Moby Dick Chapters 7-11
Jun. 7th, 2013 01:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferret-So in my big post on Macrofiction, I describe Moby Dick as "Endless stylistic mashups in search of the Great American Novel."
If Moby Dick is about mashup, The Sermon is Melville's first entry in the game. It's the first time he escapes Ishmael's perspective to offer us someone else's. It's the first time he abandons straight narrative for something more peculiar. It's the first time he... detours.
Melville will be doing a lot of detouring over the course of the book, and The Sermon is probably one of the detours with the most obvious justifications for its inclusion in the novel, but still it's probably worth noting it as a signpost of deviation. I'll trot out my college English professor's chestnut about Ulysses making use of its early chapters to train you to read its later chapters and suggest that Moby Dick does likewise. If every reading is a negotiation between author and reader, an accommodation to the author's rhythms, The Sermon forces the reader for the first time to adjust to a variation in tempo and perspective, and perhaps to start being prepared for this to happen continuously.
-At the same time, The Sermon kind of stands on its own as a thing, right? I mean, its purpose is to pretty heavy-handedly foreshadow the book's whole plot, with foreboding about the death and destruction to come. It purpose is to foreground SIN and good and evil as concepts for the reader to think about as they read what is to follow, which for the most part is a naturalistic adventure that doesn't dwell much on Miltonesque morality fable. (Except when it does. Moby Dick is not committed to anything stylistically except experimentation.) And I keep using words that begin with 'fore-', because whatever we want to say about the famous first line and those initial chapters in New Bedford, this is pretty much where the adventure kicks off. This is sort of Melville re-setting with a new beginning. All the pieces are on the board, we've met Ishmael and Queequeg and the fear of the whale, let's get going. Prologue Take 2.
And where Ishmael's beginning dissembles, Father Mapple tells nothing but the truth. Where Ishmael fumfers around with weird, head-in-the-clouds ideas about the spiritual magic of the sea luring him, Father Mapple talks about souls in mortal peril. You could read Chapter 1 and think this was going to be nothing more than an airy adventure story. The Sermon is about saying, no, shit's going to get real.
But the thing I most want to say about The Sermon is that Melville wrote it. And there's this thing, this kind of lurking question that dogs multimedia art and art about art, that I find myself re-approaching again and again from different angles as I explore more and more post-modernist work. When I read Pale Fire, I asked what the relationship was between Nabokov as a poet and John Shade as a poet. I meant, if I read the poem part of "Pale Fire" and think it's kind of mediocre, is that because Nabokov wants you to think of John Shade as a mediocre poet, or is it because Nabokov is kind of a mediocre poet and he's failed to create a sufficiently brilliant poem?
So the thing about Father Mapple's sermon is that Melville wrote it. And it's a very queer sermon. Part of that, I think, is obviously Melville's craft as storyteller rather than his craft as sermonizer. He's intending this to be a queer sermon because he's intending it to be delivered by a preacher who is also a dyed-in-the-wool whaler speaking to other committed whalers. Melville peppers the sermon with nautical metaphor. It's sort of a joke. (My experience is that all of the humor in Moby Dick can be classified that way: sort of a joke. I never laugh out loud at Moby Dick, just sort of grin and tilt my head a little and ask myself "Did he really just write that?")
But I digress. To return, some of the queerness of The Sermon is clearly deliberate on Melville's part. But consider my Nabokov comparison. Just as Nabokov is a novelist rather than a poet, Melville is a novelist rather than a preacher. The Sermon is not, I believe, Melville's only sermon, nor is "Pale Fire" Nabokov's only poem, but it is still a venture somewhat afield. Some of the queerness of the sermon can be ascribed to the fact that it is a composition by a novelist designed to fit within a novel, rather than a composition designed to be spoken at an actual pulpit. It may be that Father Mapple would happen to speak on Jonah when Ishmael shows up, that he would greet this crew of whalers with that most obvious of whaler sermons, but I find myself kind of skeptical. I think Melville's author instincts here overtake his preacher instincts, as he guides the sermon to where it needs to take the reader rather than where it needs to take its audience of sinners. Though maybe this is a classic example of a Melvillian joke, with the suggestion being that every week a bunch of whalers walk into a chapel to hear the same sermon on Jonah. Naturalism and fabulism feud fiercely throughout Moby Dick.
