Big Books of American Literature: Alchemies of Mind
Day 9: Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Moby-Dick (Finale)

I. Coursekeeping: revised syllabus
(n.b.: the option of not writing one paper gives you both the option of

not reading one book, and
writing about a book two weeks AFTER we've finished talking about it

Thurs. lecture re: reader response theory

5 p.m. Fri. second set of papers due

Apologies re: cost of course packet

"Ahab's Boat Seemed Drawn Up Towards...." (This and most other images on this page taken
from George Klauba: "Moby Dick: Avis Transformata" (Ann Nathan Gallery, Feb.-March, 2005)

II. Meditation on taking risks=making mistakes....

"Science is ... a matter of making mistakes in public ... for all to see, in the hopes of getting the others to help with the corrections" (Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Evolution and the Meanings of Life 1995, p. 380).

One could say, "we learn from our mistakes, therefore, if we do not make mistakes, we are making a mistake"( "Jake," on teaching stupidity vs. mistakes, 1997).

"My daughter's getting 100's on all her math assignments. They're not letting her make mistakes!" (A colleague, 2006).

... on-line forum on Serendip...a space for sharing our ideas, our stories, our thoughts in progress.... a place where you can come back and revise your thinking in public. (Anne Dalke, Welcome to "Making Sense of Change 2005 Forum")

Elizabeth Catanese, Some Thoughts on Teaching (2006)

Never jump from a boat, Pip, except--but all the rest was indefinite, as the soundest advice ever is. Now, in general, Stick to the boat, is your true motto in whaling; but cases will sometimes happen when Leap from the boat, is still better. (Moby Dick, Ch 93, p. 320)

There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause....once gone through, we trace the round again....Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more?....Where is the foundling's father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it. (Ch. 114, p. 373)

Alice: As I'm slowly stumbling my way through the last hundred pages of the book, I've started to realize that...the infuriating way the book is laid out...might reflec ...life...there are these moments of clarity and insight completely surrounded by sort of boring-blah-whatever things. If Melville had just condensed all of his insights and left out the everyday life, he'd be going against his own philosophy in a way, because he'd be giving you a finished and refined product instead of letting you come along on the (usually kind of boring) voyage.

"The Pod"

III. Mistake-making is centrally related to the issue I want us to look @ together today: what this book tells us--both in the story it tells and in the way it shapes the story--about how societies (schools?) are constructed, and (more importantly!) what we might do when we object to the construction in which we find ourselves participating.

We had begun exploring, last week, why it was that the crew follows Ahab....doing so gives them a shared sense of purpose? enables them to avoid responsibility?

How it was that they so aboundingly responded to the old man's ire - by what evil magic their souls were possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the White Whale as much their insufferable foe as his; how all this came to be - what the White Whale was to them, or how to their unconscious understandings, also, in some dim, unsuspected way, he might have seemed the gliding great demon of the seas of life, - all this to explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go. (Ch. 41, p. 158)

"I can't withstand thee, old man. Not reasoning; not remonstrance; not entreaty wilt though hearken to; all this thou scornest. Flat obedience to thy own flat commands, this is all thou breathest. Aye, and say'st the men have vow'd thy vow; say'st all of us are Ahabs. Great God forbid!--But is there no other way? No lawful way? (Ch 123, The Musket, p. 387)

...their fear of Ahab was greater than their fear of Fate...the pagan harpooneers remained almost wholly unimpressed; or if impressed, it was only with a certain magnetism shot into their congenial hearts from inflexible Ahab's (Ch. 124, The Needle, p. 389)

They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all...was put together of all contrasting things....even so, all the individualities of the crew, this man's valor, that man's fear, guilt and gultlessness, all varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to (Ch 134, The Chase--Second Day, p. 415).

I misdoubt me that I disobey my God in obeying him!" (Starbuck, Ch. 135, p. 420)

IV. What is Melville's attitude toward the crew? Do you understand why they follow Ahab? Does comparison with our current political situation help us make sense of their behavior?

"Like an Open-Doored Marble Tomb"

Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary. (Ch. 107, p. 356)

Yet cf. C.L.R. James, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, 1953:
"It is clear...that Melville intends to make the crew the real heroes of his book, but he is afraid of criticism...The men were entitled to revolt and to take possession of the ship themselves....The meanest mariners, renegades and castaways of Melville's day were objectively a new world. But they knew nothing...the symbolic mariners and renegades of Melville's book were isolatoes federated by one keel, but only because they had been assembled by penetrating genius....Ahab's totalitarian rule...and Ishmael was an intellectual Ahab..."

Yet. cf. again Michael Kimaid, "Bush as Ahab: Aboard the Modern Day Pequod,"Counterpunch (May 28/30, 2005)--thanks, Chris!

