Uncategorized

An Eight-Sided Circle

Jeff Anderson2 Comments

“A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.”

William Blake.

Ah, “The Doubloon.” This is my kind of chapter (ch. 99). It’s all about interpretation, or the search for (and imposition of) meaning. It explicitly dramatizes the process we all go through every day, where we take notice of part of the world (something that is the case) and create a way of understanding it as it relates to our lives. This is a very normal part of the way human beings interact with our surroundings, and is in fact necessary to formulating the narratives we recognize as our selves and our lives.

Note that this is not the argument Ishmael makes in favor of interpretation. He says, “And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher.” In his view, what gives the world worth is the significance in it that can be divined by human beings; the world has meaning insofar as it means something to people, but no intrinsic value. This seems to me an extreme anthropocentric view, but not necessarily an uncommon one. Just an unreflective one.

So in the course of this dramatization of interpretation, we see eight different characters all try their hand at “reading” the doubloon that Ahab nailed to the mast at the beginning of their voyage as a guaranty to the sailor who first raises Moby Dick. (Other than the obvious meaning, of course, which is the one they all drank to during that weird ceremony.) Ahab’s interpretation, while dramatic and almost mythologically Norse in its pessimism, is also kind of funny: Looking at the various devices on the coin—mountains with fire, a tower, and a crowing rooster, and a segment of the zodiac—he sees Lucifer, Ahab, Ahab, Ahab, and the unrelieved misery of life, which begins in pains and ends in pangs. But also, it’s not for nothing that Ishmael keeps calling Ahab “monomaniacal.” This is very nearly solipsism in action.

Starbuck starts out as a foil to Ahab in his reading—he sees the mountains as a symbol of the Trinity, so that even when he passes through the dark valley between them, God still strengthens him and the “sun of Righteousness” still shines down on him—but then he remembers that the sun is only up about half the time, on average, which leaves human beings looking for hope and comfort much of the time (wait for it) in the dark. So even though he finds some devotional meaning in the doubloon, it is on the whole a somewhat depressing exegesis for Starbuck. Nonetheless, it’s a pretty clear application of the hermeneutic method involved in reading the Book of Nature, whereby everything created has a theological lesson within it, if you can just find the key.

Then Stubb gets up and sneaks in two interpretations. In the first one, he sees the doubloon as a piece of money, just as good for spending in commerce as any other piece of money. It’s a wonderful puncturing of the portentous mode Ahab and Starbuck both operate in, but it’s also a welcome nod to the fact that objects and experiences are embedded in the world and entangled with other people and places. Both Ahab and Starbuck find insular, self-centered meanings in the doubloon, but Stubb instead immediately recognizes how the doubloon is enmeshed with the rest of the world. Then he looks more carefully, convinced by Ahab and Starbuck’s long faces that there must be a deeper meaning, and descries a very long zodiacal version of the Sphinx’s riddle that supposedly charts a universal course for the life of man. (Women don’t count for much on a whaler, you might have noticed.)

When Flask looks at the doubloon, he literally sees nothing but the monetary value of it. (A special note from my Norton Critical Edition, on Flask’s line “It is worth sixteen dollars, that’s true; and at two cents the cigar, that’s nine hundred and sixty cigars”: “The arithmetic seems shaky.”) Unlike Stubb, he doesn’t seek a deeper meaning; he’s satisfied with his pragmatic observation of “a round thing made of gold.” I see this version as an important recognition of the thingness of the doubloon, regardless of what meanings a more reader-response-type approach yields.

The Manxman uses his special training in esoterica to identify the doubloon as half of a zodiacal prophecy of when the ship will encounter Moby Dick. I read this one as a small parody, actually. Daryl brought our attention to prophecy in the novel, and there’s always the possibility that’s at play here, but this one is so general that I suspect it’s much more like an ancestor of Maslow’s hammer. The Manxman knows something most people don’t, and everything he sees tends to be through that lens.

Queequeg comes in for comic relief, mistaking the doubloon for a fancy button. There may be a point to make here about constructed reality—if Queequeg’s pants lose a button and he sews a doubloon on in its place, that doubloon is now a button (as well as a doubloon and whatever else it may be)—but I wouldn’t want to strain that one too much, so I’ll just say it’s possible.

