Moby Dick Chapters 42-45
Oct. 29th, 2013 09:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretThere are some amazing sentences in Chapter 42, one of which in particular I would quote because it fills a two page long paragraph with a single sentence and what's more, a single thought. Except that I don't want to inflict that sentence on sanguinity, because its comments on Native American culture are pretty awful in their clueless stereotyping.
Chapter 42 is about whiteness as a cultural touchstone of primal fear, wit the Great White Shark, the Polar Bear, and the Albatross, and of course the White Whale Moby Dick. Except that three chapters later we get Chapter 45, with one of my favorite sentences in the book, "So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory."
This sentence is plainly Melville fucking with us. Moby Dick is the biggest, most hideous and most intolerable allegory I have ever seen, and it makes no difference whether it is real or believable. Moby Dick is the most realistic novel that is also a brilliant fantasy.
But to go back to whiteness, the one kind of whiteness Melville does not spend any time on in this chapter is human whiteness. Race is a hard thing to talk about in Moby Dick in contemporary terms because the language of the novel is so very much the language of contemporary liberal racism. It is much easier to reject it on those terms than it is to confront it on its own terms, as a book that is legitimately struggling with how to overcome white racism and very often failing. Almost always failing. It is tempting but extremely dangerous to try to defend Moby Dick using contemporary liberal racist apologetics: to hold up Ishmael/Queequeg as evidence that Ishmael isn't really prejudiced, to point to this chapter as evidence that Melville appreciates the absurdity of making judgments based on skin color. These things aren't completely untrue, but I think we fail the text if we don't point out how all the non-white characters are cannibals, how Melville makes no serious effort to understand their culture and consistently depicts them as being less cultured and almost less human than his white sailors, how caricatures of pagan rituals underpin much of the narrative as a metaphor for the dark force of Ahab's vengeance. The best lesson to learn from Moby Dick's racism, I think, is probably how deep it lies in our souls. As we plumb the allegorical ocean of humanity's most inhuman desires, we study the ease with which it is possible to completely surrender to them, and what costs we pay for that surrender.
In between those two chapters, in between Melville's most obvious signposts of realism and allegory to date, we have Ishmael once more attempting a proto-psychoanalysis of Ahab. This time it is not in Ahab's voice, this time we see a narrator struggling and ultimately failing to explain the depths of Ahab's madness, but it is no more clear that it is Ishmael who is narrating. The intimate knowledge the narrator has of Ahab's life in his cabin argues against it, but perhaps we are intended to understand that this, too, is a guess on Ishmael's part, a fiction crafted from partial truths uncovered in search of a wholer truth.
But this is gamesmanship and almost besides the point. For all that Ishmael talks and talks and talks, we never seem to get any more of Ahab than the idea that he is obsessed with Moby Dick, completely and terrifyingly mad, and yet he was able to mask this madness in harbor because the ship owners and the rest of Nantucket society was either willfully blind to it or caught up in their own similar madness. Every detail Ishmael tells us, of Ahab mapping and remapping, worrying and plotting, merely serves to heighten our appreciation of the depths of the obsession.
sanguinity, because its comments on Native American culture are pretty awful in their clueless stereotyping.Chapter 42 is about whiteness as a cultural touchstone of primal fear, wit the Great White Shark, the Polar Bear, and the Albatross, and of course the White Whale Moby Dick. Except that three chapters later we get Chapter 45, with one of my favorite sentences in the book, "So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory."
This sentence is plainly Melville fucking with us. Moby Dick is the biggest, most hideous and most intolerable allegory I have ever seen, and it makes no difference whether it is real or believable. Moby Dick is the most realistic novel that is also a brilliant fantasy.
But to go back to whiteness, the one kind of whiteness Melville does not spend any time on in this chapter is human whiteness. Race is a hard thing to talk about in Moby Dick in contemporary terms because the language of the novel is so very much the language of contemporary liberal racism. It is much easier to reject it on those terms than it is to confront it on its own terms, as a book that is legitimately struggling with how to overcome white racism and very often failing. Almost always failing. It is tempting but extremely dangerous to try to defend Moby Dick using contemporary liberal racist apologetics: to hold up Ishmael/Queequeg as evidence that Ishmael isn't really prejudiced, to point to this chapter as evidence that Melville appreciates the absurdity of making judgments based on skin color. These things aren't completely untrue, but I think we fail the text if we don't point out how all the non-white characters are cannibals, how Melville makes no serious effort to understand their culture and consistently depicts them as being less cultured and almost less human than his white sailors, how caricatures of pagan rituals underpin much of the narrative as a metaphor for the dark force of Ahab's vengeance. The best lesson to learn from Moby Dick's racism, I think, is probably how deep it lies in our souls. As we plumb the allegorical ocean of humanity's most inhuman desires, we study the ease with which it is possible to completely surrender to them, and what costs we pay for that surrender.
In between those two chapters, in between Melville's most obvious signposts of realism and allegory to date, we have Ishmael once more attempting a proto-psychoanalysis of Ahab. This time it is not in Ahab's voice, this time we see a narrator struggling and ultimately failing to explain the depths of Ahab's madness, but it is no more clear that it is Ishmael who is narrating. The intimate knowledge the narrator has of Ahab's life in his cabin argues against it, but perhaps we are intended to understand that this, too, is a guess on Ishmael's part, a fiction crafted from partial truths uncovered in search of a wholer truth.
But this is gamesmanship and almost besides the point. For all that Ishmael talks and talks and talks, we never seem to get any more of Ahab than the idea that he is obsessed with Moby Dick, completely and terrifyingly mad, and yet he was able to mask this madness in harbor because the ship owners and the rest of Nantucket society was either willfully blind to it or caught up in their own similar madness. Every detail Ishmael tells us, of Ahab mapping and remapping, worrying and plotting, merely serves to heighten our appreciation of the depths of the obsession.