Herman Melville "Moby Dick, or the White Whale" Roman G
Herman Melville
Sailor, teacher, customs officer and brilliant American writer. In addition to “Moby Dick,” he wrote the most important story for 20th-century literature, “Bartleby the Scribe,” which is reminiscent of Gogol’s “The Overcoat” and Kafka at the same time.
It all started on January 3, 1841, when the whaling ship Acushnet set out to sea from the American port of New Bedford (East Coast of the United States). The team included 22-year-old Melville, who had previously sailed only on merchant ships, and also worked as a teacher (we open Moby Dick and see a similar biography of the narrator Ishmael). The ship circled the American continent from the south and headed across the Pacific Ocean to the Marquesas Islands. In one of them, Melville, and with him seven other people, fled to the native Typei tribe (this plot would later be reflected in Melville’s first, 1846, novel “Typee”). Then he ended up on another whaling ship (where he became the instigator of the uprising) and finally landed in Tahiti, where he lived the life of a vagabond for some time (“Omu”, 1847). Later we see him as a clerk in Hawaii, from where he hastily fled when the very ship from which he slipped away to the type came into port, and then Melville enlisted on a ship sailing to America (“The White Pea Jacket,” 1850).
The point is not only that he sent ready-made adventures that life itself threw at Melville onto the pages of his books. In the end, it is very difficult to separate fantasy from truth in them - and the presence of fiction there is undeniable. But the sea voyage of 1841–1844 gave the future writer such a powerful creative impulse that it was reflected in almost all of his major works, no matter in what vein they were written - adventure-ethnographic (like early texts) or symbolic-mythological (like “Moby Dick” ).
Melville's books of the 1940s are only half novels. If we understand a novel's plot as based on intrigue and conflict, then Melville's stories are not novels. These are rather chains of essays, descriptions of adventures with numerous digressions: they attract the reader more by the improbability and exoticism of what is described, rather than by the rhythm of the narrative. The tempo of Melville's prose will forever remain haltingly indistinct, unhurried, and meditative.
Already in the novel “Mardi” (1849), Melville tries to combine an adventurous theme with allegories in the spirit of William Blake (it turned out rather awkwardly), and in “The White Peacoat” he describes the ship as a small city, a microcosm: in a space that limits freedom of movement, all conflicts especially pointed, relevant, naked.
After the publication of his first works, Melville became a fashionable figure in New York. However, the writer soon became bored with the bustle of local literary circles - and in 1850 he moved to Massachusetts, buying a house and farm near Pittsfield.
Melville's new literary impressions date back to the same time (1849–1850). It is known that until 1849 the writer did not read Shakespeare - and for a very prosaic reason: all the publications that came his way were in very small print, and Melville could not boast of perfect vision. In 1849, the writer was finally able to purchase a seven-volume Shakespeare book that suited him, which he studied from cover to cover. This seven-volume set has survived - and it is all covered with Melville's notes. Most of them are on the fields of tragedies - primarily “King Lear”, as well as less obvious to us “Antony and Cleopatra”, “Julius Caesar” and “Timon of Athens”.
Reading Shakespeare completely changes Melville's literary tastes. In Moby Dick (1851), which clearly reflected Shakespearean influences, we find not only numerous quotes from the English classic, but also its rhetoric, and the deliberate archaism of the language, and fragments framed in dramatic form, and long, theatrically elevated monologues of the characters . And most importantly, the depth and universality of Melville’s conflict not only intensifies, but moves to a new qualitative level: the adventurous sea novel turns into a philosophical parable of timeless significance. Melville before and after Shakespeare are two different writers: they are united only by the theme of the sea and some features of the narrative style. Moreover: reading Shakespeare leaves an imprint on Melville's perception of modern American and British literature. Thanks to Shakespeare, he had a system of coordinates that made it possible to identify the peaks in the sea of in-line fiction.
In 1850, Melville reads the novel “The Mosses of the Old Manor” by Nathaniel Hawthorne - and, inspired by what he read, immediately wrote the article “Hawthorne and his “The Mosses of the Old Manor”,” in which he calls the author of “The Scarlet Letter” a successor to the traditions of Shakespeare. Melville defends the artist's right to talk about the mysteries of existence, about really big themes, about the deepest problems, comprehending them poetically and philosophically. In the same article on Hawthorne, Melville returns to Shakespeare: “Shakespeare suggests to us things which seem so fearfully true that it would be pure madness for a man of sound mind to utter or hint at them.” This is the ideal that Hawthorne follows and that Melville himself must henceforth follow.
In the same year, he became acquainted with the novel “Sartor Resartus” (1833–1834) by the English historian and thinker Thomas Carlyle. Here he found a combination of complex philosophical constructs and a playful narrative style in the spirit of Stern; free-flowing comments that sometimes obscure the main story; “philosophy of clothing” - habits, fetters that bind a person hand and foot - and the preaching of liberation from them. Free will, according to Carlyle, consists in realizing the essence of “clothing”, finding the evil hiding in it, fighting it and creating new meanings, free from “clothes”. There is an opinion that the main character of Moby Dick, Ishmael, is very reminiscent of Carlyle's Teufelsdröck. Even the title of the first chapter of “Moby Dick” “Loomings” (in Russian translation - “Outlines appear”) Melville could have borrowed from “Sartor Resartus” - however, in Carlyle this word (which denotes the “outlines” of his philosophy appearing on the horizon) appears only briefly.
A little earlier, Melville attended one of the lectures of the American transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Emerson (also a fan of “Sartor Resartus”). In those same years, he carefully reads Emerson's texts, in which he finds an understanding of existence as a mystery, and creativity as a sign pointing to this mystery. And in 1851, already finishing Moby Dick, Melville simultaneously read A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) by Henry Thoreau, a devoted student of Emerson.
Moby Dick is the child of these disparate influences (let us add to them the powerful tradition of the British and American maritime novel, already well mastered). Shakespeare's tragedy, heavily romanticized and interpreted in a transcendentalist spirit, was played out on the deck of a ship, covered in whale oil. Less clear is the question of Melville's acquaintance with E. A. Poe's The Tale of the Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), although there are plenty of interesting textual parallels with Moby Dick.
