moby dick chapters 21-25

-Um... the Bulkington Chapter is my biggest WTF so far, and certainly my least favorite chapter. I don't know what to do with it at all. I think the problem is I'm not supposed to do anything with it. I think it's a piece of prose-poetry, a meditation on the place of man in the sea, another one of the early stylistic deviations. It doesn't set anything up plotwise. It doesn't tell us much about Bulkington and it doesn't tell us much about Ishmael. It's a mood piece.

I think what I'm supposed to do with it is just enjoy it. I don't think it's structurally important, I don't think it's meaningful or deep, I just think Melville had a thing he wanted to tell the readers and he was so worked up about it that he gave it his finest, more flowery language. That is really difficult for me. I don't know why it's difficult. Maybe it's just that the chapter is so damn overwritten that I want to treat it as satire. Maybe it's just not very good. I'm okay if the answer is that Melville slipped in a bad chapter. I can kind of accept that and move on, because he has so many good chapters.

But maybe the problem with the Bulkington chapter is that it's not just structurally unimportant, but actively works against some of Melville's other stylistic choices. Every character sketch thus far has been in its fashion, comic. (See past comments on Melville's humor in Moby Dick) Every character sketch has been pretty Dickensian, really. No, let's back off that a bit. Dickensian might imply that Melville is creating an inferior imitation of Dickens, but Melville's character sketches are not that. His portrait of Queequeg, his portraits of Bildad and Peleg, of Ned Coffin and Father Mapple, they're magnificent things that capture each character's essence in a stray gesture, a quirky response, a bizarre tic that reveals the monomanias and fascinations that define who these people are. And at the same time, they are leaden, ugly things that let us look deep into Ishmael's soul and his own deepseated prejudices.

Bulkington's introductory sketch qualified, but in The Bulkington Chapter, he is converted into an archetype. He is strong, noble, adventurous, but none of these traits are defined by any particularized action. Thus the Bulkington we see here is not a character who is compatible with the other characters in the story. He is a figure out of some other novel, some odd gothic monstrosity.

Maybe the right question to ask on the Bulkington Chapter is why Melville chose to make it anomalous. Why, in Melville's monstrously odyssean epic, where everything can be schematized and sliced and diced, where the point of the book is to chase a whale because it represents so much more than just a whale, is the epic hero a sideshow, someone who inspires Ishmael but is ultimately not relevant to the story?

-Melville follows it up with a duo of chapters titled Knights and Squires, in which he dissects the human dynamics of the harpoon boats, the relationships between the mates and the harpooneers. And these are great chapters, although I find the sectioning a little odd. Why have two chapters that serve a continuous function, have the same title, but break them up?

That notwithstanding, one of the things I love about the Starbuck chapter is how little it's about his skills as a first mate. There's virtually nothing about his experience as a sailor, virtually nothing about him as a leader, it's just about his caution and his courage. Cue the ISHMAEL IS SUCH A GREENHORN macro again, maybe? But I think I should penetrate a little deeper into an aspect of that: Is Ishmael still a greenhorn in these chapters? It's not clear. Time is fluid and messy in Moby Dick. Melville is inconsistent with tense and perspective in his narration. Is Ishmael telling this story as it's happening, unaware of the quirks of fate he is about to be subjected to, or is he telling it retrospectively, or is he doing a little of both? To bring back the Dickens comparisons, in David Copperfield Dickens balances this tension extraordinarily. The reader is always aware of Adult David's presence and consciousness, yet this doesn't keep us at any real remove from Child David's thought processes. But my ISHMAEL IS SUCH A GREENHORN macro is about the fact that Melville completely makes a hash of the distinction. Even in scenes where the reader is aware that Ishmael is being stupid, it's not clear by any means that Narrator Ishmael is aware that Greenhorn Ishmael was being stupid. Grownup Ishmael doesn't seem any wiser than Greenhorn Ishmael.

To be more specific, all this talk of the way Starbuck balances his caution and his courage suggests that Ishmael is writing this after having fought whales with Starbuck, yet the reader hasn't seen Ishmael fight whales with Starbuck, doesn't have the context to appreciate the value of Starbuck's whaling caution. It kind of makes a terrible introduction to the first mate of a whaling ship. We haven't had enough whaling porn for it to make sense. I still love the chapter, though, because I think it is a fascinating distillation of a person, to reduce him entirely to the question of how cautious he is when confronted with danger, and to try to render a moral dimension in that choice. Because everything is a moral question in Moby Dick. This is not a story about competency winning out over incompetency, it's a story where any battle between competency and incompetency is really and truly a proxy for the war between man's good impulse and his evil impulse. Starbuck's capacity to serve as chief mate is ultimately not about whether or not he is a good sailor and leader of men. It's about whether, when he is put to the test, he steps up to meet the challenge. Whether he is manly, which in a novel that basically doesn't have female characters, means whether he is decent.

And now to get back to my question on the division, I find myself gravitating toward the theory that Melville split it because he felt like it. Because his intuition told him it was right. More than a lot of other great novels, Moby Dick feels half-planned and at times half-finished, and I'm mostly pretty okay with that. Recall the note I made on Infinite Jest

Something I find exhilarating about the writing is the way it feels unmastered, like Foster Wallace has lost control of his narrative. The beginning didn't feel that way, I don't think, but sometime a few hundred pages ago I started sensing it coming off the rails. I don't really mean the narrative, though. I mean the language, the prose itself, that is out of anybody's control. It makes the narrative feel wild and unmanaged, but actually I think Foster Wallace still owns his plot. It's everything else he's given up on.

I feel sort of the same way about Moby Dick's bigness. Melville is butting up against themes so big he can't deal with them representationally by coloring within the lines, working within some systematic schema like his ludicrous marine biology textbook. So he doesn't even really try. The plot diagram of Moby Dick is almost impossible to draw. The next section is the next section because Melville wanted it next, not because it helps support the plan. The point isn't to build to something in particular, the point is just to keep building and building, a Babelian edifice that one feels certain will collapse at any moment, that perhaps does collapse repeatedly along the way.