Moby Dick

In class we discussed the idea of reading Bartleby the Scrivener as a story of resisting societal expectations. I found this a very useful and logical way of approaching the bizarre fantom-like character of Bartleby. For instance, early in the his presence in the tale we see the following set up:

I should have stated before that ground glass folding-doors divided my premises into two parts, one of which was occupied by my scriveners, the other by myself…I resolved to assign Bartleby a corner by the folding-doors, but on my side of them…I procured a high green folding screen, which might entirely isolate Bartleby from my sight, though not remove him from my voice. And thus, in a manner, privacy and society were conjoined.

This description places Bartleby as physically unseparated from the narrator in stark contrast to the intentional separation that exists between them and the other three men in the office. Many times the narrator looks to these men for their consensus and support on his outrage with Bartleby and all three regardless of their seemingly different characters give the same response. They seem to represent the majority which we use to justify our own “reasonable” opinions. Bartleby’s resistance is so peculiar because it is so very pure in its form. Unlike our “irrational” anger or “childish” refusal to do what is asked of us, Bartleby’s demeaner is steady, calm, mature, and he does not (or cannot) waiver from his particular cause. We see this is the following exchange:

“I would prefer not to.” (Bartleby)

“You will not?” (narrator)

“I prefer not.” (Bartleby)

Even while the resistance is enough to rid Bartleby of completing each task, he is careful to correct the idea that he is stubborn refusal. No, he is resistance. Interestingly, the narrator eventually grows to appreciate this idea/person even while he never seems any less irritated by it.

I looked round anxiously, peeped behind his screen; but it was very plain that he was gone…For the first time in my life a feeling of overpowering stinging melancholy seized me.

Without questioning society, even if it is a dangerous or perhaps simply irksome internal struggle, our lives and purpose become depressingly dull.

Bartleby, the Scrivener is definitely one of Melville’s funny short stories, though far from benevolent it has a pretty dark ending. In class it was mentioned that Bartleby is not the typical worker: he is not industrious, he has no ambition, and he may be crazy. However, I would say that the narrator is not the typical boss either: though he talks about money at the beginning, just as Bartleby shows ambition at the beginning, his dealings with Bartleby and the fact that he has a half-effectual staff show that he does not really care about making money. I think Melville thought this would be a funny situation, to take Wall Street and what is at the heart of American values and invert it.

Bartleby’s “preferences” gradually decline until he seems to prefer not to do anything. This could be a commentary on the American system, especially since Bartleby used to work at the government bureau of dead-end letters which the narrator supposes is partially responsible for his apathy. However, I think Melville as a satirist had more in mind. Perhaps, he saw at the heart of the American system is “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” that the pursuit of life and happiness is what runs the country. Anyone can succeed in America so long as they have a great work ethic and ambition. What happens when someone has no ambition? What happens when one would prefer not to pursue life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as Bartleby seems to do, when he chooses to do nothing, get arrested, and die? In other words, what place does madness have in American life, that part of us “that would prefer not to?” Bartleby is almost like that part of our consciousness, or perhaps the narrators, that is stubborn and unsatisfied.

The motto of a free, industrious country is “I would prefer to…”, a positive pursuit of values. Though that also comes with the freedom “to prefer not to,” Bartleby is just concerned with the negative. He never really says what he would prefer to do, thus going into a state of self-resignation and shock. The narrator, who represents the American system, does not know how to respond to this Bartleby and can not accommodate him; no one can. Thus people like Bartleby do not have a place in American life or society. Melville could just be playing around, satirizing readers who did not have the stomach for Moby-Dick (Bartleby does not even want to read over his own proofs), or trying to get us to be more acceptable of our our reluctant consciences by satirizing and dramatizing the conflict, i.e. it’s never as bad as Bartleby. What makes Bartleby funny, endearing, and relatable is that there’s a part of him in all of us, whether we’d prefer this or not.

As I slaved over my thesis for the past few weeks, I came across some interesting information that made me stop and re-imagine the novel. My thesis is on Matthew Vassar’s brewery, and while looking for some of the ways in which he diversified his investments, I found that he was a founding partner in the “Poughkeepsie Whaling Company,” incorporated on April 20, 1832. In fact, a year later a second, rival whaling company was founded, and during this period whaling ships were based up and down the Hudson River. One of the first ventures for the whaling company was to send a ship on a four year cruise, where, unlike the crew in Moby Dick, they mutinied and executed the captain. The industry did not last particularly long in Poughkeepsie, about a decade, but this got me thinking.