As to the sermon itself, I might observe that if it's about sin and redemption, it is equally about the exercise of human free will. God poses to Jonah a command and then Jonah must choose to follow it. Each time Father Mapple speaks of Jonah's repentance, he emphasizes that it is in a way an echo of the sin. Just as Jonah chose not to attempt to follow God's will, he chose to welcome God's punishment.
Ishmael calls himself a Presbyterian in this chapter. I'm not actually all that good at Protestantisms, but isn't that one of the ones that has some form of doctrine of Predestination? A curious contrast, that.
-Turning all the Ishmael backstory around in my head, it strikes me as not implausible that Ishmael is a mulatto, passing as white. To start with, this explains the name/pseudonym. I previously emphasized merely the Biblical Ishmael's sense of exile, but the other half of the allusion may be Ishmael being the son of his father's less favored wife, the illegitimate scion of the famous family he coyly suggests he belongs to. This would give context to a weird moment when he accidentally enters a freedman church. It would explain the disjoint between his kinship with the upper classes and his total lack of money. And it gives an interesting flavor to his relationship with Queequeg. Obviously, I have no proof of any of this, but I'm tossing it out anyway. Google tells me I'm not the first to have this idea.
-And then, um... Chapter 10 is the one where Ishmael and Queequeg get married and Chapter 11 is the one where they spend a postcoital morning in bed together. And that's not the slashgoggles reading of the scene.
The sheer motion of the Ishmael/Queequeg relationship is something of a problem for me. Moreso this time than the last time, I think, because I was primed for it and expecting it and it kinda just felt like Melville maneuvering the pieces to get to the story he wanted to tell. This is not a story about overcoming prejudices and forming a friendship. This is a story that glosses over the overcoming prejudices part because look, Ishmael's just this guy whose best friend is a cannibal, okay?
This time around, that bothers me a little bit more. It is always weird in a novel of this length to wish for any part to be longer, but I feel like the ease to which Ishmael acclimates to Queequeg's presence is not well justified in the story, and the ease to which Queequeg acclimates to Ishmael is even worse. I think Ishmael just says something like "Since he's an unpredictable savage, who can say why he decided to like me?"
I think it does speak to a deep unmooring loneliness that accompanies Ishmael through these opening chapters. In one additional stray revelation about Ishmael's backstory, he says that he has decided to accept pagan kindness because Christian kindness has betrayed him. Ishmael is a seeker, going out to sea because there is something about the people on land that is unwelcoming to him.
If Moby Dick is about mashup, The Sermon is Melville's first entry in the game. It's the first time he escapes Ishmael's perspective to offer us someone else's. It's the first time he abandons straight narrative for something more peculiar. It's the first time he... detours.
Melville will be doing a lot of detouring over the course of the book, and The Sermon is probably one of the detours with the most obvious justifications for its inclusion in the novel, but still it's probably worth noting it as a signpost of deviation. I'll trot out my college English professor's chestnut about Ulysses making use of its early chapters to train you to read its later chapters and suggest that Moby Dick does likewise. If every reading is a negotiation between author and reader, an accommodation to the author's rhythms, The Sermon forces the reader for the first time to adjust to a variation in tempo and perspective, and perhaps to start being prepared for this to happen continuously.
-At the same time, The Sermon kind of stands on its own as a thing, right? I mean, its purpose is to pretty heavy-handedly foreshadow the book's whole plot, with foreboding about the death and destruction to come. It purpose is to foreground SIN and good and evil as concepts for the reader to think about as they read what is to follow, which for the most part is a naturalistic adventure that doesn't dwell much on Miltonesque morality fable. (Except when it does. Moby Dick is not committed to anything stylistically except experimentation.) And I keep using words that begin with 'fore-', because whatever we want to say about the famous first line and those initial chapters in New Bedford, this is pretty much where the adventure kicks off. This is sort of Melville re-setting with a new beginning. All the pieces are on the board, we've met Ishmael and Queequeg and the fear of the whale, let's get going. Prologue Take 2.
And where Ishmael's beginning dissembles, Father Mapple tells nothing but the truth. Where Ishmael fumfers around with weird, head-in-the-clouds ideas about the spiritual magic of the sea luring him, Father Mapple talks about souls in mortal peril. You could read Chapter 1 and think this was going to be nothing more than an airy adventure story. The Sermon is about saying, no, shit's going to get real.
