Moby Dick

I can’t make heads or tails of Bartleby. But I thought it would be interesting to reflect on his character anyway.
He lives  frugal life and does not seem to care about material. After learning that Bartleby had been living in his office, the narrator recalls, “Rolled away under his desk, I found a blanket; under the empty grate, a blacking box and brush; on a chair, a tin basin, with soap and a ragged towel; in a newspaper a few crumbs of ginger-nuts and a morsel of cheese…” (6).
As the story progresses, he refuses to do more and more things. He does not wish to work, he does not wish to move, and then he even refuses to eat. He gradually refuses to participate in more and more facets of what most people consider to be a “normal” part of life.  I find his refusal to eat at the very end to be the most intriguing of his actions. Not only has he come to reject that which is asked of him by others, but he has even gone as far as to deny his own body sustenance. His  seems to want to detach himself- by himself I mean his mind, his spirit, whatever you would like to call it – from the sensible world. By the end of the story it’s as if his spirit, is dangling onto his body, i.e., the physical,  by a thread. His connections with the physical world have diminished to a point where the next logical step would be death. But why gradually? Why not just jump off a bridge? Who knows?

For my final post directly related to “Moby Dick,” I wanted to go back to one of my favorite chapters in the novel.  I found one moment in “Grand Armada” to be one of the most touching in the text.  While before Starbuck had bemoaned the fact the Pequod’s crew had so little of their human mothers in them, Ishmael’s brief encounter with mother whales and their own children invites the reader to see similar social constructs in the animals which have been portrayed so antagonistically up to this point.  In this one moment of serenity, we sense that Ishmael may see the whale as not so different from men after all.

It is no coincidence that Queequeg and Starbuck are the men who share this quiet insight with Ishmael.  Both men have been previously “feminized” in the text, at least within the context of the violent, hyper-masculine crew.  As Queequeg is a celebrated killer of whales and a purported savage, it is ironic that he seems the most alarmed by any harm coming to this “nursery.”  His horrified reaction seems based more on instinct than any calculated assessment of the situation, as if he knows it is somehow inherently wrong to bring violence upon this peaceful herd.  As I think we discussed in class, this incident is one example of how Melville may have been asking his readers to feel sympathy for the hunted animals.  For by disrupting this calm natural balance the crew brings disaster down onto themselves.  It has already been suggested that without a maternal influence, the men of the Pequod are destined to commit acts of violence and inhumanity.  One could argue then, that the destruction of the maternal element in the ocean by the crew foreshadows the violence that will be done unto them by the same principle.

Interestingly, the next chapter delves further into this gendered description of whales in that female whales are depicted as creatures that exist as part of a peaceful and cohesive community.  In contrast with this, he also develops more parallels between man and whale by indirectly associating Ahab with the aged male whales that go off on their own belligerent paths.  In this sense Ahab and the crew of the Pequod are again disrupting a natural balance struck within the group of whales themselves.  Together these two chapters offer a surprisingly human interpretation of the beast, a portrayal which I have a difficult time believing was not meant to elicit some degree of sympathy or at least contemplation on the part of the reader.

Ahab’s maniacal obsessive mind finally takes full control in the chapter The Quadrant.  This instrument is used to measure the position of the sun in order to determine a ship’s latitude.  Ahab decides that it is useless on his quest to find Moby Dick, exclaiming

Foolish toy! Babies’ plaything of haughty admirals, and commodores, and captains…Science! Curse thee thou vain toy; and cursed be all the things that casts man’s eyes aloft to that heaven…Curse thee thou quadrant!  No longer will I guide my earthly way by thee…thus I split and destroy thee!” (481)