The beginning of the book places so much emphasis on Nantucket, and throughout the rest of the novel it shows up again and again. Melville obviously chose to begin his novel there because of how dependent it is on whaling, but what if he had chosen Poughkeepsie, or another town where whaling wasn’t the center of the universe but just another industry where businessmen were trying to make money? Would the crew be made up of similar people, or would there be mostly non-whalers, locals who were looking for a job and found one aboard a ship. There is no more information about the mutiny mentioned above, but after reading Moby Dick I can’t really imagine anything more than the captain’s insanity driving the crew to action. For our dear Founder, however, it just meant one failed investment among several very, very successful ones.

I read once that Melville wrote “Bartleby the Scrivener” in response to the disappointing success of “Moby Dick.”  While I cannot confirm whether or not this is true, it is certainly interesting to compare the two with this in mind.  The world of “Bartleby” seems to be exactly the kind many of the crewmembers on the Pequod were trying to escape. Ishmael expresses outright contempt for city life or any “honorable, respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever.”  He argues that people are drawn in part to the city because of its proximity to water, which represents freedom from the monotony of their everyday lives.  Without Ishmael’s willingness to live apart from the norms of society, the events of Moby Dick would never have occurred.
In “Bartleby,” then, Melville explores the other side of this surprisingly modern dilemma: people who, unlike Ishmael, cannot escape from the tedium that is office life.  If he felt “Moby Dick” had somehow failed in its mission to get this message across, he had to go about addressing the issue in a different way.  By placing “Bartleby” in a setting that must have been infinitely more relatable for his readers than a whaling ship, Melville might have hoped to more directly challenge the complacency present in everyday life.
In some ways I saw this story as a precursor to absurdist fiction.  Bartleby, after all, is a highly unusual character who defies easy categorization.  He has fallen into the culture of passivity that modern life fosters through the repetition of boring, daily tasks.  However, his similarly passive refusal to take part in this culture is absurd: “I would prefer not to.”  It is no coincidence that this is the line people most remember from the story.  It would simply not be the same story if Bartleby took radical action to liberate himself from the daily grind of modern life – it is far more disturbing to follow this man as he passively resists participation in the life society has laid out for him, ultimately dying because of it.  By creating this absurd character Melville questions the validity of a society that could create such a person.

In attempting to come up with alternative lenses through which to read chapter fifty-one, I immediately latched on to that of determinism. Personally, I’m obsessed with the idea of determinism in this book, especially as it might relate to Melville’s Calvinist background.

As far as Calvinist determinism goes, Augustine emphasized the notion that man was created with free will, but for some reason lost significant aspects of it over time, particularly the ability to permanently change oneself and to accept what he called the “offer of salvation.” These things, according to Calvinist theology, have been for some time either total accidents, or effected by some agent or third party.

Who could such an agent be?…

Ah. The massive white whale who took off Ahab’s leg, thereby permanently altering his physical self. That one.

Taking Moby Dick as an agent of divinity (and, ultimately, fate) offers an interesting perspective on the chapter. There’s a sense of destiny, or at least of divinity, to the spout:

It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude: on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea.

The spout continues to lead the men for days, and it is this fact which I think is important. The spout is not a singular spectacle; Melville makes absolutely sure that it leads the ship somewhere. Calls to the men like a siren. Melville describes the men’s compulsion to follow: “And so it served us night after night, till no one heeded it but to wonder at it.” There is a sense that the men can no more comprehend the nature or purpose of the spout because an understanding is simply not possible. The spout (and, by extension, Moby Dick) leads the men on and they, not even knowing what the sign could portend, follow. Moby Dick is controlling the ship and, just like he broke Ahab, is now by the same token offering a kind of beautiful, terrifying grace—or at least a final solution:

For a time, there reigned, too, a sense of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition, as if it were treacherously beckoning us on and on, in order that the monster might turn round upon us, and rend us at last in the remotest and most savage seas.

Calvinist determinism not only offers new explanations and interpretations of this chapter, but also opens much of the book to discussion. It also begs the question of whether Moby Dick is good or evil… or neither. Also a lens through which to read this chapter.

And only I am escaped alone to tell thee.

Ishmael introduces his epilogue with this quote from Job I. In response, I’d like to share another quote from the same chapter of the Bible:

In all this, Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing.

As a reader, my impression of Ishmael was that he is as balanced a narrator as any. He constantly interjects with all sorts of cetological and philosophical musings and odd stylistic choices—and one might even say these are specifically Melville’s doing, and not Ishmael’s—but he never once questions Ahab outright, never once judges Queequeg negatively after their first meeting, and appears to all the while be relatively invested in the hunt for Moby Dick. Ishmael seems something of a Job-like determinist in this respect; by never “charging” anyone with “wrongdoing,” Ishmael displays a kind of casual acquiescence that suggests a faith in the events on and around the ship. Basically, Ishmael trusts in what’s to come. With this reading of Ishmael’s character, his reasons for including an epilogue seem clear: Ishmael wants to show how right he was.

