moby Dick’ and the circumstances surrounding my failure to read it, but it was also observed by my O-level English teacher that whereas the earlier course did a good job of encouraging love of literature, the later one tended to kill it stone dead, such that even decades later someone exposed to it is happily using the cliché “stone dead” rather than using my imagination a bit more.

I still don’t really know what to make of the novel. It’s been observed that it has strong homoerotic overtones and that it probably isn’t post hoc eisegesis to read that into it. “Ishmael” shares a bed with Queequeg early on in the story and the man’s world described almost throughout lends itself to that too. Queequeg’s tattoos are also significant masculine adornment, and his unused coffin being decorated with them and later saving “Ishmael’s” life after the shipwreck, where he hugs the empty coffin until rescued. This seriously suggests that the references to “seamen” and “sperm” are absolutely meant as doubles entendres, and this is not a retroactive projection by bored schoolboys, but the actual “Moby Dick” title just seems to be a happy accident as the word “dick” wasn’t used that way back then. It seems strange that something so puerile-seeming could be incorporated into a popular mainstream novel of the nineteenth century without any comment, but maybe it was hidden in plain sight, as so many things are. It probably goes without saying that the whale in this is easily interpreted as a phallic symbol, and in fact just as many phalluses are unwanted and intrusive, the presence of this book in my life was also like that. It’s a massive erection, basically.

There used to be a whale fetus in a large jar in one of the biology labs. I always used to feel equally sad and fascinated about it. I expected that some unfortunate event had occurred to the mother, possibly in the Faroes, which had led to it falling into the school’s hands. The human skeletons which used to be present in state schools often also had dodgy origins and the one at mine was apparently eventually repatriated to its next of kin, which was actually two separate families as it was made up of two separate sets of human remains. I don’t know what happened to the whale, but I wonder if it might have been used by the English department in connection with the novel.

I’d long been fascinated by whales, and in fact cetaceans in general. The only ones I’d actually seen in the flesh except for the pilot whale were bottlenose dolphins, but there had been a lot of emphasis over the ’70s and ’80s that they were both magnificent and endangered, and in Britain they are of course the property of the Crown, like swans. It was what everyone used to associate with Greenpeace. Beyond that, as I’ve said before I used to be really into reading stories centred on other species such as ‘Watership Down’, ‘Ring Of Bright Water’, ‘Tarka The Otter’ and many others. These don’t sanitise the lives of the animals concerned and there’s plenty of death and suffering in them. Anthropomorphism also varies. ‘Tarka the Otter’ probably does it the least out of these examples. I’ve talked about my “preganism” before on here. I wasn’t to go vegan for three years after reading the novel and at that point wasn’t even vegetarian although I’d considered it. However, I had already long since begun to adopt what I might call a biocentric attitude: that humans are members of the animal kingdom and not set apart in a manner which is different than the individual traits of any other species.

I read ‘Moby Dick’ with that mindset, and having that attitude makes it a really difficult read on top of the difficulty the book presents more generally. Whales are charismatic organisms associated with characteristics such as majesty, grace and beauty. Melville does attempt to acknowledge that in his writing, but when it comes down to it, ‘Moby Dick’ is basically about a group of men who go out and murder numerous beings for their livelihood. They’re basically contract killers, but their victims are also generally arbitrary, with the exception of Ahab and the White Whale. It isn’t even expedient that these individuals need to be gotten out of the way as it might be in war, espionage or organised crime. They’re not even on the level of drive-by shootings, which seem to be about demonstrating loyalty and how far a gang member is prepared to go. These murders are arbitrary and solely motivated by profit, and okay it may be a tough life and manly, dangerous work but it reflects an obliviously genocidal attitude towards the biosphere. All that said, there is some mitigation in that in a sense going out and murdering whales is more humane from a utilitarian perspective than killing buffalo, a comparison Melville doesn’t make because the big massacre didn’t happen until a couple of decades later, because a whale can have a mass of more than a hundred buffalo and only one of them dies to provide all that mass of material for food and industrial purposes. By contrast, murdering the nameless beasts exploited for their milk, or sheep and pigs requires a lot more deaths to produce the same amount of materials, so in a sense whaling is much less unethical than “livestock” farming, and this is reflected in the murder of pilot whales in the Faroes – it’s just the same as what happens in a slaughterhouse except that it takes place in the open for all to see rather than being hidden away as if we’re ashamed of it as a society. But I felt like I was being expected to empathise with characters carrying out genocide. Now that can happen of course, and I’m sure that there are plenty of works of art that attempt to force their audiences to throw their lot in emotionally with the “baddies”, as ’twere, but when this is done as far as I know this is more to give the readers pause for thought about humanising evildoers. I wouldn’t say there’s no element of this at all in the story but I still feel that Melville cannot bring himself to condemn the practice of whaling completely, and it’s hardly worth observing that this is because he’s a man of his times and culture. Likewise, I can’t step out of my life and times in considering this book, which raises the frequent question of universality.

