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>> Okay, I asked last time about a device, rhetorical device,
that is the name of the rhetorical expression
that I used, I think was I'm not going to tell you
that you shouldn't cut corners in my class.
And thereby in saying I'm not going tell you, I told you.
And I had a few e-mails about this.
Somebody said oh, it's an idiom.
Which is true, cutting corners is probably an idiom.
But that doesn't get at what was unique about that statement.
And I had a few others.
Somebody came close.
In fact, it's theoretically correct, I suppose.
In suggesting that this was called apophysis.
And that is one term, name, that is sometimes given
to this rhetorical figure.
And I don't tend to use that one simply because it also is --
it refers to a type of reasoning as well as a rhetorical figure.
The type of reasoning one that's close to being Socratic,
where you would determine what is true
by eliminating what is false.
Right? So you affirm by negating.
But basically, apaphasia is thought now to not only cover
that but a large group of devices that basically share
in common the idea of affirming by negating.
The one I used to like was acre la tad o as a name for this.
But people have suggested to me, aha you know, there are those
who prefer that acre la tad o be reserved for certain kinds
of dramatic scenes and you know,
then there are a whole bunch of names.
One of the things to know is that many
of these rhetorical figures have double --
I mean, they sometimes have triple names.
Personification, right?
You've heard about in literary interpretation, probably,
also gets called proslapia,
and there's a Latin version of it too.
So the name that we're going to give to this figure,
we're not going to call it apophysis,
we're not going call it oclatado although you wouldn't be wrong,
I suppose, to do that.
No, the one that we're going to use and that's going to appear
on the scavenger hunt that we're going to give you
in a little while is this paralypsis.
If you really want to be fancy pants, you can also say
that a particular version of that is prolepsis.
In which you give a ton of detail while you're saying
that you're not going talk about it.
Right? But this is -- paralypsis is one
of Cicero's favorite devices.
He'll begin by saying I'm not going talk
about how terrible Katline has been, blah, blah, blah.
So one of the things to remember is
that when we identify a figure of speech or a figure
of rhetoric, write paralypsis.
That's only the beginning of the work
that we're supposed to be doing.
In other words, I say what is that,
you say paralypsis, you're not done.
Because the next question I'm going to ask you in the context
of this course is so what.
What work does having that figure in that place do.
All right?
And that's what the point of the scavenger hunt is going to be.
We're going to ask you to look for an example
of a metrical foot, a couple of figures of speech,
a couple of figures of rhetoric.
You'll have a list from which to choose.
In the reading that you're doing you should be sort
of tracking these things.
And it will be due shortly before the midterm.
The idea is not only for you to identify that this is,
I don't know what, cesura in a line of poetry,
but then to be able to say what the effect is
that the cesura creates.
Why would the poet use a cesura, a pause, in the middle of a line
in that particular place, or a figure like paralypsis.
What did it buy Phyllis Wheatly to create that structure
at the beginning of her poem instead
of just speaking openly, right?
So we're going to be wanting from just identification
to something like interpretation.
And that's really part of what the point
of close reading is for us.
Close reading is going to be --
we might say we as English majors is interested
in how texts work.
We're also interested in a number of other questions,
but one of the things you might imagine that we're going
to take a text and we're going to read it
in a really strange way.
We're not going read it the way other people read it who are
in different majors or who are general readers.
They tend to read one time through
and figure they've got the meaning of it or don't,
and then they're done.
We reread.
We often reread and reread and reread.
Not only that, but we read in a particular self conscious way.
Last time I started to try to get you to think about the ways
in which meaning are being constructed.
Not simply because the author has put some set of marks down
and created meaning in text.
But in a sense, those marks are the guidelines for you,
the reader, to be able to construct the meaning of a text
within certain guidelines.
It's like the tree falling in the forest.
The text that is not open has no meaning.
It only has meaning if somebody has read it, only continues
to have meaning if more people read it.
And it only continues to have meaning after that
if people talk about it, and it becomes kind
of a living document, right?
So we're very interested in the ways
in which meaning is constructed and part of that means
to understand how those marks work when they're on the page.
If you're a good reader, you will be able to, as it were,
take the text, put it up on the blocks, look under it,
look under the hood, take it apart,
put it back together again.
You want to figure out, in other words,
how the text creates certain possible meanings, certain kinds
of effects by putting certain words together,
creating certain kinds of images.
Making use of ambiguities, contradictions, paradoxes.
Those are going to be the most interesting things
for us, right?
So we're reading in a strange and artificial way.
And one of the ways I think that it's helpful to get used
to reading in this way is to breakdown the text
into what I will be calling exemplary moments.
And when I say exemplary, I don't mean like the best,
what I mean is coming from the Latin exemplum,
something that is a representative example
of the way the text works.
Or of something that is extremely important
to that text.
I will try in lecture to bring out certain exemplary moments.
But I want you to be looking for these things.
So you are going to get a midterm exam.
And the midterm exam is to a certain extent going
to be a reading check.
But it's not only going to be a check of have you been reading,
it's even more importantly a check
on how you've been reading.
And we want you to read in a way that allows you
to notice these exemplary moments.
Now again, you're all different readers with different horizons
of expectations, you're likely to think
that different moments are exemplary.
Therefore, we also want you to be able
to say why you think a moment is exemplary.
Therefore, the teaching staff and I have agreed
that we are going to try to promote this form of reading
by asking you to do it while you're reading
and in preparation for section.
Okay? So this is what we're going
to do starting this week before Wednesday's lecture.
We will ask each of you to e-mail your section leader,
we'll do this just --
we're going set up separate Gmail accounts
where these things go,
so they're all segregated in one place.
We want you to e-mail two sentences.
These two sentences -- the first isn't even really a sentence,
it's a sentence fragment.
It's going to be an identification
of your exemplary moment by author, text, page,
in the Norton anthology or Moby *** or whatever it is,
the text that we're using, and delimited.
You don't have to copy the whole passage, if it's a passage.
But we want you to give the beginning and the ending.
So it's kind of like the bracketing words.
So your TA and I can take a look at this
and see immediately what the passage is.
Now they shouldn't be whole chapters of Moby ***,
unless it's a really short chapter,
and there are some of those.
You need to think about why what you've identified constitutes
a moment.
Could be a moment as short as a sentence or even a phrase.
Then we'll want you to say something about why
that moment is exemplary.
So one more sentence about why you think
that moment is exemplary.
Of what is it exemplary.
It could be exemplary of a number of things.
Could be the style that the poet uses is captured
by this passage, right?
Probably be a long sentence in which you explain what
that style is, then, so don't just say this is
stylistically characteristic.
We want to know why.
This is stylistically characteristic
because it -- right?
It could be thematically exemplary.
This is thematically exemplary because it, you know,
it shows Melville's interest in the dynamics
of freedom and fate or whatever.
The best ones will probably be both, stylistically
and thematically exemplary.
And here's the fun part.
You should come to section prepared
to talk about your moment.
You'll have your moment.
Each of you will have at least one moment to talk
about your moment in class, and you'll want
to have picked a good one, and you'll want to be able to talk
about why you think it's exemplary.
. And you'll be doing this in front of your peers.
So if you pick a particularly lame moment
and give it no thought and you picked a particularly lame
moment and you're unlucky enough to be called on that week,
well, you can do the math.
You know, you're going to be there in front of everybody
and they're going to -- well, maybe you don't care.
But they're going to think that you're kind of lame.
So we don't really want that.
We want to -- we want to promote anti-lame behavior.
