Feb 04 2010
Bias? Ignorance? Dramatic effect? Or Just Racist?
Above is a non-exhaustive list of possible explanations for Ishmael/Melville’s description of Fedallah and his Oriental homeland in Chapter 50, though we know that Fedallah’s true homeland, Persia, is actually a separate entity from East Asia altogether! The description is markedly negative:
“He was such a creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles to the east of the continent— those insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in these modern days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth’s primal generations, when the memory of the first man was a distinct recollection, and all men his descendants, unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as real phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moon why they were created and to what end; when though, according to Genesis, the angels indeed consorted with the daughters of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbis, indulged in mundane amours.”, [Herman Melville, Moby Dick]
To begin with, it is unlikely that Ishmael should hold a grudge against someone he had (1) only just met, (2) had never done him any harm, and (3) is a fellow whaler who, for all of his mysteriousness, is still working toward the same goal at himself. Therefore, Ishmael’s unflattering tale of origin is not due to a bias against Fedallah’s character.
In that case, could Ishmael’s assertion of primitiveness stem from an ignorance of East Asian culture and geography? Perhaps to a certain degree. However, the “insulated…unalterable countries” Ishmael mentions had not yet begun to industrialize at this time. Only after the Meiji Restoration in the 1860s did Japan begin to develop industry and to shift away from Bushido and agrarianism. Many other “Oriental isles”, such as Papua New Guinea, many Polynesian islands, and parts of the Philippines and Indonesia, remain largely culturally and technologically isolated even to this day. Combined with the fact that Melville himself had firsthand experience with some of these places lead one to conclude that the strange description of Asia is not due to ignorance.
At the same time, Melville is definitely taking poetic license here. It is preposterous to claim that, merely by *looking* at Fedallah, one can see the origins of humanity. This dramatic, and ostensibly bigoted, verbiage seems to be the strongest incentive for Ishmael’s soliloquy. In order to evoke how very different the islanders’ culture is, Melville chose to not only separate them spatially from the reader, but temporally as well.
I’d also like to mention the extreme irony of the narrator’s charge that Fedallah came from an ignorant place where man was “unknowing whence he came”, even though the Genesis-citing speaker was probably ignorant of his own origins, as Darwin’s Origin of Species wouldn’t be published for another eight years.
2 Responses to “Bias? Ignorance? Dramatic effect? Or Just Racist?”
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Very interesting Jared, particularly your reading of Ishmael’s description of Fedallah as inherently bigoted towards Asian cultures. (Your digression to Asian history ought to be cited; always cite your historical sources, even if they came from another class’s lecture.)
I think there may be another reason for Ishmael’s prejudice — the fact that Ahab hid Fedallah and his crew, thereby investing them with a special elevated status, but also, likewise, relegating them to a subordinate position. They are treated like caged animals, to be released only at crucial whale-killing moments. To reserve them for special cases gives them a kind of privilege; but to reserve them as killing machines also points to their difference/inferiority in Ahab’s eyes.
This is a particularly apt passage, and could be very well found as a quote in Edward Said’s “Orientalism.” It’s a classic example of a Western mind creating knowledge about somebody from the “orient” which allows him to distinguish himself as “civilized and domestic,” in contrast with the “insulated, immemoriable, and unalterable” other. Melville also throws in a few hints of the sexual deviancy also ascribed by Westerners to the Oriental, as he writes that their daughters consorted with angels, demons, and the “uncanonical Rabbis.” This type of knowledge creation was essential to the construction of European empires over Africa and Asia, as the “oriental” was seen as basically the same in all times and places, which made it very easy to mentally justify building empires which spanned innumerable distinct cultures.