Melville does not, however, portray whaling as a morally neutral or positive activity. In chapter 105, ‘Does The Whale’s Magnitude Diminish? – Will He Perish?’, he does contemplate the possibility of whales becoming extinct at a remarkably early stage for that mindset. He compares the blood-soaked lower decks and crew as the corpse’s flesh is rendered to being in Hell, in Chapter 96, ‘The Try-Works’. This, however, also draws a parallel between this industrialised work and the “dark Satanic mills”, so it isn’t that the rendering toil is particularly infernal just because of what they’re essentially doing so much as it being infernal along with, say, working down a coal mine or in a steelworks. Hence industrial labour itself is a form of damnation, and certainly those who work in slaughterhouses are doing “proper” work and also the dirty work for a carnist population who seem to prefer to be oblivious, and the existence of factory ships out in the ocean carrying out the same dirty work is similar. But I don’t know whether Melville shows them in the same light.

I suspect that the White Whale is supposed to be a tabula rasa. I think it’s possible that the whiteness is supposed to be like a screen onto which diverse things can be projected. Chapter 42 is called ‘The Whiteness Of The Whale’. Without reading it, the concept of White fragility, though highly anachronistic, comes to mind, as does Han Kang’s ‘White Book’. Melville himself seems to portray whiteness as blankness and makes it horrifying, evoking the polar bear, the paleness of death and going on to connect it to cosmic indifference, and this might actually be the key to the whole book. Captain Ahab sees a rival in the White Whale, but none of the other captains or any of the crew think that way. He’s trying to make the whale personal when in fact the sheer vastness and whiteness make the true nature of the animal beyond comprehension, like the Universe. One gets the impression that “Ishmael” and Melville are both wrestling to make sense of the whale as a concept, and that the sheer length of the book is an attempt to render his narrative incomprehensible in the same way as the whale, and by extension the Universe, are. To the White Whale, Ahab is at most a tiny figure standing on a ship at the top of the world, dimensionally marginal and maybe not even that. Maybe to the White Whale, Ahab doesn’t even exist and there’s just the threat of the harpoon. The whiteness also acts as a mirror on which the characters see reflected their dominant attitude: anger, fear and awe. It’s also like the glare of the whiteness obliterates distinctions between good and evil, humanity and nature and sanity and madness.

One frustrating element of my English course’s, and in fact the more popular, approach to the novel is that the long quasi-encyclopaedic sections on “cetology”, as Melville puts it, are padding and can be skipped, because to my mind at the time, and possibly still, they’re the best bit of the novel. All the protagonists, human ones at least, emotional realism, interaction and dialogue mercifully take a back seat and finally we get to read something interesting and engaging. Even so, I think they’re there for two reasons. One is to ensure the novel is whale-sized and the other is to show a different way of attempting to encompass the cetacean and metaphorically the newly scientifically analysed natural world. This also fails. I may find it superficially comforting through systematisation, as I often do, but it’s not deep in the way Melville wishes it to be, and he acknowledges his failure as something common to us all.