To give a crude summary of the relevant bits of Job I: Job, whose children are feasting at the house of his oldest son, learns from four messengers that various acts of man and God have resulted in the death or destruction of all land, animals, and people at the son’s home. Job’s reaction is somewhat surprising:

At this, Job got up and tore his robe and shaved his head. Then he fell to the ground in worship and said:
‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb,
and naked I will depart.
The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away;
may the name of the LORD be praised.’

Through all the pain inflicted by such a traumatic event, Job retains his faith in God, a faith for which Job will remain in God’s favor. Similarly, Ishmael floats confidently along and through a whirlpool (the experience of which Ishmael likens to the story of Ixion, a man also tortured by a god), only to be saved miraculously by Queequeg’s coffin, which had (not coincidentally) been the ship’s life buoy. Things worked out exactly as they were supposed to in Ishmael’s eyes, and he even describes the event as organized by the Fates. As the only man on the ship with true faith in the consequences of his actions and the actions of others, Ishmael survives the ordeal as was destined to happen. The epilogue, then, might seem to say, “I told you so.”

In chapter 83, “Jonah Historically Regarded,” Melville seems to be having a spot of fun. With what is essentially a tangential tale of a whaleman’s attempt to rationalize the story of Jonah and the whale, Melville examines vastly different methods of Biblical interpretation, thereby casting an inquisitive light on his own frequent Biblical references.

Ishmael introduces to the reader a host of religious intellectuals (including a bishop and German exegetist)—all of whom attempt to rationally legitimize the story of Jonah—through Sag-Harbor, who is more or less the protagonist of this brief chapter. By likening their efforts to those of Greeks and Romans who “[stood] out from the orthodox pagans of their times,” Ishmael perhaps sarcastically represents Biblical rationalization as a historically tried-and-true process. However, each successive “explanation” of the religious text is more ridiculous than the next. Ishmael points this out by slyly mocking the bishop’s explanation of the possibility that Jonah’s whale was a Right whale:

For truly, the Right Whale’s mouth would accommodate a couple of whist-tables, and comfortably seat all the players. Possibly, too, Jonah might have ensconced himself in a hollow tooth; but, on second thoughts, the Right Whale is toothless.

Ishmael goes on to entertain several considerations beyond the anatomy of the whale, including whether Jonah’s whale was alive or dead, and several quibbling geographical details. In the last paragraph, Ishmael makes absolutely clear his opinion of Sag-Harbor’s attempts at rationalization by calling him of “little learning,” and by denouncing the practice in general: “I say it only shows his foolish, impious pride, and abominable, devilish rebellion against the reverend clergy.”

Ishmael never explicitly states what he regards as the best way to approach Biblical stories. In the same paragraph, however, our narrator does reveal an alternative to Biblical rationalization, of which he apparently approves: “Besides, to this day, the highly enlightened Turks devoutly believe in the historical story of Jonah.” There is no ridicule in Ishmael’s language here; as opposed to his description of Sag-Harbor as uneducated, Ishmael makes a point of labeling these Turks “highly enlightened.” He goes on to illustrate the power of their devout belief with a legend:

And some three centuries ago, an English traveller… speaks of a Turkish Mosque built in honor of Jonah, in which Mosque was a miraculous lamp that burnt without any oil.

Perhaps what Melville is trying to say is that his story, like any Biblical story, is meant to be taken at face value. Certainly, there is a suggestion that the Turks were able to achieve miracles by their blind faith in Biblical text. Perhaps, then, the most fruitful way to read Moby-Dick is with a trusting eye.

This from Douglas Harper, who operates the Online Etymology Dictionary and, as it happens, lives rather near me:

Symphony

late 13c., the name of various musical instruments, from O.Fr. symphonie “harmony” (12c.), from L. symphonia “a unison of sounds, harmony,” from Gk. symphonia “harmony, concert,” from symphonos “harmonious,” from syn- “together” + phone “voice, sound”[.]

Thus, at their most basic, the elements of the word “symphony” can be used to describe sounds together. In this sense, many things in chapter 132 make symphony. When Melville describes the weather by writing, “The firmaments of air and sea were hardly separable in that all-pervading azure,” he creates a sense of fluidity between elements of nature, and in going on to provide each with masculine or feminine characteristics, creates a harmony of both the natural world and gender. He explores this idea further by associating “gentle… feminine” birds with the air and “murderous… masculine” beasts (leviathans, sharks, etc.) with the sea, and by illustrating the natural balance created by the two groups.

