Genoa: A Telling of Wonders

by Paul Metcalf

First published in 1965, this remarkable novel is Paul Metcalf's purging of the burden of his relationship to Herman Melville (his great-grandfather), but it is much broader than that. In the extraordinary style of writing that is now Metcalf's signature, he collages multiple stories. Metcalf explores incidents in the life of Herman Melville, the influence of Columbus on Melville and Melville's use and conversion of the Columbus myth, the influence of Melville on his own life, and the story of Carl and Michael Mills, whose semi-fictional story provides the central structure of the book. The narrator is Michael Mills, a club-footed unfortunate, who holds an M.D. degree but who refuses to practice. It is to search out the reason for this refusal, and to come to terms with the memory of his monstrous older brother, Carl (whose life was terminated by the state before the novel opens), that Michael retreats to his attic, his books, his studies -- Columbus, Melville and others.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Novels, American, 20th Century, The United States Of America, Literary Fiction

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Paul Metcalf (1917–1999) was an American writer. He wrote in verse and prose, but his work generally defies classification. Its small but devoted following includes Robert Creeley, William Gass, Wendell Berry, Guy Davenport, Howard Zinn, and Bruce Olds. His many books include Will West (1956), Genoa (1965), Patagoni (1971), Apalache (1976), The Middle Passage (1976), Zip Odes (1979), and U.S. Dept. of the Interior (1980).

He was the great-grandson of one of his major literary influences, Herman Melville.

Paul Metcalf was born in 1917 in East Milton, Massachusetts. He attended Harvard but left before graduating. In 1942, he married Nancy Blackford of South Carolina and over the next two decades spent long periods in the South. Metcalf traveled widely through North and South America and these travels figure largely in his work. Among his friends and associates were the poet Charles Olson (whom he met when he was thirteen), the artist Josef Albers, poet and publisher Jonathan Williams and the writer Guy Davenport. Later in his career, Metcalf was a visiting professor at the University of California San Diego, SUNY Albany, and the University of Kansas. He died in 1999, near Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reality and literature… Man and words…

Certainly, the study of Man: Literature is the study of Man: Anatomy… when it ceases to be, books become merely literary.

So Paul Metcalf at once submerges us in the study of Man.
The clubfooted narrator of the story identifies himself with Captain Ahab and he imagines his attic to be his whaling ship Pequod… But his attic is practically his jail so he is rather Jonah swallowed by the whale than a seafarer…

Everything comes to me in gray, a perfect gray, perfect in its neatness: tiny dots, as though created by a pointillist, ranging from black through various grays to white.

Or better still, he is a fetus suspended in the amnion of existence.

There is a law of excess, of abundance, whereby a people must explore the ocean, in order to be competent on land…

And he compares Christopher Columbus’s journey across the deep with Herman Melville’s drifting in the literary oceans. And he compares both of those ventures with the spermatozoa’s voyage to the ovum…

It is even assumed that the ovum itself has a certain radiation designed to attract the spermatozoa.

Fertilization is the purpose… And the literature engenders monsters.
And any human being is a microcosm… And one’s mind is a cosmic egg… But eggs are prone to grow addle.

[Adam Dalva · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lost treasure (I found it in an omnibus of Metcalf's work, though it has since been reprinted). It is in some ways a refinement of the collage work of Sebald, of Marker's Sans Soleil, of Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress, of Benjamin's The Arcades Project, in that archival research is weaved together to form a narrative. What sets this apart is the strength of the fictional plot, a tale of two deformed brothers, whose lives are juxtaposed with quotations of Melville, Christopher Columbus anecdotes, and excerpts from medical textbooks. Metcalf makes great usage of different fonts and justifications to make the layering of texts easily comprehensible. His fascination with Melville (his own great-grandfather), is particularly apparent.

This is an argument for how approachable experimental fiction can be. I breezed through this. I think in a lot of collage work the hazard would be skimming, say, the Columbus to get back to the fictive narrative, but all of the sources are individually fascinating, and together, they sing.

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

The experience of reading Genoa was disturbing. It wasn't simply the setting, a two hour drive from here. It was a vertigo, the weight borne by the protagonist. There's a Stoner-type grace to the character in his labor. This uphill toil is something palpable. I can relate, along with the anxiety. The whispered doubt. The shudders. I recoil from this awareness and accept it as my own, or at least something similar. I thought the collage mechanic rather effective. I liked the twinning of Melville and Columbus. There's something visceral in their failure: the ache of their arc. It was interesting that as I read this novel, my best friend kept sending me pictures from his holiday in Cuba. There's much to measure in that distance. The crash of waves against a relative silence. Though Metcalf informs us early in the book that where I sit typing was once the floor of an ocean and later just south of an enormous glacier. I carried our rock salt down to the basement last weekend. I never opened the bag and the traces of actual snow this past winter were more of a joke than a hazard. The final insertion of Dreiser and Debs didn't work for me, though it must be admitted that all of my trips to Terre Haute were to see my best friend. I had contemplated a Melville project with various adjacent texts including Olson and Perry Miller. I'm not sure about that at the moment.