So we really want you to start thinking in ways that are not
from an English major's point of view, lame.
We want to be interesting.
Okay? Are there questions about that?
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to send you an e-mail,
I'm going to remind you of these instructions
and I will give you the three addresses.
One of them is going to be the one
to which you should send your moment before this time
on Wednesday.
Yes?
>> Is it one [Inaudible] or is it --
>> No, no, no.
Just one a week.
Let's not go crazy.
Just find me one good moment that's worth talking about.
That should be easy, right?
But the idea is then you have to do a little bit --
you don't have to spend a ton of time.
Just think, it will get easier as you start to recognize --
and these are the kinds of things that are --
I don't know, you might call them highlighter moments too.
If you're a highlighter type of person -- I'm not.
If you're a highlighter type of person, these are things like --
that scream out highlight me.
There are certain ones that do.
Might be more interesting to find the ones
that only certain kinds of readers will see
as highlightable, or something you recognize as highlightable.
Try to explain to everybody else why they should have
highlight tide.
Come up with a really good one,
you'll feel good about having done it.
Okay? More questions about that?
But again, one of the -- so, the larger lesson that's
in place here, what we're trying to do is get --
if you don't want to use the rhetoric of exemplarity,
think of the rhetoric of synecdochally.
We're going to try to be thinking synecdochally.
Look at this term.
By which I mean what, what doe synecdochally mean?
Yeah?
[ Inaudible audience comment ]
>> That's right.
Part -- stick to part represents a whole.
So all hands on deck.
what's the difference between synecdochally
and metonymy, while we're at it.
Some people say there's not a real difference [Inaudible]
there's a real difference.
So what were the difference -- what's a metonymy?
[ Inaudible audience comment ]
>> Yeah.
[ Inaudible audience comment ]
>> Hmm, I wouldn't say it that way.
Yeah?
>> A related object represents another object.
>> Okay, give me an example.
>> If a waiter is holding a glass of champagne,
he would say the champagne is moving
through the crowd or whatever.
Because the champagne isn't actually -- it's not --
>> That's -- would I call that a metonymy.
I don't know, I might have called that a synecdoche,
because it's a part for the whole.
But I take your point.
Yes. There's a common one.
They use it in the newspaper every day.
>> The crown.
>> Good one.
Why, the crown for the queen,
the White House for the president.
Well, the newspaper, is that already dating me?
Anybody have any other examples?
Yeah?
>> The law?
[ Inaudible audience comment ]
>> Okay, but the thing about it is what characteristic
of a metonymy -- it's going to be a substitution of one thing
or another from -- to which it is contiguous in our experience.
To which it's connected, right?
So the White House is the place where Obama lives,
and it's the place that we locate the presidency.
So when we talk about the White House, we're talking
about something with which its associated.
So it's a kind of a trope, being next to one another.
Whereas synecdoche we're going to use a part for the whole.
So it is a trope substitution
in which a smaller part stands in for the larger.
One of the things I want you to understand, and this leads me
to thinking about Stephen Greenblatt a little bit,
is that there aren't actually -- for the most part there are,
you know, most synecdoches are not just conveniences.
They're actually coded with values and meanings
and in fact, ideology.
Now I think that's part of what Greenblatt is getting
at in his article on culture.
I wanted you to read that, because it gets you
to understand why in a course that's called literary history
we're actually going to be doing quite a bit of close reading.
He makes a powerful argument, I think, on behalf of the fact
that text -- well, in his case probably great text --
encode a lot of their cultural meanings, context,
the ideological milieu from which they spring,
they get encoded into the text.
To understand those things we need
to read the text really closely so the --
we read the text to get a kind of window
into say the Melvillean world, the world of the 19th century,
for the world of Shakespeare, in Greenblatt's case.
But again, as I said last time, there's a kind
of a reciprocal relation.
So we read the text to get at the culture,
but the culture also helps us to get at the text.
Knowing something about the culture
in which MacBeth was written --
there was an issue about succession
and possibly the play it miswritten, you know,
as the first of the plays
in which Shakespeare is the king's men,
the Lord Chamberlain's men,
might be seen as a cautionary tale.
All of those things help to illuminate the play.
So we can read the play and the culture in a kind
of reciprocal relationship.
That that's what we're going to be trying to do,
and I think Greenblatt makes a powerful argument about that.
So how does synecdoche, as an example, encode ideology.
If I say all hands on deck,
that's kind of become a dead expression, I suppose.
But it starts off as a synecdoche.
All hands on deck.
Not all men, not all sailors, all hands on deck.
Tell me about that?
What's at stake in that, yeah?
[ Inaudible audience comment ]
>> Very good.
Exactly. So what's important to you about a deck hand?
His hands, his ability to labor.
The language encodes that.
All right?
Now what happens to us, as these things become used,
they become kind of dead metaphors,
and all of these are a species
of metaphor metonymy, synecdoche.
Part of our job as good readers
or as English majory-type readers, literary scholars,
is to revivify dead metaphors to understand what was at steak
and what might continue to be at steak
in the language that we use.
That goes back to what I was saying
about the term America last time.
America is a figure -- a piece of figurative language.
I wanted to argue that it was a trope, and it was a trope
that signified paradoxically,
think Lazarus, and exclusion, right?
Think imperialism, colonialism, slavery.
Right? Racism of any kind.
So part of what our goal is in this course is
to understand the complex ways in which language works.
So we're going to be paying attention
to figures like paralypsis.
But we're going to be doing more
than playing the English major game of naming them.
We want to understand why they're there or to try
to have an interpretive guess as to why the poet puts it there,
or what effect it is, that's created by doing that.
Okay? So that's part of why we'll be mentioning things
like this, and we have some assignments
that are devoted to this.
And that's part of why I asked you to read the Greenblatt.
It's making the argument about the importance of close reading
for cultural reading, and reciprocally,
how culture can help us do close reading.
If you'll remember, one of the things he talks about in --
in this, is to -- to suggest this, right,
that a full cultural analysis needs
to push beyond the boundaries of the text, to establish links,
he says, between the text and values, institutions, practices,
elsewhere in the culture.
But these aren't a substitute for close reading.
Right? And you know, just -- since you're English majors,
you might care about this.
Greenblatt is identified with a School of thinking
that he helped pioneer that's called the new historicism.
And the new historicism in part took aim at the kind
of literary thinking that's exemplified by the piece
that I asked you to read, by Andy Delbanco [Phonetic],
which came from the New York Times Book Review some years
ago, but is also excerpted from a very good book of his,
a little book, called The Real American Dream,
which is like a short account of American literature,
which you might say embodies a kind of humanistic approach
for lack of a better word, a humanistic approach to the story
of American literature.
Delbanco is telling one story of American literature,
it has to do with a certain set of values,
with a kind of canonical tradition.
It -- it -- in some sense, it positions literature as part
of the history of ideas.
It's -- compatible, I think, with --
for example, Harold Bloom's account of literary history
as great minds contending with one another over time
through text, reading and misreading one another.
Greenblatt and the new historists were interested
in something else.
Right? And for somebody like Delbanco,
and this might be a little bit of a caricature,
you would say he gives primacy to the text and allows it --
the context to appear as a kind of background
against which the text is staged
or that might illuminate certain aspects of the text.
It becomes a kind of scenery for the term.
Greenblatt is interested in this reciprocal relationship
that we've been talking about.
When people didn't like what they did, they were parodied.
And in deed, some new historists practice is quite parodyable.