Ahab proceeds to crush the quadrant by stepping on it with both his foot and peg-leg.  This dramatic display of the destruction of this tool signifies the disintegration of Ahab’s sanity and the loss a sense of reality.  By ruining the Pequod’s navigation instrument, Ahab is left in complete control of the ship’s course and direction.  No sound, stable tool can help guide the ship in a reasonable manner.  The sailors are left to depend on the fallible mind of their captain, an almost definite sign that the ship will be wrecked and end in doom.  By crushing the very tool that can provide a practical mapping for the Pequod to follow a logical course, Ahab exerts himself and his authority over science and in a broader sense, destiny and the larger external forces that affect human lives.  Again, this bold gesture serves as an omen that hints of Ahab’s destruction by a man-made object (the harpoon line) that has yet to occur.  It also implies the Pequod’s downfall, as all the sailors can do is to follow their insane Captain on his brazen quest to seek revenge upon an angry whale.  Breaking the quadrant in a way removes any hope the men, especially Starbuck, might have of ending their journey and finding their way safely back home.

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, “the Great American Novel,” has been compared to Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables , which may be “the great French novel, “ for its similar number of meditative digressions.  (Porter vii).  His digressions also function similarly to those in Moby-Dick, alluding to what “narratologists” call “events” (acts of God) rather than to “acts” (purposeful human actions) (28).

However, I think it would be more interesting to compare Moby-Dick to Hugo’s not much later novel Toilers of the Sea, a once obscure novel to an even more obscure novel.

Just as The Pequod crosses pathes with the French ship The Rosebud (Bouton-de-Rose), these two great novels cross paths.

Toilers of the Sea has been viewed as a regional novel (77) but that is like saying Moby-Dick is a book about cetology!  It takes place on the island of Guernsey where the people live off of and toil with the sea.  Though perhaps the more correct word is ‘battle’: they are constantly exposed to the elements, the storms and the unbridled sea.  The crew of the Pequod, as well as many sailors of the 19^th century, Melville included, would not have been unfamiliar with the island.  The first mate of The Rosebud, who humorously translates Stubb’s words to his captain, also happens to be a Guernsey-man.

Both books have prophetic beginnings: Moby-Dick opens with Ishmael saying “Call me Ishmael.”  Toilers of the Sea opens up with a mysterious girl Deruchette writing “Gilliat,” the main character’s name, in the snow.

Deruchette’s father, Lethierry, has established the first steamboat service in the region, the La Durande.  His captain, Sieur Clubin (Ahab), who has long prided himself on his honesty, awaits an opportunity to defraud his boss and run off with the money.  After a fortune is stolen from Lethierry, he tracks down the money only to trick his alcoholic helmsman (Flask) into crashing the ship on a treacherous reef.

Hiding in the rocks he plans to swim to shore, where he will arrange a secret voyage overseas.  But, like Ahab, he is struck down by fate.  A monstrous octopus seizes and drowns him, leaving his rotting carcass to attract the crabs, which it feeds upon.

Lethierry promises his daughter’s hand in marriage to any man who can salvage the ship’s engine.  Only Gilliat takes up the challenge, though secretly.

He struggles for weeks on the isolated reef where he constructs his own tools, battles fierce storms, and defeats the murderous octopus.  Finding the engine, the fortune and Sieur Clubin’s body, he returns to Lethierry who, ecstatic and devoutly thankful, wants Gilliat to be the captain of his new ship and have his Deruchette’s hand in marriage.

Tragically, in Gilliat’s absence, Deruchette has fallen in love with a new handsome minister who Gilliat saved earlier from drowning.  He fell asleep, contemplating the sea in “the Devil’s chair,” a stony armchair naturally carved out of the cliffs that is subsumed underwater during high tide.

Finding this out, Gilliat offers to selflessly arrange their marriage secretly, and they accept his generosity, unaware of his suffering.  As the couple sails away towards France, Gilliat sits in the stone armchair, watching them sail away until he drowns.

As you can tell there are many themes in common, including environment, nature, fate, labor, industrialization,  science and superstition, religion, race, politics, isolation, depression, and melancholy, or what psychoanalysts would call a “melancholic” attitude: turning anger at the other against the self (79).