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bloodwaters fanning like fingerlings of the Amazon; circuitous branches that dead end in sanguine clumps of mangrove and the flayed flesh of the aboriginal; others, still, eddying and churning enormous hunks of meat while the main river is a torrent—impossible whales with razor flukes and marbled eyes; skeleton spermaceti cruising the headwaters for the eternal Ahab; he, goading Columbus and Melville off one another’s shoulders and into the water; to explore, to hunt, to kill. All of this bloodwater taking root at the stem and flowing through the tributaries of the brain; old ghosts unexorcised, genealogical specters of men, White all, whose every inclination is blood as sport, as ransom, as victory. Until the ocean itself turns a purpled crimson, Neptune crushing all great white whales into chum as enticement for sailors, writers, child-killers. All of this to purge from your conscience, the knowing of your ancestry—White as the Whale, the great M-D, whose quicker eye always spots you first and whose blowhole sprays the executioner’s poisonous gas.

If all rivers lead to the ocean, surely all oceans lead to the river.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

But for Melville, time and space are one...

Do you believe that you lived three thousand years ago? That you were at the taking of Tyre, were overwhelmed in Gomorrah? No. But for me, I was at the subsiding of the Deluge, and helped swab the ground, and build the first house. With the Israelites, I fainted in the wilderness; was in court, when Solomon outdid all the judges before him. I, it was, who ... touched Isabella's heart, that she hearkened to Columbus.

The 2017 Goldsmiths award for innovative fiction was won by Nicola Barker's H(A)PPY, with its unusual use of fonts and typefaces, and also featured Kevin Davey's Playing Possum (also longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize), which drew heavily on the works of, and works about TS Eliot, and an early contender for 2018 is Felix Culpa by Jeremy Gavron, a novel made out of lines taken from a hundred great works of literature.

Paul Metcalf's Genoa, A Telling of Wonders, recommended to me by Neil Griffiths, author of the brilliant As A God Might Be and founder of the Republic of Consciousness Prize, contains elements of all of the above books - but was originally published in 1965, "well before the period in which fiction this innovative would have found a success d’estime simply for being new and unpredictable", as Rick Moody explains in his excellent introduction to the reissued 50th anniversary edition, reproduced here: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2....

Item: a Post-mortem: to understand my brother Carl

and

Item: for the living, myself and others, to discover what it is to heal, and why, as a doctor, I will not.

Genoa combines, in a mere 200 pages, the story of our narrator, Michael Mills, a doctor, his medical musings, the live and works of Herman Melville and the story of Christopher Columbus (hence 'Genoa'), and more. But it is also gives us thoughts on the fate of his late brother Carl; Carl's story itself, at least at its end, based on the real-life kidnapping and murder in 1953, by Carl Austin Hall and his accomplice, of schoolboy Bobby Greenlease.

And it is written in an incredible bricolage of narrative and direct quotation from Melville's works and many other sources, sentences often breaking off midway as the narration pursues another parallel in the lives of the narrator, and those of Melville and Columbus, and with typographical effects (italics, bold text, different fonts, indentation) which, while no H(A)PPY, are still striking.

The effect, and part of the wide range of sources, can be seen (albeit limited by the typographical options available on Goodreads) in this early passage where Michael Mills, who narrates the book as he sits in his study, looks at the books that surround him:

----
Reaching the desk, I sit before it for a moment, uncritical, with per­ception undiminished, searching a balance.

(Melville, WHITE-JACKET, called to observe a flogging: “…balanced myself on my best centre.”

There are the titles, the feel of an old binding: Mardi, for example, an early edition, in two volumes, dark brown, maroon, and black, the backing ribbed, and inside, the marbled end-papers, and the Preface:

“Not long ago, having published two narratives of voyages in the Pacific, which, in many quarters, were received with incredulity, the thought occurred to me, of indeed writing a romance of Poly­nesian adventure, and publishing it as such; to see whether, the fiction might not, possibly be received for a verity: in some degree the reverse of my previous experience.”

Then, GRAY'S ANATOMY, Goss, Twenty-fifth Edition; and a disreput­able copy of THE HOOSIER SCHOOLMASTER, by Edward Eggleston. A thin, modern English book, COSMOLOGY, by H. Bondi; THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS, by Edwin Bjorkman; and a copy of NATURAL HISTORY, March, 1952, including an article, SHRUNKEN HEADS. A TEXTBOOK OF EMBRYOLOGY, by Jordon and Kindred; also, JOURNAL OF MORPHOLOGY, Volume XIX, 1908, containing A STUDY OF THE UNDERLYING CAUSES OF HUMAN MONSTERS.

