Response Journal Week 6 and 7 - Caleb

In this rather large reading, from chapter 61-89, I noticed that, despite its bulk, not much action takes place in this reading. Of these 29 chapters, 23 are what I call ‘documentary chapters’, which have little significance to the actual storyline, instead explaining a certain aspect of whaling or describing a concept or object (viz. ‘Cutting In’, ‘Fast Fish and Loose Fish’, ‘The Right Whale’s Head’). Though this can be extremely frustrating, I kept noticing the same confrontation-exploration-frustration form that Hayford illustrated in his essay on “Loomings”, especially the final stage of frustration. Though he starts them by asserting his factual and practical intention (“Now comes the Baling of the Case” (268), “Let us, then, look at this matter, along with some interesting items contingent” (290), etc,) Melville often ends these documentary chapters with open-ended question (Chs. 65, 69, 75, 76, 78, 79, 82, 86, 89, 92), which have no empirical answer. The chapter “The Tail” illustrates this ending best. It starts out with the intention to explain the titular tail of the whale. However, typically of Melville, it ends with frustration. “The more I consider this mighty tail,” writes Melville, “the more do I deplore deeply my inability to express it… dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will” (296). It is this procession from empirical knowledge to abstract philosophy which gives the book form and purpose, and allows Melville to use these documentary chapters without the reader feeling that his or her time was completely wasted. It is a perfect example of using what you know (whaling) to explore what you don’t.

This process is what F. O. Matthiessen calls “nailing… drama to actuality” (416). Matthiessen asserts that “it prevents the drama from gliding off into a world to which we would feel no normal tie whatever.” (416) Thus, every supernatural or incredible phenomenon in “Moby-Dick” is tied to a physical sensory object, or rational explanation. For example, the phenomenal ubiquity of the Great White Whale is explained by several obscure mythological passageways. Writes Melville, “these fabulous narrations are almost fully equaled by the realities of the whaleman” (155). Even Fedallah’s appearance has both a phenomenal and realistic explanation. Stubb opines, “…I take that Fedallah to be the devil in disguise. Do you believe that cock and bull story about his having been stowed away in board ship?” (259). In this case, the lines between rational and fantastical are blurred: Stubb believes the rational explanation to be fantastical, and the fantastical explanation to be rational. In the same way, Melville gives us many situations (the phantom spout, the circling schools of whales, the fields of brit, etc.) with both a fantastical, or otherworldly explanation, and a rational, scientific explanation.

Another aspect of the novel that supports this tension between the fantastical and the rational is Melville’s constant anthropomorphization of animals, and his constant comparisons of creatures to people. “In man or fish,” writes Melville, “wriggling is a sign of inferiority” (294). He is constantly giving human traits and feelings to whales (such as, on pg. 306, where he writes about the ‘Lothario whale’, or Melville’s “And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast Fish, too?” (310)). Fleece says, of Stubb, “I’m bressed if he ain’t more of a shark dan Massa Shark hisself” (240), which is almost the opposite of anthropomorphizing, giving animal characteristics to humans (antianthropomorphization?).

Melville not only compares humans to whales, but encourages us to act more like them (“Oh man! Admire and model thyself after the whale! (247), “Has the Sperm Whale ever written a book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in his doing nothing particular to prove it” (274)). He not only exhorts man to be more like whale, but chides man in his inability to be as great as the natural world: “…there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men” (300). Among these is the poetic analogy of the whale’s fountain to the human mind. Melville writes, “For, d’ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air; they only irradiate vapor. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray” (293).

In addition to comparing and equating humans with beasts, Melville goes even further to connect man with nature, specifically the sea. Writes Melville, “…amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy” (303). Ishmael often becomes one with nature while on board the Pequod. Earlier in the novel, Ishmael says that he is “…lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible imagine of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every… dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some indiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts…” (136) Ishmael also describes a similar period at sea more spiritually, declaring that “…at last my soul went out of my body; though my body continued to sway as a pendulum will, long after the power which first moved it is withdrawn” (230). Ahab too picks up on this transcendentalist connection. In chapter 71, he opines, “O Nature, and O soul of man! How far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! Not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.” This “duplicate” could account for the dual-explanations prevalent throughout the book, the fantastical and the rational.

Also having to do with this connection between whale and man, and the impossibility of knowing them both, is the facial “hieroglyphics” we see throughout the novel. In addition to Queequeg’s mysterious facial tattoos, the whale itself has a hieroglyphic face (246), and Fedallah’s tusk is “’sort of carved into a snake’s head’” (259).