The typical practice was to say that a text is part
of something larger that we might call discourse.
This comes out of the French thinker Michele Foucault.
We would say part of a larger thing called discourse.
And you know what, lots of other texts and lots
of other practices, lots of other things that we encounter
in culture are also part of this discourse.
And the discourse is ultimately all
about different kinds of power relations.
So you might imagine this discourse as a kind of cloth.
And the text is a thread within it.
And another text is another thread, and an event
in culture is another thread.
And if you pull on one you start to pull at the weave.
Something else moves somewhere else.
So if you wiggle this story about a hermaphrodite over here,
from something like As You Like It starts to move over there.
Right? That's in some sense the way new historians practice.
Obviously, that can -- when that works, it works very powerfully.
You can see things in a play by putting it together
with something that might seem remote from it in experience.
[Inaudible] something that is not most nominal
in relationship to it.
But also if you pick the wrong thing it becomes kind
of ludicrous.
Who's to say what is right or wrong.
The proof might be in the pudding, if it works, it works.
But what people used to say about this is they don't --
new historians didn't believe in writers and they didn't believe
in genius, so the parody was Greenblatt thinks
that Elizabethan England wrote Shakespeare's plays
or the culture wrote the plays.
And isn't that ludicrous, ha, ha, ha,
Greenblatt is clearly addressing that in the culture article.
And I think it's clear that he believes
in something called genius.
Shakespeare for him is a better writer than others.
But the way in which Shakespeare is original is not by thinking
of things out of the providence of his own imagination,
as if out of whole cloth, rather,
Shakespeare is a collaborator with his culture.
He takes the material of the everyday
and transforms it into something else.
He takes his sources, he takes history, he plays with it.
He makes prince howl and hot spur, foil for one another,
in Henry IV, Part I, even though
in actual history they were separated I think
by 20 years in age, right?
But it doesn't work as well, dramatically.
He gets at a larger truth by knowing what details to change.
And that's part of the genius of Shakespeare, and that's part
of what Greenblatt is getting at.
But in so doing you might say he illuminates his culture.
So the thing that's --
be interested in is how is a Shakespearean play timeless
precisely because it's time-bound.
We're going to ask the same questions of all these texts,
particularly Moby ***.
If Moby *** is a text that repays reading long
after the time when the kinds of industries and the people
that it describes are dead and gone, why is that?
How come this is -- if you believe it,
maybe it's an open question that we should answer at the end
of the term -- if you believe that this is more
than just simply a historical artifact,
what is it that allows it to keep living.
And we might actually say
that it might not be something intrinsic to the text itself.
It may be the way the text is constructed.
As a center of a cannon, as I told you last time
in a way the American cannon was constructed precisely
so scholars could prove to other scholars
that America has a literature
that befits a great nation that's a world power.
We already had it.
It's not like we're going have it soon
because we became this great nation, we already had it.
It's here.
And maybe people keep saying that Moby *** is a great book
because people like me keep assigning it.
You'll have to tell me at the end
of the term what you think about it.
If I were [Inaudible] I'd probably dart a harpoon
right now.
Okay, so in other words, to --
so Greenblatt is making this argument, right?
So he basically says in part we need to read contextually,
to recover the meaning of texts.
Some of which are incomprehensible
when they're removed from the surroundings.
We need to reconstruct the situation
in which they're produced.
But he's making an argument about the great text is going
to be one that actually enables us not simply to have
to reconstruct in that way.
Works of art, he says, contain directly or by implication much
of this cultural situation within themselves,
and it's this sustained absorption
that enables many literary works to survive the collapse
of the conditions that led to their production.
So maybe that's one model --
if I was going say what makes a text great and maybe, you know,
as people who are majoring in a profoundly --
I don't know what we would say, people who are majoring
in a thing that other people think is not
so economically wise, you might want to have an argument
for why it is you do what you do, and what it is
that makes text great, and why we should continue to read them.
We're going to help you marshall arguments like that
in the course of the term.
All right, so then finally on Greenblatt.
Cultural analysis is not
by definition an intrinsic analysis the way it used to be,
in other words, thought of,
as opposed to an internal formal analysis.
At the same time, cultural analysis must be opposed
on principle to the rigid distinction between that
which is within a text and that which is outside.
So part of what he's trying
to do is reconfigure what we typically thought of as text
and context as inside and outside.
Things that we used to think of as extrinsic to the text,
such as ideology, we would say now are part of the text,
they're encoded in the text.
We use close reading to tease them out,
to understand the way that they work.
Ideology works precisely through words, through the ways in which
to use a different kind of language.
Signs are created.
And if you're a derivation [Phonetic],
you'd say there's a slippage between the sign, in the sign,
between a signifier and the signified.
How many of you have any idea what I'm talking about,
did you do this in literally interpretation?
We'll get to it later on.
Don't worry about it for now.
But it's in that slippage
that you might say ideology seeps itself in.
A good close reader undoes that.
And is able to pull those things out.
Any questions on any of that so far?
Good, we're all on the same page, you understood --
you bought into why we need to read closely now?
Okay, good.
So one more word O'Dell bank o. This is a story
about American literature.
It's actually a pretty good story, I like it.
I have a few bones to pick with it, perhaps.
And one of the things I want you to be able to do by the end
of the course is to have your own understanding
of what is good and maybe what needs inundation
in this account, which isn't necessarily a brief account.
More than that, I want you by the end of the term to be able
to have your own opinion and be able to make an argument
about what is good, what is powerful,
and what needs inundation in a story that I'm telling you
about U.S. literary history.
Right? Because any literary history is going to be one way
of doing that literary history.
We're going to be looking at --
in some sense, I've giving you my construction about this,
thinking about the horizon of expectations that I see in front
of me, horizon of expectations would also include the way
that I've been trained, the things that I think about.
I want you to be able to start
to interrogate what it is we're doing here.
To be able to understand why this is one story among many
that could be told, and in part you might decide
that there are other ways in which if you were doing it,
you would tell the story.
Anybody that goes on to write an honors thesis or something
like that will want to be able to evaluate the ways in which he
or she has been taught, precisely so they can carve
out a space for their own original modes of thinking.
Okay, so that's part of again, self conscious thinking.
All right, New York in 1817.
I show you this because this is the way the city looked,
kind of this part of it.
And Herman Melville is born down here.
Down on Pearl Street.
He's born shortly thereafter in 1819.
And one of the things that I want us to think
about is whether it makes a difference to think
of Melville as a New Yorker.
I think I mentioned this last time.
But insofar as one of the stories that's going
to be a main line for us is again something
that we might call the Puritan origins of the American self.
So starting next time we're going to be talking
about settlement narratives and Puritans and a whole bunch
of people that lived in New England.
Well, Melville was a sometime-New Englander,
but his life is framed by New York.
He's born he and he comes back here
when he's no longer a practicing novelist,
and works in the custom house, and dies here.
So there's a kind of New York experience that's framing
Melville's writing.
What difference does that make, or should that make,
to our account of Melville's career.
Again, one of the things we're going to be doing today is
to use these opening chapters of Moby *** to frame some
of the larger issues that are at stake in the course of the part
of the argument, therefore, I think I'm making implicitly is
that Moby *** sums up a lot of things.
It sums up literary history up to the point
of which it's written in 1850 and 1851.
It sums up the state you might say of American culture,
as well in that moment, basically,
on the eve of the Civil War.
That's a claim I think I want you to be able to test
and evaluate before we get to the end of the term.
Melville's parents were rather different from one another.