Glancing upward, at the eight-inch rafters casting regular shadows across each other and across the roof boards, down the length of the attic, I am reminded

of the forecastle of the Julia in Omoo, planted “right in the bows, or, as sailors say, in the very eyes of the ship…”

----

Michael Mills has a fascination with the mechanics, at the cell level, of human fertilisation, at one point comparing the head of the spermatozoa attempting to breach the ovum, to that of Moby Dick assaulting a sea vessel. Medical deformities are another key theme, one that gives the novel its subtitle. Both brothers suffered with medical issues at birth, the effects of which still linger, Michael with a club foot, that he still has, and Carl with hydrocephalus, which although it was resolved, still left residual effects. Carl, although 5ft 8 gave "the illusion of hugeness" due to both his demeanour and his physique, notably his "monstrous outshapen head":

----
And it is all there, in this picture that flashed up in the back of my brain: the hugeness, a little of what Pliny meant when he said that “nature creates monsters for the purpose of astonishing us and amusing herself,” and of the meaning of the word “Teratology,” the medical term for the Science of Malformations and Monstrosities, from the Greek “teratologia,” meaning “a telling of wonders.
----

Carl himself, suffering from severe psychological issues, ones that eventually lead to his terrible crime, undergoes, unwillingly, medical treatment. When repudiating the doctors' approach he also uses the device of literary quotation:

But this notion, that science can play farmer to the flesh, making there what living soil it pleases....

Try to rid my mind of it as I may, yet still these chemical practitioners with their tinctures, and fumes, and braziers, and occult incantations, seem to me like Pharaoh's vain sorcerers, trying to beat down the will of heaven.

Michael thinks 'the words were familiar but I wasn’t sure of the source...' but eventually recognises it as from Melville's The Confidence Man His Masquerade and 'began to wonder when in his career he had read so much Melville—read him so well that he had memorized whole passages. Or perhaps he had never actually read him . . . maybe Melville, as history, had impressed himself into the fiber and cells of which Carl was made, had become part of his makeup...'.

And quoting Melville's Pierre: or, the Ambiguities’, on the eponymous character (a description that could apply to Michael himself):

A varied scope of reading, little suspected by his friends, and randomly acquired by a random but lynx-eyed mind...; this poured out one considerable contributory stream into that bottomless spring of original thought which the occasion and time had caused to burst out on himself.

although he recalls Melville's own self-assessment that 'a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard'.

Columbus, and Melville, are treated sympathetically in the book, but there is a nod to an explanation of sorts for the darker side of the former's explorations of 'undiscovered' lands (which in reality were inhabited and undiscovered only by Europeans), in this typical passage which starts with another Melville quotation:

------------
BARTLEBY THE SCRIVENER...

opening lines, written when he was 34: “I am a rather elderly man.”

and like Columbus, in search of death, he turned to the Holy Land, Sodom, the Dead Sea ...

“. . . foam on beach & pebbles like slaver of mad dog—smarting bitter of the water,—carried the bitter in my mouth all day—bitterness of life—thought of all bitter things—Bitter is it to be poor & Bitter, to be reviled, & Oh bitter are these waters of Death, thought I.—Old boughs tossed up by water—relics of pick-nick—nought to eat but bitumen & ashes with dessert of Sodom apples washed down with water of Dead Sea.— . . .”

and Columbus, following the 3rd voyage, liberated from his chains by the Sovereigns,

(as Melville had been liberated, temporarily, from the chains of poverty, by Judge Shaw,

turned inland

(as Melville turned inland, in PIERRE,

to another scheme: the liberation of Jerusalem . . .

retiring to the convent of Las Cuevas, he began work on the BOOK OF PROPHECIES:

“St. Augustine says that the end of this world is to come in the seventh millenary of years from its creation . . . there are only lacking 155 years to complete the 7000, in which year the world must end.”

“The greatest part of the prophecies and Sacred Writing is already finished.”

thus foreclosing on the future of the hemisphere he had discovered,

. . . condoning and justifying all brutalities against the Indians, as extreme haste must be made to convert the heathen . . .
-----------------

Overall - an absolutely fascinating and highly impressive work.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely amazing. Left me breathless.

Rick Moody thought this:
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/20...

If that is not enough to get your attention, then there is something wrong with you.....

[Nico · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just to be on the nose about it, Paul Metcalf’s Genoa is, indeed, a real journey! Metcalf, taking Barthes dictum that the modern writer will be the scriptor, performs a stitching together of texts that form a narrative between two brothers, all the while Metcalf’s dialogic work seeks to dissect American identity and history. In some interview, the interviewer, and Metcalf himself, brings up his work’s relation to those other poets who interrogated American place, history, culture, and identity — Ezra Pound, WCW, and Charles Olson. From Pound’s Cantos, WCW’s Paterson, Olson’s Maximus Poems, we see the form of collage and stitch that Metcalf employs to create this polyphonic work that uses texts that range from medical books, Columbus’s travel narratives, and of course, the deep fascination with Melville, who Metcalf says:

“A careful reading of Moby-Dick, by the way, will show how modern it is, how much in line it is with what I am talking about here, After a conventional novelistic opening, Melville quickly particularizes, interjecting (between narrative sequences) particles of cetology, the practice of whaling, etc.—”the ballast of the book,” as Van Wyck Brooks put it.”