Melville's novel is as vast as the ocean. In musicology there is a term “divine lengths” (usually they characterize the symphonies of Schubert and Bruckner), and if we transfer it to the space of literature of the 19th century, number one would be “Moby Dick”. It opens with a multi-page collection of quotes about whales. The names of the heroes and the names of the ships are borrowed from the Old Testament. The plot is incredible: a whale is capable of biting off a sailor's leg or arm; a one-legged captain climbs the mast; a man is crucified on a whale; the only sailor to escape the whale's wrath floats across the ocean astride a coffin. The novel has two narrators - Ishmael and the author, and they take turns replacing each other (as in Dickens's Bleak House and Daudet's The Kid). With the exception of the exposition and the ending of the book, the plot practically stands still (whale, meeting with another ship, ocean, whale again, ocean again, new ship again, and so on). But almost every third chapter of the novel is a lengthy digression of an ethnographic, naturalistic or philosophical nature (and each is tied to whales to one degree or another).
Carl van Doren "The American Novel"
1 of 4Raymond Weaver "Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic"
2 of 4Ernest Hemingway "The Old Man and the Sea"
3 of 4Albert Camus "The Plague"
4 out of 4The monster that the one-legged, hate-burning sufferer Ahab is looking for has many names: Leviathan, White Whale, Moby Dick. Melville writes the first of these with a small letter. It is also borrowed from the Old Testament. Leviathan appears in both the Psalms and the Book of Isaiah, but the most detailed description of him is in the Book of Job (40:20–41:26): “Can you pierce his skin with a spear or his head with a fisherman’s point?<…>The sword that touches him will not stand, neither the spear, nor the javelin, nor the armor.<…>he is king over all the sons of pride.” These words are the key to Moby Dick. Melville's novel is a huge prose commentary on Old Testament verses.
The captain of the Pequod, Ahab, is sure: to kill the White Whale means to destroy all evil in the world. His antagonist Starbuck considers this “malice towards a dumb creature” madness and blasphemy (Chapter XXXVI “On the Deck”). “Blasphemy” is a rhyme to the biblical Psalm 103, which directly states that Leviathan was created by God. Ahab is a conflict between a high ideal (the fight against evil) and a false path to its implementation, fairly forgotten since the time of Cervantes and resurrected by Melville shortly before Dostoevsky. And here is Ahab as interpreted by Ishmael: “He whom persistent thoughts turn into Prometheus will forever feed the vulture with pieces of his heart; and his vulture is the creature that he himself gives birth to” (Chapter XLIV “Sea Chart”).
Ahab's philosophy is symbolic: “All visible objects are only cardboard masks” and “If you must strike, strike through this mask” (chapter XXXVI). This is a clear echo of Carlyle's "philosophy of dress". In the same place: “The White Whale for me is a wall erected right in front of me. Sometimes I think that there is nothing on the other side. But it is not important. I’ve had enough of him, he sends me a challenge, I see in him a cruel force, backed by an incomprehensible malice. And it is this incomprehensible malice that I hate most of all; and whether the White Whale was merely a tool or a force in its own right, I would still bring down my hatred on him. Don’t talk to me about blasphemy, Starbuck, I’m ready to strike even the sun if it offends me.”
The image of Moby Dick can be interpreted in different ways. Is it fate or higher will, God or the devil, fate or evil, necessity or nature itself? It is impossible to answer unequivocally: the main thing in Moby Dick is incomprehensibility. Moby Dick is a mystery: here is the only answer that both embraces and negates all other options. We can say it differently: Moby Dick is a symbol that suggests a whole field of possible meanings, and depending on its decipherment, Ahab’s conflict with the White Whale takes on new facets. However, by deciphering, we narrow both the semantic variability and the mythological poetry of the image - this is exactly what Susan Sontag wrote in her famous: interpretation impoverishes the text, relegating it to the level of the reader.
Some of the novel's symbolic images are better simply noted than interpreted. The wheel of the Pequod whaling ship is made from a whale's jaw. The pulpit of Preacher Mapple is made in the shape of a ship, preaching a sermon about Jonah in the belly of the whale. The corpse of the Parsi whaler Fedallah is tightly screwed to the whale in the finale. A hawk becomes entangled in a flag on the Pequod's mast and goes down with the ship. Representatives of various nationalities and parts of the world gather on the ship - from Parsi to Polynesian (if anywhere in literature there is an ideal embodiment of multiculturalism, then this is, of course, the Pequod). In the mat that the Polynesian Queequeg weaves, Ishmael sees the Loom of Time.
Symbolic associations also give rise to biblical names. The plot of the confrontation with the prophet Elijah is connected with King Ahab. Elijah himself appears on the pages of the novel (Chapter XIX, clearly titled “The Prophet”) - he is a madman who predicts troubles for the participants in the voyage in vague terms. Jonah, who dared to disobey God and was swallowed by a whale for this, appears in Father Mapple’s sermon: the pastor repeats that God is everywhere and emphasizes that Jonah agreed with the justice of the punishment. The main character, Ishmael, is named after the Old Testament ancestor of the Bedouin wanderers, whose name stands for “God hears.” In one of the chapters the ship “Jeroboam” appears - a reference to the king of Israel, who neglected the prophecy of the prophet Gabriel and lost his son. A certain Gabriel is sailing on this ship - and he conjures Ahab not to hunt the White Whale. Another ship is named “Rachel” - an allusion to the ancestress of the house of Israel, who grieves over the fate of her descendants (“Rachel’s lament”). The captain of this ship lost his son in a fight with the White Whale, and in the finale of the novel it is “Rachel” who will pick up Ishmael, sailing through the waves astride a coffin.
All these names are Old Testament, not New Testament. Antique parallels (the head of a whale - like the Sphinx and Zeus; Ahab - like Prometheus and Hercules) also appeal to the most ancient layer of Greek myths. The following lines of Melville’s novel “Redburn” (1849) testify to Melville’s special attitude towards the most ancient, “barbarian” imagery: “Our bodies may be civilized, but we still have the souls of barbarians. We are blind and do not see the real face of this world, we are deaf to its voice and dead to its death.”
Chapter XXXII (“Cetology”) says that this book is “no more than a project, even a sketch of a project.” Melville does not give the reader of Moby Dick the keys to its secrets and answers to questions. Is this the reason for the failure of the novel among the reading public? Even those critics - the writer's contemporaries, who assessed the book positively, perceived it rather as a popular science work, flavored with a sluggish plot and romantic exaggerations.
