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>> Teacher: All right, let's get started.
So our subject for today is agency,
by which I mean the power to act.
And one of the things we're going to be thinking
about is the ways in which this novel dramatizes what we might
think of as model of agency.
And in the context of this course, it means the way
in which Melville is rethinking some of the issues that have,
you might say, motivated writers in our course
from at least Winthrop on.
The idea of the relationship between fatedness
on the one hand, and freedom, the freedom to act, on another.
Which is some sense is one
of the major trajectories in the course, right?
The Puritans had one way of thinking about the relationship
between what they called providence or fate,
and the idea of freedom.
They had to have both, even though they sometimes seemed
that they were complement, contradictory ideals, right?
But when you think of the idea of total depravity,
Adam cannot be held responsible for his disobedience.
And his progeny cannot be held responsible
for Adam's disobedience if he weren't free to act
in some fundamental way.
So that even if God had set up a situation
in which everything's foretold,
and God sees how things will turn out, in the event
for the Puritans Adam was always free to obey or not obey.
And therefore, free, had to take responsibility for what he did.
The fact that God's mind is
such that He can always know how somebody is going to choose,
does not in fact invalidate the act of choosing itself.
When you get to someone like Emerson,
you have a radically different idea about the way
in which agency is constructed and the way in which it needs
to be constructed, right?
He's thinking about the sense
in which we are too much bound to the past.
Our age builds the sepulchers of the fathers,
our age is retrospective.
The idea that we have in some sense constrained our
own agency.
That's the point of the fable of the Orphic poet that he tells.
In some very deep way Emerson believes we create the world.
And if we forget that we do that,
we severely limit the possibility of our own agency.
So self-reliance becomes a call for human beings
to reassert their agency.
To let go of the past in certain ways.
We've already looked at the ways in which Hawthorne
and Melville were skeptical of this, and I want to pursue
that a little bit more today.
Remember that scene in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter
where Hester says, you know, to Dimmesdale
in the forest, Begin all anew.
Not possible for some very good reasons.
And Melville I think also thinks that there may, you know,
that Emersonian swerve might be too quick.
We need, as he says in Hawthorne and His Mosses,
Something somewhat like Original Sin
to strike the uneven balance.
So part of what we're thinking of here in Moby ***,
is what is that something somewhat
like Original Sin that's being dramatized?
What are the constraints on agency here?
And who's placed them?
What are the models of the agency [inaudible]?
What agency does a narrator have in being able
to construct his or her narrative?
What constraints might be in place there as well?
And so those are some of the larger issues
that I want to talk about today.
Next time I want to talk a little bit about the idea
of domination, which is related to the idea of agency.
And so I'd like to start next time's lecture with a question.
If you know the answer to it now, don't reveal it.
But I want to start with a question which I'm going
to pose to you right now.
And that question is quite simple.
What color is the white whale really, okay?
Somebody will tell me the answer to that and show me how she
or he knows at the beginning of next time, right?
So what color is the white whale really?
Okay, and I'll even remind you of that in an email later on.
Okay. So let's go back to that moment where we ended last time
in the chapter that's called The Ship.
And remember what was going on there.
This is a chapter where Ishmael, it begins with the idea
of agency and fatedness being interlinked, right?
Ishmael has delegated.
Agency, the power to act, can sometimes be delegated.
There's a way in which Queequeg, saying that he's actually
on behalf of Yojo, has delegated to Ishmael the job
of choosing the ship, even though Ishmael is probably not
as expert in knowing what the best kind of whaling ship is.
Yojo said it'll be okay if you pick it, so Ishmael does.
He settles on the ship that's called the Pequod
and it's kind of a weird ship.
It's all festooned with ivory and whale artifacts.
It has a kind of barbaric look to it, which I guess makes it
in keeping with the kind of things that we presume
that Yojo would like in all of this little blackness,
you know, and woodenness.
Okay. Then he has a strange conversation with somebody,
who's also biblically name, Peleg.
And I said that Peleg's name actually refers to a stream
that divides different territories.
And Bildad, another biblical name.
These two are the managing partners of the ship.
And Peleg seems to be the real managing partner.
He's the one that's constructing the negotiations.
Bildad is looking at a book, and periodically he looks up.
And what he ostensibly is reading is this chapter
from Matthew, right?
Chapter 6, verses 19 to 21.
Lay not up for yourselves treasure upon earth where moth
and rust doth corrupt.
And where thieves break through and steal.
But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven,
where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt.
And where thieves do not break through nor steal.
For where your treasure is, there your heart be also.
That's what he's ostensibly reading.
And what emerges is a kind of interesting pun
on the idea of the lay, right?
And remember that Ishmael has just told us a little bit
about the way in which whalers normally use the term lay.
And this is on page 75 of the novel.
Here Ishmael is explaining that the way
that sailors are customarily is through some portion
of the net proceeds of a voyage.
You can imagine that everybody has shared in this voyage,
and the owners have a certain number.
And according to how highly you were rated,
and how important you are to the ship, you get a certain fraction
of the clear net proceeds.
So Ishmael has decided the probably what is appropriate
for him to get is something like the 275th lay.
Or as he puts it on the bottom of 75,
The two hundred seventy-fifth part of the clear net proceeds
of the voyage, whatever they might eventually amount to.
And though the 275th lay is what they call a rather long lay,
yet it was better than nothing.
And if we had a lucky voyage would pretty nearly pay
for the clothing I would wear out on it, not to speak
of my three years beef and board
for which I would not have to pay one stiver.
All right?
So he's thinking he's not going to be paid very well,
but he's going to get experience, and he's going
to basically break even.
Does he end up with the 275th lay?
No, he does not.
He ends up with something a little bit worse.
He ends up with the 300th lay, and he's glad to get it.
Why is he glad to get it?
Because Peleg and Bildad have put him through a sort
of negotiating routine.
And it's linked to Bildad's reading of the Bible, right?
So Peleg says, What are we going
to pay the guy, in the middle of 75.
Well, Captain Bildad.
What d'ye say, what lay shall we give this young man?
And Bildad you can imagine looking up
and saying, Thou knowest best.
The seven hundred
and seventy-seventh wouldn't be too much, would it?
And as your footnote tells you it's a biblical number
from Genesis.
Okay, fine.
There are a lot of numbers in Genesis, but that one has a kind
of ring to it, so fine.
Seven hundred and seventy-seventh, and then this.
For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
Peleg says I'm going to put him down for the three hundredth.
Now 300's a lot better than 777.
And Ishmael has already [inaudible] on the fact
that this 777th lay is a really bad thing.
Okay. So Bildad insists a little bit.
Captain Peleg, thou hast a generous heart.
But thou must consider the duty thou owest to the other owners
of this ship, widows and orphans many of them.
So there's a kind of Christian logic I suppose that's
at stake in 777.
I don't know.
There's another kind of Christian logic that seems to be
at stake here, widows and orphans, right?
We have to be Christian.
We have to provide charity.
We have to provide for those, many of them.
And then if we are too abundantly reward the labors
of this young man, we may be taking the bread
from those widows and those orphan.
The seven hundred
and seventy-seventh lay, Captain Peleg.
Now at this, Peleg, who apparently doesn't
like to be contradicted, starts to get a little bit of exercise.
Thou Bildad!
roared Peleg, starting up and clattering about the cabin.
Blast ye, Bildad!
If I had followed thy advice in these matters,
I would afore now had a conscience to lug
about that would be heavy enough to founder the largest ship
that ever sailed round Cape Horn.
Think of like Jacob Marley and that's the kind of idea.
Captain Peleg, said Bildad steadily,
thy conscience may be drawing ten inches of water,
or ten fathoms, I can't tell.