Then there’s the issue of Starbuck, which nowadays is more shocking to me than it was then. Starbuck is the Pequod’s first mate and a Quaker, the first to recognise that Ahab is insane. He says of Ahab’s monomanic quest, “Vengeance on a dumb brute, [. . .] that simply smote thee
from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing,
Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.”. Starbuck is the voice of reason, supposedly, and the moral compass. However, considering they’re out there murdering countless whales, it seems to me that the entire enterprise is operating in a moral vacuum. I don’t understand how a Quaker can be involved in something like this. I presume it isn’t supposed to be realistic but I do believe they were involved in whaling. They also owned slaves, and while I’m aware that the past is not like the present, I would also hope that there are certain values which would persist and the fact that this actually happened is almost enough to make me give up hope for humanity. Quakers, although I’m sure they acknowledge their failings, are supposed to be examples to others and carry the torch of progress. I also seem to recall that the ship is owned by Quakers: it’s a Quaker business. That’s enough to make me want to puke to be honest. Quakers as mass murderers, and that’s probably entirely realistic for the mid-nineteenth century CE.

I have to say that in spite of all this I found the names “Pequod” and “Queequeg” tantalising because they seem to betray a pattern of sound from the same language, possibly one spoken in Nantucket, and I wanted to know what that language was. It’s quite distinct from languages spoken elsewhere on the continent, unsurprisingly, which does at least show some respect for the distinct ethnicities the White people genocided and oppressed. Queequeg represents non-Western spiritual completeness, which is a bit like the noble savage myth but you can’t really expect English language literature from getting on for two centuries ago not to be racist, so unlike the rest I can look past that. Entertaining it, there is the well-known difference between the White men killing the buffalo and removing only small parts of their bodies and the more reverent and ecologically sound approach taken by their previous killers. It might be worth mentioning that Queequeg may be from a less homophobic culture than “Ishmael”, and therefore that the homoerotic overtones in their relationship might be less repressed for him, and there’s also the contrast between their friendship and Ahab’s animosity with the whale.

One notable feature of the book is that it purports to be the Great American Novel and is not set in America but on the ocean. It begins in North America but quickly leaves it, and there may be something about the idea that America actually is the world or aims to dominate it in that approach. The ocean is also the Wild West in a sense, unbounded, vast and full of potential. Twentieth century SF author Barry M Longyear also extended the notion of Manifest Destiny, this time into the cosmos, though in a manner conscious of colonialism, and in a way this novel is a precursor to that, although that potential is still quite nebulous at this point, perhaps reflecting the tabula rasa and projections made upon the whale. It makes the US feel like an infant nation looking forward to growing up and achieving great things.

As you can see, I haven’t got a lot to say about ‘Moby Dick’ and what I have said is highly contaminated by my own views and doesn’t seem germane to the novel. To me its role is probably as a whiteboard on which to discern what went wrong with my literary appreciation. I find that I can’t read it without being overcome with a kind of moral repulsion at its acceptance of the outrage against cetaceans as a backdrop to the story. This is partly admitted by Melville, but it also says something about me. You’d fail to appreciate Shakespeare if you couldn’t look past the fact that he wrote in an early modern Western society where Christianity was dominant, patriarchy and the monarchy were unquestioned and democracy was a minor detail of ancient Greek history. I do know someone who is in fact unable to appreciate him for these exact reasons, but I do enjoy his work. I encounter two basic problems with mainstream literary novels. One is that I tend to make too many associations and am unable to give them different weights, which is similar to my inability to recognise my own strengths and weaknesses. The other, though, is illustrated by my response to ‘Moby Dick’, namely that I can’t see past my moral outrage and am dominated by my immediate impressions of a piece of writing. Maybe in the end I am myself like Ahab and I can’t see past the white whale that is mainstream literary fiction. Maybe it’s a tabula rasa to me on which I end up projecting anything arbitrarily, or maybe it mirrors myself.

John

Back in the day, I think the 1960s, Kingsley Amis wrote a book called ‘The James Bond Dossier, or Every Man His Own 007’. This was basically a collection of various bits and pieces from Ian Fleming’s work, which presumably Amis had collected as a way of helping him write his own Bond stories. It purports to be how someone could best imitate James Bond. One of the ruses he mentions is to carry around a book called ‘The Bible Designed To Be Read As Living Literature’, hollowed out to store a gun in it. I don’t know if this crops up in any real Bond story but it’s similar to those “books” you can get which are boringly titled so as to disguise the fact that they’re not actually books but storage for money or keys and the like. Because I’m the way I am, I once picked up one of these books out of interest and was disappointed to find it wasn’t real. It also brings to mind the habit of making a room look like it’s lined with bookshelves by sticking the spines of books to the walls, which is quite saddening I think.