And then Pip. Pip is a character who makes me very sad, so I’m uncomfortable reading his mad babble anyway, but here it also feels to me like the kind of thing that might mean something if you try very hard to interpret it, but then probably won’t turn out to have been worth the trouble. So I don’t try. (My white flag, I wave it.) His reading of the doubloon can, however, illustrate the troubled extremity of personal meaning-making, since the significance he finds is available to him only. That is, even though he apparently finds some meaningful content in the doubloon, he can’t share it with anyone, because he spends most of his “on-screen” time in an interpretive community of one.

It’s very interesting to me that this chapter comes so late in the book. In a way, it’s kind of a programmatic chapter; it announces the book’s concern with meaning and interpretation by showing characters interpreting an object to create meaning. (I love that trick.) But I have a feeling that passages doing this work so explicitly usually come much earlier in books where they appear, to give the reader fair warning of what’s afoot—and to give us a chance to play along. Curious, then, that it’s only near the end that we’re asked to start looking for Rashomon Dick, the Allegedly White Whale.

Which edition of Ulysses is best?

Judd30 Comments

Hello. Let me introduce myself: my name is Judd, and I’ll be joining the group in some sort of “coordinator” capacity for the upcoming read of Ulysses. Daryl gave me a very nice introduction in his introductory post last week, but I feel I should make one thing very clear from the outset: I am not an expert. I am a student, and a lover of all things Joyce, but I don’t want to present myself as anything more. I’ve read Ulysses a few times, and the rest of Joyce’s work (although I resist using the past tense of the verb “read” in reference to the Wake; but I’ll save that discussion for the end of this whole project), and a fair amount of Joyce criticism (much of which I am certain to be ripping off throughout my discussion of this book, mostly unconsciously: I will do my best to acknowledge my sources when I can remember/find them, but as many great Joyceans have acknowledged, reading Joyce is a collaborative process)– but I’m sure there will be plenty of people here who know more than me, or catch me on mistakes, or just really disagree with me. And I welcome that– it’s what this is all about, right?

So anyway, this is my first post, and we’re a little over two weeks away from our start date, but I wanted to address one question that every new reader of Ulysses faces: what are all these different editions, and which one should I read?  A great overview of the different editions is available here (scroll down to “Which Edition?”): I’ll be basing my commentary largely on what they’ve already said, just throwing in my own two cents. Also, for anyone who is interested in the whole history of the text and its history of censorship, pirating, copyright disputes, and academic squabbles, the book to read is Bruce Arnold’s The Scandal of Ulysses: The Life and Afterlife of a Twentieth-Century Masterpiece, which will give you more information than you could possibly ask for, and is a hell of a read.

Essentially, there are three major versions of the Ulysses text, and then one very strange fourth version. First, there is the 1922 first edition text, which went out of copyright in the 1990s, spawning a host of “facsimile” editions. This version is rife with typos and printing errors: the first edition was rushed to the printers amidst all sorts of difficulties and, needless to say, with a complex book like Ulysses it’s pretty easy for mistakes to seep in. (Another book recommendation: there’s a great study by Tim Conley on the role of error in Joyce’s writing and in Joyce scholarship: Joyces Mistakes [title punctuation sic].) If you do a basic Amazon search for Ulysses, these facsimiles are the first things that pop up. I’d avoid them.

The next edition is the 1934 text, published after the ban on Ulysses in America was lifted, and reset in 1961. This was the standard edition for several decades, and any Joyce criticism written in the mid-century heyday of Joyce-studies will refer to it. There are two versions of this available: a Vintage paperback, and a Modern Library hardcover.  I have the Modern Library edition for a “reading” (as opposed to “studying”) copy, and that’s the version I’d recommend for someone reading the book for pleasure: it’s got a great binding, it’s easy to hold, it lies flat, it has nice quality paper. It’s just a nice book.

But then there’s the third version of the text: Hans Walter Gabler’s famous/infamous “Corrected” edition. Published in 1984, Gabler’s edition reflects over a decade of close, careful work with various manuscripts and notes from the Joyce archives, introducing thousands of changes, most small but some very significant. It was met with initial enthusiasm from Joyce scholars: here is a positive review (spoiler alert, though, insofar as any review of something like this is going to talk about stuff that happens late in the book) from no less a “name” than Richard Ellmann, author of the definitive Joyce biography.  However, several years later, once the Gabler edition had basically become the only one on the market, all hell broke loose. It all started with a lengthy essay by John Kidd exploring all of the problems with Gabler’s editorial process, and claiming that he introduced more errors into the text, rather than correcting it. However, rather than get into the details of the whole “scandal,” I’d just refer you to Bruce Arnold’s excellent book (cited above), which documents the whole affair. Suffice it to say that the Gabler edition remains the standard edition used by Joyce scholars and academics, so if you think you might want to publish an article in the James Joyce Quarterly some day, you should probably be working with this edition. But it is an unwieldy, ugly book, as an object, and the paperback version has a binding that comes apart. Just so you know.

