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\u2019s 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\u2019s time there was no conceivable way for the whale\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Chapter 57 seems a bit of a departure from the discussion of the \u201chigh\u201d 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\u2019s carvings,<\/p>\n
Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery\u201d\u00a0 244<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Here Ishmael defines savagery as \u201cthat condition in which God placed (man)\u201d, a telling and radical statement. The \u2018savages\u2019 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 \u201clack\u201d, 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:<\/p>\n
I myself am a savage, owning no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready at any moment to rebel against him\u201d (245)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
After using the word liberally for the whole of a novel, Ishmael\u2019s understanding of \u201csavage\u201d metamorphoses in front of us. He traces connections between the art, of what he terms the \u201cHawaiian savage\u201d, the \u201cwhite sailor-savage\u201d, the \u201cGreek savage\u201d, and memorably refers to Durer as a \u201cDutch savage\u201d. 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/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-922","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\/922","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=922"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/922\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":924,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/922\/revisions\/924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}