The father was -- they both -- on both sides of the family,
and this is a very good little biography of Melville
that you could look at, at the beginning
of the supplementary materials in this Norton.
But Melville's father and his mother on both sides,
he's descended from, you know, families that were prominent
in the Revolutionary War.
That is not a misprint.
That is the way the family name was originally spelled.
The mother changed it later on after the early
and untimely death of Alan Melville,
in part to distinguish them from this past that she considered
to be somewhat problematic and possibly
to help them evade creditors.
You see, Alan was not much of a very good businessman.
He came from a family from which it was expected he would live
kind of a practice Trishant life, but he found it difficult
to maintain that life.
And so you might say that Melville's childhood was marked
by economic difficulty.
A kind of economic status
that was below their actual class status
or what they assumed should be their class status.
And involved a lot of moving
around in the lower part of the city.
Alan was secular for the most part, but Maria wasn't.
She was raised in a kind of Calvinist way.
And transmitted that to her son, Herman.
Right? So one of the things we might say
about Herman is he was steeped growing up in a kind
of biblical culture that his mother was very invested in,
and that his father sort of tolerated,
perhaps for appearance's sake or not
to have a rift in his marriage.
So this biographical information is interesting to us simply
because we see evidence in the text in a kind
of ambivalence towards this Christian inheritance.
One of the things I want us to see in Moby *** is the way
in which Christianity is an inspiration and a provocation,
and also an antagonist for Melville,
as he puts this novel together.
And I want to say that there's a certain way
in which that's exemplary of certain kinds of developments
within the larger literary
and cultural history of the United States.
Right? So a religious up bringing,
a failed economic situation, there's a famous story
in which he and his father,
the father had sent the family up state.
He and his father had to take a steamer in the middle
of the night up the Hudson, they didn't have a cabin,
they were huddled together in the rain.
All of this marks Melville's up bringing.
And at a certain point later on he had to become basically a --
he had to leave school, he was a school teacher briefly,
but then he went to sea, in part
because he didn't have other prospects, and he needed
to figure out a way to -- if not send money back,
not to be a burden on the family.
There's a couple of things.
This is another picture of Alan Melville.
That's Maria again.
Pearl Street is down here.
It was right by the water front.
And this is a nice little thing.
I don't know if you can actually see it.
I'll post it to the web site so you can see it.
But right here, close to the front, I don't know
if you can see it in the back.
There's Alan Melville.
This is a jury census from 1819.
Alan Melville is recorded there.
And the number of people in the household is there.
And I think there's -- no [Inaudible] how many, four,
three Melville males there.
So that's Herman Melville, New Yorker,
born on 6 Pearl Street in 1819.
And this is from an introduction to one
of Melville's earlier novels.
It's in fact generically ambiguous.
Should it be called a novel,
should it be called a personal narrative, Typee.
And what John Bouyant tells us is that much of the area
that is now park is built on land fill,
but in those days Pearl Street was right on the water front.
This was perhaps slightly extravagant description,
but it gets -- it let's the story, it gets the point across.
Melville's home stood right at the confluence of Hudson
and East River, so that in the summer
of his first year Melville learned to walk
on the edges of New York harbor.
Today, iron railings gird those edges, allowing tourists
to lean safely and observe the Statue of Liberty,
but the infant Melville toddled the area, unfenced in search
of the sea shells that gave the street its name.
Thirty years later in the voice of Ishmael,
the author would describe his old back yard as a magnet
for all manner of seekers fixed in ocean reveries.
His birth place was a spot where meditation and water
and wedded forever, Melville new the sea from birth.
And the passage actually points to a problem
that Melville biographers often have,
which is there are portions of his life
that we don't really have a lot of independent verification of.
So they typically go to the personal narratives
that Melville wrote, like Typee and Omoo and Redburn,
as if they constituted kind of facts
that could be useful to the biographer.
One of the things you might say
about Melville is that he's one of those authors who invites us
to take a kind of approach to his novels
that is biographical or autobiographical.
But especially in Moby ***.
I say we do that at our peril.
If you choose to write about Melville later on and you choose
to write about Moby ***, I think you're going to make --
need to make a distinction in your paper.
Are you going be talking about Melville all the time,
Melville does this, Melville dramatizes this,
Melville writes.
Or are you going to talk about Ishmael.
Ishmael does this, start to think
about why it is you do one or the other.
And also is there any reason
that you would ever find to use both.
Is it possible to have a rational for saying
in certain sentences I will write Ishmael dramatizes
such as such-and-such a relationship with Queequeg
but then have Melville elsewhere?
Let's just say for the time being as our hypothesis,
that Moby ***, with the hyphen in the title but not the name
of the character, Moby *** is a novel written by Herman Melville
that takes the form
of a personal narrative written by Ishmael.
So that's our convention.
Now, in other words, what it is,
is an incredibly tall fish -- tall sea tale.
It's a yarn.
The biggest fish story you're ever going to encounter.
And one of the things that we imagine
about Ishmael is he knows that.
He knows he's working in a genre.
Or Melville's working in a genre.
Take your pick.
There are some people who would say okay,
Melville is writing a novel that takes the form of a piece
of writing by Ishmael that may be a novel masquerading
as a personal narrative.
That might fit too many layers.
Let's just say it's a novel masquerading
as a personal narrative.
So that points out a question, a kind of technical question
that we might want to ask, which is this.
Is it ever possible for a novel to know more
than its first person narrator.
Is there a way in which a novel can somehow convey the
limitations of its first person narrator,
even if the convention is
that the first person narrator is writing every single
word down.
How many of you guys have read the Great Gatsby.
Great Gatsby.
Okay, first person narration, right?
Every single thing we think as a result of reading
that text we get because of the character
of Nick Caraway who's our narrator.
Why is the Gatsby great?
Because Nick says so, right?
He created this kind of romantic character
out of this bootlegging gangster,
who when he talks is not particularly articulate.
I say old sport.
It's not -- Gatsby is not much of a wordsmith, but Nick is.
And sometimes may be over the top.
He kissed daisy and -- whatever it is.
Some people like that, and other people think it's just really
bad purple [Inaudible] prose.
So that's the question.
Are there -- start with the Great Gatsby,
because it's a simpler case.
Is it possible to think of the Great Gatsby as a text,
as a novel, knowing something beyond what Nick Caraway is
representing to us.
Are there ways in which a novel can be configured to point
out the limitations of its own first person narrator,
to create a sense of unreliability of that narrator,
and how would that work.
Then generalize out from there.
Is it possible that in some way or other,
every first person narrator is an unreliable narrator.
We'll get to that.
And I think Moby *** is a good vehicle
for talking about these things.
Is your head hurting yet?
My head's hurting just thinking about it.
Okay, so the sea.
And the problem of Melville's biography,
and the invitation to biography.
In a word, I think we should not confuse Melville and Ishmael.
I think we should keep them rigorously separated.
And my own advice would be use Ishmael and use Melville rarely.
If you went down to Pearl
and State Street, you would see this.
A little exhibition called New York Unearthed,
an archeological excavation.
The plaque on the wall says on this site,
Number 6 Pearl Street, Herman Melville was born, August 1,
1819, author of Moby ***, [Inaudible] the Scribner,
Pierre, Philly Bud and many other American classics.
Okay, so Melville goes to sea.
And he comes back.
And he has an interesting experience when he's at sea.
Unlike Ishmael, as you will discover,
he isn't faithful to his captain.
