All in a 'Dayswork': Melville and The White Whale - Vol. 2, No. 2
A Review of 'Dayswork': A Novel (Bachelder & Habel, 2023), Herman Melville and Moby-Dick
In the book, American Canon: Literary Genius From Emerson to Pynchon - {Harold Bloom: Five Decades of Writing on American Literature} (Edited by David Mikics, 2019), Bloom is credited with saying, “I would not change a sentence of Moby-Dick” (p. 101). This is indeed high praise from the foremost literary critic in the United States. Indeed, Bloom also marks Moby-Dick as in his top fifty list for “novels to read and reread” (see The Bright Book of Life, 2020). However, the full literary critique of Herman Melville is offered in this amazing example of literary critique which is an earlier publication
The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime (Bloom, 2015). I will not go through and simply replicate what Bloom has already written, rather I am going to let this next statement kinda float out there for a while:
I (D. S. Skye) the writer of this literary review, did not read Moby-Dick in its entirety (from start to finish) until after reading this book, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly (2011), which prompted me (let’s say - kicked in me in the backside to just do it) to finally tackle - it. That’s right - about thirteen (13) years ago! - So in effect moving into the later years of my academic career was my first go at Moby-Dick.
More about the Dreyfus and Kelly book (2011) below as a part of this review posting, but I have three theories as to why the delay and avoidance of my reading Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. 1) I may have tried to read it, but it did not resonate with me in my formative years at all; 2) I was already fully engaged with reading Dante, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Proust, and Joyce, and I suppose I did not have enough bandwidth to process the significance or content of Moby-Dick; 3) I blame the book (1973) and the movie (1974) - Jaws. Wait! Hear me out. My parents bought the hardcover book and
I ended up reading it too. I think this (Jaws) is the modernized version of Moby-Dick set in Amity (fictional setting) and instead of a whale - we get a shark. But the themes and symbolism (in my opinion) of Jaws are remarkably similar in terms of the setting, man vs. nature, the ship/boat, Quint/Ahab, Brody/Ishmael, and I think the movie struck a nerve with the audience on the power and lethality of “nature” and the vulnerability of humans who go out to sea. And a big check on hubris. But this would be a digression to unpack the meaning of Jaws at this juncture, needless to say - the book and movie were my obsession for decades to follow. One of the working titles for Benchley’s book was Leviathan Rising…but Jaws ended up as the title at publication.
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So…in late June and early July of 2024, I went back to Bloom’s book, The Daemon Knows (2015) and the Dreyfus and Dorrance book, All Things Shining, pulled them from my shelf, and reacquainted myself with the materials and literary critique. Why? Because I am focusing on this book for this review posting:
Dayswork: A Novel by Chris Bachelder & Jennider Habel (2023).
And this book is about an obsession with Herman Melville that emerges during the pandemic lockdown. But first a bit more about Moby-Dick from Bloom, Dreyfus and Dorrance, and a few other perspectives in the literature.
I turn to Harold Bloom (The Daemon Knows) to set the stage and explore the monumental impact of the author Herman Melville and the book, Moby-Dick. So Bloom goes this far about Moby-Dick: “Like its prototype - Hamlet, Moby-Dick is a Poem Unlimited.” Bloom has all but placed Melville (and Walt Whitman too) on (literary) par with Shakespeare. Melville? Really? Yes. Bloom proposed that Melville is the “most Shakespearean of our authors (p. 11), and that we should think of “Ahab as a tormented Job who fights back and will not accept the tyranny of the Leviathan” (p. 12). And “Moby-Dick is one major American variant upon the Homeric-Virgilian-Miltonic epic” (p. 135). And listen to me thinking that Jaws (Benchley/Speilberg 1973-1974) was something “special.”
Basically, Bloom has convinced me that I missed something important in my literary life by waiting so long to finally read Moby-Dick, but even then I am still not convinced of Melville (Moby-Dick) as in the top tier of literary giants in the American canon. But now I can understand the literary context for Moby-Dick as I examined the layers of influence on Melville, and the impact it had on authors (and literary critics) who found inspiration in the decades that followed - including Bachelder and Habel.
I am also fascinated by the ongoing “scholarly industry” that is still analyzing Moby-Dick in the same methodical way as James Joyce’s Ulysses. For example, one research article emphasized a psychoanalytical framework (Freud), and also focused on Lacan's and Burke's theories on the conscious and unconscious mind and the contrast between the beautiful and the sublime. The conclusion of this article posited that "Moby Dick" is really about the human psyche, set against the ocean's expanse. The narrative aboard the Pequod encapsulates the collective human psyche, presenting a tableau of collective yearnings, fears, and fixations. The enigmatic Moby-Dick stands as a symbol of nature's grandeur and humanity's relentless pursuit of the unfathomable, with otherworldly occurrences enhancing the story's spectral quality. The story's heart lies in the psychological journey, mainly through Ahab's quixotic quest for the whale, a metaphor for the human penchant for chasing the unreachable (see: A Psychoanalytical Study of the Gothic Marine Locales in Herman Melville's Moby Dick Vol. 14, No. 5, 2024 - Theory and Practice in Language Studies).
Digging further, and as another example, one research paper claimed that Moby-Dick is an literary novel examining the tenets of existentialism in the tradition of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, and on par with Dostoevsky by speaking to the alienation and estrangement of the modern human condition (Ishag, 1965). It was astonishing for me to hear that Melville and Nietzsche were closer in the philosophical bearings, and that they both shared the perspective that humans had to form their own consciousness against a world (and universe) that provided no template for self-reflection. The “hazardous journey” is the quest to discover that answer from within and not from some external given or received view from society/religion.