Immediately after Ahab enters the scene, however, Ishmael’s tone changes dramatically:

Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm and unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the ashes of ruin; untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl’s forehead of heaven.

By combining all these thoughts with semicolons, Melville links them through a sort of simultaneity; Ahab’s disruption of the symphonic beauty of nature is emphasized by having all the details of his entry be read at once. Were this chapter a musical symphony, this paragraph would be pure dissonance. However, the trend of classical music is to resolve dissonance, and despite Ahab’s best efforts, he cannot stay such a resolution… and what a beautiful resolution it is:

But the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel, for a moment, that cantankerous thing in his soul. That glad, happy air, that winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him… Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.

If Melville is a composer, this is his Romantic testament to the power of nature. Nowhere in the book—and this is saying something—is there a clearer or more powerful example of the triumph of nature over the will of man. Until the end, maybe.

I was struck by the similarity in thought that emerges between “Ahab’s Leg” of Moby Dick and a chapter entitled “Rebellion” in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

“Rebellion” is essentially concerned with how the unjust nature of life comes into conflict with the belief in a God that is good. How can one justify the goodness of God, no, how would God himself, justify the suffering of the innocent? What is just about about a world in which the murderer of a child may escape punishment and live his life with a clear consciousness? If God’s divine plan involves ruthless unpunished killings and the suffering of countless people then can we really say that god is good and just?

“Ahab’s Leg” discusses the grief and pain Ahab feels due to the loss of his leg. Although he is often reckless and careless with his leg, he “at times give careful heed to the condition of that dead bone upon which he partly stood” (354).

The pleasures of life are not shared equally among men. Some may live their entire lives and face one moment of terror after another. Even a good deed may be met with evil. Melville writes:

“…Some natural enjoyments have no children born to them for the world, but, on the contrary, shall be followed by joy- childlessness of all hell’s despair; whereas, some guilty mortal miseries shall still fertilely beget to themselves an eternally progressive progeny of griefs beyond the grave; not at all to to hint of this, there still seems an inequality in the deeper analysis of the thing.” (355)

Ahab, who has been driven insane by his obsession for revenge seems to attribute his bloodlust not to himself but to the divine plan by God of some othe force, which he has no choice but to abide by. In “The Symphony”, Ahab, as he laments to Starbuck of his his inability to change course and avoid annihilation, states:

“…What cozening hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me…? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is an errand-boy in heaven…how then  can this one small heart bear; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that  living and not I?” (407)

There is something unjust and cruel for Ahab about his life- a life which he does not  believe he has chosen to live but  has already been determined for him. It just does not seem fair that he must live a life of sorrow according to the plan of being greater than himself, for a reason which he himself does not know.

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Brothers Karamazov. New York: W W Norton, 1976. Print.

Melville, Herman, Hershel Parker, and Harrison Hayford. Moby-Dick. New York: Norton, 2002. Print.

Thucydides’ History of The Peloponnesian War describes the war between Sparta and Athens. While it is often interpreted as a neo-realist political work, i.e., a work which characterizes politics in terms of power relations on an international scale, I’d like to consider the work in a constructivist light. The great city of Athens had lost the war.  Thucydides, according to the constructivist interpretation, had written a work in which the loss of Athens was not only the result of poor planning and bad tactics but also of the manipulation and the eventual of the loss of the meaning of words such as “justice”, and “right”.  Thucydides seemed to believe that these words meant something concrete to the Athenians and that the meanings of these words  had, at one point, corresponded to their actions. But through the manipulation of Athenian leaders, words such as “justice” no longer corresponded with what was just, and “right” in actuality wrong; eventually Athens suffered because there was no stable meaning and thus no corresponding action. This is really oversimplified but basically, with the loss of meaning arises an instability.

I think Ishmael is struggling  with a somewhat similar instability in “The Whiteness of the Whale”. Whiteness has not necessarily lost its meaning, but its understandings are so varied  that it seems to Ishmael as though its meaning can only be found in indefiniteness and instability. It seems to me that what Ishmael really fears about whiteness is its ability to allude definition and categorization. He states, “Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voices and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behinds with the though of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way?” (165). Ishmael’s whole project in the book has been to obsessively categorize and define and when he finally confronted with something whose very nature resides in indefiniteness and indefinability he becomes afraid.

Thucydides the Constructivist
Richard Ned Lebow
The American Political Science Review, Vol. 95, No. 3 (Sep., 2001), pp. 547-560
Published by: American Political Science Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3118232

Melville, Herman, Hershel Parker, and Harrison Hayford. Moby-Dick. New York: Norton, 2002. Print.