Moby Dick

Melville’s story “Bartleby the Scrivener” reflects and anticipates important themes from contemporary and following works of literature.  It is Bartleby’s absurd refusal to do anything in the office that resonates across other stories.

I am reminded first of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, whose unnamed narrator refuses to submit to the logical positivist philosophy of nineteenth century Europe.  He has no use for logic and insists on rebelling against it, even to the point of hurting himself.  He wishes to use his life as an example of the faults of logic and reason; he wants to show that a highly enlightened and intellectual man can turn against all considerations of reasonable human existence.  He argues instead for irrationality, and an open understanding of humanity’s inherently masochistic nature.  I think the underground man’s perspective of the futility of science and reason reflects Melville/Ishmael’s musings in Moby Dick. Both narrators hope to show us the limitations of these things.  The underground man uses a metaphor of being up against a brick wall when confronting nature, and he insists he will at the very least spit on that wall. Moby Dick might be called a great deal of spit.  I think it is unlikely that Bartleby is nearly as spiteful as the underground man, but we cannot be too sure.  We hardly glimpse his personality.  Certainly there are parallels.

Another author I’m reminded of is Franz Kafka, who came decades after Melville.  Particularly I am reminded of “The Hunger Artist,” which is about a man in a circus who deliberately starves himself.  This is his act, and the crowds eventually stop finding him entertaining.

I think all of these stories reflect a predicament of modern society, whose work environments are now very similar to Bartleby’s.  I think all three of these authors are shocked and fascinated at how dehumanized people can become by the nature of their work.

In Chapter 86, The Tail, Ishmael lauds the whale for handling its immense power with such grace.
Ishmael first goes into a detailed description of the whale’s tail, describing its large size and powerful build (“a dense webbed bed of welded sinews”). Despite it’s enourmousness, however, the whale is also incredibly graceful. Ishmael tells us that:

“Nor does this—its amazing strength, at all tend to cripple the graceful flexion of its motions; where infantileness of ease undulates through a Titanism of power. One the contrary, those motions derive their most appalling beauty from it. ” (365).

I thought Melville’s choice of the phrase “appalling beauty” was interesting. Appalling usually refers to something bad, whereas when something is described as “beautiful,” it’s usually taken as a compliment. Ishmael combines beauty and destruction again when he says: “So in dreams, have I seen majestic Satan thrusting forth his tormented colossal claw from the flame Baltic of Hell” (365). His description of Satan as “majestic” emphasizes that simply because Satan is “evil” doesn’t mean we cannot admire the beauty of the terrible power he holds.

Is seems that Melville really wants his readers to know that opposites don’t necessarily have to be opposites, they can complement each other. This pervades in some of the other themes of the book: Religion and science don’t have to disagree, both feminine and masculine traits can be found in the same objects, white and non-white people should be able to coexist happily together, and horrific, appalling events can also be beautiful. Once again, Melville has used the prided whale to highlight his philosophies in an understated way.

We technically are supposed to have only one blog entry about Melville’s short stories, but I can’t help that there were two big, very different aspects of “Bartleby the Scrivener” that caught my interest. The first was Bartleby’s motivation. The second is the motif of food.

The narrator reveals to us about half-way through “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street” that he believes food and personality are intertwined. He tells us about the ginger nut cakes that Bartleby lives on, and asks, “What is ginger? A hot spicy thing. Was Bartleby hot and spicy? Not at all.” He suggests that food consumed and behavior should somehow be related, and he stands by this in describing his other employees.

It begins with Turkey. Turkey, who is drunk after dinner, smells of “eating-houses,” and reminiscent of a turkey in both looks and behavior, is often described by our narrator as “bland” in the morning. Bland like the flavor of turkey.

Next is Nippers. Nippers may not have a food name, but he is still very much a part of the lawyer’s food world. Nippers suffers from severe indigestion, and is described as having a “brandy-like disposition.”

Then there is Ginger Nut. Ginger Nut has a drawer full of various nut shells. He works as the cake and apply purveyor, and every day at noon he eats an apple. Mr. Cutlets, who makes a brief but significant appearance, is a “broad, meat-like man” and his name is “Cutlets!”

