Classics and the Western Canon discussion
Discussion - Moby Dick
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Moby Dick--the book as a whole
S. Rosemary wrote: "But the effect it had on me was quite different, like a Shakespearean tragedy when you just want to SHAKE those characters "I thought of it more as a Greek tragedy, where everybody knows what is going to happen to the main character, (except of course the main character himself), but you watch in fascination to see how it is going to happen and, more important, why and what lesson you are to take from the catharsis. The whole thing happened in slow motion, you knew it was going to end badly, but you had to watch anyhow.
S. Rosemary wrote: "Hmmm, I didn't think any of the characters in the book were evil, including Moby Dick himself. I thought the book said an enormous amount about how humans perceive evil, though. "Hmmm. Just what evil are we perceiving? I agree with you in not seeing any of the characters as evil, but nor do I see the evil that we are to perceive.
The primary emotion I had was great sadness.
Sadness for Ahab, tormented by this injury, unable to emotionally get past it and get on with his live, very much like Hamlet, totally obsessed with revenge, and as Hamlet teaches us, obsession with revenge never turns out well.
Sadness for Starbuck, tormented with the irresolvable conflict between loyalty to his captain and loyalty to his owners and the interests of the rest of the crew.
Sadness for Pip, for Queequeg, for the rest of the crew, intending a voyage of danger, yes, but primarily of profit, expecting a captain who had the same goal of filling up the ship with oil and returning safely with profits in hand, but hijacked and ultimately destroyed by Ahab's obsession.
Sadness even for Moby Dick, already marked out as different by his coloring, and if whales create outcasts of the different, as humans often do, an outcast from his whale society, hunted initially for the profit he could bring, acting in simple self defense and as a result hunted by a fanatic obsessed with his destruction.
In fact, the only character I don't feel sadness for is Ishmael. He went for adventure and found it in spades, he seemed cured of the depression which impelled him initially to go a voyage, he survived with an adventure to tell his children and grandchildren and, as my grandmother used to say, a great story "to dine out on."
But overall, overwhelming sadness was my overall emotion.
Adelle wrote: "S. Rosemary wrote: "I loved Ahab as a character because half of the time I wished I was more like him, and the other half I was relieved that I wasn't . . . ."Egad. There was never a single fiber of my body that wanted to be like Ahab!
Everyman wrote: "S. Rosemary wrote: "Hmmm, I didn't think any of the characters in the book were evil, including Moby Dick himself. I thought the book said an enormous amount about how humans perceive evil, though...."
Very nice post to read. When I think of the characters as people, then yes, very sad.
Very nice post to read. When I think of the characters as people, then yes, very sad.
Everyman wrote: "Adelle wrote: "S. Rosemary wrote: "I loved Ahab as a character because half of the time I wished I was more like him, and the other half I was relieved that I wasn't . . . ."
Egad. There was never a single fiber of my body that wanted to be like Ahab!
..."
Egad. Ahab had such will power. And he had focus. And he had goals.
And if looked at from a Jungian point of view, he was the only real character in the book---it's not a ship at all, it's simply Ahab's life voyage...and all the other characters are but aspects of his personality....and Ahab was driving himself on to be true to the truth as he saw it...and discarding the aspects of his personality that wanted to just live jolly, easy lives, or lives of convention set by his community, or prated orthodox religion...He had decided that there was something important in his life...something very important...and it's not a real whale at all....and he's set his sights on it, and he's made the decision that he's willing to sacrifice whatever aspects of himself he has to be to true to what's important to him.
I just always am drawn to the psychological slant on books.
Egad. There was never a single fiber of my body that wanted to be like Ahab!
..."
Egad. Ahab had such will power. And he had focus. And he had goals.
And if looked at from a Jungian point of view, he was the only real character in the book---it's not a ship at all, it's simply Ahab's life voyage...and all the other characters are but aspects of his personality....and Ahab was driving himself on to be true to the truth as he saw it...and discarding the aspects of his personality that wanted to just live jolly, easy lives, or lives of convention set by his community, or prated orthodox religion...He had decided that there was something important in his life...something very important...and it's not a real whale at all....and he's set his sights on it, and he's made the decision that he's willing to sacrifice whatever aspects of himself he has to be to true to what's important to him.
I just always am drawn to the psychological slant on books.
Everyman wrote: "I'm never really clear what people mean when they talk about an author as being a Romantic. At my college, we never had any lit-crit courses, we just read the books, so I didn't get all the definitions and categorizations down. How are you using the term?"
A Romantic author is someone who writes roughly according to the generalised tenants of Romanticism, a literary movement characterised by Byron, Hugo, Thoreau, Hawthorne, &c. It was a movement concerned with the transcendent power of Nature over mankind, the triumph of Emotion over Reason, and the rejection of the Evil that is Society. I would call the interpretation of Moby-Dick as Romantic a misinterpretation.
A Romantic author is someone who writes roughly according to the generalised tenants of Romanticism, a literary movement characterised by Byron, Hugo, Thoreau, Hawthorne, &c. It was a movement concerned with the transcendent power of Nature over mankind, the triumph of Emotion over Reason, and the rejection of the Evil that is Society. I would call the interpretation of Moby-Dick as Romantic a misinterpretation.
Adelle wrote: "I just always am drawn to the psychological slant on books. "
Adelle, I respond both as an objective (as far as that word can go) critic of literature and someone biased against Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis. I would venture to say that psychological analysis of the characters in this book is largely inappropriate. Even with Ahab it can only delve so deep: Ahab's motives are quite plain, and his conflict is quite understandable considering his character. Allegories are not known for their characters' psychological depth, simply because ambiguity and complexity in characters impedes the strong thematic symbolism of allegory. That is not to say, of course, that you can't or shouldn't look at Moby-Dick psychoanalytically: it just means that looking too hard might leave you making up character-traits, &c that do not exist.
Adelle, I respond both as an objective (as far as that word can go) critic of literature and someone biased against Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis. I would venture to say that psychological analysis of the characters in this book is largely inappropriate. Even with Ahab it can only delve so deep: Ahab's motives are quite plain, and his conflict is quite understandable considering his character. Allegories are not known for their characters' psychological depth, simply because ambiguity and complexity in characters impedes the strong thematic symbolism of allegory. That is not to say, of course, that you can't or shouldn't look at Moby-Dick psychoanalytically: it just means that looking too hard might leave you making up character-traits, &c that do not exist.
Everyman wrote: "Adelle wrote: "S. Rosemary wrote: "I loved Ahab as a character because half of the time I wished I was more like him, and the other half I was relieved that I wasn't . . . ."Egad. There was never a single fiber of my body that wanted to be like Ahab! "
I have to agree, but I wonder at the same time if there isn't something admirable about Ahab's determination. I'm not sure there is, but I'm reminded of the Shaw quotation:
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. All progress, therefore, depends upon the unreasonable man.
Things like climbing a previously unconquerable mountain or landing men on the moon are not really necessary, or even reasonable goals. People sometimes pursue unreasonable goals because the pursuit has become part of their identity, or because the pursuit has overtaken the goal itself. Doing the thing is more important than the benefits that accrue from having done it. I think this is why we wondered early on if Ahab would be satisfied if he were to actually succeed in killing Moby Dick. I'm not sure if it's fair to compare Ahab to people like Edmund Hillary or Ernest Shackleton or the Apollo program, but it might be worth a thought or two.
