The Cambridge Introduction to the Novel by Marina MacKay

Author:Marina MacKay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2011-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

James proposes that the American novel lacked the ready-made settings that came with Britain’s long “civilized” history and cultural accomplishments. But, he goes on to say, “a good deal remains” – and what you notice as you read this list is that these “lacks” refer mainly to a very narrow band of society: the traditional educational, clerical, military, and educational hierarchies; the leisure activities of the titled and wealthy (“no Epsom nor Ascot!”); and Britain’s architectural and cultural monuments to wealth and status. The American “joke” is a democratic one: that only a British novelist could look at this list and suppose that American writers have nothing to write about.

Dedicated to Hawthorne, the author whose fiction prompted James’s remarks, the American classic Moby-Dick (1851) has a different kind of setting altogether, a Nantucket whaling ship on the hunt for the white sperm whale to which the godless but godlike captain lost his leg on an earlier expedition. Instead of the contingent social particularities that James associated with the British novel – Epsom, Ascot, and the rest of it – we have a bid for the timelessly, transcendently universal made through the novel’s seascape: the pursuit of what Melville calls “landlessness,” or a willingness to lose the comfortable earth-bound orthodoxies of social existence, becomes the highest human virtue in the novel.26 In an ironic departure from the social and class categories that (James implied) give their orderliness to the British novel, Moby-Dick is a novel about the failure of categorizations, an encyclopedia of whaling that admits at every turn the limits of its own encyclopedic mode. Chapter after chapter of this novel tackles an individual aspect of the whale and whaling, but not even the most dogged accumulation of facts can shed light on the predestined, fated act of self-destruction that the novel describes. Captain Ahab will destroy himself, his ship, and all but one of his men in this quest and yet will not call off the hunt for the white whale that has become for him a material, tangible embodiment of the metaphysical evil that lurks unseen everywhere and at all times.

So while this novel about work and workers seems to propose an almost encyclopedic factuality, all its explanatory detail is put ultimately into the service of what you might call a mythology, or an overarching way of thinking about the place of human beings in the universe. You can see its influence in the modernist Conrad’s use of the ocean in The Shadow-Line (1917), his autobiographical novel about a ship’s captain tormented by deadly illness, madness, guilt, and malevolence of a quasi-supernatural order; and you can see its influence very clearly, too, on Ernest Hemingway’s novella The Old Man and the Sea (1952), about a Cuban fisherman, the Christ-like Santiago, and his struggle with a giant marlin. More generally, though, it would be true to say of many realistic-seeming novels that what initially resembles a scrupulously particular attention to the details of laboring life proves to be driven by some further-reaching and more metaphysical interest.

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