Food-related analogies and descriptions prevail in the first half of the short story. In explaining Bartleby’s good work, the lawyer narrator states, “As if long famishing for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents. There was no pause for digestion.” Later, after Bartleby has begun to pose a problem for the company and for our narrator, the death the narrator imagines for Bartleby, were he to fire the scrivener, is starvation. The narrator decides against the dismissal, which he says is “delicious self-approval” and a “sweet morsel for [his] conscience.” The narrator continues to contemplate Bartleby, soon coming to the realisation that “He never visited any refectory or eating house.” We now see that the narrator thinks of food as a social activity. Bartleby stays cooped up inside all by his lonesome. He never goes out to eat with friends or family. Bartleby’s starvation, then, can be seen as a sign of his loneliness. He eats only what he needs to survive. He socializes with others only as much as he has to. When Mr. Cutlets invites him to dinner, Bartleby responds “I am unused to dinners,” meaning not only does he eat very little, but he socializes very little, and would not do well at a social gathering.

Bartleby died of starvation in the end. Perhaps what he really died of was loneliness. The narrator describes the dead as he who neither “eats, nor hungers anymore.”

I found an interesting article about Moby Dick and American myth.  The author, Harry Slochower, addresses the question of whether there is such a thing as an American myth, and he discusses where Moby Dick fits in.  Ahab, in his view, a mythic hero not unlike Dante’s pilgrim or Goethe’s Faust, but with distinctly American characteristics.

Slochower explains first the American myth of opportunity, which is embodied in the “rags-to-riches” tales or in the stories of great heroic outdoorsmen finding gold, etc. Slochower identifies the distinct qualities of the American myth.  The outdoor hero is a rugged, self-reliant individualist, but his country came to be through a common effort: “Many races, religions, and customs found themselves on one boat which led them away from the restrictive and divisive hierarchies of the Old World” (261).

This myth of opportunity decayed over time.  It developed from idealism to skepticism.  He writes:

By the time of Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, and Robinson Jeffers, it has lost most of its legitimacy.  The success story of Dreiser’s “Titan” becomes suspect and the efforts of the little man to hit it rich provide the foundation for an “American tragedy.”  The shortcut to the happy ending receives even more acid treatment in Faulkner and Jeffers.  Among our contemporary writers, the myth of expectancy appears frozen (O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh), cornered (Tennesse Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire), pitiful (Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman), and self-destructive (Clifford Odets’ The Big Knife).   (261)

Shlochower argues that Moby Dick is the American myth, that it is the ideal American myth, combining individualism and collective action:

Herman Melville stands at the watershed moment of this historic cycle, between individualism and coordination, between freedom and equality.  America in the mid-century still harbored vast, unexplored possibilities of adventure and fortune.  But Melville is among those who are beginning to question the ethic of expansionism and coordination.  (262)

This dynamic of individualism and collective action is exercised throughout the novel.  It is important to remember that Ahab’s quest, carried out collectively by the Pequod’s crew, is a personal quest.  And, as Slochower alludes to in the above quote, these personal quests can often be destructive and wrongfully conceived.

        In the eighty-sixth chapter of Herman Mellville’s Moby Dick, after describing the sperm whale’s tail, Ishmael states that he still has an “inability to express it” (Melville, 366) and that even after dissecting a whale, he “know[s the whale] not, and never will” (Melville, 367).  There is a similar instance in the 103^rd chapter of the novel, entitled “Measurement of the Whale’s Skeleton.” For the most part, this chapter is a fairly dry and very detailed description of the whale’s skeleton. When Ishmael is examining a skeleton, he suddenly breaks away from his observations and thinks

“How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untraveled man to try to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring over his dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood. No. Only in the heart of the quickest perils; only within the eddyings of his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out” (Melville, 438).

As suddenly as this mental soliloque began, it ends and moves back to the description of the skeleton in a manner so abrupt that it is almost comical.  The added factor in this thought – that the “true” whale can be discovered only in a perilous fight – is very likely an allusion to the final hunt of Moby Dick that will finish the novel. Therefore, it would be interesting to examine the first concrete sighting of Moby Dick to attempt to determine if there is an instance in which this particular whale’s true nature is revealed.

            One possible revelation of the true Moby Dick is the shockingly calm and peaceful first description of him: “A gentle joyousness – a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale” (Melville, 525). While this moment does not seem perilous, the danger of hunting Moby Dick has been well forewarned and is not doubted.  The fact that the word “invested” is used to refer to the whale in both instances is especially indicative of a correlation. The descriptions of Moby Dick, for the most part, become increasingly more fearsome as this tragic climax in the novel progresses.

