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Moby Dick Chapters 46-101
Jun. 27th, 2016 10:11 amYeah, a lot of chapters. I've been reading the book in bits and pieces since I last posted in October 2013, and am getting fairly close to the ending now. It makes a nice filler in interstices of free time, because of how absurdly choppy it is narratively. Every chapter isn't just a new piece of story, it's a new way of telling the story.
It's such a big piece of text that I'm ostensibly reviewing that I'm not sure how to review it. This section of the book constitutes a lot of the 'boring' parts, the chapter after chapter is intensive detail about how a whale is butchered and its oil extracted. But even the non-boring parts are written in strange ways. Massive amounts of plot happen in tiny bursts. People die or almost die, people lose limbs, people lose huge sums of money, and it's all reported as asides to the dense explanations of whaling technology. There's one chapter where the Pequod is chased by pirates in the straits of Malacca, and it's written in full-on 19th century adventure novel form for about a page, until Melville runs out of steam and switches to writing about sick whales and whether they still yield good oil. In another passage, Tashtego nearly drowns until Queequeg dives in and saves him, and then Ishmael immediately switches back to talking about the different layers of fat on the whale.
Also, the 'boring' parts are not boring. They're technical and detailed and I'm never going to need to know them in a practical way, but they really give an impressive sense of immersion and they tell about a world I'll never get to experience, and that's honestly really exciting. I love reading the 'boring' parts of Moby Dick, I love learning little bits like how the Pequod is constantly illuminated at night with large numbers of oil lights because they have such a huge surplus of oil that they can afford to waste a little of this very expensive oil on the sailors. The almost surreality of the experience is brought to full attention.
There is very little of Ahab in these sections. He pops up in the brief moments when the plot diverts to the quest for the White Whale, and then vanishes again. Starbuck and Flask and Stubb in some ways serve as stand-ins for his authority, particularly on the chase, but that hardly suffices. We know that Starbuck and Ahab are at odds, a tension perhaps most magnificently expounded upon in the strangely rhythmic chapter where each member of the crew provides a successively more unusual exegesis on the gold coin Ahab placed as reward for spotting the whale. Starbuck's orders represent the natural order of life at sea, efforts at continuity and stability that Ahab's obsessive presence incessantly undermines. No matter how routine the marine rituals Ishmael reports are, something is wrong with the Pequod.
As to Ishmael himself, he gets stranger and obscurer as the book goes on, a fact even he acknowledges in the chapter on the whale skeletons where he concedes that if he were all he said he was, an inexperienced oarsman on a whaling boat, he would not be able to provide all the detail about whale skeletons that he does, in fact provide. Ishmael has seen an absurd amount of the world in an era where mass media was limited in its scope. He's seen so much that he can report casually on incredible adventures, doing whatever the opposite of burying the lede is. Countless times he starts off a story with something that requires explanation of how he learned it, and then veers off away from the part that would reveal how he came to be in that situation and tells the story as if the story were its own justification. The story of the "Town-Ho", Ishmael tells as he told it to the Peruvian Dons, without giving any reason why he would be in the company of such distinguished and dangerous figures. WHO THE HELL IS FUCKING ISHMAEL?
We get this hilarious reversion back to Ishmael is such a Greenhorn in like, Chatper 98, when Ishmael falls asleep at the tiller and manages to turn around, standing up, until he is facing 180 degrees the wrong way. This scene is not actually hilarious. One thing that is clear by chapter 98 is that life on the Pequod is incredibly dangerous. It is a miracle that Ishmael is still alive. But Ishmael writes this scene with such dreamy whimsy that it's impossible to see it as anything but a joke. "My God ! what is the matter with me? thought I. Lo! in my brief sleep I had turned myself about, and was fronting the ship's stern , with my back to her prow and the compass." I think I said much earlier that this is how most of the humor in Moby Dick works- you're never quite sure if it's really a joke.
I have several other similar epigrams recorded from this part of the book because they amused me. After a discursion about the absurd hodgepodge of laws regarding who has ownership of a whale, whether it be a 'fast fish' or a 'loose fish', he concludes: "And thus there seems a reason in all things, even in law."
And this amazing mathematics joke that had me laughing for minutes, describing a scene in which Ishmael is cleaning the inside of a domed furnace: "It was in the left hand try-pot of the Pequod, with the soapstone diligently circling round me, that I was first indirectly struck by the remarkable fact, that in geometry all bodies gliding along the cycloid, my soapstone for example, will descend from any point in precisely the same time."
And then I have some epigrams bookmarked because they are super-racist Melville. "The truth is, that living or dead, if but decently treated, whales as a species are by no means creatures of ill odor; nor can whalemen be recognised, as the people of the middle ages affected to detect a Jew in the company, by the nose." And "We can't afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama. Bear that in mind, and don't jump any more." Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that though man loved his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence."