But as thou art still an impenitent man, Captain Peleg,
I greatly fear lest thy conscience be but a leaky one.
And will in the end sink thee foundering
down to the fiery pit, Captain Peleg.
All right, them's fighting words apparently, right?
Fiery pit!
Ye insult me, man.
Past all natural bearing, ye insult me.
It's an all-fired outrage to tell any human creature
that he's bound to hell.
Which is of course what every Puritan tells every child
that they raise, you know, except for those that are
by the grace of God saved.
Flukes and flames!
Bildad, say that again to me, and start my soul-bolts.
But I'll, I'll.
They get into almost a kind of fist fight here.
And at a certain point it's like okay, fine.
I'll take the 300 lay.
Now, what is this?
I mean what kind of negotiating tactic is this?
We give it a name on cop shows.
Yes?
>> Student: That's [inaudible] to be good cop, bad cop.
>> Teacher: Yes, it's a good cop.
It's a kind of classic early good cop,
bad cop routine, right?
Peleg is the good cop.
Bildad is the bad cop.
But what I want you to see that lies beneath it,
is what place does this have in an economic negotiation?
You know, okay, we're willing to accept maybe
that it's not a bad thing for the owners of a ship
to care a little [inaudible] investments
for the widows and the orphans.
And to be making sure that they are taken care of.
Okay, that's a kind of generous capitalism
that we don't normally see.
But 777th lay because you're reading Matthew?
And because lay happens to occur
in both your conversation and in text?
There's something slightly odd about that.
What I want you to see is that there are two discourses
that are coming into collision with one another here.
One of them is a discourse about the limitations of agency
that is also religious and spiritual, biblical.
Another is theoretically a discourse about economy,
which may or may not be about limitations on agency.
But the two collide, and you might say what their strategy
is, is to shift the ground of discussion from the realm
in which is properly belongs, which is economy and wages.
To a realm in which it probably shouldn't belong,
which is spirituality and the Bible
and biblical sorts of reasonings.
And you can say okay, well, maybe they're good Christians
and they have a theological reason for that.
But then as we see, what happens is later
on when they meet Queequeg, they're a little bit concerned
about his, you know, his spiritual well-being.
But as soon as he can hit the mark with a harpoon it's
like pay the man and there's no negotiating.
It's like what, what does he get, the 80th lay or something?
Something really good, right?
So one of the things you can see here is that one of the things
that the novel I think is dramatizing here,
is that biblical culture is still powerful here.
It needs to be contended with.
But it can be used for persuasion,
and not necessarily only in the arena
of religion and spirituality.
There are cultural uses for religion, in other words.
And one of the uses to which it's put right here is
to get Ishmael to take a lower wage
than he otherwise would have expected.
And so we want to track that.
We'll see another use of that.
But we want to see where in the novel, you might say,
different registers of discourse are combined, juxtaposed,
and sometimes put in collision with one another.
What is Melville saying about the nature of those discourses
when these kinds of things happen?
All right, but the chapter isn't quite over yet.
He say, you know, I've got a friend.
Can I bring him down?
Sure, okay.
Finally, he's about to leave and on the top of 78 he says,
Turning back I accosted Captain Peleg,
inquiring where Captain Ahab was to be found.
And what dost thou want of Captain Ahab?
It's all right enough, thou art shipped.
So as you know, I asked you about Ahab before,
before you signed up but now you signed up.
Sorry, you know it doesn't really matter whether you see
him or not.
Yes, but I should like to see him, Ishmael says.
No, I don't think you'll be able to at present.
I don't know exactly what's the matter with him,
but he keeps close inside the house, a sort of sick
and yet he don't look so.
Now we've already been prepared a little bit
for Ahab I said, right?
I mean this idea of the Quakers that have become Quakers
with a vengeance, and they're bloody Quakers
and they become pageant creatures.
And really if we are, we.
We should understand that this is a description,
a kind of foreshadowing of Ahab himself, right?
He speaks his mighty scripture language,
they're born for noble tragedies.
So here's another description of Ahab,
and in a way it makes him less of an epic figure and more
of something like a figure of paradox.
A sort of sick, and yet he don't look so.
In fact, he ain't sick.
But no, he ain't well either.
Anyhow, young man, he won't always see me,
so I don't suppose he will thee.
And then this, which might make you worry
if you're a greenhorn who's just sign on to the ship.
He's a *** man, Captain Ahab,
or so some think, but a good one.
Oh, thou'lt like him well enough.
No fear, no fear.
He's a grand, ungodly, god-like man, Captain Ahab.
Doesn't speak much, but when he does speak,
then you may well listen.
What does that mean, grand?
Okay, that's keeping with the ethic
of ungodly and yet god-like man?
What does that.
You know, there's a kind of an apparent paradox there.
One of the things that might make you really worry is the
fact that what Ahab may be is a kind of figure who's prone
to blasphemy, who might well be wanting
to set himself up instead of God.
Might give you pause.
Mark ye, be forewarned, Ahab's above the common.
Ahab's been in colleges, as well as 'mong the cannibals.
Been used to deeper wonders than the waves.
Fixed his fiery lance in mightier,
stranger foes than whales.
At this point we might wonder what are mightier,
stranger foes than whales?
His lance!
aye, the keenest and the surest that out of all our isle!
Oh, he ain't Captain Bildad, no.
And he ain't Captain Peleg.
He's Ahab, boy, And Ahab of old,
thou knowest, was a crowned king!
Okay, so we're invoke the Bible.
Ahab has authority because why?
Because in the Bible Ahab was a crowned king.
You might say, well, what's the logic of that?
Why does the name of an ancient historical character have
anything to do with this present Ahab?
But more than that, Ishmael is one
of these people who's actually read the Bible
and knows his Bible, he's a school teacher.
So he knows this.
And a very vile one.
When that wicked king was slain, the dogs,
did they not lick his blood?
So you might say Peleg is bluffing.
Ishmael calls his bluff, so now Peleg has
to change his tactics a little bit.
Come hither to me.
Hither, hither, said Peleg, with a significance in his eye
that almost startled me.
Look ye, lad.
Never say that on board the Pequod.
Never say it anywhere.
Captain Ahab did not name himself.
All right, so you want to see
that he's done a completely 180-degree reversal.
At first he says, oh, Ahab authority.
Ahab was a king.
And then Ishmael says, Ye, he's a wicked king
and dogs licked his blood.
Okay, never say that.
His name doesn't mean anything.
He didn't name himself, it's not his fault.
'Twas a foolish, ignorant whim of his crazy, widowed mother
who died when he was only a twelve month old.
Pause. And yet the old squaw Tistig, at Gayhead,
said that the name would somehow prove prophetic.
Okay, so we have that other evidence as well.
Perhaps other fools like her may tell thee the same.
Why bring that up?
To be more persuasive?
Or because Peleg can't quite get it out of his head.
I wish to warn thee.
It's a lie.
I know Captain Ahab well.
I've sailed with him as mate years ago.
I know what he is.
A good man, not a pious good man like Bildad,
but a swearing good man, something like me.
Only there's a good deal more of him.
Aye, aye, I know that he was never very jolly.
And I know that on the passage home pains
in his bleeding stump.
What? That brought that about, as any one may see.
I know, too, that ever since he lost his leg last voyage
by that accursed whale he's been a kind of moody,
desperate moody, and savage sometimes.
Right? So now we're getting a kind
of psychological explanation for this.
But that will all pass off.
And once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee young man.
And this formulation should remind you of something
that you've heard in the novel already.
It's better to sail with a moody good captain
than a laughing bad one.
Is that reminding anybody of anything?
>> Student: That we're cannibals.
>> Teacher: Yes, right.