After Melville's death and up to and including the 1910s, he was considered a generally unimportant author. In the 19th century we find almost no traces of his influence. One can only hypothetically assume Melville’s influence on Joseph Conrad (there is a 1970 book by Leon F. Seltzer about this), since the author of “Typhoon” and “Lord Jim” was definitely familiar with the three books of the American. It is very tempting to see a variation of Moby Dick, for example, in the image of Kurtz from Heart of Darkness (this interpretation stretches a thread from Melville's novel to F. F. Coppola's Apocalypse Now).
The Melville revival began with an article by Carl Van Doren in The Cambridge History of American Literature (1917), then, after the cultural world remembered the writer’s centenary in 1919, in 1921 a book by the same author, An American Novel, appeared with a section on Melville and the first biography of the writer is “Herman Melville, Sailor and Mystic” by Raymond Weaver. In the early 1920s, his first collected works were published, in which his unknown story “Billy Budd” (1891) was presented to the public for the first time.
And away we go. In 1923, the author of Lady Chatterley's Lover, David Herbert Lawrence, wrote about Moby-Dick in Studies in American Literature. He calls Melville “a majestic seer, a poet of the sea,” calls him a misanthrope (“he goes to sea to escape humanity,” “Melville hated the world”), to whom the elements gave the opportunity to feel outside of time and society.
Another master of modernism, Cesare Pavese, translated Moby Dick into Italian in 1931. In a 1932 article, "Herman Melville," he calls Moby-Dick a poem of barbarian life and compares the writer to the ancient Greek tragedians and Ishmael to the chorus of an ancient tragedy.
Charles Olson, poet and politician (a rare combination!), in the book “Call Me Ishmael” (1947), carefully analyzed Melville’s collection of Shakespeare’s texts with all the scholial notes in the margins: it was he who came up with reasoned conclusions about the decisive influence of the Bard on Melville’s work.
"Moby Dick"
1 of 6"Jaws"
© Universal Pictures
2 of 6"The Life Aquatic"
© Buena Vista Pictures
3 out of 6"In the heart of the sea"
© Warner Bros. Pictures
4 out of 6© 20th Century Fox
5 out of 6"No Country for Old Men"
© Miramax Films
6 out of 6What did the 20th century find in Melville? There are two considerations.
First. Melville is defiantly free in form. He was not the only one, of course (there were also Stern, Diderot, Friedrich Schlegel, Carlyle), but it was this writer who managed to unfold the novel with endless slowness, without rushing anywhere, like a grandiose symphony, anticipating the “divine lengths” of Proust and Joyce.
Second. Melville is mythological - not only by referring to the Old Testament names of the prophets and comparing the whale with Leviathan and the Sphinx, but also because he freely creates his own myth, not forced-allegorical (like Blake and Novalis), but lively, full-fledged and convincing. Eleazar Meletinsky in his book “The Poetics of Myth” (1976) proposed the term “mythologism” in the meaning of “plot-motivational construction of artistic reality based on the model of a mythological stereotype.” In the literature of the last century, we encounter mythology very often, and Melville in this case looks more like an author of the 20th than of the 19th century.
Albert Camus studied Moby Dick during the creation of The Plague (1947). It is also possible that the novel influenced the play “Caligula” (1938–1944) by the same author. In 1952, Camus wrote an essay about Melville. He sees in Moby Dick a parable about the great battle of man with creation, the creator, his own kind and himself, and in Melville - a powerful creator of myths. We have the right to correlate Ahab with Caligula, Ahab’s pursuit of the whale with the confrontation between Dr. Rieux and the plague, and the riddle of Moby Dick with the irrational power of the plague.
The hypothetical influence of Moby Dick on Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (1952) has become a commonplace in literary criticism. Let us note that the story also correlates with the Old Testament - both in terms of meaning (Psalm 103) and in the names of the characters (Santiago - Jacob, who fought with God; Manolin - Emmanuel, one of the names of Christ). And the internal plot, as in Moby Dick, is the pursuit of elusive meaning.
Noir master Jean-Pierre Melville took his pseudonym in honor of Herman Melville. He called Moby Dick his favorite book. Melville's closeness to Melville is clearly visible in the plots of his crime films: their heroes fully manifest themselves only in conditions of the every minute proximity of death; The characters' actions often resemble a strange, infernal ritual. Like Melville, Melville endlessly stretched the temporal space of his films, alternating slowly dragging fragments with sharp dramatic explosions.
The most significant film adaptation of Moby Dick was made in 1956 by another master of noir, a lover of Joyce and Hemingway, John Huston. He suggested writing the script to Ray Bradbury (by that time the author of the novels Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles). Later, in his autobiographical book Green Shadows, White Whale (1992), Bradbury claimed that before starting work on the film adaptation, he took on Moby Dick ten times - and never mastered the text. But already during the production of the film, he had to read the text several times from cover to cover. The result was a radical reworking of the novel: the screenwriter deliberately refuses to slavishly copy the original source. The essence of the changes is outlined in the same “Green Shadows” (chapters 5 and 32): the Parsi Fedalla was removed from the characters, and all the best that Melville associated with him was transferred to Ahab; the order of the scenes has been changed; disparate events are combined with each other for greater dramatic effect. Comparing Melville's novel and the film based on Bradbury's script is a good lesson for any screenwriter. Some of Bradbury’s advice could be included in a film textbook: “Get the biggest metaphor first, the rest will follow. Don't get dirty with sardines when Leviathan looms ahead."
Bradbury was not the only one who worked on this film who was haunted by the text long after filming. Gregory Peck, who played Ahab, will appear as Pastor Mapple in the 1998 television adaptation of Moby-Dick (produced by Apocalypse Now author F.F. Coppola).
Orson Welles, who played the same Pastor Mapple for Houston, at the same time wrote the play “Moby Dick - Rehearsal” (1955) based on the novel. In it, actors gathered for rehearsal improvise Melville's book. Ahab and Father Mapple should be played by the same artist. Need I say that at the London premiere in 1955, Orson Welles took the role for himself? (In the 1962 New York production of the play, he was played by Rod Steiger - and in 1999 he voiced Ahab in Natalia Orlova's Moby Dick). Orson Welles tried to film the London production, but then gave up; all the footage was later lost in a fire.
