Uncertain whales
DIDASCALIE, n. This is a fancy French word for what we would call a “stage direction” in English, and it comes directly from the Greek didaskalia, which means a teaching or an instruction. It’s related to “didactic.”
I’ve been thinking about this word because (1) it’s fun to say and (2) you usually see stage directions in plays, rather than prose, but Moby-Dick, which I just finished, has a ton of them. Some chapters are written in script format. Some are written in paragraphs, but interrupted with parenthetical stage directions:
(Ahab goes; Pip steps one step forward.) (Chapter 101)
Melville felt such freedom to do whatever he wanted with the form of the novel. I would really love to talk to someone who knows about American literature to get more context for this phenomenon, because I can’t come up with a French novel of the mid-19th century that is quite so formally free. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts, absolutely. (Twentieth-century texts too but I don’t care about that.) But “the novel” is well-established by the 19th-century—after the 1830s, there’s a serialized one below the fold of every newspaper’s front page—and most of the 19th-century French examples coming to mind for me are written in paragraphs, even if their subject matter is experimental as hell. Is this formal playfulness an American thing? Is it a conditions-of-publication thing? Is it a Herman Melville thing?
I’m gonna assume it’s the latter until someone tells me otherwise.
These questions of context stymie me. Probably the best thing graduate school did for me was to provide me with several centuries of context for French literature. When I was reading Les Mis last summer, it was easy to understand its place in the literary landscape. Then again, I think it would be easy for even a “naive” (uncontaminated by grad school, I mean) reader to grasp that about Les Mis, because Victor Hugo is an extraordinarily didactic writer. He would love to tell you everything you need to know. A history of convents? An overview of Enlightenment philosophy? A guide to the sewers of Paris? Check, and check, and check.
Didascalies aside, Melville is an extraordinarily undidactic writer. This probably seems like a weird thing to say about someone who has his narrator share things like “Nor have I been at all sparing of historical whale research, when it has seemed needed” (Chapter 101). But even Ishmael’s Compendium of 10,000 Wrong Whale Facts is obsessed with the unknown and the incomplete. He ends his list of whales, after a wonderful digression into many different whale names (“the Junk Whale; the Pudding-Headed Whale”!), by saying
…there might be quoted other lists of uncertain whales, blessed with all manner of uncouth names. But I omit them as altogether obsolete, and can hardly help suspecting them for mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, but signifying nothing (Chapter 32)
In a book that distrusts words and knowledge this much, it’s startling to find something as straightforward as a stage direction. Except they’re not straightforward. Every time I saw one, I thought: is Ishmael witnessing this action? Or did he invent it? Many, many scenes are described—directed—with no indication of how Ishmael knows about them. His narration tenses are similarly all over the place, sometimes present and sometimes past, and you start to wonder how he’s telling this story at all. It’s quite common, at least in French novels of this moment and in the preceding decades, for first-person narrators to justify their accounts, or for epistolary novels to come with a foreword that explains how these letters were found in a box in someone’s attic and they’ve been edited and published here to edify your virtue or whatever. Ishmael has a lot to say when it come to sources for whale facts—the Biblical story of Jonah, the story of Saint George and the dragon, a lot of etchings and paintings that he’s very judgmental about—and very little to say about his own account. Either way, he sows doubt constantly.
God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught (Chapter 32)
It’s nice to be writing to you all again! Also, apparently when I take breaks from writing this newsletter every week, I read so much that it becomes hard to keep track. Including Moby-Dick, I seem to have read sixteen books? I should probably consider going outside. But in my defense, it’s been very hot, and some of the books were quite short. In the interest of thoroughness, I’m gonna mention all of them, but don’t worry, I’ll keep my comments brief. (If you need content guidance for any of these books, please let me know!) In small-r romance, they were:
The Wicked King + The Queen of Nothing (m/f, both cis and het?, fantasy, young adult) by Holly Black. Whew. These are action-packed and twisty and magic. I love a stabby heroine and a man who wants her to stab him.
Fallow + Draakenwood + Balefire + Deosil (bi m/gay m, both cis, fantasy, historical) by Jordan L. Hawk. I finished the whole Whyborne & Griffin series! A good gay eldritch horror time.
Stocking Stuffers (het m/bi f) + Candy Hearts (pan m/gay m) + Bottle Rocket (bi m/het f, all MCs are cis, contemporary, erotic) by Erin McLellan. I didn’t start this series at Christmas because as a rule I don’t like Christmas stuff, but once I had read Bottle Rocket and been so thoroughly charmed, I had to go back and read the rest of the series. All three of these are such perfect little escapes.
The rest of the anthology He’s Come Undone: “Unraveled” by Olivia Dade, “Caught Looking” by Adriana Herrera, “Yes, And…” by Ruby Lang, “Tommy Cabot Was Here” by Cat Sebastian. These novellas are all quite different, but everything in this anthology is totally gorgeous.
Being Hospitable (bi f/lesbian f, both cis, contemporary, novella) by Meka James. And They Were Roommates! This is very sexy, I liked both main characters a lot, and I highly recommend it.
Rise of the Rain Queen (f/f, both cis and lesbian, historical, fantasy) by Fiona Zedde. This takes place in precolonial Tanzania, which is a really cool and unusual historical setting.
Two Rogues Make a Right (bi m/demi? bi m, both cis, historical) by Cat Sebastian. In her last Date Night, Alyssa Cole described this as “the sweetest romance you can imagine between a recovering addict and a consumptive,” and that feels exactly right.
In books that are neither romance nor Romance, I read We Set the Dark on Fire by Tehlor Kay Mejia, which is a young adult dystopian novel that does have a compelling romance between two women, but as it is the beginning of the series and the romance ends on a “to be continued” note rather than a happy ending,” I haven’t categorized it with the others. It’s suspenseful and political and I liked it a lot.
I also read Meaty, a collection of essays by Samantha Irby, which is so smart and funny and occasionally absolutely heartbreaking. She writes about her life as a fat Black woman with a chronic illness, and about TV and food and dating, and she’s just so unerringly precise about everything. I have Irby’s other essay collections coming from the library soon and I’m really looking forward to them.
And as discussed above, I finished Herman Melville’s gay whaling epic Moby-Dick. Some really incredible sentences. Lotta racism. I’m really glad we don’t slaughter whales anymore.
And I have read several really great essays recently, and I wanted to mention them here. First, this beautiful, haunting piece called “Skin Feeling” about jazz, Blackness, diversity and representation in academia, and exposing oneself and being exposed, by Sofia Samatar.
And second, this powerful piece “You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument” by Caroline Randall Williams, about Blackness and history and the American South, which begins “I have rape-colored skin.”
And third, this essay about artists Rosa Bonheur and Anna Klumpke and their “divine marriage of two souls,” which I stumbled across while doing research for a story and which is some real-life Portrait of a Lady on Fire “gonna stall you while you try to paint my portrait so you’ll have to stay with me longer” romance novel shit. Here’s Anna Klumpke’s 1898 portrait of Rosa Bonheur:
See you next Sunday!
Exit stage left.