So we're cannibals and what do we think about that?
What do we think about this?
What does it mean that Peleg isn't sometimes using the same
kind of rationalizing locution that Ishmael did?
So good-bye to thee, and wrong not Captain Ahab,
because he happens to have a wicked name.
Okay? Naming isn't destiny.
Naming doesn't mean anything, right?
That's what we take away from this.
Oh, one more thing.
Besides my boy, he has a wife, not three voyages wedded.
A sweet, resigned girl.
Think of that.
By that sweet girl that old man has a child.
Hold ye then there can be any utter, hopeless harm in Ahab?
No, no, my lad.
Stricken, blasted, if he be, Ahab has his humanities!
Okay, fine.
So I want to ask you, having, you know, read all the things
that you've read, what does it mean if we're going
to stake Ahab's humanity on the fact
that he has a wife and child?
The wife and child he pretty much leaves behind
for long periods of time back on land.
You might almost say that he goes to sea in part
to escape them, or at least that's the effect of it.
So if his humanity is rooted back there what do we,
what is that image supposed to tell us?
Is he leaving behind his humanity?
Is that going to be the anchor that keeps him grounded somehow,
a thing to which he always returns?
Is that what we're supposed to believe?
Well, one of them we can go as, you know,
students of literary history, we can go meta, if you will.
And ask ourselves this.
What does it mean that Peleg is invoking, you might say,
the Christian domestic tradition of the novel to stake
out Ahab's humanities which we already know is precisely the
tradition against which Moby *** is situating itself.
Again, these are paradoxes for us to think about.
Should, does this ennoble Ahab?
Or does it mean.
Or is this something.
I mean we're going to read a novel
in which there are pretty much no women.
So what does it mean that one's tenuous tie to a wife
and child is going to be the basis of your humanity?
Even if we put the best construction on it, we might say
that that's a fairly tenuous tie to something
that is liable to be fragile, no?
As the voyage continues.
If that's where we're staking our humanity,
then maybe we do have a problem.
Of course Ishmael himself doesn't know.
Well, at least the narrative does and perhaps if we do.
As I walked away, I was full of thoughtfulness.
What had been incidentally revealed to me of Captain Ahab,
filled me with a certain wild vagueness
of painfulness concerning him.
And somehow, at that time, I felt a sympathy and a sorrow
for him, but I don't know what,
unless it was the cruel loss of his leg.
And one of the things I want to suggest to you,
is there is that idea of a sympathy
between Ishmael and Ahab.
And I want us to think about that.
I mean obviously in a certain way,
if we say that Ishmael is constructing this narrative,
then Ahab and everybody else, including Ishmael the character
in this narrative, is Ishmael's own creation.
So of course he presumably has some kind of sympathy
or some kind sympathetic,
some sort of negative capabilities allowing him
to dramatize these characters.
Okay. But typically we would say that Ishmael
and Ahab are very different kinds of characters.
I think I've related this to some of the reading
that Melville did before he went away.
One of the things that he did in going to Europe was try
to steep himself in romantic literature.
And one of the people that he read was Goethe.
And a couple of things of Goethe's.
One, you know, Faust he read,
and he probably also Dr. Faustus.
Goethe's autobiography, Truth and Poetry.
So when he writes to Dante [assumed spelling] later
on that, you know, that he's interested in thinking
about whaling, but the poetry is hard to comes out.
It's like, it doesn't run very well.
It's like sap out of a cold tree, but he means
to get it up by cooking it up.
All that stuff seems to, would indicate that he's got Goethe
on his mind a little bit.
One other book of Goethe's
that he read was Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship,
thought to be the first bildungsroman.
And Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship is in part
about the young German boy who's trying to bring a production
of Hamlet to the stage.
And Hamlet becomes an interesting thing to bring
to the stage because it allows Goethe, via Wilhelm
and his friends, to think about what drama can do
and what the novel can do.
And they come up with the theory that Melville seems
to have somewhat to heart.
Which is that drama is all about action and pressing forward.
The novel is about consciousness and process and thinking,
and therefore resists pressing forward.
Hamlet, therefore, becomes the novelistic of dramas.
It's got a novelist/protagonist who really doesn't want
to do the thing that he's supposed to do.
He's in a genre called revenge tragedy.
He knows he's in a genre called revenge tragedy.
Revenge tragedy requires that he be the revenger,
and that he basically kill everybody
so that the stage is littered with dead bodies at the end.
Preferably not his own, but if it has to be, so be it.
And interestingly, if you remember your Hamlet,
he gets there by the end.
That's exactly what happens, and yet not in the way
that would happen in classical revenge tragedy
with an actively pressing forward protagonist.
Hamlet tries to retard it at everyone's prove,
he has to stage a play, he's got to do all this stuff.
And finally he comes out almost by accident, or through plots
that are not of his devising.
This, we might say, is a dramatically inflected novel,
and we're going to see today moments where it actually breaks
into drama for a couple minutes.
So one of the things we might say is
that Melville is interested in Hamlet
because it's a dramatically,
it's a novelistically inflected drama.
Or perhaps the most novelistic of dramas.
And what he's creating here is a novel that's going
to be Shakespearean in several senses, and maybe one
of these sense is that it's going
to measure these forms against one another.
So in Ahab we will find the mighty pageant creature born
for epic, born for drama.
Pushing forward always.
Ahab is the revenger,
and in some crucial way this is a revenge tragedy like Hamlet
and like its predecessors.
In some other ways though, we have the narrator,
Ishmael, who is one of these.
Who is a very chatty, digressive narrator who tells you things
that you really think you don't really need to know.
And he's kind
of free-associating it with you at times.
Wanting to keep us from getting to where it is that we're going.
Now I suggested last time that this is a story about trauma.
Maybe that's a psychological explanation for what's going on.
That in some sense Ishmael also knows where we're ending up,
and he's doing everything he can to delay getting there.
Or you might say he's giving us as much as we deserve
to understand the full weight of the trauma that awaits us.
Okay. That would suggest that Ahab
and Ishmael are very different figures.
And some critics have said that part
of the characteristic feeling of Moby *** is a kind
of alternation between their styles.
We get these encyclopedic kind of digressive style that's part
of Ishmael's narrative when he's interested in the business
and the techniques of whaling.
And then we get these other very dramatic chapters which are all
about Ahab and his performance pieces.
And we see this kind of alternation
for at least two-thirds of the way through.
When you finish the novel we can, you'll see what happens
to that set of alternations.
So what people would say, at least at the beginning,
Ahab and Ishmael are rather different characters.
I want us to ask in what ways are they different?
And in what crucial ways is there this kind
of sympathy between them?
Crucial similarities between them all along.
That's one of the things that I want to bear in mind.
This might be one place where it starts, but it's almost as if
as soon as Ishmael thinks about it he drops it.
As if perhaps it's almost too traumatic, even in this moment,
for him to seriously think about and so he lets it go.
Okay, I want to take a look now
at the first moment that we see Ahab.
This is in the chapter that's called Ahab.
And we are prepared for this chapter by a series of chapters
that are designed to introduce us to the crew, right?
So these are the chapters, Chapter 26 and 27,
that are both called Knights and Squires.
And so they give us an introduction to the crew,
particularly the three mates.
Starbuck, Stubb and Flask.
All of whom have different characters,
and those characters become important
as the novel progresses.
We're introduced to the three harpooneers
at the end of Chapter 27.
Not only Queequeg but Tashtego and Daggoo.
And remember, Queequeg is a South Seas Islander.
Tashtego is a Native American.
And Daggoo is an African, so we have a kind of variety
of different others who are serving as these harpooneer.
And then we get this passage
on 107 just before the introduction of Ahab.
