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Author Topic: The White Whale and Glenn discuss Moby Dick thread
Glenn Arnold
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Rather than post a long thesis, rant, diatribe, I'm going keep my posts short, so this is more of a conversation.

I have to start with the Etymology and Extracts. I think most people overlook them, because they assume they're just a preface or something. They are actually critical to the understanding of the book.

First, the etymology, the "source of the words." Melville is playing with us, as he does throughout the book. The etymology is his warning that he loves words and he intends to play with them, so you have to be on your toes.

The extracts also serve a purpose. As you read them, the weight of all this documentation serves to support the idea of how massive, monstrous, legendary whales are. This is very important later on, but it's one of those things that maybe can really only have meaning on the second read-through.

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The White Whale
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Wonderful idea Glenn. I've been a little busy and wasn't keeping up with the thread.

For anyone who cares, the full text to Moby Dick is online in several places. Here and here, and here's the etymology and extracts.

When I read through these extracts, it struck me how prevalent whales are in stories and literature, even in 1851. You've got the Bible, Shakespeare, Paradise Lost, an account of Darwins, songs, poems, captains logs and interviews, and many others. And I think that by presenting all of this before he even starts the story, Melville gives his story much more weight by showing that he has done him homework, and has really delved into the natural and cultural history of whales.

And then, you turn to Chapter 1, and you have one of the most famous opening lines to any book I've heard of, except for maybe the Tale of Two Cities.

Call me Ishmael.

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Glenn Arnold
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But who is Ishmael? Melville is already playing with words.
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Glenn Arnold
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A note to anyone who reads the book. On the second reading I went several times and picked up a bible, in order to understand the references. I remember the first time, actually, was to find what it meant when Bildad says that Ahab was a vile king and dogs had licked his blood.

The third time I read the book, and thereafter, I just kept a copy of the bible on my nightstand. The references come along hot and heavy, so it's better just to have it handy.

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Glenn Arnold
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I guess this might be a solo act, but I'll keep adding to the thread, just in case it develops a life of its own.

One of the key things you have to realize about Moby Dick is that the wild tangents that Melville goes off on are critical to the understanding of the book. Pay attention to the form of the different chapters.

My biggest clue was the chapter titled "Midnight, Forecastle," which is written as a script:

(note the foresail represents the curtain)

quote:

Midnight, Forecastle

HARPOONEERS AND SAILORS (Foresail rises and discovers the watch standing, lounging, leaning, and lying in various attitudes, all singing in chorus.)

Farewell and adieu to you, Spanish ladies! Farewell and adieu to you, ladies of Spain! Our captain's commanded.-

1ST NANTUCKET SAILOR Oh, boys, don't be sentimental. it's bad for the digestion! Take a tonic, follow me! (Sings, and all follow) Our captain stood upon the deck, A spy-glass in his hand, A viewing of those gallant whales That blew at every strand. Oh, your tubs in your boats, my boys, And by your braces stand, And we'll have one of those fine whales, Hand, boys, over hand! So, be cheery, my lads! may your hearts never fail! While the bold harpooneer is striking the whale!

MATE'S VOICE FROM THE QUARTER-DECK Eight bells there, forward!

2ND NANTUCKET SAILOR Avast the chorus! Eight bells there! d'ye hear, bell-boy? Strike the bell eight, thou Pip! thou blackling! and let me call the watch. I've the sort of mouth for that- the hogshead mouth. So, so, (thrusts his head down the scuttle,) Star-bo-l-e-e-n-s, a-h-o-y! Eight bells there below! Tumble up!

Many of the chapters are written in a completely different voice, as though the story is being written by a number of different people. This is a legend, after all. I believe Ishmael is a composite, not an individual.
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Tante Shvester
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Who, really, is the narrator? Ostensibly Ishmael, but there are plenty of places that the narrator is relating events in places where Ishmael is not, even recounting a character's inner thoughts. Ishmael kind of wanders in and out of the narrator role throughout the novel.


And what's up with all the homoerotic jazz going on with Ishmael and Queequeg? Ishmael counts them as practically married after they spend their first night together in bed.


Melville tries to convince the reader that there are good reasons and bad to hunt down whales. The bad reason is for personal vengeance after a whale bites your leg off. The good reason is for the obscene profit there is to be made in hunting down whales. What kind of a good reason is that? That's just messed up.