He jumps ships a couple of times, he leaves his ship,
he deserts from the ship that he's on in the Marquesas
where he spends a few weeks among supposed cannibal tribes,
and he writes this up in Typee.
All right?
And presents this as a kind of personal narrative.
Then he goes off from Typee, he makes his way to another island,
he writes it up in Omoo, eventually he ends
up in Honolulu, he's in prison for a little bit.
He finally ends up on another whale ship,
and after that he ends up on a military brig.
All of these things go into his novel.
Typee and Omoo, about the time in the Marquesas,
the military ship gets written about in White Jacket.
The time on the whaler becomes Moby ***.
Now the thing -- couple of things to note.
That Melville was already playing on the boundaries
of what is fact and what is fiction.
So that's one of the things that I mentioned last time
that we're going want to track in the course of the term.
What is literary, and what is literary's relationship to fact
and to fiction, all right, so the Puritans
that we will start reading next time in the next week,
fiction is a dangerous category.
It's akin to lying.
By the time we get --
and history is something that we would respect,
as well as biblical poetry and sermons and that sort of thing.
By the time we start to get to the enlightenment,
people are starting to get slightly away
from this religious imagination and think about the ways
in which there may be higher faculties that we need
to think about, that make us human.
The imagination.
The reason.
The story of enlightenment is the beginning --
people beginning to understand
that knowledge may not only take place as a result
of revelation from God.
That maybe if you believe in God and maybe if you're religious,
you say what did God give everybody.
God gave everybody a soul, okay.
But God gave everybody reason and the ability to think.
That's God-given.
We should use it.
Don't always have to sit around waiting
for revelation or reading the Bible.
We can use our own reason and that's a divine faculty.
Romantic thinkers start to push beyond that.
Maybe reason is overrated.
Maybe there are things that reason doesn't cover,
the sub conscious, the unconscious, the dreaming life.
We'll encounter this
in a wonderful novel called Edgar Huntly.
Right?
And we see some of it at work here
as we move on through Moby ***.
The imagination, then, because a fact
that romantic writers start to develop.
That's where we get to when we get to Melville, right?
He's starting to be one of those writers whom we would call a
writer of romantic literature.
And by that doesn't mean he's interested in, you know,
kissy-face between men and women or women and women --
whatever -- it's not Hollywood romance, right?
We're talking about romance as opposed
to what the novel has already come to mean
by the middle of the 19th century.
The novel has tended to mean writing about seduction
or writing about domestic situations or religious forms,
that's what's selling in the middle of the 19th century.
Not the kind of stuff that Hawthorne
and Melville are writing.
And one of the things that Melville is doing,
along with Hawthorne and other writes, is try to create a form
of the novel that can have higher aspirations
than they think the typical novel does.
So Melville writes to his publisher in 1848.
He's already known as the writer of some successful sea tales,
based mostly on his personal life, although again he gets
into trouble with Typee when people say wait a minute,
some of the dates don't add up, was this guy really there.
Later on the companion that he has in Typee,
a guy named Toby whose name Melville actually used comes
back and writes an annotation that's bound
into the second edition and says I was actually there
and this really happened.
So Melville is interested in pushing the boundaries.
If personal narrative is what's going to sell, fine,
we're going to bill it as personal narrative.
Get people to read it by calling personal.
There's some recent scandals along those lines, the same,
you know, literary history replays itself.
Anyway, in 1848 Melville tells his British publisher my
instinct is out with the romance, and let me say
that instincts are prophetic and better than acquired wisdom.
So you see the key terms here, and we'll get back to this.
I'm trying to set these as seeds in your imaginations
that will germinate as we read.
To out with the romance.
Romance is somehow here being a counterweight
to acquired wisdom, right?
This is a code for saying I'm interested
in what we would call romanticism as opposed
to the kinds of thinking that went along
with the enlightenment and with neo classism.
Right? So who writes romance?
Well, one more thing.
In 1850, about the whaling voyage,
he writes another novelist who's written about the sea,
I am halfway in the work.
It will be a strange sort of book though, I fear,
blubber is blubber, you know, though you may get oil
out of it the poetry runs as hard as sap
from a frozen maple tree, and to cook the thing up one would need
to throw in a little fancy, which from the nature
of the thing must be as ungainly as the gambles
of the whales themselves.
Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing in spite of this.
Who writes romantic writing?
Well, one of them is a German named Goethe.
And one of the things that Melville has done on the eve
of writing Moby *** is take a trip to the continent.
People think in part because he's looking for a kind
of intellectual community that he's not finding
in the United States, as we can see.
People talk about the United States culture in this moment
as being young, psycho-fanatic.
Too reliant on British and European models.
Melville wants to go to the source.
He reads Goethe's autobiography,
which is called Truth and Poetry.
And he starts to think a little bit
about what romantic writing is going to be like.
This term fancy is a kind of code word for the imagination.
In the romantic era, fancy means imagination ,
someone like Coleridge in the British context would try
to separate it out as a different faculty,
fancy is one kind of imagination,
imagination is another kind of image nation.
It doesn't really work.
It takes -- so for our purposes, we might say that they are --
this is a kind of technical term from the imagination, right?
But there's one other thing to note that's going on here,
it's a strange sort of book, right?
Blubber is blubber, you know.
The poetry runs as hard as sap from a maple tree.
But look at the metaphor that he uses.
To cook the thing up.
That's a meta for that refers to domestic life.
And there's a way in which both Hawthorne
and Melville are doing is trying
to appropriate the territory that's occupied the best seller
list, if there were best seller lists,
novels that are selling are these domestic novels written
by people like Susan Warner and Maria Cummings.
And in some senses say we can do that,
and we can do it better, right?
Our kind of cooking is harder,
our kind of cooking is ultimately more rewarding.
Now Hawthorne complains about precisely this genre
of the domestic novel written by women in this famous quote.
And this is after he's already started
to publish his own book-length romances.
America is now wholly given
over to a damned mob of scribbling women.
I should have no chance
of success while the public taste is occupied
with their trash.
And I should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed.
There's something a bit petulant about it.
I mean, he wants to sell books.
But the marketplace is not interested so much in the kinds
of things that Hawthorne and Melville are writing.
So that's one of the things I want you to understand
about the way the cannon was constructed.
The literary historians didn't go back
to see what people were reading.
They went back and said this is what people should have read
if they were smart, they were literary.
This is what we think from now on you should read
that represents the American literary tradition.
Hawthorne calls his novels romances.
And these are the book-length ones that he completed.
So as we move forward, we will see that Hawthorne is part
of what Melville draws in separation
from is precisely Hawthorne's mode of writing.
If you -- when I said you should open up this book and read it,
take a look at it from the title page on.
One of the things to note is the dedication.
In token of my admiration for my genius, this book is inscribed
to Nathaniel Hawthorne.
And there's a famous story about this.
Melville begins writing Moby *** when he's in New York.
And in that moment he moves
to Massachusetts, into the Berkshires.
So the time when he's actually writing this, he has one,
I think, conception of the book in place.
And then, so the story goes,
he meets this guy Nathaniel Hawthorne, at a picnic.
Hawthorne by this time is an older writer,
he's just written the Scarlet Letter,
he's got these other things going on.
He's known as a -- an excellent writer
of short stories and tales.
Melville's imagination is fired up by meeting the older man.
He goes and reads a short story collection [Inaudible]
from the old [Inaudible] and immediately gets to thinking.
He very quickly writes the piece that I asked you to read
for today, which is called Hawthorne and His Mosses.
It appears in two parts, anonymously.