Let's take about eight lines down from the top of 107.
Herein it is the same with the American whale fishery
as with the American army and military and merchant navies,
and the engineering forces employed in the construction
of the American Canals and Railroads.
Right? So he's talking here about American military power,
and also the power of American progress, right?
What's the building the canals and railroads
that are enabling U.S., the U.S. government and U.S. culture
to take control of a continent.
The same, I say, because in all these cases the native American,
by which he doesn't mean Indians.
He means the white Anglo-Saxon presumably Protestant American.
The native American liberally provides the brains,
the rest of the world
as generously supplying the muscles.
Right? And so in this way, you might say, the hierarchy
on board the Pequod replicates American culture
in the middle of the 19th Century.
No small number of these whaling *** belong to the Azores,
where the outward bound Nantucket whalers frequently
touch to augment their crews from the hardy peasants
of those rocky shores.
In like manner, the Greenland whalers sailing out of Hull
or London, put in at the Shetland Islands
to receive their full complement of crews.
Upon the passage homewards, they drop them there again.
How it is, there is no telling, but Islanders seem
to make the best whalemen.
They were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod.
Then he gives them a term, a name.
Isolatoes too, I call such,
not acknowledging the common continent of men,
but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own.
And in a way we might think of this as very American.
When I think back to Tocqueville's critique
of individualism, that it creates a kind of egotism.
It creates a kind of atomism.
People withdraw from the public society.
These guys start out that way.
And although they come from all over the world,
but maybe they're sort of perfect Americans.
They're all isolated, each out for his own game
to get his high, you know, his lay and that's about it.
But something happens, either on all whalers
or certainly on this whaler.
Yet now, federated along one keel,
what a set these Isolatoes were!
An Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the isles of the sea.
And the footnote tells you that this is a kind
of cosmopolitan moment when people from different nations
of the world come together before the French assembly.
And all the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab
in the Pequod to lay the world's grievances before that bar
from which not very many of them ever come back.
And one of the things I want to say about that phrase,
is this idea of being federated on one keel.
Is a sense in which Ishmael is playing
with the old metaphor of the ship of state.
And suggesting that there is a sense
in which the Pequod may well be replicating the American,
you know, national polity.
And then one other thing that we should mention.
Remember this is 1850.
Remember that Melville's father-in-law is the man
who sends the first [inaudible] of slaves
from New England back down to the South.
There was the hope in this moment that the problem,
the internal problems of slavery might be deflected, if not,
you know, gotten away with, gotten rid of completely
by the energies of what became called
in this period Manifest Destiny.
The idea that the United States would take over the.
It was a destiny, the providence,
the fate if you will, of the United States to take
over the entire continent.
If we could be outward thinking, we wouldn't worry
about the problems internally that we had.
Of course, the whole debate of the Compromise of 1850 shows
that there's a problem with that, right?
That it's precisely the outcome of the Mexican War
that provokes the crisis over slavery in 1850.
But there was this hope
that somehow Manifest Destiny might take these energies
and deflect them outward and keep American coherent.
So there's a certain way in which Ishmael seems
to be playing with the idea
that the Pequod embodies these energies of Manifest Destiny.
We'll see how well that works out.
Question?
>> Student: Do you think it would be like, I don't know,
a mystery and also you.
[ Question inaudible ]
>> Teacher: Yes, I think.
I don't think you need to make a, to say that.
I mean I don't know how you'd argue that.
You say Isolato reminds me of a Mulato that seems.
Maybe, it's possible.
I think you could make that argument.
But certainly the other things that you are saying,
and I don't think they depend on that particular point,
are true enough, right?
That there is this sense
of everybody coming together and being.
That the nation is all implicated
in this larger system.
Here he's.
He is not at first singling out the south, right,
in the way that Stowe is.
Stowe is saying love you in the South.
We're, you, we understand we're sympathetic with you,
and the people in the North are equally guilty.
She's putting them together.
But look, if you will, where the part of the passage
that I didn't get to ends up.
Who is this that he focuses on?
Black Little Pip, he never did.
Poor Alabama boy!
On the grim Pequod's forecastle, ye shall ere long see him,
beating his tambourine.
Preclusive of the eternal time, when sent for,
to the great quarter-deck on high.
He was bid strike in with angels,
and beat his tambourine in glory.
Called a coward here, hailed a hero there!
So I think that's a whole discourse
of rage that's clearly at stake here.
Right? It's these South Sea Islanders
and others commonly provide the muscle.
And then clearly when you bring in Pip, you have that kind
of subtext of slavery coming in as well.
So I think that it isn't an allegory exactly.
But we might say a lot of the elements
of the 1850s are being thrown I here, mixed up.
And it seems to promote something
like [inaudible] we could say.
I mean there's a number of possibilities at this point.
We could say this is a kind of version of Manifest Destiny,
ship of state sailing off, going to go do battle
against the white whale, the enemies of the nation.
Maybe. But also maybe this is an emblem
of a certain kind of cosmopolitanism.
And that would seem to be the primary meaning
that he's getting at.
Now is this a cosmopolitanism that's happening
because of the whaling mission?
Despite the whaling mission?
Is it the captain's intention?
It is something that the captain is intending in order
to manipulate this crew more effectively?
Does it have a different outcome than either we
or the captain expect?
I think these are some of the elements that are being,
you know, proposed here by Ishmael in this moment.
And all of this before we've actually seen Ahab.
In the next chapter we actually see Ahab.
Now remember what Ishmael has heard about him, right.
That he had his leg taken off in a previous voyage,
and it made him kind of moody and a little bit crazy.
And that he might or might not be sick.
Take a look at the bottom of 108.
Ahab finally comes up, and we see him for the first time.
Now I want you to see what it is
that Ishmael mentions first about him.
So Ahab is standing on the quarter-deck,
which is basically the part of the ship that's behind H, right?
So that's the captain's province.
You go down J to get to his cabin.
So he comes up and at the bottom of 108,
Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck.
He's come out of the cabin and they see him for the first time.
There seemed no sign of 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.
And remember, Ahab has fixed his lances
in stranger things than a while, right?
That's what Ishmael has been told.
Yet, this wild hint seemed inferentially negatived
by what a grey Manxman insinuated.
An old sepulchral man, who, having never before sailed
out of Nantucket, had never ere this laid eye upon wild Ahab.
Nevertheless, the old sea-traditions,
the immemorial credulities,
popularly invested this old Manxman
with preternatural powers of discernment.
Right? So we're talking about how stories get passed on.
How legends get created.
How we believe what we believe.
The sailors, by tradition,
end up believing one particular person.
Does he have more authority really than the others
that they choose not to believe?
So that no white sailor seriously contradicted him
when he said that if ever Captain Ahab should be
tranquilly laid out, which might hardly come
to pass, so he muttered.
Then, whoever should do that last office for the dead,
would find a birth-mark on him from crown to sole.
So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me,
and the livid brand which streaked it,
that for the first few moments I hardly noted
that leg upon which he partly.
That not a little of this overbearing grimness was owing
to the barbaric white leg upon which he partly stood.
And now we get to the peg leg.
I mean, if you think about Ahab, the next thing you think
of after the white whale is the peg leg.
I mean, that's the characteristic.
What does it mean that it's not the first thing
that strikes Ishmael about Ahab?
That the first thing he sees is this scar that seems to run
down his face, livid white out of his hairline that marks him?
What are the associations that are being created here?
Why do this?
I'll give you one more bit before I ask you.
Now this is at the bottom of the end of the last full paragraph.
Not a word he spoke, nor did his officers say aught to him.
Though by all their minutest gestures and expressions,
they plainly showed the uneasy, if not painful, consciousness
of being under a troubled master-eye.
