Moby Dick

For this post I figured I’d tackle the most subtle, perplexing aspect of Ishmael’s narration: the foot note. What is the purpose of the footnote in Moby Dick? What are these pesky, little creatures that pop up at the bottom of the sea?

Since nobody else has the time and patience, I did an exhaustive search of the book and counted a total of 17 footnotes (if anyone wants to challenge me on this matter please go ahead).*

Footnotes typically belong to the phylum of non-fiction, in which case they are added by the author, or in an antiquated or translated work of fiction, in which they are added by an editor or translator, like in my Norton ed. of The Brothers Karamazov.

So does Meville revolutionize the footnote by employing it in Moby Dick?

At first glance, they seem to be nothing out of the ordinary, often giving the appearance of explaining dry, technical details. In fact, this could have added to the early mis-categorization of the book as a novel about cetology. In the chapters Cetology and The Right Whale’s Head, they are used to give further insight on the categorization and anatomy of whales, backing up the perception that the book is primarily about whales. However, as often with Melville, this soon proves not to be the case. In the chapter The Whiteness of the Whale, the footnote recalls personal observations and memories, giving the appearance of a travel narrative.  Others explain the meaning of mariner terms and other aspects of whaling life to land-locked, tight-lipped readers, in which case they could also be a satire for the travel narrative he felt he had outgrown. Melville certainly takes as much creative license with footnotes as he does with other narrative and stylistic forms in Moby Dick.

There are many other types of footnotes in Moby Dick:

Humorous footnotes that give color to the text:

The monkey-rope is found in all whalers; but it was only in the Pequod that the monkey and his holder were ever tied together. This improvement upon original usage was introduced by no less a man than Stubb, in order to afford the imperilled harpooner the strongest possible guarantee for the faithfulness and vigilance of his monkey-rope holder. (Signet, 311)

Feminist-footnotes:

When by chance these precious parts in a nursing whale are cut by the hunter’s lance, the mother’s pouring milk and blood rivallingly discolor the sea for rods. The milk is very sweet and rich; it has been tasted by man; it might do well with strawberries. (376)

Elitist footnotes:

But as these pig-fish are a noisy, contemptible set, mostly lurking in the mouths of rivers, and feeding on wet hay, and especially as they do not spout, I deny their credentials as whales; and have presented them with their passports to quit the Kingdom of Cetology. (128)

Abuse of footnotes:

(See The Whiteness of the Whale)

Whatever you may make of them, or even if you skip over them, these footnotes leave us a footprint of Melville’s thought.

So, next time you stumble upon a footnote in the text, stop and take note. You may find something interesting.

*Compiled list of footnotes (by no means authoritative):

Signet Edition

Pg. 106,128,133,182,183,199,200,228,234,276,277,293,311,325,376,406,456,527

** I can’t count, there are actually 18

In chapter 124, Ahab asserts his navigational skill:

…He hurried towards the helm, huskily demanding how the ship was heading. “East-sou’east, Sir,” said the frightened steersman. “Thou liest!” smiting him with his clenched fist. Heading East at this hour in the morning, and the sun astern?” Upon this every soul was confounded… the old man [Ahab] with a rigid laugh exclaimed, “I have it! It has happened before. Mr. Starbuck, last night’s thunder turned our compasses- that’s all.”

Here we see one more element of the danger in whaling: not only can the physical power of the sea capsize a boat or wash a man overboard, but the navigational system is vulnerable. Without the astute senses of Ahab, the Pequod could have taken a wrong course for days or weeks, following a broken compass instead of their planned route. This is again an example of man vs. nature, where the natural world has the ability to interfere with that of man, or the ship. The crew relies on technology, and loses its ability to observe one of nature’s most basic facts: the sun rises in the East, and sets in the West. In the continuing struggle between man and nature throughout the novel, it is moments such as these that demonstrate what the crew misses by campaigning in opposition to nature, instead of working cooperatively with it or with respect to it. Ahab is able to discern the problem and the cause, but steadfastly refuses to recognize the solution.