Everyman wrote: "Just what evil are we perceiving? I agree with you in not seeing any of the characters as evil, but nor do I see the evil that we are to perceive. "I didn't see any evil that we should perceive, either- that was sort of my point. Ahab perceives evil that isn't there; the book is not so much about evil itself but about the ways that we perceive and misperceive it.
Adelle wrote: "Egad. Ahab had such will power. And he had focus. And he had goals. "Exactly! I was reading this while finishing my Master's project. I was procrastinating and avoiding and doing lots of things last-minute, and wishing I could harness Ahab's single-willed drive, just for a little bit!
Logan wrote: "Adelle wrote: "I just always am drawn to the psychological slant on books. "
Adelle, I respond both as an objective (as far as that word can go) critic of literature and someone biased..."
LOL. My most respected co-reader is MOST outspoken to me that she doesn't care for psychological interpretations of books. So you're obviously not alone. Yet I keeps bringing them into discussions nonetheless.
I would venture to say that psychological analysis of the characters in this book is largely inappropriate. ]
Well, I can understand that you personally might not care for such an interpretation, but it seems a bit sweeping and judgmentally unsupported to say that it's "inappropriate."
There are so very many books and articles on Moby Dick from that perspective both online and in print. From people who seem quite respected. And,I must say, I didn't have to reach to see it from that perspective.
Adelle, I respond both as an objective (as far as that word can go) critic of literature and someone biased..."
LOL. My most respected co-reader is MOST outspoken to me that she doesn't care for psychological interpretations of books. So you're obviously not alone. Yet I keeps bringing them into discussions nonetheless.
I would venture to say that psychological analysis of the characters in this book is largely inappropriate. ]
Well, I can understand that you personally might not care for such an interpretation, but it seems a bit sweeping and judgmentally unsupported to say that it's "inappropriate."
There are so very many books and articles on Moby Dick from that perspective both online and in print. From people who seem quite respected. And,I must say, I didn't have to reach to see it from that perspective.
Adelle wrote: "Egad. Ahab had such will power. And he had focus. And he had goals. "True. But so did Attila the Hun, but there's not a fiber in my body that wants to be like him! :) But I do see that properly focused those characteristics could be beneficial.
And if looked at from a Jungian point of view, he was the only real character in the book-
I really must read Jung some day.
Thomas wrote: "I have to agree, but I wonder at the same time if there isn't something admirable about Ahab's determination. I'm not sure there is, but I'm reminded of the Shaw quotation:The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. All progress, therefore, depends upon the unreasonable man.."
True enough, I guess. But so does all anti-progress, for lack of a better term, doesn't it? Without naming names, I think we cal all think of figures who brought about great sorrow to the world trying to adapt it to themselves.
Adelle wrote: "Well, I can understand that you personally might not care for such an interpretation [psychological], but it seems a bit sweeping and judgmentally unsupported to say that it's "inappropriate." "One of the great things about great books is that there are so many different ways of looking at them that can yield beneficial insights to the looker. I don't, for example, much care for feminist interpretations of most works, but I wouldn't say that they were inappropriate for those who pursue them (though I definitely reserve the right to disagree, sometimes strongly, with some of the feminist criticisms I have read of certain works. Off topic example: (view spoiler)
S. Rosemary wrote: "I didn't see any evil that we should perceive, either- that was sort of my point. Ahab perceives evil that isn't there; the book is not so much about evil itself but about the ways that we perceive and misperceive it."
Ah. Yes. But carrying that on a bit, comment after writing the following: this is musing, questing, not proposing is it right to say that Ahab considers Moby Dick evil? He certainly considers MD to have wronged him personally. But isn't evil more than that? Doesn't evil have to go beyond harming one individual? If a person murders only one person but otherwise leads a blameless life, is that person really evil? Or does calling that person evil diminish the power of the concept of evil? Can one person (or, here, one whale) by one heinous enough act, qualify as evil? Or does there have to be a broader catalog of wrongs to qualify a person (or whale) as evil? But, of course, MD did also take off another man's arm, which Ahab didn't know at the start of his vengeance but does by the end.
Not that we would necessarily think of MD as evil in either case, that's not my question; my question is whether it is fair for Ahab to consider MD evil, or whether he should only consider him an enemy who has wronged him? Or does fairness not enter into it, and is it sufficient for Ahab to consider MD evil simply for what MD did to him?
Musing, as I said. I propose no answer here!
Adelle wrote: "it seems a bit sweeping and judgmentally unsupported to say that it's 'inappropriate.'"
I can surely see a very good argument behind being able to look at any book from any perspective. As I acknowledged, you have both the right and the ability to read Melville's book through a psychoanalytical lens. But when I said inappropriate, I hope I did not infuse it with too negative a connotation. While reader-response theory is instrumental to the understanding and interpretation of literature, it is not the end-all-be-all here.
Authorial intent is amazingly important to a work of literature. When we discuss Moby-Dick, most of us would probably concede that Melville did not want his audience, whether or not they sympathised with him, to emulate Ahab: it is almost impossible to make a reasonable case for Melville's endorsing Ahab's actions. Such is the nature of what I might venture to call authorial-intent theory.
In any case, the reason I call psychological analysis of Moby-Dick 'largely inappropriate' is because Melville's intent for his story leaves us with very little to find. Outside of Ahab, it becomes painfully difficult to perform any psyochoanalysis. Of course it is easy to jump to such a perspective with Ahab because he is, as Shaw might say, an 'unreasonable man', and therefore confuses and fascinates us. But that's not the point. Melville isn't trying to justify his existence or his motives: he's trying to make a point through the allegorical character that is Ahab. We might puzzle over a few specific aspects of that character, but for the most part Melville lets us know loud and clear that he is out to tell us something about the world through Ahab: that Ahab himself is not the point. Such authorial intent greatly restricts the value one might get out of psychoanalysis—at least as far as I'm concerned.
I hope this justifies what I have said for you, as I intended neither sweeping nor unsupported judgement of this novel.
I can surely see a very good argument behind being able to look at any book from any perspective. As I acknowledged, you have both the right and the ability to read Melville's book through a psychoanalytical lens. But when I said inappropriate, I hope I did not infuse it with too negative a connotation. While reader-response theory is instrumental to the understanding and interpretation of literature, it is not the end-all-be-all here.
Authorial intent is amazingly important to a work of literature. When we discuss Moby-Dick, most of us would probably concede that Melville did not want his audience, whether or not they sympathised with him, to emulate Ahab: it is almost impossible to make a reasonable case for Melville's endorsing Ahab's actions. Such is the nature of what I might venture to call authorial-intent theory.
In any case, the reason I call psychological analysis of Moby-Dick 'largely inappropriate' is because Melville's intent for his story leaves us with very little to find. Outside of Ahab, it becomes painfully difficult to perform any psyochoanalysis. Of course it is easy to jump to such a perspective with Ahab because he is, as Shaw might say, an 'unreasonable man', and therefore confuses and fascinates us. But that's not the point. Melville isn't trying to justify his existence or his motives: he's trying to make a point through the allegorical character that is Ahab. We might puzzle over a few specific aspects of that character, but for the most part Melville lets us know loud and clear that he is out to tell us something about the world through Ahab: that Ahab himself is not the point. Such authorial intent greatly restricts the value one might get out of psychoanalysis—at least as far as I'm concerned.
I hope this justifies what I have said for you, as I intended neither sweeping nor unsupported judgement of this novel.
