Response Journal Week 5 - Caleb

Harrison Hayford’s “Loomings,” I thought, had some fascinating ideas. Although the whole essay at times seemed a bit strained or tenuous, Hayford’s highlighting of each chapter as “frequently constructed on a pattern of confrontation-exploration-nonsolution of a problem” (659) I though shed light on the problem we’ve been discussing for much of the semester: Melville’s cohesiveness. We’ve discussed how, as readers, we are supposed to reconcile the fact that Ishmael/Melville jumps around a lot, between what would seem like random subjects. However, this form of confrontation-explanation-frustration, a pattern that I now notice in even the most trivial chapters (“The Line”, for example), helps me to make sense of the book as a whole. As Hayford asserts, one extremely important theme in the novel is “that of confronting an insoluble problem.” (659) This brings to mind the quote from “Cetology,” where, after spending several pages trying to explain and classify types of whales for the reader, Melville/Ishmael gets fed up and exclaims, “God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught--- nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!” (125) This, to me, gives Hayford’s chapter formula a more large-scale application. The whole book, as the sum of its chapters, could be seen as following the “confrontation-exploration-nonsolution” format. Though it is a confrontation with a larger theme (the contents could be debated), it is Ahab’s confrontation with Moby-Dick, which, I predict, will end up in a nonsolution.
The second critical work I read was Camille Paglia’s “Moby-Dick¬ as Sexual Protest,” in which Paglia argues that Melville struggles to make Moby-Dick a primarily masculine book, contrasting the masculine titular whale with the fleeting feminine squid. Though I didn’t quite agree with (or perhaps totally grasp) Paglia’s assertion, one of her ideas caught my interest. Paglia claims that Melville, in his “nonfiction sections… aspires to epistemology, organizing the known, if only to dramatize that which is unknown. “ (697) This provides an interesting and plausible explanation for Melville’s constant catalogues. Perhaps all of this listing and stress on the known (things like cetology, currents, the artistic history of the whale) serve only to highlight the real focus of the book: that which is unknown. This fits back in with Hayford’s idea that the whole book is about the impossibility of confronting the unknown.
Hayford’s other assertion, that of Ishmael’s attitude toward dominance, I didn’t understand as fully, though I was reminded of it in “Brit”, Ishmael asserts that “the masterless ocean overruns the globe” (224). The Town-Ho’s Story seemed to me an early incarnation of “Billy Budd”, and I saw the same themes of fatalism we’ve been discussing woven throughout the story, with sentences like,“… a strange fatality pervades the whole career of these events, as if verily mapped out before the world itself was charted.” (212) or “but, gentlemen, the fool had been branded for the slaughter by the Gods” (204).