Seeking Ferret

Yeah, 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.

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.

-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.

-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.