Also, Moby-Dick is a metaphor for America in the nineteenth century, while Graham Robb has called this novel “a metaphor for the nineteenth century—technical progress, creative genius and hard work overcoming the immanent evil of the material world” (78).

And isn’t a giant octopus just as awesome as a whale? Kraken vs. Leviathan. I would like to see Moby-Dick and the octopus duke it out any day.

Porter, Laurence M.. Victor Hugo. Michigan State University. Twayne Publishers: New York, 1999.

I would like to again focus a post on a single chapter. Specifically, I would like to compare the monkey-rope in chapter 72 to a climbing rope. I am moving away from my usual category of gender to the umbrella of labor, work, and slavery, as the monkey-rope is used for labor and involves, as Ishmael says, a mortal wound to one’s free will, like slavery. Thus, allow me to compare chapter 72 of Moby Dick to one of the most astounding pieces of mountaineering lore: the true story, Touching the Void, by Joe Simpson.

Interested in mountaineering for much of my life, it was hard to miss Joe Simpson’s story of his own survival, but I brushed up my details with a sup-par article from Wikipedia, which can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touching_the_Void

First, the short version of Simpson’s story: Simpson and his climbing partner, Simon Yates, set out to make the first ascent of a 21,000 foot peak. They made it to the top, but on the way down Simpson fell and broke his leg. Since the two were low on food and fuel, they needed to make a quick descent to their base camp, so the two tied a pair of ropes together and Yates began to lower Simpson down the mountain in 300 foot intervals. However, at one point, Yates accidentally lowered Simpson off a cliff, and with the belay seat he cut into the snow crumbling, rather than allow them both to slide down the slope and fall off a cliff to their deaths, Yates cut the rope, resulting in Simpson’s fall off the cliff and into a crevasse. Yates figured his buddy was dead and down-climbed to base camp to save himself. Meanwhile Simpson didn’t die and managed to craw out the side of the crevasse and all the way back to base camp in one of the most impressive mountaineering survival stories ever told (which I do no justice).

Let’s begin now with a Footnote from Melville, describing the monkey-rope situation (337, Bantam Ed.):

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 on the original usage was introduced by no less a man than Stubb, in order to afford to the imperilled harpooner the strongest guarantee for the faithfulness and vigilance of his monkey-rope holder.

However, Yates bypassed the fails-safes designed by that noble man Stubb, by severing his 300 feet of kernmantle money-rope; thereby saving himself while most likely dropping his friend to his death.

So here we have the dilemma of the monkey-rope and the climbing rope. As Ishmael points out, the situation of belaying another man, who in his imperiled state also endangers the belayer, is often a, “humorously perilous business” (336, Bantam Ed.). There is much inherent danger in summiting a high peak or being lowered onto a dead whale inundated in shark-infested water, but these are nonetheless humorous endeavor’s, in part to share a laugh to forget about one’s mortality, and simply in the sense that these can be seen as absurd practices. Why would any sane man ever allow himself to take the working end of the monkey-rope, or the sharp end (the leader’s end) of a climbing rope?

Though the monkey-rope is of hemp, and a climbing rope of nylon, and though the monkey-rope is found only at sea, only on a whaler, and in this technique, only on the Pequod, the situation of Ishmael and Queequeg, and the situation of Yates and Simpson can be found to be very similar. As Ishmael observes, being tied together for safety in a hazardous situation is very much a partnership, almost a marriage of sorts:

…for better or worse, we two, for the time, were wedded; and should poor Queequeg sink to rise no more, then both usage and honor demanded, that instead of cutting the cord, it should drag me down in his wake.” (336, Bantam Ed.)

“…my free will, had received a mortal wound; and another’s mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster and death.” (337, Bantam Ed.)

These passages seem to make a strong case for the viewpoint that severing one of those lifelines is never the thing to do, and breaking that code of honor is worse than your own potential death. But on the other hand, though the assurance of death for the belayer gives insurance to the monkey, why should a mishap or misfortune take two lives when one can be spared?