“Men,” said he [Ahab], steadily turning upon the crew, as the mate handed him the things he had demanded, “my men, the thunder turned old Ahab’s needles; but out of this bit of steel Ahab can make one of his own, that will point as true as any.”

Ahab chooses again to forgo the warnings of nature and impose his will on his surroundings. It appears to be a minor issue: a ship has to have a working compass. However, as one of many examples of Ahab’s determination and relentless aggression, it serves to show the extent to which Ahab will go in order to assert his dominance. For this reason, Ishmael notes that “In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all his fatal pride.”

As we reread and reflected on “The Spirit Spout” (Ch. 51) in class today, I approached it from a spiritual perspective, perhaps due to the name of the chapter.  What I found within, however, is a sort of summation of Captain Ahab’s hubris, how it spreads to the crew and yet another foreshadowing of the consequences, but this time in a more spiritual sense than solely a religious one (I believe that there is a difference, anyway). 

In the very start of the chapter, Ishmael makes a direct connection between the spout and a higher power: “Lit up by the moon, [the spout] looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea” (Melville 253).  Perhaps some extension or appendage of god or gods (a pagan reference?), the spout is representing the whale as something beyond man’s reach.  This idea is only deepened by the failed chases that continue into the chapter, giving an image of forever chasing something that will yield nothing if it doesn’t want to. 

Once the image of the spout as a celestial extension is produced, the spread of hubris around the ship is easy to see.  Despite the fact that all of these spouts occur at night, the men desperately and continually (at least for a time) chase after these mysterious occurrences in the dark.   Ahab’s personal harpooner, Fedallah, seems to be sort of responsible for the fervor that has risen among the men:

“‘There she blows!’ Had the trump of judgment blown, they could not have quivered more; yet still they felt no terror; rather pleasure.  For though it was a most unwonted hour, yet so impressive was the cry, and so deliriously exciting, that almost every soul on board instinctively desired a lowering.” (254)

With Fedallah prevoking the crew with his war cry, almost every man aboard would lower in the dark if they approached the creature that produced the spout, an action which Ahab would most certainly support if the spout proved to belong to Moby Dick, as he and the crew seem to believe: “It seemed… that unnearable spout was cast by one self-same whale; and that whale, Moby Dick” (254).  As we discussed in class, the crew seems very willing to give Moby Dick a malevolent intention which he does not naturally posess, believing that the whale was “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” (255). 

By giving the whale this dark power, they are arming it with the very weapons needed for their downfall, an occurrence that is heavily foreshadowed.  As soon as the spout is first spotted, Ahab begins to roam the deck, and his very pacing was indicative of a death rattle: “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” (254).  Only Ishmael seems to be aware that now that the Captain has the crew on his side, their doom is almost certainly sealed.

In chapters 55-57, Melville reflects on what seems to be yet another whale-related obsession, that of aesthetics and representation. This inclination was first summoned in the Spouter Inn, when Ishmael was drawn to the enigmatic painting hung in the entryway. In 55 and 56 he revisits the topic, drawing an ever-heavier veil of mystery around the whale. There are few even barely tolerable representations of the whale in painting, as the whale’s form is a thing that seems to positively resist representation. This is because the whale is only ever seen living by whalemen, and whalers are not painters. The skeleton of the whale, or even its lifeless body cannot show us its true visage, the whale is a lived being, and always partially submerged in water. In Melville’s time there was no conceivable way for the whale’s full swimming figure to be taken in by the human eye, and there never could be. It was unknowable, not subject to our limited knowledge. To create a copy of a whale, or indeed a copy of anything that touches the eternal is not possible, not even imaginable.

