EM Forster on Dostoevsky and Moby Dick

More from EM Forster’s ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL. (I introduce what this book is about here.)

Moby Dick is one of the grandest most exciting reading experiences I’ve ever had. It wasn’t like a book at all. It was an experience. The kind of book where you get goosebumps because you can sense you are in the presence of something enormously great, and also ultimately mysterious. It’s not a ponderous book at all. It’s rollicking, chaotic, it goes here, it goes there, we’ve got omniscent narrator, we’ve got first-person … You just have to SUCCUMB. Because the reward is so damn great.

Anyway, enough ranting. I’m posting this one for Chai-rista, who is in the process of reading it for the first time. I am always thrilled when someone “discovers” that book, so her post excited me.

Forster talks about different elements in novels: story (which is different from plot), people, pattern … but then he gets into the really good stuff, and talks about “fantasy” and “prophecy”.

Here, in brief, is what Forster says about the very rare novels which can be called “prophetic”:

With prophecy in the narrow sense of foretelling the future we have no concern, and we have not much concern with it as an appeal for righteousness. What will interest us today — what we must respond to, for interest now becomes an inappropriate word — is an accent in the novelist’s voice, an accent for which the flutes and saxophones of fantasy may have prepared us. His theme is the universe; he proposes to sing, and the strangeness of song arising in the halls of fiction is bound to give us a shock. How will song combine with the furniture of common sense? we shall ask ourselves, and shall have to answer “not too well”: the singer does not always have room for his gestures, the tables and chairs get broken, and the novel through which bardic influence has passed often has a wrecked air, like a drawing-room after an earthquake or a children’s party. Readers of DH Lawrence will understand what I mean.

Prophecy — in our sense — is a tone of voice. It may imply any of the faiths that have haunted humanity — Christianity, Buddhism, dualism, Satanism, or the mere raising of human love and hatred to such a power that their normal receptacles no longer contain them: but what particular view of the universe is recommended — with that we are not directly concerned. It is the implication that signifies and will filter into the turns of the novelist’s phrase, and in this lecture, which promises to be so vague and grandiose, we may come nearer than elsewhere to the minutiae of style.

Forster says that the Russians do prophetic novels better than anybody. I cannot say that I disagree. And he theorizes why that this is so, which is a very interesting section of the book. But these lectures have to do with “English” literature, so he can’t dwell on the Russians, as much as he obviously wants to. However, he continuously steps back to acknowledge their greatness in these arenas. He does have this to say about Dostoevsky’s writing in Brothers Karamazov (a beautiful analysis, just wonderful):

In Dostoevsky the characters and situations always stand for more than themselves; infinity attends them; though yet they remain individuals they expand to embrace it and summon it to embrace them … Every sentence he writes implies this extension, and the implication is the dominant aspect of his work. He is a great novelist in the ordinary sense — that is to say his characters have relation to ordinary life and also live in their own surroundings, there are incidents which keep us excited, and so on; he has also the greatness of a prophet, to which our ordinary standards are inapplicable.

Good God, ain’t this the truth…More on Dostoevsky and then we’ll move to Melville as prophet:

Dostoevsky’s characters ask us to share something deeper than their experience. They convey to us a sensation that is partly physical — the sensation of sinking into a translucent globe and seeing our experience floating far above us on its surface, tiny, remote, yet ours. We have not ceased to be people, we have given nothing up, but “the sea is in the fish and the fish is in the sea”.

After all of this, though, here is what Forster says about that great rarity: the prophetic novelist:

So although this lecture is on a genuine aspect of the novel, not a fake aspect, I can only think of four writers to illustrate it — Dostoevsky, Melville, DH Lawrence, and Emily Bronte.

And here, finally, is what Forster has to say about Moby Dick.

Moby Dick is an easy book, as long as we read it as a yarn or an account of whaling interspersed with snatches of poetry. But as soon as we catch the song in it, it grows difficult and immensely important. Narrowed and hardened into words the spiritual theme of Moby Dick is as follows: a battle against evil conducted too long or in the wrong way. The White Whale is evil, and Captain Ahab is warped by constant pursuit until his knight-errantry turns into revenge. These are words — a symbol for the book if we want one — but they do not carry us much further than the acceptance of the book as a yarn — perhaps they carry us backwards, for they may mislead us into harmonizing the incidents, and so losing their roughness and richness. The idea of a contest we may retain: all action is a battle, the only happiness is peace. But contest between what? We get false if we say that it is between good and evil or between two unreconciled evils. The essential in Moby Dick, its prophetic song, flows athwart the action and the surface morality like an undercurrent. It lies outside words…we cannot catch the words of the song. There has been stress, with intervals: but no explicable solution, certainly no reaching back into universal pity and love; no “Gentlemen, I’ve had a good dream.” [That’s from “Brothers K”]

The extraordinary nature of the book appears in two of its early incidents — the sermon about Jonah and the friendship with Queequeg.

The sermon has nothing to do with Christianity. It asks for endurance or loyalty without hope of reward. The preacher “kneeling in the pulpit’s bows, folded his large brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea.” Then he works up and up and concludes on a note of joy that is far more terrifying than a menace…

Immediately after the sermon, Ishmael makes a passionate alliance with the cannibal Queequeg, and it looks for a moment that the book is to be a saga of blood-brotherhood. But human relationships mean little to Melville, and after a grotesque and violent entry, Queequeg is almost forgotten. Almost — not quite…

Moby Dick is full of meanings: its meaning is a different problem. It is wrong to turn the Delight or the coffin into symbols, because even if the symbolism is correct, it silences the book. Nothing can be stated about Moby Dick except that it is a contest. The rest is song.

And when that book was taught to me in high school, with all the “this symbolises this” and “that symbolizes that” – it did, indeed, “silence” the book for me. A brilliant observation. Once I read it in adulthood, it was the SONG that swept me away.