Metcalf uses this form not to produce a disjunctive collaging of texts; his novel truly does “sing” as many note, it’s arranged in the way a symphony would be, with all the different movements and arrangements. And through this form, I perhaps don’t know enough to truly argue this, but I will anyway, Metcalf creates what is a very rhizomatic book, from what I know of Deleuze, there were moments of major resonance with a sort of Deleuzian perspective I thought. Particularly, Michael’s own focus on his body and the sensations coursing through him as he undertakes his journey. He himself is going through a journey, even if he mostly remains in one place — his attic — he is going on a voyage, at parts discovering America like Columbus (I know that’s not historically accurate anymore but that’s not the point), the sea voyages of Meville, a sperm voyaging to the ovum. Metcalf maintains these narrative threads and brings them together, stitching them together, in a conjunctive way that harmoniously voyages to the insides of the American identity. It’s insistence on discovery is important in the way that Michael, and Metcalf, are discovering the linkages between past and present, how the past structures and enables the present and thus creates the future.

Genoa is an important reckoning with American history and culture that performs a function almost unseen before in its time and somewhat still now. Both Michael and Carl’s respective traumatic experiences, I think, have a fundamental American aspect to them as they attempt to navigate their way through their lives. Michael and Carl represent these two sides of a dichotomy where Michael navigates through this textual work and Carl himself goes through actual voyages in his life. There is a certain sense that reminded me of House of Leaves and it’s aspect of coming to terms with trauma. I, however, can’t fully say what I think the trauma is necessarily doing and it’s relation to American identity. There is, certainly, something to do with the construction of American identity and its relation to colonialism, Metcalf seems very aware of the erasure of Native American presence and history, and he plays upon this presence and absence by using traces of Native presence through his arrangement of texts. Is the fundamental trauma the traumatic history of American identity? A cannibalistic identity that was generated through decades of colonialism and imperialism? Genoa tries to open spaces within the grand narrative of America’s own narrative to interrogate its linkages and connections, it’s contradictions and conflicts.

In an interview with John O’Brien, Metcalf says:

“Compared to all this, the conventional novel, with its sequential flow of events, seems less “original,” or, more simply, less appropriate to the character and quality of American life today.”

And it’s that idea he brings up, of linearity and “originality” that Genoa really dissects in its play of the novel form and upon its use of dialogue and intertextuality to dissect the American. In a sense, if linearity and “originality” are “less appropriate to the character and quality of American life today,” I almost would say there’s a sense, with what Metcalf is saying here, and in Genoa, that proclaims that there is no authentic or original American identity. The American identity was always-already constructed off of other sources that generated it — again its construction through decades of colonialism and imperialism — there is no authentic or origin to the American, its a copy without an original, a copy of a copy. Metcalf’s use of collage strikes at the heart of this simulated idea of a centre to American identity. But, Michael never does find one — he slowly loses every centre as his voyage goes deeper and deeper in trying to find the source, to return to the beginning of things. And then, of course, the form does this too, through placing texts together that Metcalf himself did not write, there is no “original moment,” no original text — going with the Barthesian formula, every text is already the citation of other texts. Metcalf, knowing this, ups the effect to the next level. Genoa is an assemblage, a voyage into the insides of American identity — finding that there is no centre, no origin, no “original.”

Also, I have kept gesturing at this — I’m going to get Bakhtin under my belt fully one day, there is certainly a major dialogic principle to this novel, by its very use of collage and intertextuality, it is always in dialogue with itself and the world. With the form of the novel, the texts it uses, and the world itself. The book, again, is a rhizome-book, an assemblage.

Genoa is one of the most exciting books I’ve read and I really look forward to reading more of Metcalf’s work. His method of collage and stitching together texts to form this dialogic work that dissects the particulars (particles) of American identity, place, and so forth is incredible. It’s a shame he’s passed under the radar for so long because his work is vast in what it is trying to do.

[Marc Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

Video review https://youtu.be/UcdgU5Y9Erw

[Wendy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A tour de force of Metcalf's great rhymes method, marred for me by the one-sided (positive) view of Columbus. When you consider the chapters in which Metcalf deals with "savages"-- the Japanese during WW2, the cannibals in Typee-- and the fact that he leaves out why the Caribs became extinct (while noting it), it becomes evident that a more clearsighted consideration of the facts would have imperilled the whole design of the book, which requires Melville to equal Columbus. The meaning of historical figures changes over time, and clearly the meaning of Columbus has changed a great deal since this book was written, but I still can't help wondering how Metcalf, who is usually so good at picking up on what other people ignore, failed to question the very evidence of genocide that he points to.

