The year's movie THE WHALE, starring Branden Fraser as Charlie, won a lot of awards in this year's awards season, include a Best Actor for Fraser. I recently saw it and, in general, I approve. SPOILER ALERT. If you don't want to learn certain facts about this movie and its plot, stop here. ------------------------------------------------ Charlie is morbidly obese and, in the course of the plot, he effectively kills himself by continuing to overeat while refusing medical treatment. Charlie is also, importantly, an English teacher, assisting college students (by internet connection -- in his condition he cannot leave his home) as they develop their critical writing skills. Charlie would perhaps rather be teaching literature than composition. The screenplay is full of references to the great American romantics, especially Whitman and Melville. The movie's title is a reference not only to the cruel term often used for obese humans, but to Ahab's nemesis....
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Melville was "a great, deep artist, even if he was a rather sententious man. He was a real American in that he always felt his audience in front of him. But when he ceases to be American, when he forgets all audience, and gives us his sheer apprehension of the world, then he is wonderful his book commands stillness in the soul, an awe. "In his 'human' self, Melville is almost dead. That is, he hardly reacts to human contacts any more; or only ideally: or just for a moment. His human-emotional self is almost played out, He is abstract, self-analytical and abstracted. And he is more spell-bound by the strange slidings and collidings of Matter than by the things Men do." What the heck does all that mean? D.H. Lawrence, who was himself IMHO a "deep artist, even if he was a rather sententious man," did not use the phrase "a real American" as a compliment. Ever. For him, the real American prototype was Ben Franklin, whom he saw as a wealth-...
I'm still working my way through Leon Chai's book on the relationship between Europe's Romantics and America's mid-19th century Renaissance. I'll say something today about Chai's take on Melville's novella, Billy Budd, Sailor. We begin, as usual in this book, with the relevant European, Balzac. Chai writes about Balzac's attachment to a particular understanding of the "great chain of being," and of how it implied that matter is continuous with spirit, animal nature continuous with that of humans, etc. In this connection, Chai alludes to Balzac's tale, Une passion dans le désert, published more than half a century before Billy Budd . the passion between panther and soldier is plausible on the assumption that there is a smooth continuum, no sudden break separating soul-endowed humans from organic-but-mechanistic felines. Related: in Seraphita Balzac writes of the body and the spirit in these terms, "The body has redemanded...
"And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues- every stately or lovely emblazoning- the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge- pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes hi...