The theme of “Moby Dick” worried Orson Welles even after. Who, if not him, the most Shakespearean director of world cinema, an artist of large strokes and metaphorical images, would dream of his own film adaptation of the novel? However, Moby Dick was destined to join Welles' already long list of unfulfilled projects. In 1971, the desperate director himself sat down with a book in his hands in front of the camera against the backdrop of a blue wall (symbolizing the sea and sky) - and began to read Melville’s novel into the frame. 22 minutes of this recording have survived - a desperate gesture of a genius forced to put up with the indifference of the producers.
Cormac McCarthy, a living classic of American literature, calls Moby Dick his favorite book. In each of McCarthy’s texts, we can easily find not only numerous prophets (like Melville’s Elijah and Gabriel), but also a unique White Whale - an incomprehensible, sacred, unknowable image, a collision with which is fatal for a person (the she-wolf in “Beyond the Line”, Chigurh in , a drug cartel in the film script).
Moby Dick has a special meaning for national culture. Americans remember that the United States was once a major player in the world whaling industry (and in the novel one can see an arrogant attitude towards the whaling ships of other countries). Accordingly, the local reader catches in Melville's text those overtones that elude readers in other countries: the story of the Pequod and Moby Dick is a glorious and tragic page in the formation of the American nation. It is not surprising that dozens of explicit and implicit variations of Moby Dick appear in the United States. The obvious ones are Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975), Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic (2004), or, for example, the very recent film In the Heart of the Sea by Ron Howard, where the story of the White Whale is revised in an environmental spirit. Implicitly, the story of Moby Dick is read in hundreds of films and books about fights with mysterious monsters - from “Duel” (1971) by the same Spielberg to “Alien” (1979) by Ridley Scott. It is not at all necessary to look for direct references to Melville in such films: as he said in a collection of conversations with the historian Jean-Claude Carrière, “Don’t Expect to Get Rid of Books,” significant texts influence us, including indirectly - through dozens of others who were influenced by them .
Moby Dick is alive and giving rise to new interpretations. The White Whale can be called an eternal image of world culture: over the past century and a half it has been reproduced, reflected and interpreted many times. This is an irrational and ambivalent image - it will be interesting to watch his life in the rational and problem-oriented 21st century.
Well, Morenism is what it should be, the harsh philosophy of the ocean, 20,000 Leagues, Arthur Gordon Pym, The Ghost Ship. All good stories, the main thing is to learn to work with information.
Grade 4 out of 5 stars by Sir Shuriy 08/24/2018 08:45
An ambiguous, not an easy book.
Grade 3 out of 5 stars by Anya 05/27/2017 01:57
That's not what you read this book about. This is not a novel.
“Yes, Jed, a hundred and fifty years after Melville wrote Moby Dick, it looks like you were the first to understand what he meant.” She raised her glasses. “Congratulations.”
“Great,” I replied. “I should get something for this.” A beautiful letter, for example.
“It seems to me that a book called “Spiritually Misguided Enlightenment” that begins with the words “Call me Ahab” will not attract much attention in the literary world.
“Oh, my letter was crying.”
These are words from Jed McKenna's book, "Spiritually Misguided Enlightenment." Well, you get the idea
Alexey 04/01/2017 01:40
I support dbushoff. +1
Grade 3 out of 5 stars from Ru5 01.06.2016 22:24
I barely made it through.
Lots of ranting and lots of whale violence. But there is a meaning in the book, I don’t argue.
My opinion and assessment fully reflects the review written below, I will not repeat it.
Grade 3 out of 5 stars from Ksana_Spring 20.03.2016 13:42
The book remains controversial for me. On the one hand, I really liked the storyline itself. The scale of what is happening is so captivating and absorbing that you simply unimaginably want to plunge into its gloomy atmosphere of madness and comprehend the whole essence of what is happening, eagerly reading page after page, if not for one “but”! The whole book is replete with endless references, reveling in extensive encyclopedic knowledge, the pathos of appeals and conclusions that only cut the plot into grains, dissolving it in the endless knowledge of the author, which essentially does not carry any semantic load and their value for the book is very doubtful, they rather draw on analysis books, scientific work, whatever, but not in any way, complement the plot, which sometimes itself in a detailed description, down to the smallest detail of something insignificant, is so tiring and does not progress that it simply infuriates, and sometimes makes you so angry that you want to shoot the book hits the wall, although on the contrary somewhere, namely at the end, the rapid development and no less rapid denouement simply leaves one in confusion. And it’s not just the denouement that leaves questions. Why hasn't the team been worked out like this, at least Queequeg? What happened to him after he arrived at the Pequod? it feels like the ship has depersonalized him, and Ishmael and the crew. What were they doing all this time? You've probably read about Melville's "whale fish", poisonous? I know! try reading a book in which, to the detriment of an excellent plot, a separate dry pseudoscientific book unfolds! You could safely throw out everything unnecessary and it would already be a story of 150-200 pages, succinctly describing what is happening. The only reason why I finished reading the book is undoubtedly one of the outstanding and exciting stories, unfortunately dissolved in a huge amount of unnecessary information presented by the author in an outrageously pathetic form of irresistible complacency. Based on this, my assessment is that she is motivated.
Grade 3 out of 5 stars from dbushoff
In the literary history of the United States, the work of Herman Melville is an outstanding and original phenomenon. The writer has long been ranked among the classics of American literature, and his wonderful creation “Moby Dick, or the White Whale” is rightfully considered one of the masterpieces of world literature. Melville's life, his writings, correspondence, and diaries have been thoroughly studied. There are dozens of biographies and monographs, hundreds of articles and publications, thematic collections and collective works devoted to various aspects of the writer’s work. And yet Melville as a person and as an artist, the lifetime and posthumous fate of his books continue to remain a mystery, not fully solved or explained.
Melville's life and work are full of paradoxes, contradictions and inexplicable oddities. For example, he did not have any serious formal education. He never studied at university. Why is there a university? The harsh necessities of life forced him to leave school at the age of twelve. At the same time, Melville's books tell us that he was one of the most educated people of his time. The deep insights in the fields of epistemology, sociology, psychology, and economics that the reader encounters in his works presuppose not only the presence of acute intuition, but also a solid stock of scientific knowledge. Where, when, how did he acquire them? One can only assume that the writer had an amazing ability to concentrate, which allowed him to absorb a huge amount of information and critically comprehend it in a short time.