Nonetheless, there is a real book out there called ‘The Bible Designed To Be Read As Living Literature’, published in the 1930s by someone called Ernest Sutherland Bates. It’s the King James Version of the Bible typeset as a single column, like a novel, with various omissions such as the “begats”, and with different forms of writing set out to highlight the fact that they’re meant, for example, to be verse or prose. It’s been said that there’s something deadening about reading a book organised into columns. The Bible, encyclopædias and dictionaries are laid out that way, and it gives the impression of being a mere reference work and in no way entertaining or engaging on an emotional level. Some of the Bible is, to be sure, like this, but not all. But in this case it’s still the KJV rather than something more engaging to a modern audience.

I want to interject a note at this point, by which time I may already have lost most of my potential audience. Please don’t be boring and turn this into an argument about religion, because this is nothing to do with the topic of this post, and if you do that, it probably means you’re not in a place when you can look at the Bible in this way. That’s understandable because of the likes of the assumption of animal exploitation, hostility to other spiritual paths, homophobia and sexism which seems to inhere in much of Scripture. The Bible is a collection of ancient works of literature and other kinds of text. I’ve noticed that many anti-theist atheists seem, oddly, to accept the historical-grammatical approach to the Bible, which is strange because that’s exactly how fundamentalists see it and it’s fine with them if you do that. I suspect, though, that this arises from ignorance of the Higher Criticism, which has been around since the eighteenth century, and is deployed by most serious Biblical scholars who aren’t fundamentalists. Just as you let conservative Christians have it their own way when you say you aren’t Christian just because you happen to be atheist, you also let them set the agenda by conceding to the historical-grammatical approach. It’s maybe a century older than more intellectually respectable Biblical criticism, but wasn’t the way the early Church or the Roman Catholic or Orthodox churches approached the text.

Instead, look at it this way. Over a period of several centuries, people collected an oral tradition into the Torah, most of which wasn’t written down, apparently from four different sources. The creation accounts and other stories in the Book of Genesis seem to originate from such sources as the Sumerians, for example. Then there’s poetry, proverbs, attempts to chronicle, sermons, lamentations and finally, after almost a thousand years, a flurry of activity by an initially Jewish sect over a few decades consisting largely of letters and collections of the sayings of Jesus. You do not have to believe any of it to approach it intellectually, and you can look at it just as literature. Just because you’re neither Jewish nor Christian doesn’t mean you don’t live in a world which is enormously influenced by this corpus of texts, which I think I can be detached enough to judge as an interesting record of the literature and attitudes of patriarchs in the Near East in the late Bronze and early Iron Ages.

Just a few words on the Synoptic Gospels, which are the first three in order. Hypothetically, Mark was the earliest gospel to be written, and the easiest to read. It’s the shortest, mainly covers the Passion and ends with the empty tomb with no suggestion of resurrection. Some versions of the gospel have a bit added at the end which briefly recount the events after the resurrection, but this isn’t in the oldest versions of the gospel and is nowadays excluded. Mark was then used as a source by Matthew and Luke, and both appear to have drawn on a separate source which is referred to as Q – Quelle (German for “source”) – which is a collection of apparent quotes from Jesus. This is remarkably similar to the Gospel of Thomas, which is just such a collection and therefore may actually be either Q or close to it. Mark was written in the 70s and is anonymous. Matthew is the Jewish gospel, that is, it was written for a Jewish readership. Luke is the most approachable gospel and has the most original material. It reads more like a story. It should also be noted that the whole of the New Testament is written in colloquial Greek rather than the higher register used by intellectuals and poets. It always makes me think of Mills And Boon for that reason, which is not a criticism. It just means it speaks directly to people in the language of the street.

Then there’s John, and the Johannine literature in other parts of the New Testament.

