Melville's ghost tortoises

Tortoises, I was going to write something about the tortoises in “The Encantadas.”  I suppose television has made Galápagos tortoises less exotic and bizarre than they would have been in 1854 when Herman Melville published this little whatever it is.

Melville makes the tortoises strange.  He is doing what he always does, mixing a naturalist’s accuracy with a metaphorical fantasia.  The tortoises are like the whales in Moby-Dick.  They are meant to mean everything, or as much as Melville is able to pack into them.  He is riffing on the Galápagos tortoise.

So the tortoise is food for the hungry sailor: “a merry repast from tortoise steaks, and tortoise stews”.  The tortoise is erotic: “remember the sudden glimpses of dusky shells, and long languid necks protruded from the leafless thickets”.  It is a text, a record of history:

lantern in hand, I scraped among the moss and beheld the ancient scars of bruises received in many a sullen fall among the marly mountains of the isle – scars strangely widened, swollen, half obliterate, and yet distorted like those sometimes found in the bark of very hoary trees, I seemed an antiquary of a geologist, studying the bird-tracks and ciphers upon the exhumed slates trod by incredible creatures whose very ghosts are now defunct.

They are the turtles that carry the earth on their backs.  They are the ruins of the Roman Coliseum.  They are

the victims of a penal, or malignant, or perhaps a downright diabolical enchanter, seems in nothing more likely than in that strange infatuation of hopeless toil which so often possesses them.  I have known them in their journeyings ram themselves heroically against rocks, and long abide there, nudging, wriggling, wedging, in order to displace them, and so hold on their inflexible path.  Their crowning curse is their drudging impulse to straightforwardness in a belittered world.

Not all of the metaphors are easily extendable to humans, but I suspect that this one is a self-portrait, Melville as tortoise, ramming each new book against the indifferent rocks.  The writer has been cursed.

In the strangest turn, the writer suspects he has been cursed by the Galápagos, the enchanted nightmare islands.  Even today, he is haunted by ghost tortoises. 

For, often in scenes of social merriment, and especially at revels held by candle-light in old-fashioned mansions, so that shadows are thrown into the further recesses of an angular and spacious room, making them put on a look of haunted undergrowth of lonely woods, I have drawn the attention of my comrades by my fixed gaze and sudden change of air, as I have seemed to see, slowly emerging from those imagined solitudes, and heavily crawling along the floor, the ghost of a gigantic tortoise, with "Memento * * * * *" burning in live letters upon his back.

I never get invited to revels  held by candle-light in old-fashioned mansions.  Maybe they are out of fashion.  Regardless, those asterisks are a wonderful mystery.  “Memento mori”?  A strange message from the long-lived tortoise (“What other bodily being possesses such a citadel wherein to resist the assaults of Time?”), and anyway there are too many asterisks.

No wonder everyone thought Melville was crazy.

Salamanders, unknown; Devils, ditto - Melville's Enchanted Islands

“The Encantadas” (1954) is a strange hybrid of fiction and travel writing, or strange for writers besides Herman Melville, who had been writing fictionalized memoiristic allegories for almost ten years at this point.

The Encantadas are better known as  the Galápagos Islands.  The symbolic attraction of the Spanish name is obvious.  Melville reinforces the enchantment by giving each chapter an epigram from The Fairie Queene, such as:

Most ugly shapes and horrible aspects,
Such as Dame Nature selfe mote feare to see,

and so on before “Sketch Second,” which is all about giant tortoises.

“The Encantadas” has chapters, ten of them in fifty pages, telling multiple stories.  It really feels more like a tiny little book.  I don’t know what it is.

Melville’s fairy-land sounds suspiciously like hell (“A group of rather extinct volcanoes rather than of isles; looking much as the world at large might after a penal conflagration,” or “Like split Syrian gourds left withering in the sun, they are cracked by an everlasting drought beneath a torrid sky”), or an abandoned cemetery, or a city in ruins,  or the Dead Sea.

Now that is curious.  Everything has been from “Sketch First,” by the way.  Melville’s massive 1876 poem Clarel is about a trip to the Holy Land, include a long visionary descent to the Dead Sea that is perhaps the highlight of the book.  Yet, here several years before Melville’s trip, we have:

Nothing can better suggest the aspect of once living things malignly crumbled from ruddiness into ashes.  Apples of Sodom, after touching, seem these isles.