And then there’s this crazy-ass “Reader’s Edition” edited by Danis Rose, which seeks to simplify the text and about which probably the less said the better. (I’ll simply refer you back the Modern Word, and let their comments on it stand here.)

One area in which I am woefully unable to comment is regarding the e-book versions available, so I’d like to invite anyone who has any experience in that area to chime in, in the comments section below. There are some reviews on Amazon here, and there are free versions on Project Gutenberg here, but that’s about as far as I’ve gotten. A friend asked me about an iPad version, and I was like: “Huh?” So, please, if you have any knowledge of this area, help me understand this technological stuff.

One problem we will probably face is keeping our page references together across editions. This is one of that handy things about the Gabler edition: he provides episode and line numbers on every page, which makes referring back to the text very easy. Don Gifford, in Ulysses Annotated (I’m going to post next week on secondary sources, but this is the one book that is basically indispensible, if you want to order ahead), refers to the Gabler edition, but provides page references to the 1961 edition in parentheses, so that’s how I usually track references from edition to edition. I’ll see if I can find anything more useful before my next post.

Which brings me to my conclusion: next week I’ll be writing about secondary sources, websites, and background reading, but in the meantime you might want to order your copy of the book itself. Bottom-line: do you want “Joyce” to tell you the answer to the question “What is the word known to all men?”? Get the Gabler edition. Want to figure it out on your own? Get the 1961 edition.  But either way, you’ll be getting a great book, so don’t let the (fairly minor) differences weigh too much on your mind.

Week #5 Langauge

Paul Debraski10 Comments

I’m reading the Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick.  The edition includes the occasional footnote (and I’m pleased to say very occasional, I didn’t want to get too bogged down in the footers here) which has explained some of the more esoteric words that Melville used.  (These are not the footnotes that Melville has included, although those are here too).

What struck me particularly this week was the euphemisms that Melville/Ishmael uses.  It’s especially funny given how gruesomely explicit he is about so much of the whale.  But I guess even back in 1851 some bodily functions were more acceptable than others.

Someone told me that they hadn’t read Moby-Dick, but they knew it was all subtext about sex anyhow.  On my post from last week, Daryl and I were having a discussion about the not-so-subtle sexual speak in Chapter 78 (Cistern and Buckets) when: “Towards the end, Tashtego has to ram his long pole harder and harder, and deeper and deeper into the Tun” (340).  But, unless Melville decided that he could write a sex story because of a double entendre about sperm (which I don’t think for a second), I don’t see a lot of sex in the book.   Perhaps they were exaggerating.

But back to language.

Melville himself addresses one issue of word usage in Chapter 87 (The Grand Armada) in his footnote.  Ishmael says that when whales reach a certain sense of inertia, they are gallied.

To gally, or gallow, is to frighten excessively – to confound with fright. It is an old Saxon word. It occurs once in Shakespeare: – “The wrathful skies Gallow the very wanderers of the dark And make them keep their caves.” To common language, the word is now completely obsolete. When the polite landsman first hears it from the gaunt Nantucketer, he is apt to set it down as one of the whaleman’s self-derived savageries. Much the same is it with many other sinewy Saxonisms of this sort, which emigrated to New-England rocks with the noble brawn of the old English emigrants in the time of the Commonwealth. Thus, some of the best and furthest-descended English words – the etymological Howards and Percys – are now democratised, nay, plebeianised – so to speak – in the New World (389).

While this isn’t set out as a Melville manifesto to use obscure words or anything, it is interesting that Melville does use words that are in common discourse (we already saw Melville define Gam (in the body of the text) in Chapter 53 (The Gam):

GAM. Noun – A social meeting of two (or more) Whale-ships, generally on a cruising- ground; when, after exchanging hails, they exchange visits by boats’ crews: the two captains remaining, for the time, on board of one ship, and the two chief mates on the other (239).