John is respectably referred to as the “Fourth Gospel”, because at no point is authorship claimed by anyone in the text. Even reading it in English, one gets the impression that something odd is going on. There’s something about the writing style which stands out and reads quite oddly to a modern audience. This of course pales into insignificance compared to the eccentric style of Revelation, also claimed to be John’s work. There are also three letters attributed to John in the New Testament, including the shortest book in the whole Christian Bible, 3 John, which is only two hundred words long. The gospel of John was written later than the others, in about 90, and clearly after a time where lots of people have been able to ruminate over the implications of their new religion and the significance of the figure of Jesus. It uses a fair number of pretty high-flown concepts such as the Logos, which stands out because it’s mentioned in the first sentence of the whole gospel.

I must confess that I haven’t read the whole gospel of John in Greek. However, even without having done so, the distinctive style shows through any translation I’ve been exposed to. It tends to repeat certain key terms over and over again. The word “believe” is used more than eight dozen times, which sounds insignificant until you realise that’s more than in all of the synoptics combined. The word “kosmos”, translated as “world” although there are also other words translated as “world” such as “aion”. “Kosmos” is used six and half dozen times, and in the whole Bible (I assume this means the New Testament plus the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible) it only occurs three and a quarter times as many. I personally like the idea of leaving it as “Cosmos”, but “System” might be a better word for it. It also uses words for “name”, “light”, “truth”, “darkness” and “love”, i.e. “agape” which is consummate love combining passion, intimacy and commitment, a lot, and it says “amen” more often than usual as well.

There’s also a strong tendency to use synonyms and double meanings. For instance, when Jesus is lifted up on the cross, the word used also means “exalted”. Consequently, there are lots of misunderstandings portrayed in the narrative, and this is interesting because it’s only the writer of this gospel who includes the ambiguities. Jesus, the main character in this book, tends to speak in spiritual terms while his audience understands him in concrete terms. For instance, he refers to his body as a “temple”, leading people to think he was talking about the idea of restoring the Jewish temple. Altogether there are a couple of dozen examples of this kind of thing. It needs to be borne in mind that the ambiguity and synonyms would sometimes need to carry over into the Aramaic that he would’ve actually been speaking in reality, so it would be interesting to note whether the synonyms tend to be used in the narrative or the dialogue, and whether similar wording also works in Aramaic. Another example is his use of “anothen” to mean “(born) again”, which leads to another misunderstanding that the person he’s speaking to expresses by saying he can’t re-enter his mother’s womb. “Anothen” means “from the top”, “from above” and also “again”, so it’s like the musical phrase “da capo”, and means you have to be born from above, i.e. from Heaven or God, or perhaps God as the Holy Spirit. And this issue with the combination of synonyms, ambiguity and recorded responses to the ambiguity where that’s actually a feature of the writing style suggests one of two things to me. Either this is a fictionalised version of the story of Jesus, which is why I referred to him as the central character here, or it’s a feature of the dialogue which was lost from the synoptic gospels but somehow preserved in an account which wasn’t set down until later, which doesn’t seem to work.

Light, water and bread are used as symbols widely through the gospel, and there are many other symbols, more in fact than in the other gospels. In John 6:22, Jesus refers to the bread of heaven, and the bread of life, alluding also to manna from heaven. Oddly, it doesn’t refer to the blessing of bread in the Last Supper.

The wider structure of the gospel also includes what might nowadays be footnotes and sudden breaks to the flow of the story. In the NIV, chapter 12 verses 30-33 read:

Jesus said, “This voice was for your benefit, not mine.  Now is the time for judgment on this world; now the prince of this world will be driven out.  And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”  He said this to show the kind of death he was going to die.

and in chapter 10:

“Very truly I tell you Pharisees, anyone who does not enter the sheep pen by the gate, but climbs in by some other way, is a thief and a robber. The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice. But they will never follow a stranger; in fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognize a stranger’s voice.” Jesus used this figure of speech, but the Pharisees did not understand what he was telling them.

Both of these are basically footnotes, expressed differently due to the different conventions at the time.There are also “aporias”. Jesus is in Galilee in chapter four, Jerusalem in chapter five and back in Galilee in chapter six. Some people have actually rearranged the order of the chapters here to resolve this, but the earliest versions have this ordering. At the end of chapter twenty, it reads like the book is being wound up:

Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

Then chapter twenty-one tells of a miraculous catch of fish (not very vegan but that’s another tale) and carried on with the narrative like it’s tacked on at the end. Some people have gone so far as to suggest that “John” was suffering from dementia at this point, and I think his disorganisation is interesting if one assumes that this is also the author of the Book of Revelation, which of course reads like an acid trip. Is there something going on in his brain? If so, does it matter that he might not be a reliable narrator?