Or let's take, say, the nature of the genre evolution of Melville's work. We are already accustomed to a more or less traditional picture: a young writer begins with poetic experiments, then tries himself in short prose genres, then moves on to stories and, finally, having reached maturity, takes on the creation of large canvases. For Melville, it was the other way around: he started with stories and novels, then took up writing stories and ended his career as a poet.
There was no student period in Melville's creative biography. He did not make his way into literature, he “broke into” it, and his first book – “Typee” – brought him wide fame in America, and then in England, France and Germany. Subsequently, his skill increased, the content of his books became deeper, and his popularity inexplicably fell. By the beginning of the sixties, Melville was “deadly” forgotten by his contemporaries. In the seventies, an English admirer of his talent tried to find Melville in New York, but to no avail. To all questions he received an indifferent answer: “Yes, there was such a writer. What happened to him now is unknown. He seems to have died." Meanwhile, Melville lived in New York and served as a cargo inspector at customs. Here is another mysterious phenomenon that can be called “Melville’s silence.” In fact, the writer “fell silent” in the prime of his strength and talent (he was not yet forty years old) and remained silent for three decades. The only exceptions are two collections of poems and a poem, published in scanty quantities at the expense of the author and completely unnoticed by critics.
The posthumous fate of Melville's creative legacy was equally extraordinary. Before 1919, it seemed to not exist. They forgot about the writer so completely that when he actually died, they couldn’t even correctly reproduce his name in a short obituary. 1919 marked the hundredth anniversary of the writer’s birth. There were no solemn meetings or anniversary articles on this occasion. Only one person remembered the glorious date - Raymond Weaver, who then began writing the first biography of Melville. The book came out two years later and was called “Herman Melville, Sailor and Mystic.” Weaver's efforts were supported by the famous English writer D.H. Lawrence, whose popularity in America during these years was enormous. He wrote two articles on Melville and included them in his collection of psychoanalytic articles, Studies on Classical American Literature (1923).
America remembered Melville. Yes, how I remembered! The writer’s books began to be republished in mass editions, unpublished manuscripts were retrieved from archives, films and performances (including operas) were made based on Melville’s writings, artists were inspired by Melville’s images, and Rockwell Kent created a series of brilliant graphic sheets on the themes of “The White Whale.” .
Naturally, Melville’s “boom” extended to literary studies. Literary historians, biographers, critics, and even people far from literature (historians, psychologists, sociologists) got down to business. The thin stream of Melville studies turned into a torrent. Today this flow has subsided somewhat, but has not yet dried up. The latest sensational splash occurred in 1983, when two suitcases and a wooden chest containing Melville's manuscripts and letters from members of his family were accidentally discovered in an abandoned barn in upstate New York. One hundred and fifty Melville scholars are now busy studying new materials, with a view to making the necessary adjustments to Melville's biographies.
Let us note, however, that Melville’s “revival” has only a distant connection with his centenary. Its origins should be sought in the general mentality that characterized the spiritual life of America in the late tenths and early twenties of the 20th century. The general course of the socio-historical development of the United States at the turn of the century, and especially the first imperialist war, gave rise in the minds of many Americans to doubt and even protest against the bourgeois-pragmatic values, ideals, and criteria that guided the country throughout its century and a half of history. This protest was realized at many levels (social, political, ideological), including literary. It was laid as an ideological and philosophical foundation in the works of O’Neill, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Anderson, Faulkner, Wolfe - writers who are traditionally classified as the so-called lost generation, but who would be more correctly called the generation of protesters. It was then that America remembered the romantic rebels who affirmed the greatest value of the human personality and protested against everything that suppresses, oppresses, and reshapes this personality according to the standards of bourgeois morality. Americans rediscovered the works of Poe, Hawthorne, Dickinson, and at the same time the forgotten Melville.
Today it would no longer occur to anyone to doubt Melville’s right to be placed on the literary Olympus of the United States, and in the Pantheon of American Writers, being built in New York, he is given a place of honor next to Irving, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne and Whitman. He is read and revered. An enviable fate, great glory, which the writer could not even imagine during his lifetime!
Herman Melville was born on August 1, 1819 in New York in the family of a middle-class businessman engaged in import and export operations. The family was large (four sons and four daughters) and, at first glance, quite prosperous. Today, when we know how closely Melville’s personal and creative fate is intertwined with the historical destinies of his homeland, the very fact of his birth in 1819 seems significant. It was this year that the young, naive, full of patriotic optimism and faith in “divine destiny” experienced a tragic shock: an economic crisis broke out in the country. The Americans' complacent belief that in America “everything is different from what they have there in Europe” received its first tangible blow. However, not everyone was able to read the fiery writings on the wall. Melville's father was among those who did not heed the warning and were severely punished. The business of his trading company fell into complete decline, and in the end he was forced to liquidate his enterprise, sell his house in New York and move to Albany. Unable to withstand the nervous shock, he lost his mind and soon died. The Melville family fell into “noble poverty.” The mother and daughters moved to the village of Lansingburg, where they somehow made ends meet, and their sons scattered around the world.
Herman Melville
"Moby Dick, or the White Whale"
A young American with the biblical name Ishmael (in the book of Genesis it is said about Ishmael, the son of Abraham: “He will be among men like a wild ass, his hand against everyone and the hand of everyone against him”), bored with being on land and experiencing difficulties with money, accepts decision to set sail on a whaling ship. In the first half of the 19th century. the oldest American whaling port, Nantucket, is no longer the largest center of this fishery, but Ishmael considers it important for himself to hire a ship in Nantucket. Stopping on the way there in another port city, where it is not unusual to meet on the street a savage who has joined the crew of a whaler who visited there on unknown islands, where you can see a buffet counter made of a huge whale jaw, where even a preacher in a church climbs to the pulpit on a rope ladder — Ishmael listens to a passionate sermon about the prophet Jonah, who was swallowed up by Leviathan, trying to avoid the path assigned to him by God, and meets the native harpooner Queequeg at the inn. They become bosom friends and decide to join the ship together.
In Nantucket, they are hired by the whaler Pequod, which is preparing to set out on a three-year voyage around the world. Here Ishmael learns that Captain Ahab (Ahab in the Bible is the wicked king of Israel who established the cult of Baal and persecuted the prophets), under whose command he will go to sea, on his last voyage, fighting with a whale, lost his leg and has not been out since then out of gloomy melancholy, and on the ship, on the way home, he was even out of his mind for some time. But Ishmael does not yet attach any importance to this news or to other strange events that make one think about some secret connected with the Pequod and its captain. He takes a stranger he meets on the pier, who makes vague but menacing prophecies about the fate of the whaler and everyone enlisted in his crew, for a madman or a swindler-beggar. And the dark human figures, at night, secretly, ascending to the Pequod and then seeming to dissolve on the ship, Ishmael is ready to consider as a figment of his own imagination.