[Tom Buchanan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't think he can blame Melville for EVERYTHING.

[Cheryl · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was very difficult to rate this book, since it was written in 1965 and set in earlier decades, and does not acknowledge the genocide that Columbus precipitated, and has misogynistic, ableist, and racist undertones throughout. I stumbled on it while preparing for my trip to the Caribbean, and thought it would be interesting to read ocean themed ideas from Melville and expedition notes from Columbus, and that is all I liked about it. There are odd passages from medical textbooks and a subplot about the brother of the narrator who was a murderer, which were really distracting and did not add to the book.

Throughout the trip, I would struggle between the sense of holiness at being at the place where the European expeditions happened, where Columbus named islands like Antigua, and feeling like it was like the holiness one would feel at Auschwitz, a horror-filled, deep reverence for the evil ultimately perpetrated on natives there, on slaves imported there, and the continuation throughout the colonial period that exploited the freed slaves. I felt that deeply, in sorrow and in the mindset of having to confront the past to be able to do better; and also envisioned what it was like to be a native Carib on the shore watching the ships enter harbors and bays. What were they thinking and feeling? The Europeans decimated them so much so that it was thought they were eradicated, but genes have shown the Taino culture is still present in people in some islands, but the memory is lost.

The book did not answer any of my deeper questions, but still was a vast collection of sailing, seagoing, ocean lore, ocean metaphors, Melville’s ‘sea-feelings,’ that complemented my vacation, and I am grateful for the coincidence and poetry and mystery found in it about the sea on our planet ocean, which ultimately can be seen as universal truths.

from the intro:
“The American expedition, according to this braid of intertexts, is always additionally an adventure in language and reading—never the topographical exploration without the ship’s log. And as with the alchemists, this need for exploration, while appearing outward, shipboard, always ends as an interior exploration of who we are.” Rick Moody

There is an experience that I must try to understand, and it has to do with awareness, with a point in time and perhaps also in space where the awareness may be fixed, a time-space location, such as, say, a whale-ship, or perhaps what a cosmologist means when he says—with his stage the universe—“A fundamental observer partakes of the motion of the substratum, that is, he is located on a fundamental particle.”

Blank stillness would for hours reign unbroken on this prairie. ‘It is the bed of a dried-up sea,’ said the companionless sailor—no geologist—to himself, musing at twilight upon the fixed undulations of that immense alluvial expanse bounded only by the horizon, and missing there the stir that, to alert eyes and ears, animates at all times the apparent solitudes of the deep.  But a scene quite at variance with one’s antecedents may yet prove suggestive of them. Hooped round by a level rim, the prairie was to John Marr a reminder of ocean.

(Melville)           “I have a sort of sea-feeling here in the country, now that the ground is covered with snow. I look out of my window in the morning when I rise as I would out of a port-hole of a ship in the Atlantic. My room seems a ship’s cabin; & at nights when I wake up & hear the wind shrieking, I almost fancy there is too much sail in the house, & I had better go on the roof and rig in the chimney.”

“In summer, too, Canute-like: sitting here, one is often reminded of the sea. For not only do long ground-swells roll the slanting grain, and little wavelets of the grass ripple over upon the low piazza, as their beach, and the blown down of dandelions is wafted like the spray, and the purple of the mountains is just the purple of the billows, and a still August noon broods upon the deep meadows, as a calm upon the Line; but the vastness and the lonesomeness are so oceanic, and the silence and the sameness, too.”

Melville again:           “You must have plenty of sea-room to tell the Truth in; especially when it seems to hare an aspect of newness, as America did in 1492, though it was then just as old, and perhaps older than Asia, only those sagacious philosophers, the common sailors, had never seen it before, swearing it was all water and moonshine there.”

The sailors talked of islands: of Antilia, and the splendid mirages beyond Gomera; of the French and Portuguese Green Island, and the Irish O’Brasil;of the great pines, of a kind unknown, cast ashore on the Azores by west and north-west winds—and the lemons, green branches, and other fruits washing upon the Canaries;the Saint himself, who set out in search of islands possessing the delights of paradise, and finally landed, And there was Scheria, home of Nausicaa and the Phaeacians, UIysses’ longest resting place before his return home—like Atlantis, it boasted a great city, and was located beyond the Pillars of Hercules.

Columbus:           “Most exalted Sovereigns: At a very early age I entered upon the sea navigating, and I have continued doing so until today. The calling in itself inclines whoever follows it to desire to know the secrets of this world. Forty years are already passing which I have employed in this manner: I have traversed every region which up to the present time is navigated.”           “During this time I have seen, and in seeing, have studied all writings, cosmography, histories, chronicles, and philosophy and those relating to other arts, by means of which our Lord made me understand ...”