The book also uses irony. For instance, the Sanhedrin express their concerns that if Jesus is permitted to continue everyone will end up taking him seriously, which is of course what actually happened. Incidentally, you don’t have to believe Jesus was the Messiah or a miracle-worker to accept that this is ironic in the context of the belief system of the author. Caiaphas then says “you do not realise that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish”, which is dramatic irony because it alludes to atonement. This all means, of course, that by the time the gospel was written, certain doctrines had already become established which may not be apparent in the other gospels, particularly Mark where there’s no resurrection at all.

John doesn’t talk about Jesus’s birth or childhood, the temptation in the wilderness, the Sermon on the Mount, the Last Supper, the Transfiguration, healing lepers, casting out demons or tax collectors and it only mentions the Kingdom of God twice. On the other hand, the first five chapters are unique, Jesus is referred to as the Messiah, the Lamb of God, rabbi, the king of Israel and the Son of God. He also utters a number of “I am…” statements. All of these features, or their lack, make John unusual.

Now the question arises in my mind of whether a similar style can be detected elsewhere in the books attributed to John. They may not all have been written by the same person, and if they were it’s the only example of a New Testament author who wrote both letters and a gospel, and if Revelation is included he also wrote a unique book of the Bible. Even if this was done by a group of people, as is often concluded nowadays, there’s a certain unity between them.Taken together, there are references to the Logos in Revelation as well, and possibly in one of the epistles. They’re all particularly insistent on the idea of God become human, and they all tend to polarise darkness and light, truth and falsehood, and so forth. Revelation then goes on to dramatise this polarisation through the likes of Babylon and Jerusalem.

This brings me of course to the book of Revelation itself, although I feel I haven’t paid as much attention as I might have to the epistles. I have to say I do think this was written by one person because it reads like a continuous narrative, and of course it lends itself to all sorts of interpretations. There are a number of possible readings of the book, some of which are mutually incompatible, and each has a name:

• The Futurist view sees the book as a prophecy of the End Times. This is the view which everyone seems to think is what it’s “supposed” to be about, Christian and non-Christian alike, and it’s shown, for example, in the Left Behind series.
• The Historicist view can be somewhat broader, and sees the book as covering a period from the time of the author up until the end of the world.
• The Preterist view is that it’s a camouflaged narrative of the history of the persecution of the early church, for instance by Nero, whose name can be made to add up to 666.
• The Idealist view is that it represents the idea that God will always triumph in particular situations.

The futurist and historicist views have a number of sub-categories divided up according to their view of the millennium and tribulation, meaning that there are also three views regarding the millennium:

• Premillennialism: the Second Coming witll usher in a thousand-year age of peace.
• Postmillenialism: the Second Coming will occur after a golden age of Christian dominion.
• Amillennialism: the millennium is not a literal thousand-year period but represents the Church Age.

The first two of these depend on a pre-existing interpretation of the book as futurist or historicist.

I’m not going to offer a view on these except to say that they tend to have political consequences, particularly with reference to Zionism but also elsewhere, and that those who make much of the symbolism in the Book of Revelation tend to lead to specific attempts to link current affairs to the book which go in and out of fashion. For instance, one of the many-headed beasts has been taken to refer to the Common Market and 666 to bar codes. Amillennialism was popular in the nineteenth century but fell out of favour due to the World Wars and the Holocaust, because the idea of progress towards the Kingdom of Heaven is hard to reconcile with these unless you decide you’re a Nazi or something.

I don’t know how far I’ve got with this. The point I’m trying to make is that although the themes in these writings are Christian, it doesn’t follow that you have to believe in any of it to engage with it, and that whether or not you personally might engage, others do, and that has political and perhaps also personal consequences. Also, Johannine Literature is, apart from anything else it might be, actually literature and can be approached in the same way as a novel might be. It’s important to recognise that these are important and influential texts, and to leave your personal beliefs behind when you read them, although of course for some it’s important to do so with these beliefs in mind. But you don’t have to be that person.