Hawthorne is a little bit embarrassed
by the extravagant praise that he receives in it.
But I thought it was worth looking at, at the outset
of both our reading of Moby *** and the course precisely
because of the way in which it pitches not only the project
of Melville's own writing but the project
of American literature.
Okay? This is one of a number,
probably chronologically the latest, but probably a one
of a number of pieces that we'll encounter in the course
of the term that are kind of manifestos
for an American literature.
If you have your Moby ***, take it out
and take a look at Page 521.
All right, he's been talking about Hawthorne's writing.
And what he calls the Indian summer sunlight
of one aspect of it.
But that's the side of Hawthorne's writing
that really draws Melville to it.
This is in the middle of the page.
For despite all of the Indian summer sunlight
on the hither side of Hawthorne's soul,
the other side, like the dark half of the physical sphere,
is shrouded in a blackness ten times black.
But this darkness but gives more effect to the ever-moving dawn
that forever advances through it,
and circumnavigates his world.
Whether Hawthorne has simply availed himself
of this mystical blackness as a means
to the wondrous effects he makes it to produce in his lights
and shades, or whether there really lurks
in him a touch of Puritanic gloom.
This, I cannot all together tell.
And part of our project for the next couple of weeks is going
to be to try to understand what
that phrase Puritanic gloom means, right?
He gives us a little gloss here.
Certain it is, however, that this great power of blackness
in him derives its force from its appeals
to that Calvinistic sense of innate depravity
and original sin from whose visitations in some shape
or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free.
For certain moods no man can [Inaudible] this world
without throwing in something somehow like original sin
to track the uneven balance.
I want you to go back to the model of culture I offered
up last time, of dominant, residual, and emergent.
Calvinist culture in Melville's conception would be residual.
It's part of the past.
It has an ongoing hold on the present.
No deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free from it.
I want you to look at that and spend some time with it.
Look at the way the sentence is constructed.
It's a marvelous Hawthornean sentence that's full of all kind
of hedging and negative statements.
No deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free.
So how connected is that deeply thinking mind?
I guess some minds that aren't deeply thinking can be wholly
free of what is it?
Original sin.
Calvinist depravity.
From whose [Inaudible] in some shape or another,
there's wiggle room there.
That's why it's residual.
It's changing.
Maybe by the time of Melville,
it isn't so much actual Calvinism that's lurking
over American culture, but something, something like it.
Something else that's going to be needing
to take its place, right?
So this is an example I think of the interplay of residual
and dominant cultures, this is after the enlightenment.
Calvinism, which we're going to study in the next couple
of weeks, has started to recede into the background,
yet it still has its hold over Melville, it still has its hold
over this book Moby ***.
All right?
Then Melville does this.
He goes on and he compares Hawthorne to Shakespeare.
This is on Page 522.
Now it is that blackness in Hawthorne of which I've spoken
that so fixes and fascinates me.
It's the first full paragraph.
It may be, nevertheless, that it is too largely developed in him.
Perhaps he does not give us a ray of his light
for every shade of his dark.
But however this may be, this blackness that is,
that furnishing the infinite be secure of his background,
that background against which Shakespeare plays his grandest
conceits, the things that have made
for Shakespeare his loftiest but most circumscribed renown
as the foundest of thinkers.
One of the things we might say about Shakespeare is you know,
at this moment, when Melville is writing,
perhaps the cheer writer in the English tradition
because of the writings of a number of people,
including Samuel Johnson,
have made us see how important Shakespeare is.
And yet he isn't quite sacrosanct
in the same way he might be thought of as today.
I mean, today when you take liberties
with a Shakespeare play, you adapt it, you do all kinds
of things, you cast Leonardo DiCaprio, oh, that's fine.
But do you give Romeo and Juliet a happy ending
when you put Leo in the play?
No, you don't.
They did, in the 19th century.
They felt free to tamper with Shakespeare's meaning.
They played up the melodramatic side of Shakespeare.
And that's what Melville is alluding to here.
But he sees something greater in Shakespeare,
Shakespeare as a kind of philosophical writer.
We'll talk about this more when we get back --
when we get back to Melville.
But take a look at the bottom of 523.
I mean, Hawthorne was one of those who Melville's
about to describe here.
Some may start to read of Shakespeare
and Hawthorne on the same page.
They may say that if an illustration were needed some
lesser light might have sufficed to illustrate this Hawthorne,
this small man of yesterday.
But I am not willingly one of those
who is touching Shakespeare, at least exemplify the maxim
of [Inaudible] that we exalt the reputation of some in order
to press that of others.
Who to teach all noble-souled aspirants that there is no hope
for them, pronounce Shakespeare absolutely unapproachable.
But here's the rub.
Shakespeare has been approached.
There are minds that have gone as far as Shakespeare
into the universe, and hardly a mortal man who at some time
or other has not felt as great thoughts in him
as any he will find in Hamlet.
You will see later on that this is a very Emersonian moment,
right?
We have to be cowed
by the previous achievements of England.
More than that, Melville wants to say, in the middle of 525.
This too, I mean,
that Shakespeare has not been equalled.
He is sure to be surpassed, and surpassed
by an American born now or yet to be born.
And, since you're English majors you should look at the footnote.
And the footnote tells you with all the manuscripts,
not the text as it was printed.
Because Dikinky [Phonetic] the editor almost certainly was the
one who toned the passage down to read
if Shakespeare has not been equalled give the world time
and he is sure to be surpassed in one hemisphere or the other.
I'm going to stop there, but you can see why this is a program
piece on behalf of an American literature.
And I think that Herman Melville has a pretty good idea
of which American it's going to be, that's going
to surpass Shakespeare.
You'll have to let us know at the end
of the term what you think,
how extravagant a claim you think that is.
Okay? So this -- this is what we want to see here, right?
That there's a sense in which the Puritanism
that we're going look at is hanging over American culture,
American writers, this writer, this book.
So we study it now in order to understand
in some sense what it means to Melville and what, perhaps,
it might still mean to us today.
Okay? So that's part of what our goal is in this course,
to think about the ongoing residual effects of the fact
of the Puritan origins or at least part of the American self.
Now I want to go back to one other thing.
This New York business, right?
So Melville has written sea tales before.
He's taken liberty with a few of the facts.
But he's never taken liberty with as many of the facts
as he does in Moby ***.
In Moby ***, he takes his own personal narrative
and changes it almost utterly, right?
I mean, Melville was never on a ship that has happened
to it what happens to this particular ship.
And since some of you may not know, I won't tell you yet.
His ship sails west.
It goes down, it sails around South America to the west.
Melville sends the Pequad east.
It goes across the Atlantic, it sails around Africa to the east.
You end up in the same place,
it's just two different ways to go.
He sends his fictional ship in the opposite trajectory
from the one that he has come to, okay?
The one he has done himself.
So immediately, you can see Melville is playing
with his narrative of his own experience in a way
that he's never done before.
So the we question remains why start the book
with that first chapter in New York?
Why start there at all.
In fact, why start the book the way that he does.
I said last time a novel often will begin with a kind
of beginning that's sort of an ante chamber,
that sort of sets the ground rules for interpretation.
Let's you know what kind of book it is that you're reading.
Take a look on Page 7.
This is the beginning of our novel.
It starts with a section called Entomology.
Supplied with a late consumptive usher in a grammar school.
And then in funny brackets the pale usher, thread barren coat,
hard body and brain, I see him now.
He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars
with a clear handkerchief, mocking the embellished
with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world.
He loved to dust his old grammars.