But these are the two major definitions that Melville supplies.  The other words that I enjoyed were thrown into the text with little fanfare.  Some words were probably in common usage in 1851, and are out of favor now.  Mr. Norton Critical saw fit to footnote a few in this week’s reading though, and they prove to be scandalous!

The first one comes in Chapter 88 (Schools and Schoolmasters).  Ishmael says that the male whale in “charge” of a harem is called a “schoolmaster”

His title, schoolmaster, would very naturally seem derived from the name bestowed upon the harem itself, but some have surmised that the man who first thus entitled this sort of Ottoman whale, must have read the memoirs of Vidocq, and informed himself what sort of a country-schoolmaster* that famous Frenchman was in his younger days, and what was the nature of those occult lessons he inculcated into some of his pupils (392).

* My edition lists this country-schoolmaster note as: “The sort who would seduce the young girls in his charge” (330, Norton).  [Naughty!]  This of course, references the other of Melville’s own notes from Chapter 87:

The Sperm Whale, as with all other species of the Leviathan, but unlike most other fish, breeds indifferently at all seasons (389).

But it’s not all sex in this week’s readings, there’s also fouler stuff.  This particular sentence was so euphemistic, that without the note, I would have never guessed its true intent:

Stubb was struck by a shower of outcries and anathemas proceeding from the Captain’s round-house abaft; and looking in that direction saw a fiery face thrust from behind the door, which was held ajar from within. This was the tormented surgeon, who, after in vain remonstrating against the proceedings of the day, had betaken himself to the Captain’s round-house (cabinet he called it) to avoid the pest; but still, could not help yelling out his entreaties and indignations at times (403).

It’s not even just the strange terms (round-house & cabinet) that are confounding, it’s the whole context.  We know that they are talking about the horrible smell of the dead whale.  But the exclamations and indignations do nothing to reveal this rather simple note:

*The Captain’s privy.  As Bernard Mosher explains, the surgeon prefers the odor of the “cabinet” to that of the blasted whale  (339, Norton). [Ew!]

Moving on to more of this substance, Chapter 92 (Ambergris) has two footnotes.  The first one is totally obvious from context, but I have to wonder if the item in question was so very common at the time.

How to cure such a dyspepsia it were hard to say, unless by administering three or four boat loads of Brandreth’s pills*, and then running out of harm’s way, as laborers do in blasting rocks (407).

Norton notes: *a laxative (343, Norton).  But it’s pretty funny even if you don’t recognize the brand name.

A Google search turns up this charming poster for a Brandreth item.  Heh, there’s also an article from April 1, 1860 in The New York Times, entitled, “Brandreth’s Pills are Excellent Purgative.”

Speaking of this, we get this amusing line about the origins of perfume:

And likewise call to mind that saying of Paracelsus about what it is* that maketh the best musk (407).

Norton: * “What it is” is excrement (343, Norton).

Paracelsus does have quite a bit to say about musk, by the way.  In The Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Paracelsus by Arthur Edward Waite, musk comes up 11 times!  The most relevant would be: “Hence it happens that occasionally some of the excrement is mingled with the musk, because this penetrates more readily than any lily with all its operations” (61).

Moving beyond excrement, the most wonderful euphemism of the bunch calls back to Chapter 3, when Ishamel tries on Queequeg’s “poncho.” Ishamel says: I went up in it to a bit of glass stuck against the wall, and I never saw such a sight in my life. I tore myself out of it in such a hurry that I gave myself a kink in the neck (20).  In Chapter 95 (The Cassock), the whole chapter is about the whale’s penis, but it is never explicitly stated at all.  What you get is (and it’s hard to know where to stop this quote, so many ramifications are there:

Had you stepped on board the Pequod at a certain juncture of this post-mortemizing of the whale; and had you strolled forward nigh the windlass, pretty sure am I that you would have scanned with no small curiosity a very strange, enigmatical object, which you would have seen there, lying along lengthwise in the lee scuppers. Not the wondrous cistern in the whale’s huge head; not the prodigy of his unhinged lower jaw; not the miracle of his symmetrical tail; none of these would so surprise you, as half a glimpse of that unaccountable cone, – longer than a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and jet-black as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg. And an idol, indeed, it is; or, rather, in old times, its likeness was (417).

Norton very simply footnotes the word object as: the whale’s penis (350, Norton).  But what I really enjoyed was the second footnote added to this section.  As Ishmael explains that the mincer then wears the skin of the penis as a kind of poncho so as to make the sheets for the Bible, he comments: “What a candidate for archbishoprick” (418).  Norton notes: “The unusual archaic spelling with final K emphasizes the phallic pun” (351, Norton).  And that is hilarious.  Who even knew it was ever spelled archbishopric?

