Wednesday reading

Moby Dick is a hard act to follow, and I tried several things that didn't sustain my interest. I'll probably go back to them eventually and won't talk about them here.

Recently finished:

I re-read the first three books of Melissa Scott and Jo Graham's Order of the Air series (Lost Things, Steel Blues, and Silver Bullet) and read the other two (Wind Raker and Oath Bound) for the first time. The series is technically unfinished, but it's been a while, so . . . who knows.

For the unfamiliar, the series is set in the 1930s and involves a group of pilots (most of them First World War veterans) who are also magicians. Magic in this world is based on real-world occult practices, so there are a lot of little groupuscules with their own traditions and ties. But there's also a broad coalition of groups who want to protect the world, and some other groups that are not so nice. (Yes, Nazi occultism becomes a plot factor in later books.)

Anyway, I liked the first three a little better on re-reading then previously, in part because I knew what to expect and what not to expect. (Expect: a prevalence of het, lovingly and perhaps excessively detailed aviation technicalities, a tendency for carefully set up plot points to get resolved undramatically in a couple of pages. Do not expect: the extensive queerness or worldbuilding depth of Scott's other books.) The later two books deepen the worldbuilding, but in directions I found both silly and kind of troubling, brushing a little too closely to the idea that some special people have an eternal destiny to be heroes. I tend to think these things were among Graham's contributions, if only because Melissa Scott is one of my favorite sff authors and Jo Graham . . . is not. Also, Graham's other books that I'm familiar with lean into that kind of thing.

Anyway, they were fine, I didn't hate them, but I didn't like them very much either. They didn't scratch my itch for the Points novel Scott's been working on for years, which hopefully will see the light of day eventually.


Currently reading:

In the end, I decided the only way to follow Melville was with more Melville, so I'm working my way through some of his short fiction. So far I've read "The Piazza," "Bartleby the Scrivener," and "Benito Cereno." "Bartleby" was inflicted on me in high school when I was far too young to get anything from it (and I was, for high school, a pretty sophisticated reader), and I've read "Benito Cereno" before too, maybe in college. (All I remember of it was the basic premise and my fury at discovering that was I thought was the end of the story wasn't, and there was an additional ten pages of "court documents" to get through.)

At this point I think I'm getting a sense of the Melvillean Story, which is "people are behaving really weirdly, and I will offer you a rational explanation but it will be unsatisfactory and inadequate in ways I'll probably point out, and you'll be left wondering why even are people anyway and whether there might be a malevolent divinity that shapes our ends."

"Benito Cereno" follows this basic structure, but goes far beyond it, just as Moby Dick does in a different way.

Some spoilery discussion follows. Perhaps best skipped if you haven't read the story but plan to.

It's the only story I can think of offhand where everything important is between the lines. It's about what isn't seen. It's about what still isn't seen even when the ostensible mystery--Benito Cereno is being so weird because the enslaved people aboard his ship have risen up and taken over--is revealed. The violence of the rebellion has been in semi-plain sight throughout, but the violence of slavery itself remains invisible to our spectacularly unreliable narrator Captain Delano and even perhaps to us as readers. We can see the traces of it if we look attentively: in the despair and furtive sullenness of the captive Spanish and the violence required to control them, in the "love" and "devotion" of Babo for Cereno that echoes Delano's self-congratulatory affection for "negroes," in the ferociousness of the Spanish revenge and their later official justice, and perhaps most chillingly in a throwaway half-sentence where Melville notes that the enslaved women among the rebels wanted the Spanish to be tortured to death, not just thrown overboard. But Melville's not going to push that knowledge on us if we refuse to see it.

In fact so deep and layered are Melville's ironies and indirections that the story uncomfortably defies any attempt at confident conclusions. It's an anti-slavery story, yes, but is it (as the editor of my edition claims) anti-racist as well? Melville coolly dismantles certain racist stereotypes, the pseudo-affectionate ones about Black people as natural servants who love their masters. Melville's rebels are angry, intelligent, rational people who want to go home, and who'd also like a little bit of revenge for what they've suffered. But we never hear their voices. We never hear of friendship and love among them, except in one brief moment of a Black woman holding her baby (which Delano simultaneously romanticizes as noble savagery and dismisses as animal instinct). We never know their stories. Is the silencing of their voices the point (another truth we can't perceive, aren't allowed to perceive by the narrative that structures our entire understanding)? Or did Melville just never even think of it? I don't know.

I do know that I won't soon forget the image of that picked-white skeleton fastened to the bow, where the figurehead of Columbus once was, with the words "Follow your leader." Or the closing image of Babo's dead eyes staring, staring at Benito Cereno's monastic haven until Cereno follows him into death.

Reading next: The rest of this Melville collection. Including Billy Budd, which was also inflicted on me in high school and which I haven't read since.