For this post, I am taking Professor Friedman’s suggestion to contextualize more fully how Melville writes about “pitchpoling,” at once referring to its regular usage, meaning a boat’s capsizing, and also to a sperm whale’s breaching, a connotation which Melville seems to have crafted himself.  In doing this, Melville is subtly comparing through metonymy the whale, as a natural phenomenon or symbol, and man, who is represented through the actions of the boat.

At the end of an earlier post, I briefly mentioned that chapter 84 itself is titled, “Pitchpoling.”  Upon rereading it however, I notice that Melville seems to be writing primarily about harpooning the whale, as he doesn’t actually mention breaching or capsizing at all.  Melville might have conceived a third complication of the term, literally referring to “pitching,” or throwing, a “pole,” as a harpooner does.

After looking at several online dictionaries, the only formal definition I could find for “pitchpoling” was to somersault, or to capsize a ship.  In conclusion, it appears to me that Melville has taken it upon himself to create mixed meanings for the term, using it to describe several different things.  Surely, it is evident that Melville likes to have fun with language.

There have been many interpretations of “The Spirit-Spout,” and I’d like to offer mine.  This chapter is, in fact, an indication of the crew of The Pequod slipping into something close to delirium. Ahab has infected them all with his dream of capturing Moby Dick, and now each man dreams of the white whale.  In the icy purgatory of this chapter, a dream-like feeling slips over everyone.  Ahab’s face seems to have “two different things warring” (209). He is between his two natures: the broken man and the ungodly divine ideal man, who would strike  the sun if it insulted him–and he is in complete control of the ship’s crew, in control of their imaginations.  Ishmael is inspired like the rest, perhaps the most inspired:

And had you watched Ahab’s face that night, you would have thought that in him also two different things were warring.  While his one live leg made lively echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap.  On life and death this old man walked.  But though the ship so swiftly sped, and though from every eye, like arrows, the eager glances shot, yet the silvery jet was no more seen that night.  Every sailor swore he saw it once, but not a second time.

A folklore native to the ship rapidly develops around this spout–every man sees it but once.  This is further evidence of Ahab’s capture of the crew’s imagination.

I think this contains larger implications about Ahab as a man and perhaps about genius itself.  Ahab does not appear in the novel for a long time, and yet he is a strong presence before that.  He is manifested through the stories that people have told to Ishmael about him.  Peleg, Bildad, and strange Elijah all show Ishmael a picture of Ahab before we meet him.  Without these stories, Ahab would be just another crazy old man.  It is necessary for his crew to believe in him and his wild quest in order for the voyage to succeed.  I think this is the case for all storytellers who’d like us to believe in them.  So, in the end, all genius is metaphorical, and, here, Starbuck is the only skeptic.

This reminds me of Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello.  Iago is similar to Ahab.  He speaks in his soliloquys about “pouring his pestilence” into Othello’s ear, and he watches the Moor change throughout the play as he infects his imagination.  Iago must gain the trust of the other characters in the play if he is to have his revenge.  That trust is a belief in the story he presents them, which is a complete takeover of their imaginations.  This happens, I think, every time we read a book.  We could do with more benign artists than these men!

A while back I marked a quote (we might have looked at it in class) that struck me at the time, but it wasn’t until I just returned to it that I realized how significant and meaningful this quote really is. It comes to us from Ishmael, in a seemingly unremarkable part of the novel, just after we meet the crew of the Pequod. Chapter 57: Of Whales in Paint; In Teeth, In Wood; In Sheet-Iron; In Stone; In Mountains; In Stars, page two of the chapter (289 in my Bantam Classics Edition):

Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him, i.e., what is called savagery. Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. I myself am a savage, owning no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready at any moment to rebel against him.

What a remarkable and revealing statement of Melville’s feelings on race (and more). You’ll notice I posed this blog to race, but I may just as well posted it to a half dozen other categories. Ishmael portrays these savage whalers as a different race–a group of men restored to that condition in which God placed them. Melville views these savage whalers as a somewhat divine and natural race, men not of civilization and Christendom, but of God, nature, and the environment.

How can Ishmael characterize a whale-hunter as as much of a savage as an Iroquois? Because a whaler, though bound by the rules and regulations of the ship, is otherwise a wholly free and simple man. A man–at least temporarily–without allegiance to a nation, religion, or profession other than hunting–taking what he needs for himself from the earth.