Everyman wrote: "True enough, I guess. But so does all anti-progress, for lack of a better term, doesn't it? Without naming names, I think we cal all think of figures who brought about great sorrow to the world trying to adapt it to themselves. "Sure, I suppose Ahab himself is a good example of this. I guess what I'm trying to do is see his ambition and determination as an admirable trait in itself. But perhaps it isn't possible to examine Ahab as an individual, divorced from his obsession, in his pure Ahabness. Ahab needs the whale to be Ahab, and trying to see him in an "idealized" context is like trying to see the "whiteness" of the whale. One of the things I take away from this book is Melville's contempt for generalization, so I guess it's not a good idea to try to make one now.
In Ch 110, Queequeg rallies from his illness because he recollects that he has "a little duty ashore" that he still had to do. We never find out what it was, do we? Or the consequences of his not ever doing it?
I went looking for more on evil, and ran across this passage from his first encounter with Moby Dick that makes me rethink my thinking:And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab's leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming malice. Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil;—Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it. Chapter 41
It was far enough back in the book that I didn't have it to my mind earlier today. But Melville clearly has Moby represent "all evil" for Ahab.
Then, is Ahab not attacking Moby just for his own sake, but does he in his madness believe that he is destroying all evil for a broader swath of mankind? That he is a representation of all those who seek to root and destroy evil? Again, just musing, not concluding. Dang, this book has me whirling around in confusion trying to decide what it does and doesn't mean for me.
The possibility of Ahab feeling that he is attacking not just his personal foe but evil personified took me back to Don Quixote and his quixotic quest to destroy the demons of the world. I haven't noticed yet that we have connected DQ and Ahab, and maybe there's good reason for that, but OTOH maybe there is something there worth considering?
Everyman wrote: "The possibility of Ahab feeling that he is attacking not just his personal foe but evil personified took me back to Don Quixote and his quixotic quest to destroy the demons of the world. I haven't..."I suppose it could also take you back to Hitler.
Everyman wrote: "my question is whether it is fair for Ahab to consider MD evil, or whether he should only consider him an enemy who has wronged him? Or does fairness not enter into it, and is it sufficient for Ahab to consider MD evil simply for what MD did to him?"Personally I don't think it is either fair or reasonable of Ahab to believe that the whale is evil- but he still believes it, as evidenced particularly well by the passage you quoted in post #70.
That's why he's CRAZY.
Everyman wrote: "Then, is Ahab not attacking Moby just for his own sake, but does he in his madness believe that he is destroying all evil for a broader swath of mankind? That he is a representation of all those who seek to root and destroy evil? Again, just musing, not concluding. Dang, this book has me whirling around in confusion trying to decide what it does and doesn't mean for me. "I'm whirling too! Another reason I ended up loving this book so much- I keep turning it over and over in my mind like a mobius strip trying to decide which way is up.
I think of Ahab the way I think of . . . oh, Inigo Montoya (you killed my father. Prepare to die!)
He believes what he is pursuing is evil, and the world would certainly be better off without it, but the pursuit is still totally about him, the protagonist, and not the rest of the world. The perceived benefit to the rest of us is just a side effect.
Ready for another essay? Let's see how much of this I can get in:(Introduction to Houghton Mifflin 'Riverside' edition of Moby-Dick)
Moby-Dick is not only a very big book, it is also a peculiarly full and rich one, and from the very opening it conveys a sense of abundance, of high creative power, that exhilarates and enlarges the imagination. This quality is felt immediately in the style, which is remarkably easy, natural and 'American', yet always literary and which swells in power until it takes on some of the roaring and uncontainable rhythms with which Melville audibly describes the sea. The best description of this style is Melville's own, when he speaks of the 'bold and nervous lofty language' that Nantucket whaling captains learn straight from nature. We feel this abundance in heroic types like the Nantucketers themselves, many of whom are significantly named after Old Testament prophets and kings, for these, too, are mighty men, and the mightiest of them all, Captain Ahab, will challenge the very order of the creation itself. This is the very heart of the book—so much so that we come to feel that there is some shattering magnitude of theme before Melville as he writes, that as a writer he had been called to an heroic new destiny.
It is this constant sense of power that constitutes the book's appeal to us, that explains its hold on our attention. Moby-Dick is one of those books that try to bring in as much of life as a writer can get both hands on. Melville even tries to create an image of life itself as a ceaseless creation. The book is written with a personal force of style, a passionate learning, a steady insight into our forgotten connexions with the primitive. It sweeps everything before it; it gives us the happiness that only great vigour inspires.
If we start by opening ourselves to this abundance and force, by welcoming not merely the story itself, but the manner in which it speaks to us, we shall recognize in this restlessness, this richness, this persistent atmosphere of magnitude, the essential image on which the book is founded. For Moby-Dick is not so much a book about Captain Ahab's quest for the whale as it is an experience of that quest. This is only to say, what we say of any true poem, that we cannot reduce its essential substance to a subject, that we should not intellectualize and summarize it, but that we should recognize that its very force and beauty lie in the way it is conceived and written, in the qualities that flow from its being a unique entity.
In these terms, Moby-Dick seems to be far more of a poem than it is a novel, and since it is a narrative, to be an epic, a long poem on an heroic theme, rather than the kind of realistic fiction that we know today. Of course Melville did not deliberately set out to write a formal epic; but half-consciously, he drew upon many of the traditional characteristics of epic in order to realize the utterly original kind of novel he needed to write in his time—the spaciousness of theme and subject, the martial atmosphere, the association of these homely and savage materials with universal myths, the symbolic wanderings of the hero, the indispensable strength of such a hero in Captain Ahab. Yet beyond all this, what distinguishes Moby-Dick from modern prose fiction, what ties it up with the older, more formal kind of narrative that was once written in verse, is the fact that Melville is not interested in the meanness, the literal truthfulness, the representative slice of life, that we think of as the essence of modern realism. His book has the true poetic emphasis in that the whole story is constantly being meditated and unravelled through a single mind.
'Call me Ishmael', the book begins. This Ishmael is not only a character in the book; he is also the single voice, or rather the single mind, from whose endlessly turning spool of thought the whole story is unwound. It is Ishmael's contemplativeness, his dreaming, that articulates the wonder of the seas and the fabulousness of the whale and the terrors of the deep. All that can be meditated and summed up and hinted at, as the reflective essence of the story itself, is given us by Ishmael, who possesses nothing but man's specifically human gift, which is language. It is Ishmael who tries to sum up the whole creation in a single book and yet keeps at the centre of it one American whaling voyage. It is Ishmael's gift for speculation that explains the terror we come to feel before the whiteness of the whale, Ishmael's mind that ranges with mad exuberance through a description of all the seas; Ishmael who piles up image after image of 'the mightiest animated mass that has survived the flood'. It is Ishmael who, in the wonderful chapter on the masthead, embodies for us man as a thinker, whose reveries transcend space and time as he stands watch high above the seas. And of course it is Ishmael, both actually and as the symbol of man, who is the one survivor of the voyage. Yet utterly alone as he is at the end of the book, floating on the Pacific Ocean, he manages, buoyed up on a coffin that magically serves as his life-buoy, to give us the impression that life itself can be honestly confronted only in the loneliness of each human heart. Always it is this emphasis on Ishmael's personal vision, on the richness and ambiguity of all events as the sceptical, fervent, experience-scarred mind of Ishmael feels and thinks them, that gives us, from the beginning, the new kind of book that Moby-Dick is. It is a book which is neither a saga, though it deals in large natural forces nor a classical epic, for we feel too strongly the individual who wrote it. It is a book that is at once primitive, fatalistic, and merciless, like the very oldest books, and yet peculiarly personal, like so many twentieth-century novels, in its significant emphasis on the subjective individual consciousness. The book grows out of a single word, 'I', and expands until the soul's voyage of this 'I' comes to include a great many things that are unseen and unsuspected by most of us. And this material is always tied to Ishmael, who is not merely a witness to the story—someone who happens to be on board the Pequod—but the living and germinating mind who grasps the world in the tentacles of his thought.