But the thing I most want to say about The Sermon is that Melville wrote it. And there's this thing, this kind of lurking question that dogs multimedia art and art about art, that I find myself re-approaching again and again from different angles as I explore more and more post-modernist work. When I read Pale Fire, I asked what the relationship was between Nabokov as a poet and John Shade as a poet. I meant, if I read the poem part of "Pale Fire" and think it's kind of mediocre, is that because Nabokov wants you to think of John Shade as a mediocre poet, or is it because Nabokov is kind of a mediocre poet and he's failed to create a sufficiently brilliant poem?
So the thing about Father Mapple's sermon is that Melville wrote it. And it's a very queer sermon. Part of that, I think, is obviously Melville's craft as storyteller rather than his craft as sermonizer. He's intending this to be a queer sermon because he's intending it to be delivered by a preacher who is also a dyed-in-the-wool whaler speaking to other committed whalers. Melville peppers the sermon with nautical metaphor. It's sort of a joke. (My experience is that all of the humor in Moby Dick can be classified that way: sort of a joke. I never laugh out loud at Moby Dick, just sort of grin and tilt my head a little and ask myself "Did he really just write that?")
But I digress. To return, some of the queerness of The Sermon is clearly deliberate on Melville's part. But consider my Nabokov comparison. Just as Nabokov is a novelist rather than a poet, Melville is a novelist rather than a preacher. The Sermon is not, I believe, Melville's only sermon, nor is "Pale Fire" Nabokov's only poem, but it is still a venture somewhat afield. Some of the queerness of the sermon can be ascribed to the fact that it is a composition by a novelist designed to fit within a novel, rather than a composition designed to be spoken at an actual pulpit. It may be that Father Mapple would happen to speak on Jonah when Ishmael shows up, that he would greet this crew of whalers with that most obvious of whaler sermons, but I find myself kind of skeptical. I think Melville's author instincts here overtake his preacher instincts, as he guides the sermon to where it needs to take the reader rather than where it needs to take its audience of sinners. Though maybe this is a classic example of a Melvillian joke, with the suggestion being that every week a bunch of whalers walk into a chapel to hear the same sermon on Jonah. Naturalism and fabulism feud fiercely throughout Moby Dick.
As to the sermon itself, I might observe that if it's about sin and redemption, it is equally about the exercise of human free will. God poses to Jonah a command and then Jonah must choose to follow it. Each time Father Mapple speaks of Jonah's repentance, he emphasizes that it is in a way an echo of the sin. Just as Jonah chose not to attempt to follow God's will, he chose to welcome God's punishment.
Ishmael calls himself a Presbyterian in this chapter. I'm not actually all that good at Protestantisms, but isn't that one of the ones that has some form of doctrine of Predestination? A curious contrast, that.
-Turning all the Ishmael backstory around in my head, it strikes me as not implausible that Ishmael is a mulatto, passing as white. To start with, this explains the name/pseudonym. I previously emphasized merely the Biblical Ishmael's sense of exile, but the other half of the allusion may be Ishmael being the son of his father's less favored wife, the illegitimate scion of the famous family he coyly suggests he belongs to. This would give context to a weird moment when he accidentally enters a freedman church. It would explain the disjoint between his kinship with the upper classes and his total lack of money. And it gives an interesting flavor to his relationship with Queequeg. Obviously, I have no proof of any of this, but I'm tossing it out anyway. Google tells me I'm not the first to have this idea.
-And then, um... Chapter 10 is the one where Ishmael and Queequeg get married and Chapter 11 is the one where they spend a postcoital morning in bed together. And that's not the slashgoggles reading of the scene.
The sheer motion of the Ishmael/Queequeg relationship is something of a problem for me. Moreso this time than the last time, I think, because I was primed for it and expecting it and it kinda just felt like Melville maneuvering the pieces to get to the story he wanted to tell. This is not a story about overcoming prejudices and forming a friendship. This is a story that glosses over the overcoming prejudices part because look, Ishmael's just this guy whose best friend is a cannibal, okay?
This time around, that bothers me a little bit more. It is always weird in a novel of this length to wish for any part to be longer, but I feel like the ease to which Ishmael acclimates to Queequeg's presence is not well justified in the story, and the ease to which Queequeg acclimates to Ishmael is even worse. I think Ishmael just says something like "Since he's an unpredictable savage, who can say why he decided to like me?"
I think it does speak to a deep unmooring loneliness that accompanies Ishmael through these opening chapters. In one additional stray revelation about Ishmael's backstory, he says that he has decided to accept pagan kindness because Christian kindness has betrayed him. Ishmael is a seeker, going out to sea because there is something about the people on land that is unwelcoming to him.