It somehow reminded him of his mortality.
Already, we're thinking what kind of novel is this?
And then we get to entomology, we get three quotes,
and we get well, the word whale and basically I don't know,
looks like a history of western culture from Hebrew,
interesting that Hebrew gets pride of place.
Through Greek, Latin, Danish, Dutch,
all the way down to Aaron Mangoin.
So what do we make of this list?
Do we take is seriously?
Is that really Aaron Mangoin, did he make that up?
I think he didn't make it up.
I think that's actually it.
This is a history of what, the world, the west, colonialism.
Is it cosmopolitan.
It is says that Aaron Mangoin has as much standing
for entomologists as Hebrew, Greek, Latin, or Anglo Saxon.
In any case, it isn't business as usual for a novel.
And we turn the page thinking we're going to get the start
of our book now, right?
That was maybe the first page.
No! The extracts.
And the extracts have an event longer bracketed thing.
And then all these extracts.
Again, beginning with the Hebrew.
God created great whales.
Or Job, leviathan maketh a path to shine after him,
one would think the deep to be horrid.
And we go on.
Down through Roman writers, Rabole, all the way down to oh,
I don't know, we got Hobbes in there, we've got Burke in there,
Blackstone, oh my God,
this thing is going on forever and ever.
Got pages and pages, got a missionary journal,
and the final things -- a Nantucket song.
So be cheery, my lads, that your hearts never fail while the bold
harpooneers striking the whale.
Or oh, the old whale mounts storm and gale,
and his ocean home will be a giant in might
where might is right and king of the boundless sea.
What do these things all have to do with one another.
Why are they here in the beginning of our novel.
What signals are they sending.
You can imagine why some people might look at this
and just say okay, another book.
You don't have that luxury.
So tell me what signals is that sending to you.
What's it do, when you encounter that -- yeah?
[ Inaudible audience comment ]
>> Very good.
It -- well, okay.
Yes. It is places human --
placing [Inaudible] within a history of human understands,
and then you add in the whale, which is correct.
But it's even without of the whale, right?
It is placing it within a genealogy of test.
Maybe we should do it the other way.
It is placing it within a genealogy of text
that go all the way back to the Old Testament.
As it's doing that, and inserting --
one of the things it's doing is sort
of demonstrating whaleness throughout all those texts.
You might say it's making a kind of crypto argument,
a tacit argument more the whale already.
See, the whale's here, the whale's there, the whale's --
you didn't think you were going see it.
It's creating a kind
of intellectual genealogy more, you might say.
And it's going back to sacred books.
The question arises is this in some sense thinking of itself
as a kind of sacred book.
And it's also a little bit funny.
It's mixing high and low.
It's mixing the Bible are philosophy,
with scurrilous things and whale songs and pop culture.
There's a kind of encyclopedic impulse here.
And Ishmael, we find out,
is a former school teacher, he's a bit pedantic.
He's interested in these kinds --
believe me, he's going to talk and talk.
He's gone -- he's done a lot of research.
There's a certain way in which -- and maybe, you know,
if you had gone and talked to these sub-sub librarians
and God knows who else,
you'd want to show everybody the benefits of your research too,
having spent all this time doing all this kind of tedious stuff.
So it's out there for you to see.
There are pages and pages itself.
And then finally -- finally, after all of that,
we get to something called Chapter One Lumies.
And three of the most famous words
in the American literary tradition.
Call me Ishmael.
Tell me about that.
Call me Ishmael.
What signals is that sending?
[ Inaudible audience comment ]
>> So it's casual.
He's being conversational.
Call me Ishmael.
Okay, that's very possibly true, and yes, it's true.
Yes?
[ Inaudible audience comment ]
>> Ah, but what's this call me Ishmael business?
Looks like it's all friendly and stuff.
Why didn't he just say my name is Ishmael.
What's the difference between those two.
Yeah? Go ahead.
[ Inaudible audience comment ]
>> Okay, that's fine.
That could be, maybe it's not his real name.
Maybe he's making a statement about somehow being an outcast.
And I think it was Carlise who wrote around the same period
that the writer is an Ishmaelite.
You know, people don't want to read literary writing,
so we feel like Ishmaels.
Okay, we're an outcast.
Then if you read the rest of the footnote you'll see
that he's actually evoking a particular person
from the Bible.
Did you want to add more to that?
[ Inaudible audience comment ]
>> And a contested figure.
Let's not forget that Ishmael has a different status
in Christianity than he has in Muslim thinking, right?
Ishmael is a big hero.
It's Ishmael who comes back to Abraham in the Quran, not Isaac.
So it's the out cast, possibly somebody
who has found this great alternative tradition,
immediately in three words,
we've got a very complicated kind
of textual literary dynamic going on.
And maybe it's a little bit coercive.
You know, we think he's being all friendly, call me Ishmael.
But it's an imperative.
Syntactically, it's an order.
Call me Ishmael.
Or else. Some years ago,
never mind how long ago precisely -- why not?
Already maybe we should be having our little English major
bristling spines in our head, you know, going like --
if we were porcupines, they should go spring -- like that.
Whoa, let's be on our defense.
Never mind how long precisely.
Having little or no money in my purse
and nothing particularly interesting me on shore,
I thought I would sail a little
and see the watery part of the world.
It's a way I have of driving off the spleen
and regulating the circulation.
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth,
whenever it is a damp grisly November in my soul,
whenever I find myself involuntary pausing before
coffin warehouses and bringing up the rear
of every funeral I meet, and especially whenever my hypos get
such an upper hand of me that it requires a strong moral
principle from me to prevent me from deliberately stepping
into the street and methodically knocking people's hats off --
then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
This is my substitute for pistol and ball,
with a philosophical flourish Kato throws himself upon
his sword.
I quietly take to the ship.
There is nothing surprising in this,
[Inaudible] knew it almost all men in their degree some time
or another, cherish [Inaudible] the same feelings towards the
ocean with me.
Put it up on the blocks, take it apart.
What's going on here.
What images are these?
First of all, serious or funny?
Funny. Both.
How come both.
What's serious about it.
He's talking about suicide.
Yes, he is.
Which leads you to believe, okay, stay on land,
commit suicide or go to sea.
Or maybe going to sea is suicide by other means?
In this kind of joking voice, but already call me Ishmael.
Is that friendly or coercive, or maybe a little of both.
Is this funny or serious, or maybe a little bit of both.
Is this death-obsessed?
We have a suicidal narrator here?
Maybe we already -- we have the signals
of unreliability laid out for us, right?
But he wants to suggest
that this is kind of a universal thing.
If they but knew it, almost all men
in their degree cherish fair [Inaudible] same feelings
towards the ocean with me.
And now we get to the question I'm asking.
There is your insular city of Manhattan built round by war,
Indian isles, by corral reefs, commerce surrounds it
with her surf, right and left the streets take you water-ward.
And you can see that.
One of the things that's interesting
about the city is people often think
about the way Manhattan is laid out is a kind
of north south city, right?
We have these broad avenues.
But when it evolved, the thing that was really interesting
about lower Manhattan and would have been true
in Melville's day is what was remarkable were the big east
west streets, that could take you from one set
of wharfs to the other.
And you can see from this picture in
and around the same time
that Moby *** is published how the whole city is ringed
with these wharfs that are full of ships.
You can very much see why Ishmael would think of this
as a kind of watery city.
New York became a hub precisely because it was
in this amazing harbor, where things could --
it could accommodate many ships.
