Whole Oceans Away by Barnum Jill; Kelley Wyn; Sten Christopher

Author:Barnum, Jill; Kelley, Wyn; Sten, Christopher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Kent State University Press

No amount of worldly comfort can deliver us from these uncertainties. Foundations of rock are untrustworthy. The support of water is still more so, and doubloons provide ballast, not buoyancy. Over a pit of emptiness the Pequod also sails.

After Moby-Dick, heroism evaporates from Melville’s depictions of labor and commerce. Materialism and valor go their separate ways. The paper pushers in the world of Bartleby are incapable of doing their work heroically; the only responses open to them lie in inertia and heroic refusal. In “The Tartarus of Maids,” even sex and procreation have been pushed aside by sterile, life-sapping industrial production. In The Confidence-Man, the acquisition of wealth has diminished to an absurd con game, a joke upon both character and reader. To those who regard the project of America as a matter of soul making instead of moneymaking, dollars would seem to have damned not only Melville but the heroic spirit of his culture.

And yet, from another perspective, American materialism after the time of Moby-Dick—and the experience of the industrialized globe in general—have offered visions akin to a species of heroism, one that some would argue became more palpable, not less so, when the quest for oil turned away from Leviathan and toward the depths of the earth. In Rockefeller, as well as in Ahab, reside an energy and magnitude that inspire at the same time that they may appall. In their outward appearances, the teeming vastness of financial markets, the upward thrust of skylines, and the terrific speed of air travel are triumphs of will and effort that defy denigration. If heroism were only a matter of grand displays of power, we would have to call our age heroic. But we do not, for we know that heroism demands an ability to see and strike beyond the mask—a kind of inner life that can infuse mere force with the dignity of spiritual striving. Perhaps materialism has not successfully redefined heroism. In this new and anxious century, however, it is doing an astonishingly convincing job of redefining tragedy.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.