Ishmael almost (or does he?) goes as far as to call himself a cannibal, a lawless animal without principle, as one would have taken the term to mean in the 19th century. But even to this he would be ready to rebel at any moment, because like a cannibal he has no allegiance to anyone or any institution and would devour his own brother or leader if need be (a stretch, but stay with me).

With this insight into the nature of these savage whalers, it is now no wonder to me that the savages have always had pratical control of the ship, because in essence all of the crew are savages. Compared to a landlubber, the whitest man among them may as well be a tattooed, bloodthirsty cannibal. But what I do wonder at, what now seems so impressive to me, is how Ahab could have gained the allegiance and cooperation of a ship of 35 savages. What a feat he pulled off on the quarter-deck to manage to guide the focus of all these free natives towards a doomed plot to kill an albino monster. Perhaps Ahab is this King of Cannibals, the only man who could ever hope to gain the imprudent obedience of a crew of seafaring barbarians.

We talked a lot in class about Chapter 132, The Symphony, and whether Ahab’s death occurred as a sort of punishment for his refusal to give up on killing Moby Dick, his defiance of defeat. When I read The Symphony I felt that, rather than defying his destiny, Ahab was actually submitting to it in his search for Moby Dick.

We know that Melville was Calvinist, looking for signs of his pre-ordained fate. After Ahab gives his speech questioning his choice to spend his life whaling, and Starbuck encourages him to go back to Nantucket, Melville writes:

“But Ahab’s glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last cindered apple to the soil. ‘What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozzening, hidden lord and master, and remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, and I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that is as an errand-boy in heaven…” (521).

While Ahab’s literal death occurs in the later chapters, when he is dragged down by the line, his figurative one seems to occur at the very moment when he “cast his last cindered apple to the soil.” His last cindered apple falls from the tree, leaving nothing behind, similar to the way that the speech he just gave Starbuck hinting that he wishes to give up the hunt on Moby Dick is his last attempt to avoid his fate. The speech was his last defense, and after he has given it, Ahab resigns himself to his fate: to fight Moby Dick and die. Perhaps the fact that Melville describes Ahab’s last apple as “cindered” suggests that Ahab was pre-ordained to go to Hell.

If Ahab’s fate was pre-ordained, can we blame him everything tragic that happens in this book, or do we just have to accept it as everybody’s fate, meant to happen. Is Ahab responsible for the “murders” of all those people on the ship who died because he wouldn’t give up hunting Moby Dick? If he was compelled, by a force bigger than himself, does that still make him responsible for the consequences of his actions? I think these are some questions Melville was exploring when he created Ahab.

What strikes me about the narration in Bartleby is Melville’s different approach in observing and analyzing insanity than in Moby Dick. In Moby Dick the shifting narrator delves into the very minds of those that are presumably insane, giving details that the reader would never have gotten had the entire novel been written completely through the eyes of Ishmael. In Bartleby, however, we are supplied with a consistent first person narrator who is trying to make sense of the curiosity that is Bartleby.

The question I found myself asking, however, is not whether Bartleby was crazy, but whether the narrator was crazy. Bartleby does not make sense as a person. He supposedly subsists on ginger nuts, and prefers not to do anything:

He lives, then, on ginger-nuts, thought I; never eats a dinner, properly speaking; he must be a vegetarian then; but no; he never eats even vegetables, he eats nothing but ginger-nuts.

Take note of the use of punctuation. Read aloud this passage sounds choppy and, frankly, like a rant. The narrator is incredulous of this man, as is the reader. But does he ever question Bartleby’s very existance? This is another curious difference from Moby Dick. There is never a point during the novel where I wonder whether a character is real or an apparition. I believe that Melville uses this uncertainty to disrupt the concept of insanity itself. Who is to say who is insane? Is it just as curious to Bartleby (if Bartleby is real) that this man is so concerned with reading over a copy, or that he eats a “regular” diet? Perhaps Melville’s point is to say that the line between sanity and insanity is thin at best, and that what is socially considered “insane” may perhaps be a higher level of consciousness that is, infact, more sane than any “sane” person could be.

This  brings to mind Pip’s descent to insanity. Melville describes Pip as almost entering another realm of existance:

He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. 402

I believe this to be the essential question of Bartleby, especially since Ginger Nut refers to Bartleby as “a little bit luny”. Whether Bartleby or the narrator is crazy, Melvilles narration effectively makes the reader question the nature of sanity.