I’m making a special note about the reference to Kentucky: “longer than a Kentuckian is tall.”  This is the first of two mentions of Kentuckians and their height.  This one seems to suggest that Kentuckians are tall (right?).  The second comes in Chapter 105 (Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish?–Will He Perish?), which implies that Kentuckians are small (right?):

“Because I cannot understand how it is, that while the Egyptian mummies that were buried thousands of years before even Pliny was born, do not measure so much in their coffins as a modern Kentuckian in his socks” (456).

I knew that Melville was from New York, but I can find nothing (with minimal research of course) that ties him to Kentucky.  Was there some kind of common knowledge (or joke) about the height of Kentuckians?  And what on earth would British readers have made of that?

The final joke that I wanted to mention is disgusting, but not bodily.  It comes in Chapter 101 (The Decanter).  It’s kind of a throwaway line (as all the best jokes are), especially as it comes in a lengthy discussion of the ship’s provisions.  He notes:

in short, the bread contained the only fresh fare they had (442).

Which Norton notes: “the fresh fare was maggots or weevils” (370, Norton).

As with most of the lines, it seems like such an obscure little joke that I have to wonder how many people were even meant to get it.  And yet, for those in the know, this is an amusing (if disgusting) moment in an otherwise dry Chapter.

I’m not going to go on record saying that Moby-Dick is a hilarious book or anything like that.  But I keep finding that careful reading (and a little assistance) really highlights some funny word play, comic vignettes and, in this case, gross-out humor.

I’m intrigued by all of the innuendo that these quotes contain.  The jokes are subtle at best, obscure most of the time, and almost totally hidden at worst.  I honestly don’t know what readers knew in 1851.  I don’t know if these were obscure jokes for readers back then.  Or indeed if these were really obvious jokes for everyone but we 21st century readers.  In a text that is pretty dry most of the time, these little jokes really lighten the mood.

This post is a sort of prelude to what I assume is the all-action finale!

Vignettes

Daryl L. L. Houston3 Comments

I have a lot of things I want to write about this week but not a lot of time to do it in, so I’m resorting to little vignettes or teasers.

Prophecy.

There’s a lot of prophecy in Moby-Dick, isn’t there? We start, of course, with Jonah, a reluctant prophet whose fate in the belly of the whale is certainly relevant to the text. Then Peleg mentions (in “The Ship”) an old squaw named Tistig who said that Ahab’s name would be prophetic. The Biblical Ahab was counted a vile king, and Elijah prophesied that the dogs would lick his blood upon his death. This leads nicely into the chapter entitled “The Prophet,” in which a prophet named Elijah has vague, foreboding things to say to Ishmael and Queequeg about the Ahab of Moby-Dick. In chapter 37 (“Sunset”), Ahab soliloquizes about the prophecy that he would lose a limb, and then he himself prophesies that he’ll dismember his dismemberer, planning to become (in a typical Ahabian bit of hubris) “the prophet and the fulfiller one.” In another soliloquy two chapters later, Stubb mentions prophecy and predestination (not so much religious predestination as fate, I think) with respect to Ahab. In “The Mat-Maker,” as Ishmael ruminates on a great big Homeric conceit about fate while weaving a mat with Queequeg, he describes Tashtego (aloft in the rigging with an eye for whales) as seeming a “prophet or seer beholding the shadows of Fate.” We meet another prophet on the Jeroboam who suggests that his (the prophet’s) crew not lower for Moby Dick; when they do, the mate is killed by the beast. This is one of many ominous signs that fairly scream to Ahab and crew to turn away from the vengeful business at hand. In “The Virgin,” Melville quotes from a bit in the book of Job about the leviathan and then mentions the prophets. More about this in the next vignette. Ishmael says that Pip’s misadventure in the deep “ended in providing the sometimes madly merry and predestinated craft with a living and ever accompanying prophecy of whatever shattered sequel might prove her own.”  We learn during the chapter about Queequeg’s coffin that his tattoos relate a theory of heaven and earth as given by a prophet of Queequeg’s tribe. There are other references to prophets here and there but none so interesting as the ones I’ve listed. There’s an important one coming up in chapter 117.

