Moby Dick Chapters 34-41

So after a while that feels eventually like stalling, Ahab is seized with a passion and we get a scene that reminds me of, if anything, the Saying of the Law in Wells's Island of Dr. Moreau.

In more Melville is doing it all wrong news, I was struck by a strong feeling in this reading that this scene reveals the problem Melville was struggling with in Knights and Squires. Because he does it the way he does, full of tell instead of show, we learn who the players are in anticipation of the big conflict between Starbuck and Ahab. We know what is going to happen in that conflict, it all makes sense to us. Had he flipped those passages, it might have been 'better writing' in the contemporary technical understanding, because Starbuck and Ahab would have been revealed through their actions instead of through Ishmael's editorialization. But the confrontation scene might have had less impact, because we would have been figuring out the characters instead of struggling with their moral conflict. In one of the many ways in which Moby Dick is a great book to learn writing from, these kind of choices are apparent and obvious. Because Moby Dick is so messy and apparently unartful, with all of its literary choices presented on the surface for quick judgement, it is easy and fruitful to pick it apart and learn craft from it. It is a lot harder to learn writing from some of my other favorite writers- no matter how many times I reread Joyce or Roth or Steinbeck, I can't quite figure out how it's done, because there is so much concealing art in the style.

And then after the Saying of the Law scene, which I'm going to keep calling it, Ishmael disappears completely. Oh, he didn't vanish, as he assures us when his narratorial voice returns. He tells us when he's back that he was there the whole time, part of the scene, swept up in the moment like the rest. But we get a chapter in Ahab's voice, a chapter in Starbuck's voice, a chapter in Stubb's voice, and then in the manner of a play (a comedy, most certainly a farce) we get a chapter in the multipartisan voice of the crew- ribald, merry, disturbed, thoughtful, fearful, etc. I wrote to cahn [O]ne of the things I'm commenting on is my foreknowledge of the fact that Ishmael does, as the novel progresses, sort of disappear into the background. Whereas Nick's observational perspective is always present and at the fore in Gatsby, it becomes more and more unclear what Ishmael's narrative function and perspective are. And this is the start of that phenomenon, where Ishmael stops being the narrator and starts apparently serving as something more like redactor- assembling the narrative from bits and pieces of other narratives. Are these narrations compositions of Ishmael, imagined perspectives from a narrator who while hidden is still there, or is there some uber-redactor/editor standing outside of Ishmael and adding in from other narrators where Ishmael fails to tell the story?

Either way, I think this complements nicely my gloss on Ishmael as the Exile and therefore the anti-Odyssean Nobody, the person for whom Nobody is not a joke to fool the Cyclops. Odysseus would never let some other hero steal his limelight, but Ishmael cedes Biblical primacy to his younger brother and our Ishmael cedes narrative voice to the rest of his crew, all the while insisting (desperately?) that he has not vanished at all.

These chapters strongly reminded me of Robert Browning's dramatic monologues, so I checked publication dates and it is unlikely that Melville would have known Browning's work, though I imagine Melville was familiar with whoever Browning's literary inspirations were.

But back to the Saying of the Law chapter, which is just one of the most fascinating pieces of writing we've seen so far. There's a level of anthropological detachment in places, like a naturalist studying an island tribe, and the word pagan resurfaces again and again... there's a strong suggestion that this is in some fashion an adaptation of some un-Christian rite Ahab has learned in his travels. That this is something inappropriate, something that Peleg and Bildad would be furious about back in Nantucket, and that perhaps part of the power of the ritual comes from the secrecy and taboo at its core. But of course the thing that is forbidden about the ritual isn't just the pagan element. The ritual is forbidden because the deity of New Englanders is profit, not revenge, and the crew has signed on to risk their lives proportionate to the level of reward possible, but vengeance has no limit. If the scene has a religious charge, that is what underlies it.If Ahab is Jesus overturning the moneychangers' tables in Jerusalem, he is doing so in the service of a dark god- and the way the chapter is written, anyone with any ability to detach emotionally from the moment will recognize this easily.

But that is perhaps why what immediately precedes this is Cetology. I keep phrasing it as Melville has a Lot of Feelings About Whales, Okay?, but the point Melville is making is that Ishmael has a Lot of Feelings About Whales, and so do most of the crew. This is Ahab's obsession, but it's an obsession that the rest of the crew buys into and not just because of the money at stake. For Moby Dick to work in this moment, the reader has to stand suspended between an understanding of Ahab's obsession with whales, and a readerly detachment that lets you follow the undercurrents of the scene. You have to be a little bit obsessed with whales yourself to get what's going on with the scene, but Melville clearly doesn't want you to sympathize too much with Ahab yet. He wants you to feel the foreboding of the moment, and admire Ahab while thinking he's rather mad.

But what is so marvelous about the craft of this moment is that Melville immediately deconstructs it. You get in the Saying of the Law scene a very schematic representation of the characters- the crew acts as one voice, held in sway by the arguments of Ahab or Starbuck as the moments shift. It's very Moses und Aron, actually, with Ahab as Moses, Starbuck as Aron, and the crew as the amorphous People. But immediately after the Schoenbergian (Kierkegaardian? Hegelian?) confrontation, we get a breakdown where we hear the inner voices and we hear the doubts of each position, and ultimately the crew resolves into a cacophony of individual voices. This isn't a Hegalian dialectic with a failed synthesis, Melville announces. This is a bunch of people on a ship with a bunch of opinions. (and then at the top there is the Captain. Melville/Ishmael juggles a fascinating question about whether Ahab's authority comes from some internal storehouse of power or from the mere existence of his title. It bears close watching, but thus far the answer has been a little of both. The crew seems in thrall to the mesmeric force of his personality, while Starbuck is constrained hopelessly by the maritime tradition of deference to the captain.) So that the dark, phantasmagoric potency of the Saying of the Law scene is immediately compromised with proto-Freudian psychological realism.