Chapter 57 seems a bit of a departure from the discussion of the “high” arts, in this departure it incredibly questions the constructed division of art and craft, and of marginalized peoples. Ishmael greatly admires bone carvings, and remarks upon the similarity between pacific island carvings and whaler’s carvings,

Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery”  244

Here Ishmael defines savagery as “that condition in which God placed (man)”, a telling and radical statement. The ‘savages’ are not godless primitives, but men that are not substantively different in makeup, all disparities a result of a lack of Christian society. And for Ishmael this is not necessarily a “lack”, clearly, as he himself has chosen to forsake the western world for the sea, in search of something or some understanding that has not become confused and corrupted. Ishmael proclaims:

I myself am a savage, owning no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready at any moment to rebel against him” (245)

After using the word liberally for the whole of a novel, Ishmael’s understanding of “savage” metamorphoses in front of us. He traces connections between the art, of what he terms the “Hawaiian savage”, the “white sailor-savage”, the “Greek savage”, and memorably refers to Durer as a “Dutch savage”. Ishmael satires the audacity of shrinking any person to fit the label savage, by using it indiscriminately to describe both extolled cultures and artists to the distained and forgotten. He compares the human perseverance exhibited in the years spent on a small intricate carving to the invention of a Latin lexicon, a radical idea sweeping away barriers of cultural authority, instead probing past rigid constructions to what Ishmael really cares about, the universal human spirit.

After spending today’s class talking about Melville’s ecocentricism (or lack thereof), I would like to point out some religious connections with his love of nature. I personally believe that Melville did “worship” all living things under the sun. It is for this reason that Ishmael spends so much time analyzing the ferocity and grandeur of the whale by describing the shape of it’s head and other anatomically symbolic attributes. This love for all nature, to me, is part of Ishmael’s religious perspective because he believes all creatures were created by God and we are as menacing to nature as nature is to us.

In chapter 66, The Shark Massacre, this sentiment is evident. In the first few lines, Ishmael describes such violent and ferocious creatures as “wondrous” and “vigorous” (271). When Queequeg and Stubb begin killing the sharks with whaling spades, Ishmael refers to it as a murder. He slightly humanizes the sharks even though they are menacing, violent, and eating the whale attached to the ship. The language Ishmael uses is also very unsure. When he describes the sharks being stabbed in the skulls, he calls the brains the “seemingly only vital part,” “entrails seemed swallowed,” and “a generic vitality seemed to lurk in what might be called the individual life” (272). Ishmael’s uncertainty proves that he, or Melville, believes nature should not be tampered with, and humans do not know as much as we think about other species. This connects to our discussion on global warming as well: since we are the “dominant and most developed” species on the planet, we think we can conquer and understand everything that is foreign to us.

From this passage I infer that Melville believes men should stick to what they know and leave alone what is out of their hands. God created all creatures to peacefully coexist, and he did not intend for men to disrupt the system as Queequeg and Stubb did. Ishmael has faith that God made all of nature with equal intent, and Ishmael trusts God’s decision. Queequeg, on the other hand, does not. At the end of the chapter he acknowledges this sentiment: “Queequeg no care what god made him shark, wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; but de god wat made shark must be one damn Ingin” (272).

In class we also brought up the common sentiment, especially present in Ahab, that nature is malevolent to humans. Ishmael/Melville clearly do not believe this if Ishmael is personifying sharks. In this regard the narrator thinks that it is selfish for men to claim such a high status in a world of things created equally. God made the sharks just as he made us, therefore the sharks find us just as malevolent toward them as we think they are toward us. This view of creation is very philosophical and very optimistic, but it is not surprising considering Ishmael’s tendency to philosophize everything. For once, his religious perspectives are happy and trustworthy.

I’d like to focus my blog on the issue of gender as it relates to the theatrical chapter 36: The Quarter-Deck.

First we see the bold image of Captain Ahab, walking the deck after breakfast as a country gentleman would subsequently take a stroll in his garden, though with a visage like the horizon of a coming storm. The most perceptive Stubb first notices this coming storm: (175) “D’ye mark him Flask? The chick that’s in him pecks the shell. ‘Twill soon be out.” The shell is broken and out flies that chick in this scene (Enter Ahab: Then all) as Ahab calls all hands to the Quarter-Deck–the stage of his subsequent lecture on the killing of the White Whale.

The Ra-Ra that follows is characteristic of many a homosocial scene: the general to his troops before battle, the head of a Fraternity to the soon-to-be inducted Freshmen, the Football coach at halftime. When Ahab says (178), “Aye Starbuck; aye, my hearties all round; it was Moby Dick that dismasted me,” he seems to say that Moby Dick took his very manhood from him (and his countenance has since been a means of compensating for it). Ahab makes sure–as is necessary in these situations–to compliment and praise his crew as he stirs them up: (178) “What say ye men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave.”

