Above is a non-exhaustive list of possible explanations for Ishmael\/Melville\u2019s description of Fedallah and his Oriental homeland in Chapter 50, though we know that Fedallah\u2019s true homeland, Persia, is actually a separate entity from East Asia altogether! The description is markedly negative:<\/p>\n
“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\u2014 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]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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\u2019s unflattering tale of origin is not due to a bias against Fedallah\u2019s character.<\/p>\n
In that case, could Ishmael\u2019s assertion of primitiveness stem from an ignorance of East Asian culture and geography? Perhaps to a certain degree. However, the \u201cinsulated\u2026unalterable countries\u201d 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 \u201cOriental isles\u201d, 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s soliloquy. In order to evoke how very different the islanders\u2019 culture is, Melville chose to not only separate them spatially from the reader, but temporally as well.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d also like to mention the extreme irony of the narrator\u2019s charge that Fedallah came from an ignorant place where man was \u201cunknowing whence he came\u201d, even though the Genesis-citing speaker was probably ignorant of his own origins, as Darwin\u2019s Origin of Species<\/em> wouldn\u2019t be published for another eight years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Above is a non-exhaustive list of possible explanations for Ishmael\/Melville\u2019s description of Fedallah and his Oriental homeland in Chapter 50, though we know that Fedallah\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[145],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-race"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=467"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":468,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467\/revisions\/468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}