And not only that, but moody stricken Ahab stood before them
with a crucifixion in his face.
In all the nameless regal overbearing dignity
of some mighty woe.
So what's the pattern of imagery that's being created here for us
around Ahab from the beginning by Ishmael?
What are some of the things that we see here?
Anybody? Yes?
>> Student: Well, you know,
the whole scar thing I think it's biblical.
It makes me think of.
I mean [inaudible] especially about kings.
>> Teacher: Okay.
All right.
On the one hand, maybe the mark of king,
branded from the beginning.
And let's go with that branded word.
What does branded?
Who get, what gets branded?
Who gets branded?
>> Student: Cattle?
>> Teacher: Who?
Cattle did somebody say?
>> Student: Yes.
>> Teacher: Yes, okay .
Cattle.
>> Student: Slaves.
>> Teacher: Slaves.
Anything else?
Not so much these days but, I mean, you know,
they could have done it to Hester but they didn't.
>> Student: Prisoners.
>> Teacher: Who?
>> Student: Prisoners.
>> Teacher: Prisoners or criminals, yes.
Right, you get that.
Anybody ever read the Three Musketeers,
one of my favorite books?
>> Student: Uh-huh.
>> Teacher: Three Musketeers, and the Lady DeWinter, you know,
she's got the brand of a criminal
which is finally revealed and the whole plot turns on it.
Criminals, property, slaves.
These get branded.
What does it mean?
And then you bring up another one, the mark of king.
What does that mean, that Ahab has that set of associations?
And then at the bottom of 109, Before them with a crucifixion
in his face, and some regal overbearing dignity
of some mighty woe.
What's that?
It means now it seems to indicate
that he's a kind of Christ figure.
Well, okay.
I guess that's compatible.
I mean Christ was branded, you know.
Christ was crucified because he conceived of as a criminal.
And so what do we do with this pattern of imagery?
Is his, are we seeing someone who is a kind of Avatar
or an anti-type of Christ?
Therefore, I don't know what, God's agent on earth?
That's the imagery that's being created?
Or is it the opposite of that?
But how would we know?
Anything else that see associated
with Ahab at this time?
Yes?
>> Student: Trees.
>> Teacher: Trees.
What does that do for us?
Anything?
>> Student: Trees are kind of majestic.
>> Teacher: Okay, possibly.
Trees are majestic.
Nature, maybe.
Although again, we're going out on a land,
off land so not too many trees.
What happens to this tree, by the way?
>> Student: It gets hit by lightning.
>> Teacher: It gets hit by lightning.
And what's the first image at the beginning of the paragraph?
He looked like a man?
>> Student: Burned at the stake.
>> Teacher: Cut away from the stake.
Yes, who's been burned at the stake.
So a tree struck like lightning.
Something majestic has been scarred by lightning, fire.
Or somebody that's been burned away, you know,
been burned at the stake and cut away and also fire.
Another pattern of imagery that's being overlaid,
that will be associated with Ahab as we move forward.
I want you to track both of these things.
Track the kind of, all three of things you might see.
Track the imaging, the imagery of branding, whether it's
of property or criminality or something else.
Track the imagery of Christ-like stuff.
Crucifixion and other things.
And track the imagery of fire.
How do they go along with Ahab?
How do they shift as the novel progresses?
Okay. So he's up here on the quarter-deck, right,
and that's the first time that we see him.
And I want to skip
to the chapter that's actually called The Quarter-Deck
so that we could actually see what it is
that Ahab does, right?
We've already been told that Ahab doesn't speak much,
but when he does you better listen.
This is a moment that he speaks.
This is Chapter 36, page 136.
The Quarter-Deck.
And immediately when we get to this chapter we see
that this is, there's something a little odd about it.
Something a little odd about it.
Enter Ahab.
Then, all.
We get a stage direction, right?
Something is going on.
It's almost as if what we are immediately clued
into is the fact that we're
about to see a kind of performance.
And it's another way, you might say perhaps
with a novel, shifting.
It's Shakespearean,
it's signaling it's Shakespearean ambitions.
So Ahab comes.
Now a thing to know about this, the quarter-desk first
of all is the province of the officers
and especially the captain.
So when everybody's out on the quarter-deck,
which is in the back part of the ship, if the captain's
out there the officers stay to the other side
so he can have privacy.
And the whole, the ordinary crew doesn't go back.
In fact, most of the non-officers are referred
to as people before the mast.
They're supposed to stay in the front part of the ship.
And the officers have the purview of the main,
from the main mast on to the back.
Bringing more than that, ships operate on watches, right?
Not everybody is awake all at once.
You need some people to be awake and some people to be asleep.
And the ship, some of the ship can be run all the time.
A ship like a whaler, by the way, carries a complement
of people that's far greater
than it actually needs to run the ship.
Just because they're, as you'll see later on next time, they,
a lot of them have to spend work actually processing the whales
that they catch.
The shipping in fact becomes a kind of factory
on the ocean for a while.
But you've got a big crew and most of them are,
they're not always in any one place
on the ship at any one time.
So for Ahab to say, Send everybody aft
to the quarter-deck, is a very strange thing to do.
This is on page 137.
Sir! said the mate, astonished at an order seldom
or never given on ship-board except
in some extraordinary case.
Send everybody aft, repeated Ahab.
Mast-heads, there!
Come down!
It's like we're going to pause, right.
Maybe it reminds you of that moment of Bradberg's, you know,
but here I must take a pause and look.
Everybody's going to get down, no more lookouts.
Everybody back here.
The captain has something to say.
Okay. Vehemently pausing, he cried, What do ye do
when ye see a whale, men?
Sing out for him!
was the impulsive rejoinder from a score of clubbed voices.
Good! cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones.
Observing the hearty animation
into which his unexpected question had
so magnetically thrown them.
I'm going to avoid the temptation
to sound like Darth Insidious.
Gooood. Unlimited power!
Right. What do ye do next, men?
Lower away, and after him!
And what tune is it ye pull to, men?
A dead whale or a stove boat!
Okay, so he's working them up, right?
Okay. Then top of 138.
All ye mast-headers have before now heard me give orders
about a White Whale.
Look ye! D'ye see this Spanish ounce of gold?
Holding up a broad bright coin to the sun.
It is a sixteen dollar piece, men.
A doubloon.
D'ye see it?
Mr. Starbuck, hand me yon top-maul.
And you can't particularly well here because of the lights.
But this is the actual, a representation
of the actual doubloon.
And if you were to look at it, you would see that there was,
I'll put this in the notes so that you can see
that there's a sun right here on the top.
And a couple of mountains, right?
So he takes this doubloon and he nails it
to the middle mast, right there.
Or to the mast right there, the main mast.
Okay. This is not a very good.
It's probably better to see it on this one, right?
So he's, they're all gathered by, in the quarter-deck
and he's going to nail it to F, to the main mast there.
And they're all kind of standing in that part of the,
rear part of the ship.
So he's nailed this thing.
What does that suggest?
Again, remember we talked
about the unacknowledged biblical imagery in the spatter,
in the picture scene, right?
He's got three masts there.
You're going to nail a doubloon to the middle one.
That's doing something more with crucifixion imagery, right?
Although we have to think what it its we're crucifying.
Are we crucifying a. Are we crucifying gold?
Are we crucifying the economy?
Okay. And then again, these are not allegories.
These are symbolic gestures.
But not from only the novel, but the characters
within the novel are making.
Ahab knows how to manipulate.
So he wants you to, the first he's doing is he says, look,
a good ounce this is, you know.
You guys are not making anything on this.
Think about how much money this is compared
to what you're supposed to make on this voyage.
And he says this.