As you can see, Moby-Dick has attained (for some) the status of a mysterious puzzle, an enigmatic novel, a great landscape of ontology, rich and descriptive set pieces, an assortment of characters that appear to be archetypal against the backdrop of nature unbound, a provocation and warning…and so on. If you step back and take a deep breath, one wonders how did Melville create such a deeply layered novel? Who was he exactly? Where did he pick up on the great philosophical questions and learn how to craft the messages and weaves in the tropes such that it emerged as one of the great novels of American literature? Is Moby-Dick really a exploration of epistemological issues but hidden a story about hunting a whale? Is it Melville’s attempt at becoming a Shakespearean master? It seems everyone has a perspective on what the novel was meant to convey and some are forever transformed by reading Melville’s novel. And the fascination, the interest, and creative writing about Melville’s works, his life, and his contexts continues on in this book:
Dayswork: A Novel by Chris Bachelder & Jennider Habel (2023).
First, a little bit more about the premise of the book from the publisher:
In the endless days of the pandemic, a woman spends her time sorting fact from fiction in the life and work of Herman Melville. As she delves into Melville’s impulsive purchase of a Massachusetts farmhouse, his fevered revision of Moby-Dick there, his intense friendship with neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne, and his troubled and troubling marriage to Elizabeth Shaw, she becomes increasingly obsessed by what his devotion to his art reveals about cost, worth, and debt. Her preoccupation both deepens and expands, and her days’ work extends outward to an orbiting cast of Melvillean questers and fanatics, as well as to biographers and writers—among them Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell—whose lives resonate with Melville’s. As she pulls these distant figures close, her quarantine quest ultimately becomes a midlife reckoning with her own marriage and ambition. Absorbing, charming, and intimate, Dayswork considers the blurry lines between life and literature, the slippage between what happens and what gets recorded, and the ways we locate ourselves in the lives of others. In wry, epigrammatic prose, Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel have crafted an exquisite and daring novel.
I saw the book cover and a brief description in a book review magazine and I knew I had to follow-up on it. The creative idea was what set the hooks in me: the craftwork would be sort of a biography of Melville in epigrammatic fashion (think: chunks of information; blocky; gems, gold nuggets; diamonds…) per page and yet…there is also the story of the couple (husband/wife) sharing their perspectives on Melville and resulting in a collaborative effort; thus, perhaps a metafictional format. And it works! It is experimental and yet highly interconnected with the setting of the Melville’s time, and then synchronized with other authors (see Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick; and then Hardwick’s book on Melville, 2000), and then synched again with
the authors of the book Dayswork (Bachelder & Habel) in this grand temporal cohesion. The interesting part is how the novel is created in the context of the pandemic where there was a deliberative focus by the marriage partners on working on the project together, but also realizing that the process for Melville was quite different. Yes, Melville had plenty of help (from wife and family members) but the cost of his obsession with writing the great novel had many consequences. Would the same outcome track for the woman writer as protagonist in the novel? Would working on the book by the collaborative authors (husband/wife) impact their marriage? Does the craftwork and the creative effort assume sacrifice by putting the project above all else? Does the artist work in their own world at the expense of others?
Epigrammatic notes (in the style of Bachelder & Habel):
Lizzie Melville and Lizzie Hardwick sharing first name and sharing similar martial challenges in an eerie mirrored effect even over that span of time. And then I notice that the woman who is obsessed with Melville (sorting out fact from fiction) seems to be really spending a lot of time on Melville et al. Is this what Melville does to people? They get pulled in to vortex of it all?
I did know that were a group of people who were “followers” of Melville - then and now; otherwise known as Melvilleans. That clicked a memory for me of the ‘camps’ within Bardology: Stratfordians - and - Oxfordians.
Wait! Robert Lowell and Hermann Melville have some interesting things in common - perhaps behaviorally? Does history repeat itself? Do some writers channel the weird energy of previous authors - and then live out their careers accordingly? Lighting strikes twice?
This epigrammatic style of Bachelder & Habel - as it unfolds with the woman who is gathering the notes (in their novel) - is sometimes a ‘bird’s nest’ of thoughts and factoids. Did Nietzsche write this way as he was slipping away too? Again, Melville seems to be a sorcerer…people are losing their minds…well, super-fixated on strange threads - like strands of a spider’s web - from the center - who is Melville - which seems very ‘White Whale’ like - you know - whatever it takes - following “it” and turning over every stone - to what end?
Strange threads: Jung, Yeats, Christiana Morgan, Henry Murray…somehow there are all connected to Melville. The ‘bird’s nest’ is really colored sticky notes…like in the film “A Beautiful Mind” notes everywhere with yarn and pins…creativity or…?
In summary, the Bachelder & Habel book was a refreshing novel…the design and flow of “thoughts” was a new format and I think it made the novel easy to ready, understand, and most importantly, it conveyed the ongoing interest in one of the great American novels to read and to read again. In the end, the meaning seems to fall back to our own perspectives - which may be part of the intent on Melville’s part.
In the book, All Things Shining (Dreyfus & Kelly, 2011, paperback edition), the authors claim that there is a deep philosophical message throughout Moby-Dick and they claim Melville is actually exploring and examining the possibility of a polytheistic belief system that could emerge and challenge traditional monotheism. In other words, there are many things shining in our everyday existence that we could appreciate and be at peace…simply with what we have, instead of an incessant search for great metaphysical answers and the supposed “truth” that is out there (the white whale) ready to be found…if only we could subdue the earth and the universe and bend it toward our designs. But Melville’s novel offered a hard lesson - the obsessive searching can lead to a destructive result, and life has already moved on. Nature endures, but we ultimately perish. Can we find all things shining here on earth - and be content?
Here and now. Tempus fugit.