Morning Read:
Canabrück
¶ In Chapter 32 of Moby-Dick, “Cetology,” we have a crisp and timeless portrait of the Crank, the autodidact who plunges into the vasty deeps of his own ignorance with a few rough-and-ready ideas about System, and proceeds, more often than not, to get everything wrong. Melville — who outbulks his narrator here as nowhere else in the novel so far — begins by declaring that the whale is a fish. Like all serious Cranks, he is well aware of the opposing view, and he quotes the naturalist Linnaeus, the status of whose taxonomy would ultimate proceed from persuasiveness to common sense. Melville quotes Linnaeus in Latin, primly, on the principal feature that (nowadays) distinguishes fish from mammals: penem intrantem feminam mammis lactantem. Melville is no rank amateur!
Being a Crank, however, entitles him to dismiss this reasoning simply because it doesn’t suit him: “Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me.” The appeal to Scripture in this overtly scientific setting ought to give pause to anyone who thinks of Nineteenth-Century America as a land of the future.
¶ Meta-madness: Don Quixote, already rather evidently a nutter, decides that he must “go mad,” and for no good reason, just to prove his devotion to Dulcinea — because that is what all the great knights errant do in books. Orlando Furioso is the pattern of this poetical psychopathology.
“Have I not told you already,” responded don Quixote, “that I wish to imitate Amadís, playing the part of one who is desperate, a fool, a madman, thereby imitating as well the valiant Don Roland when he discovered in a fountain the signs that Angelica the Fair had committed base acts with Medoro, and his grief drove him mad, and he uprooted trees, befouled the waters of clear fountains, killed shepherds, destroyed livestock, burned huts, demolished houses, pulled down mares, and did a hundred thousand other unheard-of things worthy of eternal renown and record?”
¶ In After the Victorians, AN Wilson looks for the root cause of World War II, and, having dismissed ideological explanations, settles on decency — decency as a kind of allergic reaction to “Munich.”
A fortnight after Hitler occupied Prague [in 1939] and took over the rest of Czechoslovakia, Britain and France signed an agreement that they would go to war if he marched into Poland. Much of the credit for this must go to Halifax, who realized that the policy of appeasement had failed, and run its course. In common with Churchill, Halifax believed passionately in the British Empire. It was to preserve that Empire from involvement in another European apocalypse, which would almost certainly spell its downfall, that he had supported appeasement. Now, something stirred inside this tall, gaunt ‘holy fox.’ Britain, which had been rearming now for two years, scarcely felt itself read for war, but something happened in the year following Munich.
There is also interesting evidence, in my edition of this chapter, of Wilson’s work habits. On page 354, the Bishop of Osnabrück’s positive report of condition at Dachau (in 1936?) is mentioned twice. The second time, the see is given as “Canabrück.” I conclude from this typo that Wilson writes in longhand and that his small-case “a” is shaped rather like it is in print. Canabrück indeed makes a nice label for such a transcription error.