Only a few days after sailing from Nantucket, Captain Ahab leaves his cabin and appears on deck. Ishmael is struck by his gloomy appearance and the inescapable inner pain imprinted on his face. Holes were drilled in the deck boards in advance so that Ahab could, by strengthening a bone leg made from the polished jaw of a sperm whale, maintain balance during the rocking. Observers on the masts were ordered to look especially vigilantly for white whales in the sea. The captain is painfully withdrawn, demands unquestioning and immediate obedience even more harshly than usual, and sharply refuses to explain his own speeches and actions even to his assistants, in whom they often cause bewilderment. “The soul of Ahab,” says Ishmael, “during the harsh blizzard winter of his old age hid in the hollow trunk of his body and there sullenly sucked the paw of darkness.”
Having gone to sea for the first time on a whaler, Ishmael observes the peculiarities of a fishing vessel, work and life on it. The short chapters that make up the entire book contain descriptions of tools, techniques and rules for hunting a sperm whale and extracting spermaceti from its head. Other chapters, “whale studies” - from the book’s prefabricated collection of references to whales in a wide variety of literature to detailed reviews of a whale’s tail, a fountain, a skeleton, and finally whales made of bronze and stone, even whales among the stars - throughout the novel complement the narrative and merge with it, imparting a new, metaphysical dimension to events.
One day, by order of Ahab, the Pequod crew assembles. A gold Ecuadorian doubloon is nailed to the mast. It is intended for the first person to spot the albino whale, famous among whalers and nicknamed Moby Dick. This sperm whale, terrifying with its size and ferocity, whiteness and unusual cunning, carries in its skin many harpoons that were once aimed at it, but in all fights with humans it remains the winner, and the crushing rebuff that people received from it has taught many to the idea that that hunting him threatens with terrible disasters. It was Moby Dick who deprived Ahab of his legs when the captain, finding himself at the end of the chase among the wreckage of whaleboats broken by a whale, in a fit of blind hatred rushed at him with only a knife in his hand. Now Ahab announces that he intends to pursue this whale across all the seas of both hemispheres until the white carcass sways in the waves and releases its last fountain of black blood. In vain does Starbuck's first mate, a strict Quaker, object to him that taking revenge on a creature devoid of reason, striking only by blind instinct, is madness and blasphemy. In everything, Ahab answers, the unknown features of some rational principle are visible through the meaningless mask; and if you must strike, strike through this mask! A white whale floats obsessively before his eyes as the embodiment of all evil. With delight and rage, deceiving their own fear, the sailors join in his curses on Moby Dick. Three harpooners, having filled the upside-down tips of their harpoons with rum, drink to the death of a white whale. And only the ship's cabin boy, the little black boy Pip, prays to God for salvation from these people.
When the Pequod first encounters sperm whales and the whaleboats are preparing to launch, five dark-faced ghosts suddenly appear among the sailors. This is the crew of Ahab’s own whaleboat, people from some islands in South Asia. Since the owners of the Pequod, believing that a one-legged captain could no longer be of any use during a hunt, did not provide rowers for his own boat, he brought them onto the ship secretly and still hid them in the hold. Their leader is the ominous-looking middle-aged Parsi Fedallah.
Although any delay in searching for Moby Dick is painful for Ahab, he cannot completely give up hunting whales. Rounding the Cape of Good Hope and crossing the Indian Ocean, the Pequod hunts and fills barrels with spermaceti. But the first thing Ahab asks when meeting other ships is whether they have ever seen a white whale. And the answer is often a story about how, thanks to Moby Dick, one of the team died or was mutilated. Even in the middle of the ocean, prophecies cannot be avoided: a half-mad sectarian sailor from a ship stricken by an epidemic exhorts one to fear the fate of the sacrileges who dared to fight the embodiment of God’s wrath. Finally, the Pequod meets an English whaler, whose captain, having harpooned Moby Dick, received a deep wound and as a result lost an arm. Ahab hurries to get on board and talk to the man whose fate is so similar to his. The Englishman does not even think about taking revenge on the sperm whale, but reports the direction in which the white whale went. Again Starbuck tries to stop his captain - and again in vain. By order of Ahab, the ship's blacksmith forges a harpoon from especially hard steel, for the hardening of which three harpooners donate their blood. The Pequod heads out into the Pacific Ocean.
Ishmael's friend, the harpooner Queequeg, having become seriously ill from working in a damp hold, feels the approach of death and asks the carpenter to make him an unsinkable coffin-shuttle in which he could set off across the waves to the starry archipelagos. And when unexpectedly his condition changes for the better, it is decided to caulk and tar the coffin, which was unnecessary for the time being, in order to turn it into a large float - a rescue buoy. The new buoy, as expected, is suspended from the stern of the Pequod, quite surprising with its characteristic shape of the team of oncoming ships.
At night, in a whaleboat, near the dead whale, Fedalla announces to the captain that on this voyage he is not destined to have either a coffin or a hearse, but Ahab must see two hearses at sea before he dies: one built by inhuman hands, and the second, made of wood, grown in America; that only hemp could cause Ahab's death, and even in this last hour Fedallah himself would go ahead of him as a pilot. The captain doesn’t believe it: what does hemp and rope have to do with it? He is too old to go to the gallows.
The signs of approaching Moby Dick are becoming more and more clear. In a fierce storm, the fire of St. Elmo flares up on the tip of a harpoon forged for a white whale. That same night, Starbuck, confident that Ahab is leading the ship to inevitable death, stands at the door of the captain's cabin with a musket in his hands and still does not commit murder, preferring to submit to fate. The storm remagnetizes the compasses, now they direct the ship away from these waters, but Ahab, who noticed this in time, makes new arrows from sailing needles. The sailor falls off the mast and disappears into the waves. The Pequod meets the Rachel, who had been pursuing Moby Dick just the day before. The captain of the "Rachel" begs Ahab to join the search for the whaleboat lost during yesterday's hunt, in which his twelve-year-old son was, but receives a sharp refusal. From now on, Ahab climbs the mast himself: he is pulled up in a basket woven from cables. But as soon as he gets to the top, a sea hawk rips his hat off and carries him out to sea. There is a ship again - and on it, too, the sailors killed by the white whale are buried.