What’s more, Ahab has a classic masculine vendetta, of enacting his vengeance on what Starbuck calls “a dumb brute.” Ahab reveals that he would go even further than that and smite that which is both inanimate and intangible: (179) “Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other.” And so he remarks, and eye for an eye, a limb for a limb–such is his stereotypically masculine principle. Though one might say that he has already gotten his limb for a limb, as upon losing his hominid leg, he gains a leviathan one (of ivory).

Ahab, attending to his goals in this chapter in a most precise, calculated, and surgical matter, understands the power of the mob mentality he has created with his performance: (to Starbuck, 179) “The crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab, in this matter of the whale?” They are, and both Starbuck and Ahab know that his sermon has produced the desired affect in inciting the crew and hindering opposition: “Starbuck is now mine, cannot oppose me now.

The speech delivered, Ahab facilitates a sort of White Whale Fraternity induction ceremony in which the men must drink and swear to bring death to Moby Dick. Finally, the performance ends as abruptly as it began–no lasting ceremonies, no lingering, no dilly-dallying. After all drink from the long, barbed, steel goblets and cry out their maledictions against the great White Whale, the men quickly disperse and Ahab disappears into his bachelor pad.

Though he wrote Moby Dick before the wave of “science versus religion” debates that came when Charles Darwin published his On the Origin of Species, it appears that Herman Melville was more than familiar with the tension between science and religion. In Chapter 58, Ishmael makes a powerful remark regarding the sea, noting that, “Man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it” (267). Ishmael suggests that man has become too powerful, that humans no longer have any sense of wonder and awe in regards to the sea. Similarly, Melville could be suggesting that by attempting to conquer nature (and the world) through science, humans have abandoned feelings of “awfulness” and “awe-fulness” when considering God.

If the sea can be taken as a metaphor for the power of God, or even an extension of said power, then it does appear that Melville is commenting upon his society’s growing apathy toward the “divine being.” Why is this important to Melville? Perhaps he felt that the conflict between religion and science could be reconciled; science can only answer so much, and while there is nothing wrong in attempting to understand our world, it is beyond human capacity to conquer it. We must accept that there are some things that we will never be able to do or understand.

This quote could also serve as a warning to the crew aboard the Pequod; since they seek to overcome fate and destroy Moby Dick, they are accepting that they have indeed lost their fear of the sea — and God. As hinted throughout the entire book, things will more than likely not end favorably for the crew aboard the Pequod, suggesting that the awfulness of God and sea will return to mankind (if the Pequod is to serve as a example).

Looking at Ishmael’s quotation from a modern perspective, it almost seems strange to think that the people of the mid-19th century believed they had control over the world when, over a hundred years later, humans have extended further control over nature and are still attempting to conquer it. I wonder what Melville would have thought of our modern world if he could have seen it; would he stay firm in his assertion that we have lost our sense of “awfulness of the sea” and God? Or perhaps he would say that we have lost the sense, but are aware of that loss. It is striking to see how easily Ishmael’s quote can relate to modern day debates between faith and science; we are still struggling, it seems.