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The White Whale
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Glenn, sorry. Overly busy these weeks.

I wrote a paper on Moby Dick (senior year of high school), and I can't seem to find it, but the gist of it was something like: Ahab is both holy and unholy, divine and demonic.

Maybe later tonight I'll be able to dig up some examples from the book.

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Raymond Arnold
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I feel obligated to read it now so I can judge for myself whether Watchmen really lives up to being the Moby Dick of comic books. (My preliminary guess is "almost but not quite.")
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Glenn Arnold
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This would seem like sacrilege to some, but I think Ahab is merely a plot device, and relatively unimportant to the book.

He's an extremely well written plot device who would certainly deserve his own book, but really irrelevant to what Melville had to say.

quote:
Who, really, is the narrator? Ostensibly Ishmael, but there are plenty of places that the narrator is relating events in places where Ishmael is not, even recounting a character's inner thoughts. Ishmael kind of wanders in and out of the narrator role throughout the novel.
Yes, you're getting it. As I said, I think Ishmael is a composite. He's a sort of everyman, except that he represents differentness that comes from having gone to sea. He's an outcast (note the citizens of New Bedford that won't let their daughters look at him on the street)

He is the voices of sailors who go away over the horizon and return with fantastical stories. Consequently, he speaks with different voices in different chapters. Decoding the purpose of the chapters is half the fun. Remember, Melville is playing with words. You can't trust him to say what he means.

quote:
And what's up with all the homoerotic jazz going on with Ishmael and Queequeg? Ishmael counts them as practically married after they spend their first night together in bed.
I can certainly see why people thinkn that episode as homoerotic, but I'm not sure Melville intended it that way. I remember going to colonial Williamsburg and they said that if you took a bed in the inn, you would probably share a bed, and you had no right to privacy. A few years ago, there was a claim that Abe Lincoln was gay because he slept in the same bed with men at several times. And lo and behold, the gay Lincoln idea was shot down by a host of historical references that indicated that it wasn't so abnormal.

I think the only part that homoeroticism played was to heighten the tension that occurred because of the differentness between the two of them. This is a main theme of the book, "Knights and Squires" is about how Queequeg, Tashtego, Dagoo and Fedallah are at the third rank below Captain and Mate, despite the fact that they are "savages." Being at sea allows "civilized" conventions of racial inferiority to be dispensed with.

One thing that they didn't get in any of the movie versions is how much of a sense of humor Queequeg has. He delights in freaking people out, but it's all in fun. And he also gives us that first glance at the untrustworthiness of stories that come back from overseas. Do they really use people for ottomans where he comes from? Or did he just make that up?

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TomDavidson
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quote:
A few years ago, there was a claim that Abe Lincoln was gay because he slept in the same bed with men at several times.
Well, in all fairness to that particular theory, there was more to it than that. [Smile]
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Glenn Arnold
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quote:
The good reason is for the obscene profit there is to be made in hunting down whales. What kind of a good reason is that? That's just messed up.
Melville goes back and forth on that issue too, without resorting to using Ahab as a yardstick. The narrator has sympathy for the geriatric whale in who is "murdered without pity" in "The Pequod Meets the Virgin." And in "The Grand Armada" he describes whale civilization in human terms where teenage whales court each other, an older male is the patriarch of his family, and a mother whale gives birth and nurses her baby.

But you have to consider the speaker. Which narrator is currently speaking? Again, if Ishmael is a composite, one voice can speak of the glory of the hunt, while another can question the morality of bringing an end to an intelligent life.

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Glenn Arnold
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Looking through one of the websites White Whale posted I found a post from a reader comparing passages from Moby Dick to September 11. I was intrigued that they made some pretty strained connections about the weather, but falied to notice this quote from the first chapter:
quote:
And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:

"Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.
"whaling voyage by one Ishmeal."
"BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN."

Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies

The first time I read these words after 9/11 I wondered why no one had compared Melville to Nostradamus.
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Raymond Arnold
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That's interesting.
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The White Whale
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quote:
This would seem like sacrilege to some, but I think Ahab is merely a plot device, and relatively unimportant to the book.
I don't see it that way. I see the novel as two different stories intertwined. On is the story of whales. All and everything about whales. The second is about Ahab and Moby Dick. I think you could pull out the actual story with Ishmael and Ahab and Moby Dick, which would only be in the ballpark of one or two dozen chapters, and leave behind the exploration of whales, in the ballpark of one hundred chapters.