So much of Melville’s writing comes from his own experience that it can be surprising how much comes from his reading, with his imagination stirring it all together.  Thus he describes a strange place he has actually visited with a strange place he has only read about, but will, in fact, someday visit.  I suppose this is no more strange than the way he constantly compares the Holy Land to the sea.

As “The Encantadas” progresses, Melville adds inhabitants, first tortoises, then birds, then, surprisingly, given his insistence on uninhabitability, people.  This point is borrowed from bibliographing nicole.   Also strange given this census, from “Sketch Fourth”:

Men,                         none
Ant-eaters,            unknown
Man-haters,          unknown
Lizards,                   500,000
Snakes,                    500,000
Spiders,                   10,000,000
Salamanders,        unknown
Devils,                      do.
                           _____________

Making a clean total of 11,000,000,

exclusive of an incomputable host of fiends, ant-eaters, man-haters, and salamanders.

But this is just one island.  The men live elsewhere.  I have no idea what the joke about the ant-eaters is supposed to be.  I assume it is a joke.

The strangest thing of all is that “The Encantadas” is Melville’s second text that explores an archipelago.  The first was his massive, mad 1849 novel Mardi, Melville’s first attempt at an omnibook, where a group of travelers debate the meaning of everything while exploring an island chain representing the world and including everything – countries, religions, book collectors.  “The Encantadas” is the tame version of Mardi, with a “real” setting, “real” reptiles, and stories based on “real” events.  The result is another surprise, a small, clear, readable Melville masterpiece.  Just look at the tortoises.  Maybe tomorrow I will look at the wonderful tortoises.

English poets and their English cats - also, a hare, and a tortoise

Thinking about literary animals, I have wandered into 18th century England, when the poets either had cats, or wrote about them, or both. Here's Thomas Gray, for example, writing about Horace Walpole's cat, Selima:

"Her conscious tail her joy declared;
The fair round face, the snowy beard,
The velvet of her paws,
Her coat, that with the tortoise vies,
Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes,
She saw; and purred applause."

That's from "Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat" (1748), and the cat is peering into a "tub of goldfishes" (hence the reflection), so you can see where this is going. The only phrase that looks to me like an original description of a cat is the "conscious tail"; otherwise, its just a catalogue description.

Christopher Smart does a lot better, in the justly famous "My Cat Jeoffry" section of Jubilate Agno (written 1759-63, published 1939):

"For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For is this done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself."

Then follow the ten steps of Jeoffrey's self-grooming, not so different from what a ethologist might write: "For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood. \ For fifthly he washes himself \ For Sixthly he rolls upon wash." Then there's the consummate description of a cat: "For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery." I find Smart's poetry very difficult, in general, but this is real observation.

I always assume that William Blake's "fearful symmetry" and so on in "The Tyger" is based as much on an actual housecat as on an imagined tiger, but I don't really know. Who else is there - oh yes, Samuel Johnson's Hodge, who "shall not be shot," but I don't know of a poem about Hodge.

William Cowper could hardly have kept a cat, since it might have endangered his prescious hares. In the third book of The Task (1785), after denouncing hunting, Cowper writes:

"Well, - at least one is safe. One sheltered hare
Has never heard the sanguinary yell
Of cruel man, exulting in her woes.
Innocent partner of my peaceful home,
Whom ten long years' experience of my care
Has made at last familiar, she has lost
Much of her vigilant instinctive dread,
Not needful here, beneath a roof like mine." (lines 334-341)

But there is not much real account of the hare in The Task, unlike in Cowper's "Epitaph on a Hare" (1783):

"His frisking was at evening hours,
For then he lost his fear;
But most before approaching showers,
Or when a storm drew near."

Well that's odd. There's another 18th century English critter who behaves similarly, Gilbert White's tortoise:

"No part of its behaviour ever struck me more than the extreme timidity it always expresses with regard to rain; for though it has a shell that would secure it against the wheel of a loaded cart, yet does it discover as much solicitude about rain as a lady dressed in all her best attire, shuffling away on the first sprinklings, and running its head up in a corner." (Letter XIII)

Now that's the kind of writing I like, the tortoise who behaves like a fine lady. I actually have not read White's The Natural History of Selborne (1789). I encountered the tortoise in an anthology, although I have no idea which, or of what (here?). White was a pioneering naturalist, a genuine scientist, so he falls into a different category than Gray and Cowper and so on. I think that's where I'll wander tomorrow.