The power behind this 'I' is poetical in the sense that everything comes to us through a constant intervention of language instead of being presented flatly. Melville does not wish, as so many contemporary writers do, to reproduce ordinary life and conventional speech. He seeks the marvellous and the fabulous aspects that life wears in secret. He exuberantly sees the world through language—things exist as his words for them—and much of the exceptional beauty of the book lies in the unusual incidence of passages that, in the most surprising contexts, are so piercing in their poetic intensity. But the most remarkable feat of language in the book is Melville's ability to make us see that man is not a blank slate passively open to events, but a mind that constantly seeks meaning in everything it encounters. In Melville the Protestant habit of moralizing and the transcendental passion for symbolizing all things as examples of 'higher laws' combined to make a mind that instinctively brought an inner significance to each episode. Everything in Moby-Dick is saturated in a mental atmosphere. Nothing happens for its own sake in this book, and in the midst of the chase, Ishmael can be seen meditating it, pulling things apart, drawing out its significant point.
But Ishmael is not just an intellectual observer; he is also very much in the story. He suffers, he is there. As his name indicates, he is an estranged and solitary man; his only friend is Queequeg, a despised heathen from the South Seas. Queequeg, a fellow 'isolato' in the smug world of white middle-class Christians, is the only man who offers Ishmael friendship, thanks to Queequeg, 'no longer my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it'. Why does Ishmael feel so alone? There are background reasons, Melville's own: his father went bankrupt and then died in debt when Melville was still a boy. Melville-Ishmael went to sea— 'And at first', he tells us, 'this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one's sense of honour, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land.' But there is a deeper, a more universal reason for Ishmael's apartness, and it is one that will strangely make him kin to his daemonic captain, Ahab. For the burden of his thought, the essential cause of his estrangement, is that he cannot come to any conclusion about anything. He feels at home with ships and sailors because for him, too, one journey ends only to begin another; 'and a second ended, only begins a third and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.'
Ishmael is not merely an orphan; he is an exile, searching alone in the wilderness, with a black man for his only friend. He suffers from doubt and uncertainty far more than he does from homelessness. Indeed, this agony of disbelief is his homelessness. For him nothing is ever finally settled and decided; he is man, or as we like to think, modern man, cut off from the certainty that was once his inner world. Ishmael no longer has any sure formal belief. All is in doubt, all is in eternal flux, like the sea. And so condemned, like 'all his race from Adam down', to wander the seas of thought, far from Paradise, he now searches endlessly to put the whole broken story together, to find a meaning, to ascertain—where but in the ceaselessness of human thought?—'the hidden cause we seek'. Ishmael does not perform any great actions, as Ahab does; he is the most insignificant member of the fo'c'sle and will get the smallest share of the take. But his inner world of thought is almost unbearably symbolic, for he must think, and think, and think, in order to prove to himself that there is a necessary connexion between man and the world. He pictures his dilemma in everything he does on board the ship, but never so clearly as when he is shown looking at the sea, searching a meaning to existence from the inscrutable waters.
What Melville did through Ishmael, then, was to put man's distinctly modern feeling of 'exile', of abandonment, directly at the centre of his stage. For Ishmael there are no satisfactory conclusions to anything; no final philosophy is ever possible. All that man owns in this world, Ishmael would say, is his insatiable mind. This is why the book opens on a picture of the dreaming contemplativeness of mind itself: men tearing themselves loose from their jobs to stand 'like silent sentinels all around the town . . . thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries'. Narcissus was bemused by that image which 'we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans', and this, says Ishmael when he is most desperate, is all that man ever finds when he searches the waters—a reflection of himself. All is inconclusive, restless, an endless flow. And Melville's own style rises to its highest level not in the neo-Shakespearean speeches of Ahab, which are sometimes bombastic, but in those amazing prose flights on the whiteness of the whale and on the Pacific where Ishmael reproduces, in the rhythms of the prose itself, man's brooding interrogation of nature.
II
But Ishmael is a witness not only to his own thoughts, but also a witness to the actions of Captain Ahab. The book is not only a great skin of language stretched to fit the world of man's philosophic wandering, it is also a world of moral tyranny and violent action, in which the principal actor is Ahab. With the entry of Ahab a harsh new rhythm enters the book, and from now on two rhythms—one reflective, the other forceful—alternate to show us the world in which man's thinking and man's doing each follows its own law. Ishmael's thought consciousl
IIBut Ishmael is a witness not only to his own thoughts, but also a witness to the actions of Captain Ahab. The book is not only a great skin of language stretched to fit the world of man's philosophic wandering, it is also a world of moral tyranny and violent action, in which the principal actor is Ahab. With the entry of Ahab a harsh new rhythm enters the book, and from now on two rhythms—one reflective, the other forceful—alternate to show us the world in which man's thinking and man's doing each follows its own law. Ishmael's thought consciously extends itself to get behind the world of appearances; he wants to see and to understand everything. Ahab's drive is to prove, not to discover; the world that tortures Ishmael by its horrid vacancy has tempted Ahab into thinking that he can make it over. He seeks to dominate nature, to impose and to inflict his will on the outside world—whether it be the crew that must jump to his orders or the great white whale that is essentially indifferent to him. As Ishmael is all rumination, so Ahab is all will. Both are thinkers, the difference being that Ishmael thinks as a bystander, has identified his own state with man's utter unimportance in nature. Ahab, by contrast, actively seeks the whale in order to assert man's supremacy over what swims before him as 'the monomaniac incarnation' of a superior power:
'If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me, he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate, and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other, since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who's over me? Truth hath no confines.'
This is Ahab's quest—and Ahab's magnificence. For in this speech Ahab expresses more forcibly than Ishmael ever could, something of the impenitent anger against the universe that all of us can feel. Ahab may be a mad sea captain, a tyrant of the quarter deck who disturbs the crew's sleep as he stomps along on his ivory leg. But this Ahab does indeed speak for all men who, as Ishmael confesses in the frightening meditation on the whiteness of the whale, suspect that 'though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright'. So man, watching the sea heaving around him, sees it as a mad steed that has lost its rider, and looking at his own image in the water, is tortured by the thought that man himself may be an accident, of no more importance in this vast oceanic emptiness than one of Ahab's rare tears dropped into the Pacific.
To the degree that we feel this futility in the face of a blind impersonal nature that 'heeds us not', and storm madly, like Ahab, against the dread that there's 'naught beyond'—to this extent all men may recognize Ahab's bitterness, his unrelentingness, his inability to rest in that uncertainty which, Freud has told us, modern man must learn to endure. Ahab figures in a symbolic fable, he is acting out thoughts which we all share. But Ahab, even more, is a hero; we cannot insist enough on that. Melville believed in the heroic and he specifically wanted to cast his hero on American lines—someone noble by nature, not by birth, who would have 'not the dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture'. Ahab sinned against man and God, and like his namesake in the Old Testament, becomes a 'wicked king'. But Ahab is not just a fanatic who leads the whole crew to their destruction, he is a hero of thought who is trying, by terrible force, to reassert man's place in nature. And it is the struggle that Ahab incarnates that makes him so magnificent a voice, thundering in Shakespearian rhetoric, storming at the gates of the inhuman, silent world. Ahab is trying to give man, in one awful, final assertion that his will does mean something, a feeling of relatedness with his world.
