The cosmic joke.

Too bad Melville never got it.

My cousin Jonathan (thanks Jon) sent me this link

http://www.radioopensource.org/harold-blooms-melville/

It’s an audio download of Harold Bloom talking about Moby Dick and probably only of interest to the hardcore student or someone like me who’s fresh to the book. Though Bloom is a bit of a blowhard and snob for my taste, I give him props for the boost he gave to Falstaff as one of the great literary creations. The most interesting thing to me is that Bloom considers Melville and Whitman to be the two great towers in American Literature. And who am I to argue since unlike Bloom, I haven’t read everyone…but his opinion got me to thinking about how the one thing that links the two in my mind is the comic-- or, the presence of the comic in one and the absence of it in the other.

Whether it’s Melville or Chopin or Faulkner or Henry James or Wagner or Tolstoy…there’s always that one small pesky little fly buzzing round my head telling me that though I’m keeping company with a powerful mind and a profoundly deep soul, it is a mind sorely lacking in a sense of humor. Melville saw life’s comedy, but Whitman felt it.

To be fair, Moby Dick has some lively scenes full of mirth and comic invention…but it’s not Melville who’s doing the laughing. Just as Henry James has a few offbeat characters who exhibit some comic flair, but that flair doesn’t extend to the man penning the story. James is always serious.

And since I’m fresh off the boat with Melville, this has me pondering some mysteries all related in some way to the same issue of the value of a comic perspective. And since my son is now a working comedian, I’m inclined to ponder such things even more. It’s akin to the challenge I posed a few weeks back to my colleagues that was to finish the sentence: There are two kinds of people in the word….

And a possible answer could be: Those who see life as a Tragedy and those who see life as a Comedy.

Melville understood more than most would ever dream of understanding. And yet he went to his grave in a restless state of disillusion and disappointment. He was a desperate seeker for ultimate truths and though he had an intellect more than sufficient to tackle the biggest questions…he didn’t have what it took to acknowledge the ultimate (comic) futility of his quest. And to recognize the limits of one’s mortal powers requires a sense of the comic.

The great spiritual teachers often speak of cultivating an awareness of the ridiculous. The Koan is a story whose moral or answer is unreachable because it illustrates life’s essential ridiculousness. In Buddhism, the goal is to free oneself of desire…and that includes the desire to know more than is knowable.

So, much as I feel like Melville was one of the great soul brothers, it’s sad that he couldn’t lighten up a bit and embrace his inner holy fool. From what I’ve read, this fatal (at least career wise) flaw was the cause of his estrangement from his mentor and friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. Maurice Sendak (the great author and illustrator of Where The Wild Things are…et. Al) is a big Melville fan and considers him one of his three greatest influences, (The others being Mozart and German writer Heinrich Kleist) and in an interview he said that he cannot read Hawthorne because he is so angry at him for abandoning Melville.

The irony of the whole thing though, is that it takes an enormously strong, stubborn and confident ego to produce something like Moby Dick, or War and Peace, or Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and for the most part, a sense of humor is (except in rare cases ) poison to the ego.