It became even more of a hub when the Erie Canal
about twenty years before this opened
up the whole middle of the country.
Right? You can take stuff up the Hudson,
and then through this canal system,
all the way to the great lakes.
It made New York temporarily, you know,
the port of ports in the United States.
Right? So it -- you can see what it is,
that Ishmael is talking about, when he talks about this.
But why start here.
Because he spends about a chapter here.
It's a chapter that functions as a kind of overture.
But then as soon as Chapter Two starts, he stuffs a shirt or two
on my old carpet bag, stuffed it under my arm and start
for Cape Horn in the Pacific, [Inaudible] the good city
of old Manhattan I duly arrived in New Bedford.
He goes to New Bedford, ends
up in Nantucket, and then out to sea.
Why? Why start here?
The hypothesis I want to give you, and it has something
to do were the reading from Thomas Bender
about this alternative mythology
that New York might represent is this.
That maybe one of the things that Melville is trying to do
in this overture to the book is signal an engagement
with what Bender calls the historic cosmopolitanism
that has been associated with New York City
over against things like the Puritan tradition
that Ishmael seems to be invoking at the outset,
or that's going to hang over this book.
So one of the things we might want to ask is
to what extent is Moby *** the novel an attempt
to draw inspiration from and also be antagonistic
to precisely the kinds of things we're going to be reading
over the next two weeks.
We could go even further.
To what extent does this novel going to be a way
of making sense of and appreciating
and amending the entire tradition that leads up to,
starting with the Puritans and moving
on through the enlightenment and up into the romantic period.
Right? So that's what I want to suggest to you as a hypothesis.
That maybe one of the things
about these canonical American novels is that from the
out set it is setting itself against what people take
to be the main stream American tradition.
Whether it be the traditional novel writing exemplified
by the damn scribbling women in an art course,
Harriet Beecher Stowe, or whether it be the kind
of larger New England tradition represented by people that go
from the Puritans all the way down to Emerson,
to try to offer something else,
something that is more cosmopolitan in its orientation.
More interested in the strange, the wondrous, the other.
So when Melville goes whaling, he gets on the ship,
he goes into the south Pacific.
He meets a guy who is I think the nephew of Owen Chase.
Owen Chase was the first man on the ship called the Essex.
About 1820s, I think the Essex is sunk by a white whale.
People who reported what happened to the Essex say
that it looks like the whale turned on the ship
and actually stove it as if it meant to do that.
It was a famous case.
There were -- so the boat goes down, the sailors are all
in their whale boats, and they're thinking like,
***, what do we do now.
We're not meant to be out here on the open ocean.
And you'll see, I mean,
long boats have a sail, but they're small.
They're not meant to be on the open ocean for very long.
So the thought is, you know, we're near the Marquesas.
We could go to the south sea islands
and probably hit land pretty easily.
Down side to that is we've all heard
that there are cannibals there.
Don't want to do that.
So instead, I should have brought a map, we will sail
to the western shore of South America.
Okay, that's only about 2, 3, depending on how you go
about it, say 2,000 miles of open ocean
with not too many provisions.
No, we're not going to go to the cannibals.
We're too afraid of them.
We're going to go to the western shore.
Some of them make it.
Some of them do make it.
They come back.
In fact, two separate groups make it.
But here's what we might call the kind of cosmic irony.
Cosmic irony is that form of irony
that some people say isn't irony.
But it's when the gods seem to be laughing at you
and using you as a play thing.
Guess what happens to them in their desire
to avoid meeting up with cannibals?
They become cannibals.
They have to.
I mean, when some of them die.
They don't -- I think there's only one case
in which somebody is actually killed.
But they do -- once somebody dies of starvation,
they do it to keep themselves alive.
So you know, that's the story.
Melville encounters this story.
He gets a copy of this,
this becomes an account that's written.
Melville gets a copy of this account on there.
And he reads it.
And it's sitting there in his brain, germinating
and becoming Moby ***.
So what does he do when he writes Moby ***?
He reverses the story of the Essex.
Just as I said that he reverses his only personal experience
and has the ship go out east where he went west.
The Essex had an encounter with a whale
and then an encounter with cannibalism.
What happens in Moby ***?
We get our cannibals out on the table right away.
We embrace our cannibal.
We become a cozy, loving pair with our cannibal.
And then we're going to go off and find our whale.
But see, I want you to understand,
if you get that cultural context you understand what a profound
gesture that is.
And when we come back to Moby *** we'll spend some time
with just how it is that Ishmael gets to know Queequeg.
But I want you to think of that as a kind of radical gesture.
Ishmael's friendship with Queequeg is [Inaudible]
and not only because it has all these ***-social relations
and they talk about themselves as *** buddies, you know,
as if they're an old married couple.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But it's that embrace of the other, right?
The other -- cannibal is a signal gesture
that this novel makes right on the outset.
Okay, one last thing.
In the aftermath of 9/11,
alt.paranormal went wild on the internet.
When people looked at what is your Page 22.
Again, it's one of these things that sounds
like it's, you know, just funny.
And doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage formed part
of the great program of Providence
that was drawn up a long time ago.
And you'll understand better what Providence means
in this context in the next couple of weeks.
It came 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.
Okay? So think about back then, I know you were younger.
But remember what happened?
Here's what Ishmael writes.
Grand, contested elections for the presidency
of the United States, which [Inaudible] one Ishmael.
Bloody batted in Afghanistan.
Okay? Bush V Gore, 9/11, the bombing of Afghanistan,
the beginning of the war that we're still fighting.
People looked at this and went whoa,
and started to wonder whether Melville's text wasn't
in fact something like spookily predictive.
A kind of Nostradamus in the American context.
It is -- it was a little uncanny,
teaching this text in those days.
So I just point this out, right?
Ishmael is talking -- and I don't know what to say
about that, that kind of strange mirroring.
But there was actually a contestable explanation,
there was actually a battle in which a bunch
of British soldiers were bushwhacked in Afghanistan.
But Ishmael goes to say though I cannot tell why it was exactly
that those stage managers, the Fates,
put me down for the shabby part of a whaling voyage
when others were set down for magnificent parts
in high tragedies and short and easy parts in comedies
and jolly parts in farces.
So I cannot tell why this was exactly.
Yet now that I recall all the circumstances,
I think I can see a little into the springs and motives
which so -- being comely presented to me
under various disguises, induced me to set
about performing the part that I did.
Besides cajoling me to the delusion
that it was choice resulting from my own unbiased free will
and discriminating judgment.
I like you to think about that, because comic as it may be,
that is a statement
about radical limitations on human agency.
And that's something that we're going to be exploring all term.
The Puritans wonder how can it be that we have free will
but that there's also something called God's providence,
in which everything is predestined.
How can we be held responsible for Adam's sin if God knew
that was going to happen all along.
That is a paradox that the Puritans wrestle with.
You can see that Melville is wrestling with it too,
or maybe Ishmael is wrestling
because Melville is acting the part
of the stage manager, having him do that.
The last thing for today.
Take a look in the next paragraph.
Why does he go on the whaling voyage?
With other men, perhaps
such things would not have been inducements.
But as for me I am tormented
with an ever-lasting for things remote.
I love to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts.
Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror
and could still be social with it, would they let me,
since it is but well to be on friendly terms
with all the inmates of the place one lodges in.
I take that to be a statement of cosmopolitanism.
So we will test and see how that kind of cosmopolitanism fares
in the literary and cultural tradition that leads up to this.
All right, thanks, that's all for today.
Settlement narratives for Wednesday.