/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.13714557]

>>He had made his way through some difficult times psychologically, and he had just about come to the end of his career as a writer of fiction. On his way to his destination he stopped over to see Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom he had known at the time he was composing Moby-Dick. Hawthorne was at that time the American consul at Liverpool. He escorted his houseguest to the seashore at Southport on a blustery November day where the two of them, sheltered by the sand dunes, smoked cigars and talked, Melville apparently doing most of the talking as in the old days when they both lived in the Berkshires. As Hawthorne reported in his notebooks, Melville said that he had "pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated."

;_;

[Anonymous No.13714824]

Damn what happened to Am*ricans? Was it the 90's? The 1890's I mean

[Anonymous No.13714834]

Huh? Melville didn't off himself.

[Anonymous No.13715066]

>>13714557
>Melville said that he had "pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated."

What did he mean by that? Was he unhappy with his wife? The way his books were received?

[Anonymous No.13715078]

>While some reviewers recognized the greatness of Moby-Dick, it failed to achieve the success Melville had hoped for, selling only a scant 3,100 copies during his lifetime. “Though I wrote the Gospels in this century,” he lamented to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, “I shall die in the gutter.”

[Anonymous No.13715106]

>Your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God’s… It is a strange feeling — no hopefulness is in it, no despair. Content — that is it; and irresponsibility; but without licentious inclination. I speak now of my profoundest sense of being, not of an incidental feeling.

>Whence come you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips — lo, they are yours and not mine. I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces.

[Anonymous No.13715491]

>>13715106

Greatest friendship of all time.

[Anonymous No.13716178]

>>13715491

>Melville met the author Nathaniel Hawthorne at a picnic and an ensuing hike up Monument Mountain in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts on August 5, 1850. Melville and Hawthorne established an immediate and intense connection. As a local journalist would later write: "the two were compelled to take shelter in a narrow recess of the rocks... Two hours of enforced intercourse settled the matter. They learned so much of each other's character, and found that they held so much of thought, feeling and opinion in common, that the most intimate friendship for the future was inevitable."

[Anonymous No.13716893]

>>13715078
I always found it to be a cruel joke the universe pulled on him. To be immortal but to never have the sense of accomplishment that comes with it.

[Anonymous No.13716911]

>>13714557
so they were gay lovers?

[Anonymous No.13716923]

>>13714834
He drank himself to death

[Anonymous No.13717020]

>>13716923
That’s interesting. I always felt that the positivity in money dick rang hollow...talk of being an eagle soaring above it all, the idea that as long as we don’t look at it we’ll be ok...no genuine notion of how to process trauma and pain. Facile coping. Must have had real cunty parents

[Anonymous No.13717093]

>>13715066
Not saying I know what he meant but apparently he did have an unhappy marriage. His wife had no interest in literature whatsoever and he married in order to connect with a respected family. When he jumped ship and spent time in the pacific islands he almost was absorbed into their culture, he was going to have a wife and they were going to tattoo him as a right of passage, but he left and went back to America. He was generally unhappy with the way his books were received, the only one that really did well was his first, Typee.he wrote some amazing books, including a few after Moby-Dick, but after writing the Confidence-Man (brilliant book) and still receiving no acclaim, he basically gave into his wife who was constantly telling him to give up writing (novels at least, which took a lot of work) so for the remainder of his career he almost exclusively wrote poetry, except for right at the end he started writing some stuff again (Billy Budd and some fragments)

[Anonymous No.13717139]

>>13717020
>I always felt that the positivity in money dick rang hollow...talk of being an eagle soaring above it all, the idea that as long as we don’t look at it we’ll be ok
What? Moby-Dick is an incredibly melancholic book. "Melancholic" is one of his favorite words, alongside "wan" and "bleak" and "woe." Did you even read it? There is a great deal of awe and joy too, but that sort of mystic's joy is a close cousin to philosophic sorrow. Ecclesiastes and Hamlet and King Lear were all central fonts of inspiration for the book; didn't you notice? And besides: he only became a proper alcoholic decades later, after his attempts at high art rather than potboiler schlock pushed him into obscurity and he lived out his final years thinking himself a failure, devoted only to poetry and the bottle.

[Anonymous No.13717530]

Why....Why did Melville add a check-mark to this passage in his copy of Schopenhauer's Counsels and Maxims?

[Anonymous No.13717623]

>>13717530
He liked Schopenhauer a lot, better than Hegel I believe

[Anonymous No.13717629]

>>13717530
I never knew Melville was such a Schopenhauer aficionado. I found this article online which is a quite interesting and comprehensive commentary on the relation of their works. Thank god for all those poor comp lit majors with nothing better to do:

https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/IFR/article/view/7765/8822

[Anonymous No.13717634]

>>13717530

[Anonymous No.13717637]

>>13717629
>Thank god for all those comp lit majors

Think I just heard hell freezing over

[Anonymous No.13717657]

He'll always be my Anakim.

[Anonymous No.13717902]

>>13717139
Read more carefully, I didn’t characterize the book as positive, I said when positivity in the book did occur, it rang hollow. And I was referencing a specific paragraph involving an eagle. And if you think failure alone is sufficient to determine a person to self-annihilation you have a very weak understanding of the mind.

[Anonymous No.13718393]

>>13715491
Nope. Hawthorne's pretty cold on Moby Dick's value as a book.

[Anonymous No.13718576]

>>13717902
>Read more carefully, I didn’t characterize the book as positive, I said when positivity in the book did occur, it rang hollow.
Garbage defense. I strongly disagree, even remembering the passage you mention. You confuse hollowness with depth!
>And if you think failure alone is sufficient to determine a person to self-annihilation you have a very weak understanding of the mind.
Oh, I,see: literally a gibberish opinion, just a skip and a jump from being meaningless nonsense. I see that if an argument were pushed with you, you would endlessly move the goalposts. You have a very weak understanding of understanding.

[Anonymous No.13718612]

>>13716178
>Two hours of enforced intercourse settled the matter.

hot

[Anonymous No.13718620]

>>13718612

Who did the enforcing I wonder?

[Anonymous No.13718716]

I’ve read a lot of Melville but I’m just reading Typee for the first time and trying to imagine how all exotica hit Victorian America. Sexy native girls, cannibals, missionaries suck...it’s a captivity narrative which would have been familiar to American audiences but rather than horror among the savages, the narrator is in paradise.
How could Melville ever relive those highs of life in the Marquesas, then the act of writing about it turning him from a life of aimless disappointment into a literary celebrity? Even as his writing soared to new heights (Typee is entertaining but raw) he would never relive that early flush of acclaim.

[Anonymous No.13718774]

[Anonymous No.13718782]

>>13718716
>trying to imagine how all exotica hit Victorian America

Like discovering other planets.

[Anonymous No.13718825]

>>13718620
G*d

[Anonymous No.13720059]

>>13718716
Is it as homoerotic as people say?

[Anonymous No.13720070]

>>13718774

[Anonymous No.13720984]

>>13716178
>enforced intercourse
>enforced intercourse
>enforced intercourse

[Anonymous No.13720993]

THARR SHE BLOWS

[Anonymous No.13721884]

[Anonymous No.13722491]

>>13720059
Typee so far doesn’t seem very gay by Melvillian standards, certainly less so than Moby Dick or Billy Budd. There’s not much bromance with the shipmate that the narrator deserts with, no Qeegqeeg type native mancrush and the only romance so far is with a native girl. Melville describes Marquesas society as casually polyamorous but even reading between the lines I don’t see much gay stuff going on.