However a pair of deaths cannot always be avoided, and that is why the agreement between these two people–the monkey and the monkey-holder, the climber and the belayer–is so important, as well as the selection of a capable partner in imperilment. Each of you must rely on the skill and vigilance of the other and each must hold up his end of the bargain if you each want to make it back on deck or back at base camp in one piece. But you have no other choice than to trust your partner. A monkey rope is no use without someone holding the other end. And of course, these safety measures–these lifelines–are far from a guarantee. Your partner at the other end of the rope can only do so much to protect you, and can just as easily endanger you.

Simpson did manage to survive his ordeal, and had Yates not cut the rope, they both may have fallen to their deaths, but would that make it acceptable for Ishmael to sever his monkey-rope to save himself, even if Queequeg was able to swim through the shark-infested sea to safety? That’s not a call for me to make. But it is too much to ask that Ishmael tie himself to the ship? I admire Stubb’s logic, but if you were to slip into the drink, wouldn’t you rather have your belayer pulling you out of the water than foundering in it along with you? Perhaps we can apply the same logic to our mountaineering story and say that, however dishonorable of Yates, it would be better for Simpson to have Yates come looking for him (dead or alive) than to have him lying dead next to Simpson at the bottom of a crevasse.

Melville seems to end his stories on a somber note.  Moby Dick, Bartleby the Scrivener, and Benito Cereno all have some people die and some survive in their final moments.  Let us examine Ishmael, the lawyer, and Delano – three survivors.

In Moby Dick, largely due to Ahab’s leadership, everyone but Ishmael perishes by the white whale.  Ishmael is this self-taught Renaissance man who seems to know a bit about everything.  He is not particularly integral to the Pequod’s crew and is more a tool for Melville to narrate and muse.  We learn at the beginning that Ishmael goes to sea because he’s depressed and feels alienated from society.

The lawyer in Bartleby the Scrivener is vain and a bit conceited, but definitely generous.  He keeps defective staff members on his payroll and doesn’t fire Bartleby when he stops working.  He tries to understand Bartleby and why he stops doing his job, but to no avail.  Nonetheless, he retains his interest in the enigmatic scrivener and narrates his story to preserve his odd legacy.

Captain Delano seems like a moderately intelligent and contemplative, yet somewhat naive captain.  We note that he realizes something is amiss and sometimes this distracts him, but he always brushes these troubling thoughts away.  Had Delano been more suspicious, he probably would have given some kind of indication of his suspicion and been killed by Babo, along with Cereno.  I can see the lawyer in Bartleby the Scrivener, a moderately intelligent but strangely detached from reality kind of person, doing the same thing.  Bartleby, like Cereno, acts strangely and confuses the lawyer, who doesn’t immediately fire Bartleby but rather remains contemplative and never assumes the worst.

In class we discussed this almost endearing ignorance found especially in Delano and to an extent, the lawyer as a distinctly American quality.  Ishmael doesn’t seem to be quite as ignorant, but he’s just as pensive.  Contemplating life, the people in one’s life, and one’s environment (not always accurately) seems to bring the three survivors together.  Maybe Melville was similarly inclined to reflect on such matters.

Now consider those who die – specifically Ahab, Bartleby, and Cereno.   Bartleby is puzzling.  The reader doesn’t learn much about this odd scrivener, except that he was a good worker until he stopped.  Bartleby seems depressed and eventually lacks the will to continue living.  We don’t know the origin of his depression, but we can speculate that it had something to do with work.  It’s similarly difficult to get a handle on Cereno’s character.   Ahab definitely has a contemplative side, as seen in his heart-to-heart with Starbuck during “The Symphony” and he’s undoubtedly clever, but his one-track mind seems to overpower any deeper thoughts that may begin to occupy his consciousness.