This is a couple of paragraphs.
Receiving the top-maul from Starbuck,
he advanced towards the main-mast
with the hammer uplifted in one hand,
exhibiting the gold with the other.
And with a high raised voice exclaiming,
whosoever of ye raises me a white-headed whale
with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw.
Whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed whale,
with three holes punctured in his starboard fluke.
Look ye, whosoever of ye raises me that same white whale,
he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!
Hurray! That's a lot of money, and it's going
to be there every single day until they see this whale.
People are looking at it.
So he's created a kind of symbol,
and it's got these other overtones
that we might notice perhaps.
That's one thing that's going on, so he puts that up.
He's created this pageant.
Everybody's attention is on this, and it seems to be more
or less in keeping with what they're supposed be doing.
They're supposed to hunt whales, right?
Okay. He's interested in a particular one.
He's giving a special reward for it.
That's fine, right?
Maybe not.
Captain Ahab, said Tashtego, a little bit further down.
That white whale must be the same that some call Moby ***.
Moby ***?
shouted Ahab.
Do ye know the white whale then, Tash?
Does he fan-tail a little curious,
sir, before he goes down?
said the Gay-Header deliberately.
And has he a curious spout, too, said Daggoo, very bushy,
even for a parmacetty, and mighty quick, Captain Ahab?
And that's Daggoo.
And then our friend, Have he one, two, tree.
Oh? Good many iron in him hide, too, Captain,
cried Queequeg disjointedly.
All twiske-tee betwisk, like him, him.
Corkscrew!
cried Ahab.
Aye, Queequeg.
The harpoons lie all twisted and wrenched in him.
Aye, Daggoo, his spout is a big one,
like a whole shock of wheat.
And white as a pile of our Nantucket wool
after the great annual sheep-shearing.
Aye, Tashtego, and he fan-tails like a split jib in a squall.
Death and devils!
Men, it is Moby *** ye have seen.
Moby ***.
Moby ***!
Right? Okay.
Moby ***.
They're not the only ones who have heard of Moby ***.
Starbuck, the first mate, has heard about him too.
Captain Ahab, said Starbuck who, with Stubb and Flask,
had thus far been eyeing his superior
with increasing surprise.
But at last seemed struck with a thought
which somewhat explained all the wonder.
Captain Ahab, I have heard of Moby ***.
But was it not Moby *** that took off thy leg?
Who told you that?
Said Ahab, then pausing.
Aye, Starbuck.
Aye, and my hearties all round.
It was Moby *** that dismasted me.
Moby *** that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now.
Aye, aye! he shouted with a terrific, loud, animal sob,
like that of a heart-stricken moose.
Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale that razeed me.
Made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!
Then tossing both arms,
with measureless imprecations he shouted out, Aye, aye!
And I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the horn,
and round the Norway maelstrom.
And round perdition's flames before I give him up.
And this is what ye have shipped for, men!
To chase that white whale on both sides of land,
and over all sides of earth,
till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out.
What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now?
I think ye do look brave.
Aye, aye! shouted everybody.
Okay, so. All right.
So the men are all psyched, but what do they know, right?
Dumb heathens, right?
Starbuck, who clearly starts to serve as a kind
of conscience of the voyage.
I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too,
Captain Ahab, if it fairly comes in the way
of the business we follow.
But I came here to hunt whales, not my commander's vengeance.
How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even
if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab?
It will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market.
Okay. This is where our experience
with difference discourses, coming against one another,
comes, it will be helpful to us.
He is invoking the discourse of business and economy.
What they've signed up for, right?
They are the designated agents of the owners of the Pequod.
They each are going to receive a share of the proceeds.
They need to catch whales, and they need
to catch a lot of them.
They stay out on the sea for two,
three years until their holds are full of whale oil.
And then they go back and they sell their oil,
and they all make their money.
Assuming the price of oil does not precipitously drop,
which in a few years it actually does.
But that's not for here.
Looking for one whale out of a whole sea?
That doesn't seem very profitable.
Won't fetch thee much in your Nantucket market, right?
Ahab has a rejoinder.
Nantucket market!
Hoot! But come closer, Starbuck.
Thou requirest a little lower layer.
If money's to be the measurer, man,
and the accountants have computed their great
counting-house the globe, by girdling it with guineas,
one to every three parts of an inch.
Then, let me tell thee, that my vengeance will fetch a great
premium here!
He smites his chest, whispered Stubb.
What's that for?
Methinks it rings most vast, but hollow.
Now I want you to think about Emerson
for a moment, among other people.
Think about what Emerson says about joint stock companies,
and what economy does to people.
It gives them this sense of false goods.
He wants them to wake up and spring to the truth.
There's a sense in which Ahab is sampling rephrasing what Emerson
has already told us.
Is money supposed to be the measure of a man?
But Starbuck won't let it go,
because there's another way of thinking about it.
Vengeance on a dumb brute!
cried Starbuck, that simply smote thee
from blindest instinct!
Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing,
Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.
Right? Okay.
It's just an animal.
It struck you because you were chasing it.
It didn't mean anything.
It was an accident of the fishery.
This is another affront to Ahab, perhaps an even worse one.
And it's something he can't abide.
And so look at the long speech that he gives
on the next, top of the next page.
Hark ye yet again, the little lower layer.
And now he's going into something
that we might call a kind of metaphysical key.
Certainly this resonates with platonic philosophy
on the one hand, you know.
The idea that ideas are the real reality,
rather than particular manifestations.
I think we've talked about this with the Puritans as well.
Something about the pneumenal world,
the world of spirit rather
than the phenomenal world, the world of matter.
That's what's the real thing, the world up there.
Hark ye yet again, the little lower layer.
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.
All right, think of the signals he's sending.
Visible objects is just a mask.
The true meaning, the true reality is somewhere behind what
we see.
Behind the material world.
Think of the number of writers in our course with whom
that would resonate positively.
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.
And remember where the word inscrutable comes up.
It comes up in Puritan discourse all the time,
right, inscrutable.
God is inscrutable.
What does it mean if the whale is inscrutable,
or the thing behind the whale is inscrutable?
And this is the sentence I want you to keep in mind.
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.
Principal and agent again is mostly economic language, right?
I mean the owners of the Pequod are the principals.
The sailors are agents.
Ahab is in a somewhat ambiguous position since he's both.
He's both a co-owner and one
of the chief agents executing the intention of the owners.
And that's what agents do, they execute intentions.
Is the white whale an agent for something else?
Executing some other intention for some other being?
If so, what?
Is the white whale a principal working on its own intention?
Whatever it is, it's that intentional thing
that Ahab wants to give to.
So if it's the white whale itself, fine.
Kill it, we got rid of the intending thing.
If the white whale is working on behalf of something else,
no other access to the intending thing
than through the white whale.
What I want you to see is that however you construe it,
it construes that there is intention.
He is refuting with, he cannot stand the idea
that Starbuck has given us on the previous page.
That it was just instinct.
That there was no meaning in it at all.
I want you to think about this logic.
We've seen it before, right?
Who is that looks at every little thing,
and some big things, and thinks there's meaning behind it?
That it's part of a larger plan.
That there's intention.
That there's providence, right?
This is a weird kind of Puritan-like thinking.
Ahab shares with the Puritans a certain kind
of haunt to the imagination.
So that even if he is a Quaker ostensibly,
you say it's a mutated form of Quakers and it has a lot
of seeming fundamentalism built into it.
This idea of intentionality, of fatedness,
of things meaning things.
Except in his case, it's become kind of inverted.
And again, there's a kind of epic motif here as well, right?
Where is that we would see the sun actually come
down in a battlefield and content with a human being,
if not on the pages of Homer, right?