The golden doubloon is faithful to its owner: a white hump appears from the water in front of the captain himself. The chase lasts three days, three times the whaleboats approach the whale. Having bitten Ahab's whaleboat in two, Moby Dick circles around the captain, thrown aside, not allowing other boats to come to his aid until the approaching Pequod pushes the sperm whale away from his victim. As soon as he is in the boat, Ahab again demands his harpoon - the whale, however, is already swimming away, and he has to return to the ship. It gets dark, and the Pequod loses sight of the whale. The whaler follows Moby Dick all night and catches him again at dawn. But, having tangled the lines from the harpoons pierced into it, the whale smashes two whaleboats against each other, and attacks Ahab’s boat, diving and hitting the bottom from under the water. The ship picks up people in distress, and in the confusion it is not immediately noticed that there is no Parsi among them. Remembering his promise, Ahab cannot hide his fear, but continues the pursuit. Everything that happens here is predetermined, he says.
On the third day, the boats, surrounded by a flock of sharks, again rush to the fountain seen on the horizon, a sea hawk again appears above the Pequod - now it carries away the torn ship’s pennant in its claws; a sailor was sent up the mast to replace him. Enraged by the pain that the wounds received the day before cause him, the whale immediately rushes onto the whaleboats, and only the captain’s boat, among whose rowers Ishmael is now, remains afloat. And when the boat turns sideways, the rowers are presented with the torn corpse of Fedalla, fastened to Moby Dick’s back with loops of a tench wrapped around the giant body. This is the first hearse. Moby Dick is not looking for a meeting with Ahab, he is still trying to leave, but the captain’s whaleboat is not far behind. Then, turning around to meet the Pequod, which had already lifted people from the water, and having guessed in it the source of all its persecution, the sperm whale rams the ship. Having received a hole, the Pequod begins to dive, and Ahab, watching from the boat, realizes that in front of him is a second hearse. There is no way to escape. He aims the last harpoon at the whale. The hemp line, whipped up in a loop by the sharp jerk of the stricken whale, wraps itself around Ahab and carries him into the abyss. The whaleboat with all the rowers falls into a huge funnel on the site of an already sunken ship, in which everything that was once the Pequod is hidden to the last chip. But when the waves are already closing over the head of the sailor standing on the mast, his hand rises and nevertheless strengthens the flag. And this is the last thing that is visible above the water.
Having fallen out of the whaleboat and remaining behind the stern, Ishmael is also dragged towards the funnel, but when he reaches it, it has already turned into a smooth foamy pool, from the depths of which a rescue buoy - a coffin - unexpectedly bursts to the surface. On this coffin, untouched by sharks, Ishmael stays for a day on the open sea until an alien ship picks him up: it was the inconsolable "Rachel", which, wandering in search of her missing children, found only one more orphan.
“And I alone was saved, to tell you...”
First half of the 19th century. American Ishmael needs money, so he gets a job on a whaling ship in the port of Nantucket. On the way to this port, Ishmael listened to an impressive sermon about how the prophet was swallowed up by Leviathan, because he wanted to avoid the path assigned to him by God, and also met the harpooner Queequeg at the inn. With him, Ishmael gets a job on the Pequod ship, which sets off on a voyage around the world for 3 years. The whaler captain Ahab lost his leg in a fight with a whale on a previous voyage. He's been sullen ever since. A stranger on the pier laments that the ship is doomed and that everyone is destined to die. Everyone takes him for a madman. Ishmael does not want to notice the mystery around him, even when dark figures secretly boarded the ship at night and disappeared. The hero thought he was imagining things.
A few days after sailing, the captain appeared on deck. Instead of a leg, he has a crutch made from the polished jaw of a sperm whale. Everyone is hunting for the white whale, nicknamed Moby Dick among whalers. He is huge and fierce. It was Moby Dick that Ahab fought and lost his leg. Now he wants to find the whale and kill it. First mate Starbuck in vain explains to the captain obsessed with the idea that the whale is devoid of reason and lives only by instinct. Ishmael is interested in observing the peculiarities of work and life on a ship that fishes for sperm whales.
During the first hunt for sperm whales, dark-skinned sailors emerge from the hold where they have been hiding until now. The owners of the Pequod did not provide a captain of oars for the boat, so he secretly brought them onto the ship and sheltered these people from the South Asian islands. The leader of the blacks is the Parsi Fedall.
The Pequod hunts sperm whales and fills barrels with spermaceti extracted from sea animals. When Ahab meets other ships, he certainly asks if they have met Moby Dick. Always the same stories about those killed and maimed by this whale.
And so the Pequod became friends with an English whaler, whose captain lost his arm in a fight with a white whale, but is not going to take revenge. But Moby Dick told Ahov where he went. Ahab ordered the ship's blacksmith to forge a very powerful harpoon.
When the harpooner Queequeg fell ill and thought he was going to die, he asked a carpenter to make him a coffin-shuttle. Having recovered, he allowed this coffin to be used as a float.
Fedallah prophesies to Ahab about his imminent death, but only before he encounters two hearses and he, Fedallah, dies first. The Pequod meets two ships in the waters of the Pacific Ocean, which have victims from an encounter with Moby Dick. The pursuit of Moby Dick lasted three days. Fedallah's words are coming true. First, he dies in the fight with the whale, then the whale sinks the ship and the captain. Ishmael escapes on a life buoy - a coffin - until an alien ship picks him up. This ship was the Rachel.
Sometimes there comes a moment when you get tired of reading modern fiction, even interesting ones, and begin to gravitate towards the classics. Usually this results in watching some film adaptation, but this time I decided to take on Moby Dick. It was this choice that inspired me to watch In the Heart of the Sea, which tells about the incident that inspired Herman Melville to write his Opus Magnum.
The end result was something strange. I can say in advance that this is a rare case when a real story turned out to be much more dramatic and exciting than its embellished literary version.