Ahab's effort, then, is to reclaim something that man knows he has lost. Significantly, Ahab proves by the bitter struggle he has to wage that man is fighting in an unequal contest; by the end of the book Ahab abandons all his human ties and becomes a complete fanatic. But Melville has no doubt—nor should we!—that Ahab's quest is humanly understandable. And the quest itself supplies the book with its technical raison d'être. For it leads us through all the seas and around the whole world; it brings us past ships of every nation. Always it is Ahab's drive that makes up the passion of Moby-Dick, a passion that is revealed in the descriptive chapters on the whale, whale- fighting, whale-burning, on the whole gory and fascinating industrial process aboard ship that reduces the once proud whale to oil-brimming barrels in the hold. And this passion may be defined as a passion of longing, of hope, of striving: a passion that starts from the deepest loneliness that man can know. It is the great cry of man who feels himself exiled from his 'birthright, the merry May-day gods of old', who looks for a new god 'to enthrone . . . again in the now egotistical sky, in the now unhaunted hill'. The cry is Ahab's—'Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?'
Behind Ahab's cry is the fear that man's covenant with God has been broken, that there is no purpose to our existence. The Pequod is condemned by Ahab to sail up and down the world in search of—a symbol. But this search, mad as it seems to Starbuck the first mate, who is a Christian, nevertheless represents Ahab's real humanity. For the ancient covenant is never quite broken so long as man still thirsts for it. And because Ahab, as Melville intended him to, represents the aristocracy of intellect in our democracy, because he seeks to transcend the limitations that good conventional men like Starbuck, philistine materialists like Stubb, and unthinking fools like Flask want to impose on everybody else, Ahab speaks for the humanity that belongs to man's imaginative vision of himself.
Yet with all this, we must not forget that Ahab's quest takes place, unceasingly, in a very practical world of whaling, as part of the barbaric and yet highly necessary struggle by man to support himself physically in nature. It is this that gives the book its primitive vitality, its burning authenticity. For Moby-Dick, it must be emphasized, is not simply a symbolic fable; nor, as we have already seen, can it possibly be construed as simply a 'sea story'. It is the story of agonizing thought in the midst of brutal action, of thought that questions every action, that annuls it from within, as it were—but that cannot, in this harsh world, relieve man of the fighting, skinning, burning, the back-breaking row to the whale, the flying harpoons, the rope that can take you off 'voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victims'. Moby-Dick is a representation of the passionate mind speaking, for its metaphysical concerns, out of the very midst of life. So, after the first lowering, Queequeg is shown sitting all night in a submerged boat, holding up a lantern like an 'imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness . . . the sign and symbol of a man without hope, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair'. Melville insists that our thinking is not swallowed up by practical concerns, that man constantly searches for a reality equal to his inner life of thought— and it is his ability to show this in the midst of a brutal, dirty whaling voyage that makes Moby-Dick such an astonishing book. Just as Ahab is a hero, so Moby-Dick itself is a heroic book. What concerns Melville is not merely the heroism that gets expressed in physical action, but the heroism of thought itself as it rises above its seeming insignificance and proclaims, in the very teeth of a seemingly hostile and malevolent creation, that man's voice is heard for something against the watery waste and the deep, that man's thought has an echo in the universe.
IIIThis is the quest. But what makes Moby-Dick so fascinating, and in a sense even uncanny, is that the issue is always in doubt, and remains so to the end. Melville was right when he wrote to Hawthorne: 'I have written a wicked book, and feel as spotless as the lamb.' And people who want to construe Moby-Dick into a condemnation of mad, bad Ahab will always miss what Melville meant when he wrote of his book: 'It is not a piece of fine feminine Spitalfields silk—but it is of the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables & hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, & birds of prey hover over it.' For in the struggle between man's effort to find meaning in nature, and the indifference of nature itself, which simply eludes him (nature here signifies the whole external show and force of animate life in a world suddenly emptied of God, one where an 'intangible malignity' has reigned from the beginning), Melville often portrays the struggle from the side of nature itself. He sees the whale's view of things far more than he does Ahab's: and Moby-Dick's milk-white head, the tail feathers of the sea birds streaming from his back like pennons, are described with a rapture that is like the adoration of a god. Even in the most terrible scenes of the shark massacre, where the sharks bend around like bows to bite at their own entrails, or in the ceaseless motion of 'my dear Pacific', the 'Potters' fields of all four continents', one feels that Melville is transported by the naked reality of things, the great unending flow of the creation itself, where the great shroud of the sea rolls over the doomed ship 'as it rolled five thousand years ago'. Indeed, one feels in the end that it is only the necessity to keep one person alive as a witness to the story that saves Ishmael from the general ruin and wreck. In Melville's final vision of the whole, it is not fair but it is entirely just that the whale should destroy the ship, that man should be caught up on the beast. It is just in a cosmic sense, not in the sense that the prophet (Father Mapple) predicts the punishment of man's disobedience in the telling of Jonah's story from the beginning, where the point made is the classic reprimand of God to man when He speaks out of the whirlwind. What Melville does is to speak for the whirlwind, for the watery waste, for the sharks.
It is this that gives Moby-Dick its awful and crushing power. It is a unique gift. Goethe said that he wanted, as a writer, to know what it is like to be a woman. But Melville sometimes makes you feel that he knows, as a writer, what it is like to be the eyes of the rock, the magnitude of the whale, the scalding sea, the dreams that lie buried in the Pacific. It is all, of course, seen through human eyes—yet there is in Melville a cold, final, ferocious hopelessness, a kind of ecstatic masochism, that delights in punishing man, in heaping coals on his head, in drowning him. You see it in the scene of the whale running through the herd with a cutting spade in his body, cutting down his own; in the sharks eating at their own entrails and voiding from them in the same convulsion; in the terrible picture of Pip the cabin boy jumping out of the boat in fright and left on the Pacific to go crazy; in Tashtego falling into the 'honey head' of the whale; in the ropes that suddenly whir up from the spindles and carry you off; in the final awesome picture of the whale butting its head against the Pequod. In all these scenes there is an ecstasy in horror, the horror of nature in itself, nature 'pure', without God or man: the void. It is symbolized by the whiteness of the whale, the whiteness that is not so much a colour as the absence of colour. 'Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way?' And it is this picture of existence as one where man has only a peep-hole on the mystery itself, that constitutes the most remarkable achievement of Melville's genius. For as in the meditation on the whiteness of the whale, it becomes an uncanny attempt to come to grips with nature as it might be conceived with man entirely left out; or, what amounts to the same thing, with man losing his humanity and being exclusively responsive to primitive and racial memories, to the trackless fathomless nothing that has been from the beginning, to the very essence of a beginning that, in contradiction to all man's scriptures, had no divine history, no definite locus, but just was—with man slipped into the picture much later.