Another interesting point is that Ahab, Bartleby, and Cereno all lost a significant amount of their humanities prior to conking out.  Ahab was a man on a mission with complete tunnel vision from the start of the book, Bartleby was estranged from his work and preferred not to do anything, and Cereno lived in complete terror of Babo.  None of them were emotionally free.  None of them could ponder like their surviving counterparts.

There are lots of parallels we can draw between the characters that ultimately end up alive or dead at the end of these three stories.  I can’t list them all here but thought these connections were interesting.  Perhaps Melville wanted to make the point that free, contemplative thought, even if it borders on ignorance or naïvete, is a desirable quality or one that’s necessary for long-term survival.  In real life, practical people who take action quickly are more likely to survive a given situation, but Melville desires a world in which the qualities he treasures keep people alive.  In Melville’s world, this type of musing is what adds the human element.

Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side, and watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank in his gaze, the more and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity.  But the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel, for a moment, the cankerous thing in his soul.  The glad, happy air, that winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother wold, so long cruel – forbidding – now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that however wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save and to bless.  From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such a wealth as that one wee drop.

This incredibly sensitive, tender moment is unexpected for its sweetness.  Leading up to “The Symphony,” a gloom had gathered around the Pequod.  The storm, Queequeg’s coffin, and the meeting with the Rachel set a morbid tone, and lead the reader to believe that a terrible fate was about to befall the ship and its crew.  But as Ahab rose one morning, intent with the knowledge that he was drawing close to Moby Dick, a strange thing happened.  The sky and sea which he had been immersed in for decades sparked a sign of humanity in him.  Instead of trying to “pierce the profundity,” he at last resigned himself to allow his guard down against nature.  Interestingly, nature is as a “step-mother” to him.  Here, Melville may be insinuating that Ahab is simply not of this world.  His mother, if he has one, must be fundamentally different than the earth which humanity has long viewed as its mother.

The image of nature Melville shows here – comforting, gentle, and kind – is a nature that doesn’t show up very much in other parts of the book.  He wrote of nature as mysterious, dangerous, murderous even, but not often in the traditional “mother” format which has defined humanity’s conception of nature for so long.  His return to that theme, on the eve of the great battle with Moby Dick, seems puzzling.  It aligns with the strange sense of beauty and magnificence that Ishmael feels upon first seeing Moby Dick up close for the first time.  As Ahab and his men draw closer and closer to the “true” embodiment of the natural world, the more and more obvious is their total ignorance of its essence.  Instead of finding hate or malice as he stares into the ocean’s depths as he probably expects, Ahab finds compassion and solace.  Rather than come to terms with this difference, however, he shuts himself off to what he does not understand, and gives up his own agency to his delusional conceptions of his fate.

While reading this strange chapter I couldn’t decide whether this was some kind of ghost-whale, small and skittish whale, or if this was all in their heads. And afterwards, I couldn’t really imagine the point of this chapter, I mean it consisted of a strange occurence at sea of the ship constantly hearing a spout for a few days, with no sign of a whale, getting completely unsettled after a while, then it just stopped happening. I can understand how this can be seen as maybe this added layer of mysticism to the ocean, or a question of men’s sanity, or both, but it was the unresolved issue that left me if anything slightly upset. But to analyze…

The ocean has always been a mystical thing in human history. In any ancient culture large bodies of waters are attributed with Gods, monsters, and sometimes given both destructive and nurturive qualities. The spirit spout reminded me a little bit about that. Even though it was the 18th centurey, this scene reminded me of the odyssey somewhat, of Jason and the Argonauts, any old sea story really of sailors on a quest encountering mythical things in the ocean. I’m still not convinced that the Pequod didn’t just encounter a whale or something they never were able to spot though. When we discussed in class about this event being caused by mass delusion I’m not sure I bought it. I could understand if it was just Ishmael just hearing it or another member of the crew but the fact that they all heard it I think shows that it was a real event, whether not it was natural or supernatural was left probably ambigiously by Melville in my opinion. Though he did make it a point to make it sound as mysterious as possible.