Melville, as Pierre: “A varied scope of reading, little suspected by his friends, and randomly acquired by a random but lynx-eyed mind . . .; this poured one considerable contributory stream into that bottomless spring of original thought which the occasion and time had caused to burst out in himself.”

Still standing, I step back from the desk, gaining my sea-legs. I am braced, with one hand on the chimney. The house arches and shudders—an inverted hull, with kelson aloft—against the weather.

It was only the bold and persistent acceptance of cosmographical errors in the mind of Columbus—shrinking the earth by a quarter, and juggling Cypango until it fell among the Virgin Islands—that made possible the discovery of the West Indies.

Whale, boobie, sandpiper, dove, crab, and boatswain bird—all were signs of land . . . for hitherto none had sailed far enough to see such things other than close to land . . . and there was sargasso weed, rumored to trap ships as in a web . . . detritus, perhaps, of Atlantis . . .

Thou canst not tell where one drop of water or one grain of sand will be to-morrow noon; and yet with thy impotence thou insultest the sun!

There is a law of excess, of abundance, whereby a people must explore the ocean, in order to be competent on land . . .

Melville: “You must have plenty of sea-room to tell the Truth in.”

Musing, still, I think of islands, of the meaning of islands .. . of the Aegean, the Indes, and Polynesia . . . and the endings in islands: Antillia disintegrating, perhaps, into the Indes, and Atlantis, into the Canaries, Azores and Cape Verdes...

(Isabel, in PIERRE: “I pray for peace—for motionlessness—for the feeling of myself, as of some plant, absorbing life without seeking it . . .”)

there is this about Columbus and Melville: both were blunt men, setting the written word on the page and letting it stand, not going back to correct their errors, not caring to be neat . . .(Melville: “It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open . . .”The orthography, the spelling of both was hurried, splashed with errors, and both men annotated, scattered postils, in whatever books they read: putting islands, fragments of themselves, at the extremes of the page . . .

Alone, in such remotest waters, that though you sailed a thousand miles, and passed a thousand shores, you would not come to any chiselled hearthstone, or aught hospitable beneath that part of the sun; in such latitudes and longitudes, pursuing too such a calling as he does, the whaleman is wrapped by influences all tending to make his fancy pregnant with many a mighty birth.”

Melville: “Weary with the invariable earth, the restless sailor breaks from every enfolding arm, and puts to sea in height of tempest that blows off shore. But in long night-watches at the antipodes, how heavily that ocean gloom lies in vast bales upon the deck; thinking that that very moment in his deserted hamlet-home the household sun is high, and many a sun-eyed maiden meridian as the sun.”

“In mid Pacific, where life’s thrill Is primal—Pagan
the fair breeze of naked nature now blew in their faces.
Tis Paradise. In such an hour      
Some pangs that rend might take release.”

“The Mind is to the Body as the Whole Man is to the Earth “

Melville:           “With wrecks in a garret I’m stranded . . .” and           “Pleased, not appeased, by myriad wrecks in me.”

Melville:
“We the Lilies whose palor is passion . . .        
. . . the winged blaze that sweeps my soul                                 
Like prairie fires . . .          
To flout pale years of cloistral life                                 
And flush me in this sensuous strife.                                 
The innocent bare-foot! young, so young!                                 
The plain lone bramble thrills with Spring                                 
The patient root, the vernal sense                                 
Surviving hard experience .

Melville: “If ever, in days to come, you shall see ruin at hand, and, thinking you understand mankind, shall tremble for your friendships, and tremble for your pride; and, partly through love for the one and fear for the other, shall resolve to be beforehand with the world, and save it from a sin by prospectively taking that sin to yourself, then will you do as one I now dream of once did, and like him will you suffer; but how fortunate and how grateful should you be, if like him, after all that had happened, you could be a little happy again.”

Columbus on board the Niña, caught in a violent storm, writing “with caligraphic poise” on a single piece of parchment, trying to reduce to this space the content of his discovery

“The party left the Enterprise, then anchored off Puerto Plata, Island of Santo Domingo, at 6:30 on the morning of the 14th of May and proceeded in the steamcutter thirty miles to the westward along the north shore of the island of Santo Domingo. We were accompanied by an old native pilot who was recommended by the U. S. Consul of Puerto Plata as familiar with the coast and such traditions as exist among the natives respecting the first settlement of Columbus. He has piloted vessels to and from the port of Isabella for many years.

“About eight miles inside the cape now known as Isabella there is a bay of considerable size; on its eastern shore a slight rocky projection of land formed by one of the numerous bluffs was chosen for the first permanent settlement of the Spaniards in the New World . . .