I found the various encounters the Pequod had with other ships to be a kind of relief, a chance for the reader to even slightly escape the confines of the ship and its inhabitants and see how they interact with their peers in the larger world.  Of course, these can be read as more than chance meetings, as each ship also seems to embody its own ideology or somehow act as a symbol of an idea Melville wanted to get across in the text.  Here, I think, it may also be significant that ships are conventionally referred to with female pronouns, and can thus make interesting cases for the representation of gender in the novel.
I found the meeting with “The Virgin” in chapter 81 o be a particularly good example of this.  While “virginity” is often associated with youthful femininity in Western culture, it does not necessarily preclude a connection to male virginity as well; thus, the fact that the German word “jungfrau” (the ship’s true name) contains in it the word for “woman” is perhaps more significant in an indirect way.  I hope that this analysis is not reading too much into the text by latching on to one of the relatively few references to women, and making it more than was intended.  However, I thought that in the context of our discussion of Melville’s own life and experiences with women and marriage, one could read this ship as a kind of statement on one aspect of its nature.
We first meet the Virgin empty of oil and thus “deserving the name of Jungfrau or the Virgin” (315).  However, it becomes apparent that the naiveté suggested by the name also refers to their lack of skill and knowledge of whaling.  After supplying the other ship with supplies the crew of the Pequod is insulted that it turns around and begins to compete for the same target.   Although the Pequod ultimately triumphs over the inexperienced Virgin, the old whale is practically defeated already – in it the crew finds an old piece of harpoon – perhaps the remnant of other whalers as incompetent in catching their prey as the Virgin.  We feel pity for this creature who has apparently been hounded by whalers all his miserable life only to die a meaningless death as it sinks to the bottom of the ocean.  The last we see of the Virgin, it is off chasing an “uncapturable” whale, completely unaware that its chase is in vain.  Perhaps this is not at all what Melville intended, but this desperate, fruitless search for a whale (combined with the name of the ship) almost reminded me of a young girl seeking a husband to provide the same thing a whale would provide for the Virgin: money.  However, like young girls can sometimes be, the Virgin is selfish and naïve, causing more harm than good.

I noticed in Chapter 94, “A Squeeze of the Hand” that there are numerous religious allusions.  It is evident that Herman Melville intentionally writes in a sexual manner and refers directly to the pleasure and joy of squeezing sperm with his hands.  However, the religious undertones are quite implicit.  Melville, I feel, draws an obvious connection between religion and sexuality.

First of all, for Ishmael, sperm represents a religious deliverance for it dissipates anger, bad temper, ill-willed thought, and all forms of malice.  Ishmael describes the joy of bathing his hands in the sperm.  “… while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever” (page 601).  The fact that Melville uses the word “divinely” connects sexuality to religion.

Ishmael’s feelings of affection and comraderie with his fellow-whalemen while holding and squeezing their hands together in the globules of sperm, reminds me of the part of the Church service when we turn to each other in the pews and greet one another saying, “Peace be with you.”

Another reference that Ishmael makes connecting religion and sex is his longing to squeeze sperm “eternally.”  “I am ready to squeeze case eternally” (page 602).  His reference to eternity can be seen as a religious connotation.  Furthermore, he goes on to say that he dreams and has “… visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti” (page 602).  How odd it is to imagine Heaven inhabited by angels delighting themselves in jars of semen!!  It is incredibly that in this one chapter, Melville meshes both eroticism and religion.

In Chapter 32, “Cetology,” Ishmael both questions and confirms the human need to classify, bending the rules of science and making up his own classification system. Interestingly, Ishmael’s uses words for different sizes of books to organize his classification:

“First: According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary BOOKS (subdivisible into CHAPTERS), and these shall comprehend thema ll, both small and large. I. The FOLIO WHALE, II. the OCTAVO WHALE; III, the DUODECIMO WHALE” (Melville 129).

Books used to be made by printing a certain number of pages on a sheet of paper, and then folding the paper. Books made by printing two pages on each side of a sheet of paper are called Folios. Octavos are made by printing eight pages of text on one sheet of paper, and folding eight times, and the duodecimo format has twelve pages per sheet (Ishmael left out quarto, four pages of text per sheet.) When the size of the paper used is constant, folios come out the largest, and then octavo, and then duodecimo, and similarly, Ishmael uses Folio for the larger whales, Octavo for medium ones, and duodecimo for smaller ones. I thought it was an interesting way of putting art and science together.

Ishmael’s classification is not scientific at all, and in fact he critisizes Linnaeas’ for “fain have banish[ing] the whales from the waters” (128). Linnaeas’ findings about how whales differ from fish are summarized as “lungs and warm blood; whereas, all other fish are lungless and cold blooded” (128). This description of the whale is favorable; “cold blooded” is not usually taken as a compliment. However, Ishmael still considers whales to be fish, because they live in the water.

This chapter might be another way that Ishmael suggests that whales aren’t so different from us (and that we are not so different from whales).

Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. New York: Signet Classic, 1998.

Information about book sizes from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_size