Having finally made it through this whole novel, I notice a number of connections between the epilogue and that first page and chapter when we meet Ishmael.  These are two of the only times when the reader is, in a sense, alone with him, and the story is about nothing else but his reflections.  Melville is a master at coming full circle and tying up loose ends, and he does plenty of it in the Epilogue.

First, we get Ishmael’s characteristic understated, brief start of the section – “Call me Ishmael” (21), or, “The drama’s done” (593).  There is also a great focus on death in both texts.  In the opening page, Ishmael states that he goes to see whenever he feels suicidal, or, as a “substitute for pistol and ball.”  A symptom of this psychological state, he says, is when he finds himself “involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses.”  In the story he recounts in the epilogue, of course, Ishmael is closer to death than he has ever been, spinning slowly “like another Ixion” around the vortex of water that recently swallowed up the great Pequod.  He also has another encounter with a coffin, only this time, instead of serving as a symbol of his desire to die, a coffin springs up from the water and serves as his buoy, his survival device, until he is saved by the Rachel.

To further the connections made in the Epilogue, this coffin was made by Queequeg, the friend Ishmael meets in the opening chapters and forms an unlikely bond with.  Though this friendship is sparsely covered throughout the meat of the novel, Melville brings it up once again at the end.  Even though he is dead, Queequeg saves his best friend’s life.  And so, as if he just sat down, introduced himself as Ishmael and jotted down the entirety of the novel Moby Dick, our narrator finishes as he started, alone, philosophizing on the nature of death and the magnetic power of the sea.

Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1991.

Having finished Moby-Dick, I am left to wonder, why is Ishamel the lone survivor? What qualities or characteristics does he possess that have enabled him to escape death and why has no one else also survived? As Professor Friedman discussed in class, writing the novel is Ishmael’s way of coming to terms with his near encounter with death, and his consequential survival. Retelling his journey is his attempt at understanding what happened to him and what this means for him moving forward. For us as readers, the answers to these questions involves examining the various characters Melville employed in his novel to explore human nature.

Ahab, the maniacal captain who challenges fate and destiny and is obsessive in his intent to destroy Moby is unable to achieve his goal, and is killed by the very object he uses to try and kill the whale. Melville suggests that trying to cheat, or deceive one’s destiny will not end well. Actively putting oneself above a higher authority, whether God, or merely believing one is superior to external forces, will only result in one realizing the various powers that affect one’s existence.

As a contrast to Ahab, the cautious, worrisome first-mate, Starbuck seems resigned to what he supposes is his inevitable death by Ahab’s fool-hardy quest. His “doomsday” attitude prevents him in a way from truly living and enjoying life. Through this character Melville appears to imply that simply moving through the motions of day-to-day activities is not a way to live. There is a difference between presenting oneself as superior to fate and submitting to an inevitable death.

Stubb and Flask use various forms of intoxication to float through life in a false sense of reality. While providing comic relief, Melville uses these two mates to show the futility of dulling the senses in attempts to escape the details of life.

Ishmael, a low-ranking sailor is “chosen” to be the single survivor of the battle between man and whale, and the ensuing shipwreck. He begins his voyage on the Pequod as an escape from the restriction and limitation of society and the depression he feels. Seeking solace and freedom as a means to alleviate his melancholy mood, Ishmael readily takes this chance to meditate on his thoughts, and ponder and philosophize out on the open sea. Starting his journey in a despondent state of mind, the wide, infinite horizon offers him a chance to reflect on himself and also to observe the sailors around him. This introspective nature serves him well, as Melville seems to suggest that thinking and intellectualizing one’s thoughts and emotions are significant traits in living to one’s full potential. His near death experience with Moby-Dick and resulting survival represents a sort of rebirth. Ishmael is adrift in the sea, and then saved by the Rachel, calling to mind a religious sort of revival and awakening, giving him the chance to start life anew, with all the knowledge he’s gained from his fellow sailors and life at sea.