Tradition points to this little plateau as the site of the ancient city and here we found scattered at intervals various small, ill-defined heaps of stones, remnants of walls built of small unhewn stones, evidently laid in mortar, pieces of old tiles and potsherds, some of the latter glazed, and fragments of broad, roughly made bricks. There were half a dozen or more blocks of dressed limestone that may have been part of the walls of buildings somewhat finished and permanent in character. The trees, matted roots and trailing vines overspread the ground . . .

[Judith Martin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Went nowhere, bailed early

[Alexander Weber · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love this book. But I don't get it.
I mean, I get the fictional story that is told, about Michael's brother Carl. At least, I get what happened. But I'm not sure of its significance. Or how it relates to Melville, or Columbus, or any of the other connections that are made. I mean, at times I could see the connection. But I don't understand the bigger picture. Was there a bigger picture? I'd love to hear what other people think.
See, despite this, despite me not 'getting' it... I really liked this book. It is a thrill to read, to learn about Carl, and to read the thoughts and readings that Michael quotes, to see the connections he is trying to make, or happens to make. I love Melville's writing, so of course I'm going to love a book that quotes freely from him and intersperses it into these thoughts that Michael is having.
I don't know. This book had me hooked from the beginning to end. And now I want to know more about it.
For those that don't know, and want a run-down: Michael Mills is an club-footed MD who refuses to practice. He comes home, feeds himself and his children, and then retires to the attic. The whole book takes place, let's say, over one night, as Michael ruminates about his brother Carl, his family history (he is related to Melville), and freely associates his thoughts with quotes from Melville, with the Columbus myth, with spermatazoa, and everything in between.
I want to read it again...

Just found this review. It is excellent. Behold:

As to the question of man’s monstrous inheritance, Metcalf admirably avoids offering up easy answers — the emphasis on literature does not lead the narrator to suggest that we as a species are redeemed in any way by instances of artistic excellence, nor does the narrator offer up literature as some method for finding solace. But the sympathy Mills has for Columbus, despite crimes committed upon the native population of the lands he “discovered”; for Melville, who doomed his family to penury with his will to fame; and, finally, for his murderer brother, points to the way literature can aid an understanding of monsters and their crimes. It is a simple truth, one that is easily forgotten, and one that the family members of those killed in Charleston seemed to acknowledge when they offered the murderer their forgiveness: Buried within every monster is a man.

[PaperBird]

Did a review of this book here: https://youtu.be/CkGPvrg1Db4

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Duh . . . wha?

The plot: a father secludes himself in the attic and pores over literature and news clippings from his past, neglecting his children downstairs until past midnight, at which time his wife comes home from work and scolds him for not putting the kids to bed. The father continues to dig into his books and papers until morning, which finds him going downstairs and entering the kitchen.

That's it for plot.

BUT! What's fascinating are the stories within the story. He draws parallels with his emotion state and the writing and themes of Melville, and then Christopher Columbus, and then how those two lived almost parallel lives themselves. There are full pages of excerpts examining the similarities. And there's Homer, Hart Crane, medical text, newspaper clippings from his brother's life, etc. So there is a lot of intertextual stuff going on, and I love it.

Also, some bits happen in Jefferson City, MO. It's a local piece! Cool!

Also, turns out the author is actually Melville's grandson. Cool!

A fun read for fans of . . . that. I mean, the main plot device is . . . in other texts? Cool!

Recommended for fans of cool stuff.

[Kerryvaughan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paul was Herman Melville’s great-grandson. This “wicked” book was his way of “relieving himself” of that “monkey on my back.”

It’s a “semi fictional” story of two brothers Michael and Carl. Michael has a clubfoot. Carl’s been executed by the state. But Michael spends a lot of the story’s time in his attic thinking back on his great-grandfather Melville, Melville’s writing, and Melville’s reuse of Christopher Columbus’s story. All of these threads weave together into a novel. But in totality, Metcalf’s novel reads more like a scholarly collection of quotes from Melville’s works and Columbus’s letters, and less like the story of Michael and Carl. And although Melville’s words are each a gold nugget, and I will never complain about reading them, I wanted to read more of *Metcalf’s* words. Luckily I’ve got Will West up next.

[Lloyd Potter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another masterful work of juxtaposition. How it would flow from speaking about birth, to biology, to psychology, to whale anatomy, to exploration, and to philosophy was lovely. The narrative weaving all these themes and topics was strange, but fit larger meta topics, like the authors own relationship with his famous grandfather. Again, Melville fan or not, highly recommend!

[Karen Carlson]

h/t Luis Panini on Twitter = "challenging but rewarding: "accurate picture of brain function" combines Melville, Columbus, and the protagonist. Short, 206 pgs; not sure I'm up to it but might be worth a try.
https://twitter.com/TheLuisPanini/sta...