In both of these cases, it's classic liberal paternalist racist Melville, where both of these statements can be read as excoriating 'actual racists', but both statements still, in their dark humor, deny the right to full personhood of the Jews and Blacks in question. Moby Dick is incredibly frustrating in so many ways.
It's such a big piece of text that I'm ostensibly reviewing that I'm not sure how to review it. This section of the book constitutes a lot of the 'boring' parts, the chapter after chapter is intensive detail about how a whale is butchered and its oil extracted. But even the non-boring parts are written in strange ways. Massive amounts of plot happen in tiny bursts. People die or almost die, people lose limbs, people lose huge sums of money, and it's all reported as asides to the dense explanations of whaling technology. There's one chapter where the Pequod is chased by pirates in the straits of Malacca, and it's written in full-on 19th century adventure novel form for about a page, until Melville runs out of steam and switches to writing about sick whales and whether they still yield good oil. In another passage, Tashtego nearly drowns until Queequeg dives in and saves him, and then Ishmael immediately switches back to talking about the different layers of fat on the whale.
Also, the 'boring' parts are not boring. They're technical and detailed and I'm never going to need to know them in a practical way, but they really give an impressive sense of immersion and they tell about a world I'll never get to experience, and that's honestly really exciting. I love reading the 'boring' parts of Moby Dick, I love learning little bits like how the Pequod is constantly illuminated at night with large numbers of oil lights because they have such a huge surplus of oil that they can afford to waste a little of this very expensive oil on the sailors. The almost surreality of the experience is brought to full attention.
There is very little of Ahab in these sections. He pops up in the brief moments when the plot diverts to the quest for the White Whale, and then vanishes again. Starbuck and Flask and Stubb in some ways serve as stand-ins for his authority, particularly on the chase, but that hardly suffices. We know that Starbuck and Ahab are at odds, a tension perhaps most magnificently expounded upon in the strangely rhythmic chapter where each member of the crew provides a successively more unusual exegesis on the gold coin Ahab placed as reward for spotting the whale. Starbuck's orders represent the natural order of life at sea, efforts at continuity and stability that Ahab's obsessive presence incessantly undermines. No matter how routine the marine rituals Ishmael reports are, something is wrong with the Pequod.
As to Ishmael himself, he gets stranger and obscurer as the book goes on, a fact even he acknowledges in the chapter on the whale skeletons where he concedes that if he were all he said he was, an inexperienced oarsman on a whaling boat, he would not be able to provide all the detail about whale skeletons that he does, in fact provide. Ishmael has seen an absurd amount of the world in an era where mass media was limited in its scope. He's seen so much that he can report casually on incredible adventures, doing whatever the opposite of burying the lede is. Countless times he starts off a story with something that requires explanation of how he learned it, and then veers off away from the part that would reveal how he came to be in that situation and tells the story as if the story were its own justification. The story of the "Town-Ho", Ishmael tells as he told it to the Peruvian Dons, without giving any reason why he would be in the company of such distinguished and dangerous figures. WHO THE HELL IS FUCKING ISHMAEL?
We get this hilarious reversion back to Ishmael is such a Greenhorn in like, Chatper 98, when Ishmael falls asleep at the tiller and manages to turn around, standing up, until he is facing 180 degrees the wrong way. This scene is not actually hilarious. One thing that is clear by chapter 98 is that life on the Pequod is incredibly dangerous. It is a miracle that Ishmael is still alive. But Ishmael writes this scene with such dreamy whimsy that it's impossible to see it as anything but a joke. "My God ! what is the matter with me? thought I. Lo! in my brief sleep I had turned myself about, and was fronting the ship's stern , with my back to her prow and the compass." I think I said much earlier that this is how most of the humor in Moby Dick works- you're never quite sure if it's really a joke.
I have several other similar epigrams recorded from this part of the book because they amused me. After a discursion about the absurd hodgepodge of laws regarding who has ownership of a whale, whether it be a 'fast fish' or a 'loose fish', he concludes: "And thus there seems a reason in all things, even in law."
And this amazing mathematics joke that had me laughing for minutes, describing a scene in which Ishmael is cleaning the inside of a domed furnace: "It was in the left hand try-pot of the Pequod, with the soapstone diligently circling round me, that I was first indirectly struck by the remarkable fact, that in geometry all bodies gliding along the cycloid, my soapstone for example, will descend from any point in precisely the same time."
And then I have some epigrams bookmarked because they are super-racist Melville. "The truth is, that living or dead, if but decently treated, whales as a species are by no means creatures of ill odor; nor can whalemen be recognised, as the people of the middle ages affected to detect a Jew in the company, by the nose." And "We can't afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama. Bear that in mind, and don't jump any more." Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that though man loved his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence."
In both of these cases, it's classic liberal paternalist racist Melville, where both of these statements can be read as excoriating 'actual racists', but both statements still, in their dark humor, deny the right to full personhood of the Jews and Blacks in question. Moby Dick is incredibly frustrating in so many ways.