Chapter 17:

Summary

Three Little Words:The focus of the opening section on Moby-Dick focuses around the 3 opening words of the novel. Clark asserts that "Call me Ishmael" is such a gigantic way to start the novel that it dwarfs the rest of the entire opening paragraph. He states that these three words have permeated pop culture and literature through the ages not only because of the novel but the context that the words words make to a reader approaching the book.

Short Sentence as Gospel:This section focuses on why the opening sentence of this novel is so effective. Clark list a few reasons:

• It has a oddly potent structure.
• It introduces the narrator.
• It has mystery to it.
• It introduces a biblical allusion.

Clark states that all this is done efficiently with 3 words. Clark also mentions that this is called the "Jesus wept" effect. The shorter the statement the more validity it has with readers.

Arc of the Ark:This section, while quite short, emphasizes the importance of foreshadow in the writing structure of the first and last paragraphs of Moby-Dick.

Allusion, not Illusion:Clark hones in on the idea that all authors, regardless of genre, use back up sources and quotes to bring about intersexuality to their text. Clark ties Ishmael to the biblical character of the same name, and even ties the stories together, showing how Melville brought old stories forward through the naming of his character.

Coffin as Lifeboat:The main idea of this section is the focus on narrative inversion. The coffin that saves Ishmael being a container of life and how the inversion of meaning happens throughout all narrative writing. Clark mentions the idea of felix culpa, the happy fault, and gives the examples of Adam and Eve and Harry Potter and Severus Snape. The fall of Adam and Eve resulted in Christ and Harry's most hated enemy is actually his greatest ally.

Writing Lessons

1. Read the Bible. This is not a plea for you to become religious - or more religious. But if you don't know the stories of the Bible and it's main character, you are cutting yourself off from the most powerful source of allusion in Western culture - with Shakespeare a distant second.
2. Embrace brevity. I've written a book about short writing, which may be a contradiction in terms. But short bits can accumulate. How many stones does it take to build a cathedral? Remember that this eight-hundred page novel begins with a three-word sentence.
3. Learn the name. Nonfiction writers gather interesting names. Fiction writers can invent them. Names become part of character development, but they also send messages about class, culture, race, region, nationality, and history.
4. Offer mystery. Tow words I love to use in my writing are "mystery" and "secret". Readers will make a journey with you if you help them solve a mystery or expose a secret. The great white whale and Captain Ahab's obsession with it contain mysteries and secrets, but so does the first sentence. Who is this man who would have you call him Ishmael?
5. Foreshadow. Can you imagine writing a story in which a word in the first paragraph saves the life of the hero in the last? Look at the way a death box- a coffin- in the beginning becomes a lifeboat in the end.

Critique

Clark focuses this chapter on more direct writing devices. The planning of foreshadow and using certain names can be summed up as developing a rhetorical situation as a writer. In their article "Cognition of Discovery: Defining a Rhetorical Problem" Flowers and Hayes look at how exposure to a variety of rhetorical situations allows a writer to plan out their writing for maximum effect. Clark also channels a little bit of Bizup's "BEAM- A Rhetorical Approach to Teaching Research Writing" with stating that both non-fiction and fiction authors use certain artifacts in text to engage readers in certain ways, rather than to just state a found fact. This is especially interesting when applied to fictional writing as Bizup only applies his theory to research writing. Using characters to engage with readers to echo other stories to portray meaning is an interesting idea when intersected with Bizup's BEAM theory.