The novel at one time was completely ignored by the public and critics, who considered Moby Dick some kind of incomprehensible crap, in contrast to his previous works, which were more or less known. How did this happen? Well, then the genre of romanticism was popular in the Land of Opportunity, and Melville really liked social criticism and did not want to write in the mainstream genre. Although, as it seemed to me, there was just a lot of romanticism in Moby Dick and Herman caved in to the times, but only half and that’s why people didn’t like it. The rediscovery happened 50 years later, when prominent people began to look for deep meanings in this Opus, and then shout everywhere about the genius of the novel, making it absolutely top among American novels in general. Yes, yes, even Gone with the Wind took a bite. Unfortunately, by that time Melville had already glued his flippers together in poverty as a customs officer. Even in the obituary they made a mistake in the last name. 
Actually, what is this work about? From the first third it may seem that this is a story about a young man, tired of life (come on, who among us hasn’t been moping for several months at least once in his life?), who is hired on a whaling ship and sets off on a voyage around the world, and the ship’s obsessed captain along the way trying to track down a huge white sperm whale to exact his revenge.
But after the first third you realize that this is actually a book about how Melville once decided to write about whales. Write so much and in such detail that after reading just the mention of the sea leviathan you will feel sick. By God, 60% of the entire book are detailed descriptions of what whales look like, how they are built, what is inside them, what is outside them, how they were depicted by artists, how they were depicted by modern artists, how they were depicted in encyclopedias, in the Bible, in poems and stories of sailors, what species there are, what they get from them... and that’s not even all, you can continue if you wish. Melville's editor should have hit him on the head and told him that he was not writing a textbook or a script for release on the Discovery Channel (if this happened in our time). There is only one consolation in this educational hell - sometimes the author, through descriptions of whales and near-whale stories, mocks the society of that time. The only problem is that now all this is no longer relevant, it’s quite difficult to understand, and sometimes these jokes of his are so complex that you can only understand them if you know Melville’s biography. Also in this layer of the novel it is fun to read about things that have now been studied in much more detail. For example, in one of the chapters the author proves that whales are fish, and all innovators who claim that they are mammals are assholes and degenerates.
Another big problem with Moby Dick, which makes it seem rather bland, is the characters. Initially, everything is fine with this item. We have a main character, let's call him Ishmael, on whose behalf the story is told. His attitude to life, motivation, and character are described in great detail. He interacts with other people and conducts dialogues. However, after joining the crew of the Pequod ship, Ishmael disappears somewhere. That is, until the very end, he does not interact with any hero at all, simply dissolving among the faceless team. The same fate befalls Queequeg. An absolutely gorgeous (again, at first) hero: a Polynesian prince of a cannibal tribe, who carries around a dried head and on any matter consults with his deity - the black man Yojo, whom he places on his head every now and then. At the same time, he is a very humane and kind character, almost the most sympathetic of all. And even he disappears after the first third, returning only once again to the “plot” closer to the end. 
Who is the book about then? Of course, about Captain Ahab, who appears just at the end of the successful part of the book and remains the only bright ray in the dark kingdom of the encyclopedia about whales. This is a completely crazy old man, obsessed with revenge on the White Whale, who once bit off his leg, and constantly reads killer speeches, mixing them with quotes from the Bible and his own nonsense. “I am ready to slay the Sun itself if it dares to insult me!” Pathos worthy of Warhammer. Despite the fact that the author himself more than once says that Ahab is gone, nevertheless, both Ishmael and the whole team become infected with his passion and begin to consider his revenge on Moby Dick to be their revenge.
The rest of the team is described, alas, rather schematically. There are first, second and third mates - Starbeck, Stubb and Flask. There are three harpooners - the already mentioned Queequeg, Daggu and Tashtigo. Sometimes a blacksmith with a cabin boy and a couple of other guys appear, but, having fulfilled their role, they immediately disappear. If we look at them in a little more detail, then almost all of them can be described in just one or two words. Daggoo is a black man, Tashtigo is an Indian, Flask is always hungry, Stubb is a kind of cheerful cattle. That's all. At that time, Melville was a man with a hell of a lot of broad views, especially in relation to religion, and he wanted to show his tolerance with his assorted harpooners (he’s generally a big fan of telling how cool small nations are and how all the white snickering goats are), but they could have just... Write down the character a little! But no. The only more or less written side character is First Mate Starbuck. From the very beginning of the voyage, he stands out from the others, since he is not affected by Ahab’s speeches, listening to them with a facepalm, and is the only one (except for the narrator) who realizes that their captain needs to go crazy, and not chase whales. But since they were great friends in the past, he tolerates it. The weak interaction between the characters is aggravated by the manner in which Melville writes his dialogues. It looks something like this - one person speaks direct lines, and everyone else answers vaguely and in general terms, “behind the scenes.” 
And do you know why Moby Dick is so amazing? The fact that after wading through 4/5 of the novel (which took me a month and a half), swearing at the next chapter about whale guts and the way Leonardo da Vinci described them, comes the final part... and it’s gorgeous! Suddenly, the plot returns from somewhere, the characters again begin to somehow interact with each other, the pretentious Ahab is already pushing Roboute Guilliman and Beowulf off the throne, and something is constantly happening around the ship. As icing on the cake, there is a battle with the White Whale, which stretches over three days and is described simply brilliantly. I never thought I’d say this about a figure of classical literature, but Melville has some cool action. The finale turned out to be so hair-raising and dramatic that at the end you sit, wipe away a tear and think “wow.” But tears come not only from the ending, but also because you realize that Melville’s talent is through the roof, but he reveals it only at the beginning and at the end, leaving the reader rubbing his eyes from the rolling sleep for most of the book. 
So is Moby Dick worth reading? I would say no. Only if the classics suit you well now, and even then the whale encyclopedia can unsettle even Dostoevsky’s admirers. And this despite the fact that this book is called the best novel of the 19th century. Take a bite, Tolstoy, yeah.
But if you are interested in the story itself, I advise you to watch the film adaptation of 2010 (somewhere they say 2011). Because in the film format this story looks perfect, since everything unnecessary is thrown overboard, and what remains is only much better developed characters and the journey itself. Starbuck, played by Ethan Hawke, is truly wonderful, and Ishmael is played by “Daredevil” Charlie Cox and his huge eyes. Plus, in the Russian voice acting, the voice of Ahab is answered by the great and terrible Vladimir Antonik, from whose lips the speeches of the mad captain can inspire you right through the monitor and make you feel like a member of the Pequod team. Just don't accidentally confuse it with Asylum's masterpiece, which came out around the same time. 
Well, that seems to be it. Well done to those who read to the end.