When Apollo comes and fights on the side of the Trojans,
among many different examples.
Ahab, therefore, figures himself
as in fact what we've heard earlier.
As this ungodly, god-like man.
He's willing to be what Starbuck thinks of as blasphemous.
[ Silence ]
And he understands that he has a certain kind
of persuasive power, right?
What has he done, in other words?
He has taken an economic discourse.
He's appropriated the terms of that economic discourse,
agent and principal, and turned them into kind
of a philosophical or metaphysical key
so that they come to mean something different.
It's almost a reverse, you might say, of what Peleg
and Bildad have done to Ishmael on the ship.
But he isn't done yet.
He needs to seal the deal.
So at the top of 141.
The measure!
The measure!
cried Ahab.
Receiving the brimming pewter, and turning to the harpooneers,
he ordered them to produce their weapons.
Then ranging them before him near the capstan,
with their harpoons in their hands,
while his three mates stood at his side with their lances,
and the rest of the ship's company formed a circle round
the group.
Right? So they're all at the center, everybody's in a circle.
There's clearly some kind of ritual about to take place.
He stood for an instant searchingly eyeing every man
of his crew.
Right? He's the boss, but he's going to make a kind
of personal connection to all of them.
He knows how to manipulate.
You can see what this is, is a scene in which,
of ideological persuasion which he is bending them
from one mission to another.
Or perhaps revealing the true measure, the true mission
that he thinks they signed up for.
But he's got to persuade them.
He's only one guy.
If they all ban against him in mutiny he can't do anything.
So he has a certain position of authority,
but he needs to seal the deal.
He needs to get them to believe
that his mission is their mission.
First thing to do, drink together.
That always is good, right?
Drink and pass!
And drink in a ritual way.
The crew alone now drink.
Round with it, round!
Short draughts, long swallows, men.
Tis hot as Satan's hoof.
So, so, it goes round excellently.
It spiralizes in ye.
Forks out at the serpent-snapping eye.
Well done, almost drained.
Steward, refill!
Okay. It's clearly a scene of communion, right?
So we have a lot of religious imagery here,
but it's being manipulated.
It's hot as Satan's hoof.
We're going to drink together.
We're going to have this kind of communal moment.
It is a kind of Satanic communion.
And remember what I said, right?
Melville reverses his own voyage.
He sends the Pequod out east where he went west.
He goes around.
Melville himself goes around South American and Cape Horn.
The Pequod goes around the Cape of Good Hope and Africa.
What else is it a reversal of?
It's also a reversal of the Puritans coming from Europe,
sailing west to the New World.
These guys sail east.
And as they leave the New World, they have this kind
of devil communion here.
There's again a kind of weird playing with it,
as if Ahab is part of a kind of new.
He's part of a tradition that's, in which the terms are set
by New England fundamentalism, but he's reversed them
in strange ways for his own particular purposes.
He's not done yet.
Advance, ye mates!
Cross your lances full before me, at the bottom of 141.
Well done!
Let me touch the axis.
So saying, with extended arm, he grasped the three level,
radiating lances at their crossed centre.
While so doing, suddenly and nervously twitched them.
Meanwhile, glancing intently from Starbuck to Stubb,
from Stubb to Flask, it seemed as though,
by some nameless interior volition, he would fain,
have shocked into them the same fiery emotion accumulated
within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life.
And then what does he do?
He asks the three harpooners to detach the iron part
of their harpoons, turning those into chalices.
He fills those and forces the mates,
who are basically the masters, each one, of a harpooner,
to become the cup bearers.
So this is the middle of 142.
Stab me not with that keen steel!
Cant them, cant them over!
Know ye not the goblet end?
Turn up the socket!
So, so, now, ye cup-bearers, advance.
The irons, take them.
Hold them while I fill!
Now three to three, ye stand.
Commend the murderous chalices!
Bestow them, ye who are now made parties
to this indissoluble league.
This is the oath that they all swear together
over against what Starbuck has asked them to do, right?
And it's done through a mixture of ritual that is a blend
of kind of Christian ritual and pagan ritual.
And it has a lot of ***.
It's ideological persuasion in action, right?
What happens?
Melville wants, or Ishmael wants, one of the two of them,
wants to register how radical a gesture this has been.
And so what happens is that Ishmael disappears
from the narrative for a number of chapters.
And these chapters turn instead to about
to be dramatic chapters.
In fact, they're soliloquys.
The first one, the Sunset chapter, is Ahab's soliloquy.
And there are people who have actually said
that it's Shakespearean in his language.
Somebody's actually rearranged this into blank verse lines
and it works pretty well, so it's got that kind
of Shakespearean cadence.
I won't read it to you, but I'll point
out one interesting image at the end of 143.
He's talking about people who are fighting against by,
they're kind of, they have rifles.
They're behind cotton bags.
Ahab says, Come forth from behind your cotton bags!
I have no long gun to reach ye.
Come, Ahab's compliments to ye.
Come and see if ye can swerve me.
Swerve me?
Ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves!
Man has ye there.
Swerve me?
Look at this one.
The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails,
whereon my soul is grooved to run.
Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains,
under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush!
Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way!
Of what is that an image?
What's he evoking there?
How does he metaphorize himself?
>> Student: It's a trade.
>> Teacher: Yes, it's a trade, right?
So he is linking himself to the very emblem
of American progress, right?
Capturing that imagery of, you know, the Americans taking
over the continent through canals and rail building.
But it's an image of purpose.
And he says, you know, my purpose is fixed.
I can't be served.
So think about that as an image of agency.
What agency does the railroad engine have?
It goes from its starting point to its destination
on these unbending rails.
But can it deviate at all?
It has a fixed purpose.
Does it have agency?
Is it simply not acting under orders
that have been given to it?
The place on a rail, it's been sent, you go forward.
There's a limited amount of shifting to do.
And even when a train shifts it's not even the engineer
who can do it, right?
The train rails need to be shifted by someone else.
It's a kind of paradoxical image of power.
Ishmael has Ahab evoking this as an image
of his fixed purpose and his power.
But I want you to see there's a kind of ambivalent image
in which the dynamics of agency are very much constrained.
Couple of other things to know.
So each of the other mates get their chapter.
Starbuck gets his.
Again, realizing he is a testimony in some sense.
He sees what's going on, but he's almost powerless
to do anything about it, right?
Take a look at the top of 144.
My soul is more than matched.
She's overmanned and by a madman!
He drilled deep down, and blasted all my reason out of me!
I think I see his impious end;
but feel that I must help him to it.
Will I, nill I, right there, where's his agency there?
The ineffable thing has tied me to him.
Tows me with a cable I have no knife to cut.
Horrible old man!
Who's over him, he cries.
Aye, he would be a democrat to all above.
Namely he says I can, you know, God has to come down to my life,
and go to God so I can fight the sun.
Look how he lords it over all below.
Oh! I plainly see my miserable office, to obey, rebelling.
And worse yet, to hate with touch of pity!
We'll come back to this, but there's a sense again
of a sympathy between Starbuck and Ahab, as if Ahab seems
to Starbuck a thing that he himself, Starbuck,
could easily become and with whom he has sympathy.
The next mate, jolly Stubb.
Again these are all versions of Ahab, you might say,
and possibly of Ishmael as well.
But look at this line here.
So Stubb is the one who is the comic force.
Ha! ha! ha!
Clear my throat!
I've been thinking over it ever since, and ha,
that's the final consequence.
Why so? Because a laugh's the wisest,
easiest answer to all that's ***.
And come what will, one comfort always left,
that unfailing comfort is, it's all predestinated.
So that might remind us in this course of Edward Taylor, right?