Call us all Ishmael.

At least those of us who have been unwittingly conscripted on what we thought was a voyage with purpose only to learn out of the sight of land that we were on a monomaniacal expedition of bloodlust revenge....there are Starbucks among the crew. Those who question the motivation, the reason and morality behind the decision to chase the white whale of terror...at all costs....there are as many Stubbs aboard the ship, but their dissent is mute....Reason gives way to the perceived need for order, and they stifle their dissent in deference to command. Mutiny is never a serious prospect, but their consciences trouble them....

"Starbuck"

Where does this leave us, Ishmael? Though we cringe at the prospect of Ahab's directive, we are on this "cannibal of a craft," bound by the enforced hierarchy that governs it. Or are we? Will our relief come as Ishmael's did, when the white whale destroys our ship and crew while we are left floating on the waves, clinging to a coffin meant for someone else? Or will it come from elsewhere? Will our Ahab listen to the many... warnings that the attempt to destroy the white whale will be his own as well as his entire ship's and crew's undoing? Or will a Starbuck or a Stubbs yet unheard rise up from within the ranks of the morbid chain of command to challenge the undertaking at hand? Melville's outcome is a disastrous one, forewarned... It is a warning well worth considering so that our fate is not a similar one aboard this modern-day Pequod.

Leviathan, from Espace Modial V. So: what guidance does Melville give us, for constructing a state that is lawful and ordered?

"By art is created that great Leviathan, called a Commonwealth or State--(in Latin, civitas) which is but an artificial man." Opening sentence of Hobbes's Leviathan ("Extracts," Moby-Dick)

American fisherman... have provided a system of terse comprehensiveness:
I. A Fast Fish belongs to the party fast to it.
II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it.
But what plays the mischief with this masterly code is the admirable brevity of it, which necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to expound it.... What are the rights of man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-fish? What all mens' minds and opinions but Loose-fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too? (Ch 89, p. 308, 310)

Cf. talk @ emergence group on "Misinformation Networks":
our shared search for confirmatory evidence

VI. How might the nature of the natural world affect the sort of social order we're attempting to build?

"The universe is indifferent at best, hostile at worst, to the lives of mere humans." H.P. Lovecraft

"From Hell's Heart I Stab At Thee"

Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass....the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp--all others but liars! Nevertheless the sun hides not...all the millions of miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true--not true, or undeveloped....Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invest thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. (Ch. 96, The Try-works, p. 328)

.... there still seems an inequality in the deeper analysis of the thing. For...while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking iin them, but, at bottom, all heart-woes, a mystic significance....to trail the genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among the sourceless primogenitures of the gods...the gods themselves are not forever glad. The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrows in the signers (Ch. 106, Ahab's Leg, p. 355).

...the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceal s a remorseless fang (Ch. 114, The Gilder, p. 372).

..."so far gone am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me" (Ahab, Ch. 127, The Deck, p. 396).

"Ahab"

"Ishmael"

VI. So, finally: what have we read?
A comedy? A tragedy? An "anatomy"? The chaos of life?

Adina: the word that comes to me is "poignant."

Let's end with the ending. How do you read it?

I was then, but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex....Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle, like another Ixion I did revolve. Till gaining that vital centre, the black bubble upward burst....I floated on a soft and dirge-like main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks (Epilogue, p. 427).

Ixion is chiefly known as the first human to shed kindred blood....Because this was a crime new to the human race, nobody could purify Ixion and he wandered an exile. Zeus took pity on him and decided ...to invite him to Olympus as a guest....Zeus did not believe that Ixion would be so disrespectful as to have designs upon the wife of his host....To punish him, Zeus bound Ixion to a winged (sometimes flaming) wheel, which revolved in the air in all directions...forced to call out continuously call out: "You should show gratitude to your benefactor." Ixion became one of the more famous sinners on display on Tartarus.

Have we, liked Ixion, just circled 'round and 'round in the same place?
...whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct...
to the very point whence we started ? (p. 196)

Jorge: the last about 100 pages...reminded me a whole lot of how the novel started. It seems to be that first and fourth quarter are very similar to one another...more like a novel...actually telling a story and giving accounts of even that actually move forward its plot. The two middle quarters seem to be more of a introspective journey.

Laura S: I was wondering whether Melville was going to try to make a point about the futility of Ahab's quest by leaving the whale out entirely....I wish Moby Dick had figured more prominently in his own book. So this got me wondering...why did I need to experience the whale in order to be satisfied? Was I, as a reader, succumbing to Ahab's monomania?

"And I Only Am Escaped Home To..."

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