Melville and Shelley and Edwards and Thompson

Over the summer of two years past I had the pleasure of reading Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. I was assigned to read to read it the semester prior but did not get the opportunity and it seemed to be worth it because when I read it on my own, I was entranced. It seemed that every sentence was packed full with meaning, the word choice was amazing, awe inspiring. I get the same sense with the writings of Melville his whale book. In chapter LXXXI I was hypnotized in a sense by his description of the bleeding whale. Melville writes, "Yet so vast is the quantity of blood in him, and so distant and numerous its interior fountains, that he will keep thus bleeding for a considerable period; even as in drought a river will flow, whose source is in the well-springs of far-off and indiscernible hills." When he could have just written there was so much blood it too long to all come out, he uses a melodic like language to communicate the vastness immensities of blood that come gushing out of the whale, comparing it to a river of all things. In this sense I think that I read and see more than blood coming out of a whale carcass. I see the interior of the whale and I see the banks of the river whose source as terminated its existence and the rest of the entity must live out its last moments of existence. Perhaps in the 1800's people and writers alike were far too busy and a s result packed every sentence full of meaning and significance. Reading through this section of the book I was reminded of the "Spider Letter" I saw in Melville's descriptions of the whale's anatomy the careful and descriptive articulation of Edwards' spider's webs. Further more I was reminded of another book I read last summer by Hunter S. Thompson. The language used in his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream I found this same kind of profound language. Speaking with my friend on the subject we came to the conclusion that it's not what he writes about, it's how he writes. Lines like, "a head full of acid" or "demented counter-part to the radio" communicate more than what is literally on the page. I think in this same method Melville, Shelley, and Edwards were writing. The language of all these works is profound in that it tells us more and more each time we read it, because language has that power to be morphed and twisted and to be read with infinite perspectives making it a never ending tool of the communication of knowledge and experience.