I mean taking a kind of comic view of this idea of providence
and predestination, and a potential lack of agency.
Who bolds the sun, right?
It's kind of funny at the beginning
of God's determinations.
[ Student sneezes ]
Bless you.
But notice how the thing
that gives Stubb comfort here is precisely the thing
that drives Ahab mad.
The fact that it's all predestinated.
Well, which is it?
Is predestinated something
that should drive us crazy and feel tragic?
Provoke kind of war-like epic responses?
Or should it just allow us to, you know, take it as it comes.
Enjoy our life.
Do what we need to do, and not worry
about the larger meanings of it all?
The point is, someone like Stubb can do that.
Ahab can't.
So again, we have a collision of perspectives.
Both of them believe in predestination,
but there are radically different ways to do it.
Which way in the end will win out?
Then Chapter 40 gives us a kind
of mad Walpurgisnacht, as in Goethe's Faust.
Kind of, you know, a night where seemingly spirits come out.
Won't go through it all,
but there's lots of different voices.
Kind of weird racist thing going on with Daggoo.
I'm getting into a fight in the center.
It kind of, you might say,
it takes the whole dramatic portion of this to a climax.
And then we get to the top of 152.
The chapter that's called Moby ***, and Ishmael is back.
[ Silence ]
And again, what we've had is a text
that was disrupted, textually, right?
Ahab's disruption of the voyage is signaled textually
by disruption of the stopalistic [assumed spelling] form
of the text.
It's almost now as if Ishmael asks us to come back
to personal narrative, but we have to go back
and rethink everything.
We have to go back at least to the quarter-deck
and rethink what Ahab's role was and what Ishmael's role was.
Because I, Ishmael, was one of that crew.
My shouts had gone up with the rest.
My oath had been welded with theirs.
And stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath,
because of the dread in my soul.
A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me.
Now remember we've seen the seeds of that sympathy planted
as soon as he heard Ahab's name.
Ahab's quenchless feud seemed mine.
With greedy ears I learned the history
of that murderous monster against whom I
and all the others had taken our oaths of violence and revenge.
Right? So what I said before was, what Ahab needs
to do is he can't just order it.
He needs to get them to believe.
This paragraph here indicates the extent
to which he's gotten them to believe.
So much so that to register,
Ishmael has to basically lose himself in the oath
and the events that follow from it.
And only then manage retrospectively
to reassert himself.
Right? So it's almost as if the narrative happens with him,
and then he has to go back and reinject him.
And we have to try to reinject him ourselves back
into the narrative.
That's how effective, you might say, it's been.
Ahab has completely taken over them.
Their identities have become completely linked
to this idea of the mission.
Now I want to show you, I'll end today with one other chapter.
It's called The Chart in which Ishmael tries to account
for Ahab, using that same language of agent and principal.
This is on page 166.
It's Chapter 44.
And it's one of these strange split chapters.
It starts off one way and ends another.
It's about trying to chart the progress of the whale.
Ahab has all these whale charts.
I meant to bring one together.
I'll start next time with a whale chart
so that you can see it.
I mean you think this is kind of crazy.
In a sense it is, but in a sense it isn't.
Though whale ships all tend to follow a similar track.
I mean they know from experience where the populations
of whales go to at different times of the year.
They know where they're going to be birthing,
where they're going to be hunting.
Where they're going to be doing what.
So they all fall a similar track.
That's how come whale ships can run into each other
on the ocean, and we'll talk
about the Gam chapters next time.
Ahab is trying to map.
He's trying to pursue a route
that will give him the greatest chance of finding Moby ***.
He has an idea of where he will eventually find him.
Back where in fact he had that first confrontation with him.
But he's hoping to go in such a route
that he might encounter him along the way.
And there's a suggestion with that,
that stuff about the spirit spout.
And that in fact Moby *** may be playing with them
and being not too far away from them all along.
But one of the things that the chapter here suggests is
that rational belief and scientific methods
and empiricism will only take you so far.
That maybe where Moby *** is concerned,
the rules don't tend to apply.
And that's what Ishmael tries to get
at at the end of this chapter.
Take a look on page 169.
[ Silence ]
This is into the first full paragraph on 169.
Ahab is asking himself, And have I not tallied the whale,
Ahab would mutter to himself, as after poring
over his charts till long
after midnight he would throw himself back
in reveries, tallied him.
And shall he escape?
His broad fins are bored, and scalloped
out like a lost sheep's ear!
Ishmael pulls back, Ah, God!
What trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed
with one unachieved revengeful desire.
He sleeps with clenched hands,
and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms.
Another image of crucifixion.
And we might think of again part
of what Melville is exploring is what Hawthorne explored
in the Scarlet Letter with Chillingworth,
a kind of psychology, the demented obsession of revenge.
And then Ishmael tries to get into Ahab's head, right?
And this is another one of these chapters
where Ishmael is clearly trying to look at things.
He's looking at things that he can't possibly have seen,
so he's describing things that he's only imagined.
So we need to take this all with a grain of salt.
Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting
and intolerably vivid dreams of the night.
Which, resuming his own intense thoughts through the day,
carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies,
and whirled them round and round in his blazing brain,
till the very throbbing
of his life-spot became insufferable anguish.
And when, as was sometimes the case, these spiritual throes
in him heaved his being up from its base,
and a chasm seemed opening in him.
Now remember, he thought that what he figured himself,
Ahab was, as a train crossing gorges.
Here we have a chasm opening in himself from which forked flames
and lightnings shot up.
Again, imagery of hell and fire and lightning.
When this hell in himself yawned beneath him,
a wild cry would be heard through the ship.
And with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room,
as though escaping from a bed that was on fire.
And I think there's more than a little overtones
of Milton's Satan here, right?
A hell in himself.
What Satan realizes in Paradise Lost is
that hell is not a particular place.
Hell is wherever Satan is, because he's been cast
out of the sight of God.
Now it's the insight that Satan has that Melville seems
to think suggests that we should have about Ahab as well.
Now listen to the language of agency.
Yet these, perhaps, instead
of being the unsuppressable symptoms
of some latent weakness, or fright at his own resolve,
were but the plainest tokens of its intensity.
For, at such times crazy Ahab, the scheming,
unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the White Whale,
this Ahab that had gone to his hammock was not the agent
that so caused him to burst from it in horror again.
The latter was the eternal, living principle or soul in him
which at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or agent.
It spontaneously sought escape from the scorching contiguity
of the frantic thing of which, for the time,
it was no longer an integral.
But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul,
therefore it must have been that, in Ahab's case,
yielding up all his thoughts and fancies
to his one supreme purpose.
That purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will,
forced itself against gods and devils into a kind
of self-assumed, independent being of its own.
Right? What we have here is a fracturing of personality,
a fracturing of agency.
And Ishmael uses all this language.
But ask yourself whether it really all makes sense.
Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality
to which it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken
from the unbidden and unfathered birth.
Right? The revenge is so powerful
that it takes on a life of its own.
It gets Ahab soul fleeing from it, and then when Ahab jumps
out of bed he's this kind of formless.
Thinking of Edgar Huntley's somnambulistic being.
A ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object
to color, and therefore a blankness in itself.
A whiteness, therefore not unlike a certain other whiteness
that is in fact its obsession.
One last thing.
God help thee, old man,
thy thoughts have created a creature in thee.
And he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus.
A vulture feeds upon that heart for ever,
that vulture the very creature he creates.
We all know the Prometheus myth.
What's the name of the modern Prometheus?
It's a book that Melville read shortly before writing
Moby ***.
It's what?
>> Student: I'll say Frankenstein.
>> Teacher: Frankenstein.
The unfathered and unbiddened birth.
Let's take it up from there next time.