This view of reality, this ability to side with nature rather than with man, means an ability to love what has no animation, what is inhumanly still, what is not in search, as man himself is—a hero running against time and fighting against 'reality'. Here Melville puts, as it were, his ear to reality itself: to the rock rather than to the hero trying to get his sword out of the rock. He does it by constantly, and bitterly, and savagely in fact, comparing man with the great thing he is trying to understand. Ahab may be a hero by trying to force himself on what is too much for him, but Melville has no doubt that man is puny and presumptuous and easily overwhelmed—in short, drowned—in the great storm of reality he tries to encompass.
This sense of scale lies behind the chapters on the natural history of the whale, and behind the constant impressing on our minds of the contrast between man and the whale—man getting into a small boat, man being overwhelmed by his own weapons. The greatest single metaphor in the book is that of bigness, and even when Melville laughs at himself for trying to hook this Leviathan with a pen—'Bring me a condor's quill! Bring me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand!'—we know that he not merely feels exhilaration at attempting this mighty subject, but that he is also abashed, he feels grave; mighty waters are rolling around him. This compelling sense of magnitude, however, gets him to organize the book brilliantly, in a great flood of chapters —some of them very small, one or two only a paragraph long, in the descriptive method which is the great homage that he pays to his subject, and which so provides him with an inexhaustible delight in devoting himself to every conceivable detail about the whale. And, to go back to a theme mentioned earlier, it is this sense of a limitless subject that gives the style its peculiarly loping quality, as if it were constantly looking for connectives, since on the subject of the whale no single word or statement is enough. But these details tend, too, to heap up in such a staggering array as to combine into the awesomeness of a power against which Ahab's challenge is utterly vain, and against which his struggle to show his superiority over the ordinary processes of nature becomes blasphemous. The only thing left to man, Melville seems to tell us, is to take the span of this magnitude—to feel and to record the power of this mighty torrent, this burning fire.
And it is this, this poetic power, rather than any specifically human one, this power of transcription rather than of any alteration of life that will admit human beings into its tremendous scale, that makes up the greatness of the book—by giving us the measure of Melville's own relation to the nature that his hero so futilely attempts to master or defy. For though Melville often takes a grim and almost cruel pleasure in showing man tumbling over before the magnitude of the universe and though much of the book is concerned, as in the sections on fighting and 'cooking' the whale, with man's effort to get a grip on external nature, first through physical assault and then by scientific and industrial cunning, man finds his final relatedness to nature neither as a hero (Ahab) nor by heeding Father Mapple's old prophetic warning of man's proper subservience to God. Though all his attempted gains from nature fail him and all goes down with the Pequod—all man's hopes of profit, of adjustment to orthodoxy (Starbuck), even of the wisdom that is in madness (Pip)—man, though forever alien to the world, an Ishmael, is somehow in tune with it, with its torrential rhythms, by dint of his art by the directness with which his words grasp the world by the splendour of his perceptions, by the lantern which he holds up 'like a candle in the midst of the almighty forlornness'. Man is not merely a waif in the world, he is an ear listening to the sea that almost drowns him; an imagination, a mind, that hears the sea in the shell, and darts behind all appearance to the beginning of things, and runs riot with the frightful force of the sea itself. There, in man's incredible and unresting mind, is the fantastic gift with which we enter into what is not our own, what is even against us—and for this, so amazingly, we can speak.
S. Rosemary wrote: "I think of Ahab the way I think of . . . oh, Inigo Montoya (you killed my father. Prepare to die!) "So does Moby Dick have six nubs on his flipper? (Okay, in joke for those who don't know the reference. Sorry. Back to Moby.)
But yes, it's that sort of dogged pursuit, though Inigo had a bit more of a motive.
BTW, have you read the book, or just seen the movie? Lots of people who read the movie don't realize that there is indeed a book, which I actually thought was better even though I liked the movie a lot.
Laurele wrote: "Ready for another essay? Let's see how much of this I can get in:(Introduction to Houghton Mifflin 'Riverside' edition of Moby-Dick)
Moby-Dick is not only a very big book, it is also a peculiarly..."
The author of the essay is Alfred Kazin.
Everyman wrote: " have you read the book, or just seen the movie?"Both! When I was little I was convinced that there was indeed an original by S. Morgenstern, if only I could find it . . .
Um, in a helpless attempt to relate this back to Moby Dick, I will say that I agree- Inigo is, of course, not insane and has a much better motive and therefore it's not really a perfect analogy to Ahab and the whale.
(But now I want to keep making analogies. Queequeg as the Man in Black, and Ishmael as Buttercup? Nooooooooo!)
Huh, Laurele, there's a ton in that essay and I don't think it's convinced me of half of it!I'll keep mulling it over.
Laurele wrote: "There are certain men who are artists in suicide, who carve out for themselves over many years careers which have as their goal self-destruction. Ahab is such a man, and all his adventures, rages, conversations, soliloquies are but the joists and floorings of an immense structure of self-ruin."Going back to this essay, I thought that was particularly insightful. Would others agree? Along those lines, I liked the comparison the author drew a little later on to Hamlet.
What's also interesting is that in neither case do we receive any reason that both men are so self-destructive. Probably because there isn't a reason to be had- madness like that can come and blight a life and there isn't anything one can do about it.
More minor authors try to explain every psychological quirk of their characters by some element in their back-story; I like how Ahab here just IS like that, "a fixed type," no need to explain it. Like a force of nature.
Everyman wrote: "I went looking for more on evil, and ran across this passage from his first encounter with Moby Dick that makes me rethink my thinking:And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lo..."
Great find, Everyman. Ahab is enraged by the evil and malice in the world, and that is a kind of sanity. But he personifies it and pursues it as if it were embodied in the Whale, and that is madness. It seems like a kind of displacement.
S. Rosemary wrote: "Everyman wrote: " have you read the book, or just seen the movie?"Both! When I was little I was convinced that there was indeed an original by S. Morgenstern, if only I could find it . . .
Um,..."
Hell, I went looking for Morganstern without the excuse of youth. But Inigo is unlike Ahab--he's seeking revenge, and also justice, against a real villain truly responsible for ills he has suffered. And he doesn't put anyone else at risk for the sake of his search.
These are notes from Weinstein's second lecture on Moby Dick, with a few thoughts that came to me as I listened, presented in brackets.Ahab is modeled after the whale; it’s the larger than life hero of this text. Represents a swollen, deified version of the self.. The book is much more than Ahab; he’s been inserted into a text that is equally interested in subjectivity, multiple perspectives, and multiple vistas. Collision course between the monomaniacal single viewpoint of obsession and a world that has much more scope and diversity to it.
Nantucketeer is presented by Melville as a new sort of American hero, but Ahab is much larger than this, as huge as the whale – “an ungodly but godlike figure.” Melville was fascinated with this godlike aspect of the ship captain – contrary to the aspiration of the new nation to be a democratic society, ships are not in the least democratic places. In Billy Budd and other stories, Melville came back to this question of the legal and moral authority of the captainacy, both the legal and the moral aspects of it.
Ahab’s soliloquies are on the same level as Shakespeare, gorgeous, rich language.
Weinstein addresses directly the question of evil we had been mentioning: he contends that Ahab sees in the White Whale “the very incarnation of evil.” MD is not just the whale, but a spirit of evil that needs to be fought against. This is a problematic sort of position. Starbuck, as a Christian, believes there is something inherently wrong in viewing the whale as the embodiment of evil. [My comment: that role is reserved for Satan?]
He brings up Ahab’s vision of the world as a series of masks, or of pasteboard walls; if we want to deal with the real forces that course through the world and inform our lives, we must strike through the masks. And Ahab doesn’t care whether the whale is principal or agent; he will still strike him. [my question: did Moby take Ahab’s manhood along with his leg?]