[Daniel J.T.V. Thorn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange book; illuminating on the details of Melville’s life but maybe deliberately obfuscating Metcalf’s own history as the descendant of the man. Interesting comparisons between Melville’s prose and Columbus’ apocalyptic diaries.

[Mary · Rating 1 out of 5]

Couldn’t get past the second chapter. Way to complicated.

[Allegra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Masterful.

Fair warning that it depicts violence in great detail in a way I have never encountered elsewhere.

[Joe Olipo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Genoa-A Telling of Wonders

2021 Thoughts:
clubfoot : ahab foot
rolling plains : "roughly like the sea" ... our sacred cow (Alice Goodman)
Attic (greek) : the boat
moving backwards on the stern (walking in chains, feeling of being dragged) : a backwards teleology
ahab's violent thrust reflected (Melville, in the Pacific—the western extreme of American force—untethered, fatherless, the paternity blasted—turning—as Ahab—with vengeance and malice to match the monster’s: turning and thrusting back to his own beginnings: to Moby-Dick, the white monster: to Maria Gansevoort Melville . . .)
twinning/division (explicitly at the end of the third chapter), discourse of Janus in Genoa chapter 2,
brother carl : whale? , vitality? : lameness?
brother carl's hydrocephalus : "ocean in my head" "the headwaters, perhaps"
cetacean head and skeleton : sperm head and flagella : narrator body, It is this—the huge-headed and long-tailed sensation—that I have been experiencing for some time.
trophoblast invading maternal tissue; sharks eating themselves in a frenzy
cetacean head, and eye position (blindness in one eye, flat world) ; embryo wide-set eyes
columbus's gout; island treasures (won as crystals)

Columbus as casuistry: "“During this time I have seen, and in seeing, have studied all writings, cosmography, histories, chronicles, and philosophy and those relating to other arts, by means of which our Lord made me understand with a palpable hand, that it was practicable to navigate from here to the Indies and inspired me with a will for the execution of this navigation. And with this fire, I came to your Highnesses.”" and then the immediate contradiction, though magnanimous “I say that the holy spirit works in Christians, Jews, Moors, and in all others of all sects, and not only in the wise but the ignorant: for in my time I have seen a villager who gave a better account of the heaven and the stars and their courses than others who expended money in learning of them.”

herman melville as if sired from St. Elmo's fire (corpusants): “Oh, thou magnanimous! Now I do glory in my genealogy! . . . thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again with haughty agony, I read my sire.”

(on the paralyzed band leader)
What would I do:

to bring back,
to save,
to return,
a not very talented musician . . .

//from a panting, breathless worship of these works (melville, columbus), to qualified praise/derision, to those who do not even read it except compelled, and who are then, if not bored to death, similarly horrified.

Carib(ian) Charybdis—such, perhaps, as Hart Crane—the ocean already in his head—leaped into . . .

"Columbus at first thought he had discovered India . . .
. . . thereby lopping off, roughly, one-half the globe: a hemisphere gone . . .
Melville, describing Hawthorne: “Still there is something lacking—a good deal lacking—to the plump sphericity of the man.”"

so-so (not so good)
Moby-Dick . . . a great white monster, with “a hump like a snow-hill . . .”
not Leucothea, not a white and winged goddess, protectress, who gave Ulysses an enchanted veil . . .
but moving out from this, from the closed and friendly Mediterranean, from the near ocean shores,
moving out, as Columbus, across the Atlantic, and, through Melville, into the Pacific:
the white gull become a white whale, cast in monstrous, malignant revenge . .

"I recall the cigars I smoked and gave away at the plant on the occasions of Mike Jr.’s birth, our firstborn; and, with the tobacco smoke, I taste again the pleasure, the pride that I enjoyed at that time—pride such as a man might feel at the mouth of the Mississippi or Amazon, sharing in those waters that push back the ocean, the waters they are in the act of joining . . ."

"He began telling a story—a wild tale about barbering among primitive Eskimos in Alaska, the natives being confused between haircuts and scalping. The customers seemed to know that he was lying, and this added to it . . ."

triple repetition (funny?):
Seeing me awake, he lit another cigar, handed it to me. I smoked, held my head in my hands, tried to reconstruct the evening. Carl finished SUPERMAN, picked up CLAREL, and
Seeing me awake, he lit another cigar, handed it to me. I smoked, held my head in my hands, tried to reconstruct the evening. Carl finished SUPERMAN, picked up CLAREL, and
Seeing me awake, he lit another cigar, handed it to me. I smoked, held my head in my hands, tried to reconstruct the evening. Carl finished SUPERMAN, picked up CLAREL, and

melville: “Pleased, not appeased, by myriad wrecks in me.” - 'more annihilated than repentant' (from Kierkegaard)
Obnoxious Carl, quoting Melville

[Steven Felicelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

hidden gem

[Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I could not put this wonderful, wonderful book down! I loved every word!!!! Wow!!!!!!!!!!