If you focus in on Ahab and Moby Dick, it's quite an exiting story. Especially around the end. Here are some of the passages dealing with Ahab and the White Whale that I find most exhilarating:

I guess this deserves a SPOILER alert..?

On Ahab:
quote:
There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the recovery from any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini's cast Perseus. Threading its way out from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded. Whether that mark was born with him, or whether it was the scar left by some desperate wound, no one could certainly say. By some tacit consent, throughout the voyage little or no allusion was made to it, especially by the mates. But once Tashtego's senior, an old Gay-Head Indian among the crew, superstitiously asserted that not till he was full forty years old did Ahab become that way branded, and then it came upon him, not in the fury of any mortal fray, but in an elemental strife at sea. (Chapter xxviii - Ahab)
On Ahab and Moby Dick:
quote:
His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab's leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming malice. Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung.
. . .
quote:
All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it. (Chapter xli - Moby Dick)
(Note: That last sentence was spoken by Jean-Luc Picard in First Contact)

Ahab on Moby Dick:
quote:
All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event - in the living act, the undoubted deed - there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. 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; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. (Chapter xxxvi - The Quarter Deck)

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Tatiana
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I'm enjoying this thread. I read Moby Dick long ago and didn't get a whole lot out of it at the time. I remember the love of whales, and of the sea, and the general misanthropy that built up inside the narrator until he had to leave and go to sea from time to time to soothe it. I remember laughing out loud at a lot of things Melville said. So far nobody has touched on the humor of the book, which is what I chiefly remember. Anyway, please carry on. [Smile]
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Elmer's Glue
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quote:
Originally posted by Tatiana:
So far nobody has touched on the humor of the book, which is what I chiefly remember. Anyway, please carry on. [Smile]

Hehe, Moby Dick.
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Glenn Arnold
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quote:
So far nobody has touched on the humor of the book, which is what I chiefly remember.
Maybe I didn't explicitly say the book was humorous, but I did say:

quote:
The etymology is his warning that he loves words and he intends to play with them, so you have to be on your toes.
quote:
One thing that they didn't get in any of the movie versions is how much of a sense of humor Queequeg has.
For truly LOL funny scenes, my favorites are the scene where Stubb gets the cook to preach a sermon to the sharks, and the chapter titled: "The Cassock." We could discuss that in the circumcision thread. And BTW, some editors try to correct the spelling of "archbishoprick."
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Fyfe
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I liked the part where they hailed a ship to ask if they had seen Moby Dick, and the captain said something cheerful asking them to come aboard and Ahab said, "Thou art too damn jolly! Sail on!"

Although I didn't like the book itself. At all. And I had to read it twice, which was like a cruel joke from the Lord.

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Glenn Arnold
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The captain said he didn't believe in Moby Dick. He thought he was just a story.

Ahab didn't want to hang with a disbeliever.

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Glenn Arnold
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quote:
I don't see it that way. I see the novel as two different stories intertwined. On is the story of whales. All and everything about whales. The second is about Ahab and Moby Dick. I think you could pull out the actual story with Ishmael and Ahab and Moby Dick, which would only be in the ballpark of one or two dozen chapters, and leave behind the exploration of whales, in the ballpark of one hundred chapters.
Actually, I see it as at least four stories intertwined, any one of which could make a perfectly good movie. Obviously, "the plot" follows Ahab, and it's a good plot, based on a well written character.

As I said before, Ahab is worthy of a book on his own, but I don't think Melville's "Mighty theme" is brought about by the character of Ahab. It's brought about through the various styles in which he tells the story, and the weight of myriad metaphors that build up in layers as you read through all the detours and tangents he goes on in order to create a sense of wonder that such a story will hang together at all. Ultimately, Ishmael has no proof of his story, other than it's retelling. The sea, like history, swallows the proof whole.

Why are we to believe that class of men who come back from the other side of the world with such amazing stories, when they offer no proof?

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Glenn Arnold
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quote:
(Note: That last sentence was spoken by Jean-Luc Picard in First Contact)

Not surprising, Patrick Stewart played Ahab in a television miniseries version at about the same time. Stewart did an excellent job as Ahab, but he couldn't save the movie, which was absolutely terrible. It was clear he had studied the character extensively.
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