In mapping out Ahab, Melville creates a sort of archeology of the soul. Ahab is not just a map, but you have to go beneath the map.
Ahab has a counterpart. Ishmael is not the counterpart; Ishmael is our conduit, our guide [me: think Beatrice in Dante? Maybe not a bad comparison, though here it is Ahab, and not Ishmael, who leads the crew into hell; Ishmael merely records the journey]. Ahab’s counterpart is Pip, his perhaps alter-ego, who “saw God’s foot on the treadle of the loom, and spoke it..”
[Weinstein talks a lot about height and depth. Beyond the archeology image, there is the Catskill eagle which dives down deep into the gorges but is still high up; the hotel in Paris where you can go down under the vaults to see the ancient Roman figure; and Pip who goes deep down into the sea and sees the underbelly of the sea. I have to wonder whether Melville knew Plato, and knew of Plato’s strong connection with up and down imagery, which we will see dramatically in the Republic.]
One way Melville shows Ahab’s obsession is in the meeting with the other ships. This was historically accurate; there was a community of ships which crossed paths on the sea more often than one might think [perhaps because the whaling grounds were a fairly small slice of the sea, and so they tended to come and go along the same basic lines?]. The other captains and crew want to chat, to interact with people they haven’t been cooped up with for months, but Ahab has only the one question for all of them: Hast seen the White Whale? It’s Melville’s way of showing just what you pay in socialness, really in humanity, by being hijacked like this for your obsessions.
He cites the chapter The Doubloon as a wonderful example of looking at the variety of the crew as opposed to the monocular mind of Ahab. Money, of course, has no intrinsic value, but it has great semiotic value, being worth whatever people think it is, being the repository of hopes and dreams and desires. So we see each character’s peculiar and particular nature as they reflect on the doubloon and what it means to them.
What he considers the richest and most prophetic chapter in the novel isn’t Ahab, it’s Ishmael. It’s the chapter on The Whiteness of the Whale. It offers the most provocative view this book is going to give us of the making of our world. Melville dismisses all the semiotic meanings we assign to color, he points out that color is just the surface of nature meaning nothing about its substance and concealing its true nature as the cosmetics conceal the true nature of the harlot, but he goes further than that; white is what shows us the illusory nature of all the world. Weinstein suggests something that Melville does not say, but that he thinks is consistent with Melville: this operation of turning the world leprous is almost like a cannibalizing operation, that to look at surfaces and then to see through them, this is what thinking is in Melville, this is what thinking does to the surface of the world.
S. Rosemary wrote: "aurele wrote: "There are certain men who are artists in suicide, who carve out for themselves over many years careers which have as their goal self-destruction. Ahab is such a man, and all his adventures, rages, conversations, soliloquies are but the joists and floorings of an immense structure of self-ruin."Going back to this essay, I thought that was particularly insightful. Would others agree? "
Actually, I don't. I don't see Ahab, throughout the voyage, as intending suicide; he has killed many whales, and I think that even with all the baggage he has loaded onto Ahab he still thinks he can kill this whale, too, and survive.
Does he really think, though, that he can conquer and dispel all evil? Only one man did that, Christ, and of course he did indeed die in the process. But does Ahab see himself as a Christ figure, one recognizing the need to die in order to conquer over evil? I don't see that.
S. Rosemary wrote: "More minor authors try to explain every psychological quirk of their characters by some element in their back-story; I like how Ahab here just IS like that, "a fixed type," no need to explain it. Like a force of nature. "Nice point.
I was wondering if anyone could clarify this point from the essay. The author contends that "Behind Ahab's cry is the fear that man's covenant with God has been broken, that there is no purpose to our existence."I can understand the rationale behind the second half of the claim, that Ahab is afraid there is no purpose to our existence. I don't really understand the bit about man's covenant with God being broken. What covenant is he talking about? My biblical knowledge is minimal. But, as far as I remember, God doesn't suggest humans have any purpose at all in any of the Old Testament covenants. Am I forgetting something?
S. Rosemary wrote: "More minor authors try to explain every psychological quirk of their characters by some element in their back-story; I like how Ahab here just IS like that, "a fixed type," no need to explain it. Like a force of nature. "I don't think we need to psychoanalyze Ahab, but aren't we still called to asked why he is the way he is? He isn't the sea or storm or the whale -- he's a human being, not a force of nature, even if that is the way he comes across. What are we to make of his relationship with Pip, for example? Why does Melville choose Pip, the least intelligent and most innocent member of the crew -- the "castaway" -- to show us Ahab's gentle side?
"Lad, lad, I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now. The hour is coming when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would not have thee by him. There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady. Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired health. Do thou abide below here, where they shall serve thee, as if thou wert the captain. Aye, lad, thou shalt sit here in my own screwed chair; another screw to it, thou must be."
Maybe it's also significant that this scene takes place in the Cabin, down below, which as Adelle remarked early on has the ring of the subconscious to it.
Audrey wrote: "My biblical knowledge is minimal. But, as far as I remember, God doesn't suggest humans have any purpose at all in any of the Old Testament covenants. Am I forgetting something?"Perhaps you are not forgetting something, but to clarify, God's purpose for man is clearly stated in several ways. The most apparent example of the Old Testament is the covenant which God makes with Abraham. He puts Abraham into a deep sleep and commits the ceremony (which need not be repeated here) by which he essentially makes a covenant with himself. It is a covenant made to Abraham's descendants and thus passed on to Christians as believers. Thus God's love is given freely, but with the stipulation that the people follow His rules also. THere are of course many other examples in the OT about the purpose of our life but this one stands out.
The Abrahamic covenant issue has caused problems with some modern day Christian interpretations which attempt what is known as replacement theology, replacing references to Israel and Jerusalem with the church. Certainly a great deal of snti-Semitism has been generated from such thinking andmight even be argued that Nazi Germany tolerated such attitudes generated by the writings of Luther and Calvin.
In addition, Christ, in the New Testament, gives the purpose of our life in stating the first commandment of loving God beyond all else to which he adds the love of each another as part of this. This is, of course, a mere continuation of God's plan given by the OT rather than something new.
It is worth mentioning that Melville's father, who died early, was a Unitarian and his mother was a strict Calvinist who believed in predestination. It seems fair to say, in addition, that Melville himself was a tortured soul who does not seem to be able to wrestle with and accept the notion of God in such a cruel universe. No doubt this was amplified by his journey on a whaling ship from which he (and another friend) jumped ship because he found conditions intolerable. I have always thought of the two of them as Ishmael and Queequeg, although I am certain this is an over- simplification. However, despite others' objections to psychological interpretation, I like to give Melville credit as creating a Freudian id in the character of Ahab. To that end, Ishmael is rescued by chance, "escaping alone to tell us of a catastrophe in which divine Truth is struck down as a moral standard" so perhaps he works as representing a Freudian superego too. Of course I suggest this with tongue firmly in cheek.
Susanna wrote: "I agree that The Whiteness of the Whale is one of the most important chapters. I have to think that Melville was alluding to white skin here, suggesting that there is nothing inherently superior about white skin. Remember that Ishmael's most cherished relationship is with Queequeg. "And Ahab's relationship with Pip, who is non-white.
Everyman wrote: "Susanna wrote: "I agree that The Whiteness of the Whale is one of the most important chapters. I have to think that Melville was alluding to white skin here, suggesting that there is nothing inhere..."And Ishmael's relationship with Queequeg, ditto.
Roger wrote: "And Ishmael's relationship with Queequeg, ditto. "
Yes,. that's the point I understood Susanna was making.
Everyman wrote: "Roger wrote: "And Ishmael's relationship with Queequeg, ditto. "
Yes,. that's the point I understood Susanna was making."
So it was. My bad.
Audrey wrote: "I don't really understand the bit about man's covenant with God being broken. What covenant is he talking about?"The covenant in its simplest terms is: The Hebrews worship God, and God loves the Hebrews. Of course, over and over in the Old Testament, the idea is that God loves the Hebrews despite their incessant non-worshiping of him (a theme which continues into the New Testament).
Ahab feels abandoned, as if there is no benignity or love behind the mask, only malice or (almost worse) nothingness. That's the broken covenant referred to in the essay.
Not saying I agree, just that that is what (I'm 95% certain) the author of the essay was trying to say.
Thanks, S. Rosemary. That makes it much clearer. I'm not sure I agree, either, but I can certainly see how Ahab's actions could be interpreted from that point of view.Personally, though, I'm much more inclined to agree with the author's other assertion, that Ahab is acting on a need to prove that he has mastery over nature. Ahab has many fine qualities--focus, determination, will-power, etc. But look at how he uses those things. In the end, he wastes all of his considerable energy and intelligence in a futile quest to conquer nature and prove that he is not insignificant. Of course, he fails. No one, in the end, matters in a cosmic sense. The "great shroud of the sea" swallows us up and rolls on "as it rolled on five thousand years ago." Always. I think it is significant that this is how the main part of the novel ends. Nature is practically a character in the novel, with the many omens it sends Ahab and its many attempts to dissuade him from trying to kill Moby Dick. And that last sentence before the epilogue ties it all together by depicting nature completely untouched by all of Ahab's vehement struggles and passions.
Audrey wrote: "Thanks, S. Rosemary. That makes it much clearer. I'm not sure I agree, either, but I can certainly see how Ahab's actions could be interpreted from that point of view.
Personally, though, I'm mu..."
In my opinion, one of the greatest literary misinterpretations in American literature is that of Moby-Dick as a work of Romanticism. It is very easy to take all of Melville's Nature-talk at a somewhat simpler but still meaningful symbolic level: it is not crazy to say that Melville included Moby Dick and the Sea as symbols of Nature's insurmountable influence over Man in his novel. But the novel is, as I see it, overwhelmingly bent on God and the problems of human existence and human suffering.
Moby-Dick speaks to me especially as a work of literature dealing with perhaps the most difficult question in all of Judaeo-Christian religion: Why is a loving god of any kind willing to allow, or even cause, the suffering of his beloved creations? It is a common question to ask, a mature question to tackle, and an excruciatingly and unsatisfyingly difficult question to answer. I have an intense love for this book, as I do for its predecessor, The Book of Job; but the respect I have is overwhelming for Melville. It is a shame the novel was not recognised in its own time.
That is nothing, Audrey, against your opinion. I simply believe that the confusion of this book as Romantic comes from people's unwillingness to believe or maybe inability to trust their own instincts that this is a book about God and Man and their relationship.
Personally, though, I'm mu..."
In my opinion, one of the greatest literary misinterpretations in American literature is that of Moby-Dick as a work of Romanticism. It is very easy to take all of Melville's Nature-talk at a somewhat simpler but still meaningful symbolic level: it is not crazy to say that Melville included Moby Dick and the Sea as symbols of Nature's insurmountable influence over Man in his novel. But the novel is, as I see it, overwhelmingly bent on God and the problems of human existence and human suffering.
Moby-Dick speaks to me especially as a work of literature dealing with perhaps the most difficult question in all of Judaeo-Christian religion: Why is a loving god of any kind willing to allow, or even cause, the suffering of his beloved creations? It is a common question to ask, a mature question to tackle, and an excruciatingly and unsatisfyingly difficult question to answer. I have an intense love for this book, as I do for its predecessor, The Book of Job; but the respect I have is overwhelming for Melville. It is a shame the novel was not recognised in its own time.
That is nothing, Audrey, against your opinion. I simply believe that the confusion of this book as Romantic comes from people's unwillingness to believe or maybe inability to trust their own instincts that this is a book about God and Man and their relationship.
John Bowers, for the Teaching company, also has a lecture on Moby Dick in his lecture series “The Western Literary Canon in Context,” but he takes a very different approach from Weinstein. He talks about MD in the global context, starting with the fact thain 1848, as Melville was writing MD, Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto which predicted the replacement of national literatures with a world literature. MD, Bowers points out, is a totally multi-cultural novel. It is engaged in the world search for oil for the industrial revolution; the ship almost circumnavigates the globe, starting in the Eastern US, crossing the Atlantic, rounding Cape Horn, crossing the Indian Ocean, and winding up in the Pacific somewhere west of Jap;an. And the crew is almost “a microcosm of the new global community,” having a Pacific Islander, an American Indian, and an African as the vital harpoonists. [Q: were there any earlier American novels with anything like this diversity of major characters?]
He attaches the work to the epic sea voyages of the Odyssey and the Aeneid and later sea-based literature such as More’s Utopia.
We have commented before that there was a precursor to Moby Dick in Mocha Dick, a white whale seen in the South Pacific. There was also the incident of the Essex, a whaling ship rammed and sunk by a whale. So those two incidents on which the book is based were both factual. The “whaling stuff” he notes is entirely consistent with the focus of the scientific community of the Victorian era on studying and writing about the natural world, and on the creation of encyclopedic levels of scientific information and observation. [To most of his audience, whales were still fairly mysterious; they didn’t have Sea World to go to, or the Discovery Channel documentaries to watch, or even the whaling museums from the Whale Museum in Friday Harbor to the Nantucket museum of whaling.]
Bowers talks a fair amount about MD in the Puritan tradition stemming back to Piers Plowman, which I’ve never read but he contends is present not only in the obvious case of Pilgrim’s Progress but in Paradise Lost, the Canterbury Tales, and other works. PP was, he contends, the first bestseller in the English language, with the number of manuscript copies surviving being exceeded only by The Canterbury Tales. The DNA of Piers who wanders the world seeking spiritual wisdom, the restless, self-examining questing, is contained in Ishmael.
Melville writes almost an anti-novel. He breaks all the rules of novel writing. It’s not clear who his protagonist is – is it Ahab or Ishmael? He doesn’t tell a linear story, but sticks in all sorts of information that has nothing to do with the plot. And contrary to almost all the English novelistic tradition, he has no love interest, or at least no heterosexual love interest. It’s almost a reflection of the political revolution of America vs. Europe.
Logan wrote: "the respect I have is overwhelming for Melville. It is a shame the novel was not recognised in its own time."
A tidbit I don't think has been mentioned yet. The novel was first published in England, and it got excellent reviews, so good that the American publisher rushed it into print without even reading it. When it was published in America, the magazines that reviewed it were mostly church magazines, and they savaged the book as anti-Christian and making a mockery of religion.
Everyman wrote: "When it was published in America, the magazines that reviewed it were mostly church magazines, and they savaged the book as anti-Christian and making a mockery of religion."
I think they got it right! I keep trying to figure out how the only one to survive the wrath of Moby Dick is the unbeliever, bobbing around on a pagan's coffin...
..."
That sums it up quite marvelously for me.