If I had more time, I’d ponder the relationship between fate and prophecy and how that relationship bears on the matter of finding meaning in suffering (which I wrote about before and which I think is another thing central to the book).

Lines

There are miles and miles of line in Moby-Dick, most notably the rigging and ropes for fixing your boat to a whale. There’s the monkey rope. There are the strands of material woven into a mat that serves as a nice model for how Ishmael conceives of fate and will. These opposing ideas are key ideas in the book, and Melville handles them from a number of angles, from philosophical meditations and epic similes on the topic to examples of mutiny (or near-mutiny) that seem to me to represent a loss of (or reclaiming of) free will. The monkey rope chapter illustrates how inextricably linked we are to others (an argument against any fully intact will, I think). This idea meshes very well, I think, with the circumstance of being fixed to a sounding fish. I mention above the reference to Job. Melville gives us this as the boats are chasing and have fixed to a whale that the Virgin has missed. A lengthy quote is unavoidable:

As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down into its eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan or cry of any sort, nay, not so much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its depths; what landsman would have thought, that beneath all that silence and placidity, the utmost monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in agony! Not eight inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows. Seems it credible that by three such thin threads the great Leviathan was suspended like the big weight to an eight day clock. Suspended? and to what? To three bits of board. Is this the creature of whom it was once so triumphantly said–“Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish-spears? The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold, the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon: he esteemeth iron as straw; the arrow cannot make him flee; darts are counted as stubble; he laugheth at the shaking of a spear!” This the creature? this he? Oh! that unfulfilments should follow the prophets. For with the strength of a thousand thighs in his tail, Leviathan had run his head under the mountains of the sea, to hide him from the Pequod’s fish-spears!

What an image! These guys are just sitting there on the still sea with no real idea what’s going on at the end of this rope they’re attached to. The whale could come up and stave their boats or roll over top of them, and though they’ve gotten themselves into the situation by fixing themselves to the whale, their fate after the fact is utterly out of their hands. The same can be said of how the men on the ship fixed themselves to Ahab. (Can probably be said, to some degree or another, of any choice we ever make.)

Blackness of Darkness

This phrase appears two times in Moby-Dick. It’s a striking, redundant-seeming phrase that stands in stark contrast to the whiteness of the whale, which Melville goes at length to position as a thing of terror itself. The relevant passages:

It seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred black faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a black Angel of Doom was beating a book in a pulpit. It was a negro church; and the preacher’s text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there. Ha, Ishmael, muttered I, backing out, Wretched entertainment at the sign of ‘The Trap!’

And:

then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.

There’s an interesting note here on the origin of the phrase (either Carlyle or Jonathan Edwards). Though that article says there’s no scriptural source for the quote, I find that the King James version of the Bible uses the phrase in Jude 1. I don’t have much in the way of analysis of this. It’s merely a striking phrase, repeated.

Mountains

And finally, an intratextual similarity of image that I’m surely not the first among this group to have noticed but that I wanted to bring up anyway. The first occurrence we find in “The Try-Works.” Ishmael has fallen asleep at his post and has managed to turn himself around. He’s confused and terrified for a moment before he gets his bearings. From a Biblical consideration of this event, he derives the pretty heavy statement that “there is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness,” and then he goes on to describe an eagle flying in the mountains. Even when at his lowest, that eagle, by virtue of being in the mountains, still flies higher than the highest among those not in the mountains. Such, I suppose, is the wisdom — or perhaps rather the woe — of Ahab.

In “The Doubloon,” we have this interesting presentation of people watching people watching people talk to themselves about the doubloon Ahab has nailed to the mast. Ahab sees in the mountains pictured on the coin his own firmness, courage, and victorious spirit. He sees himself in the gold coin. Starbuck, by contrast, marks the valleys and sees the peaks not as the expression of human achievement or virtue but as the Trinity. The coin is not a mirror in which one sees himself, to Starbuck, but is rather a beacon radiating the sweet solace of God (and its absence from those seeking solace in the wrong place). Both men regard the image sadly.

Shoots to Branches

Jeff Anderson5 Comments

“And now the plant, resigned
To being self-defined
Before it can commerce
With the great universe,
Takes aim at all the sky
And starts to ramify.”

Richard Wilbur’s “Seed Leaves.”

Here in the heart of the book, it should be clear by now why some of us read it as a book about everything. There’s been plenty of plot, and we’ve had some exciting action (although I wonder whether ch. 61, “Stubb Kills a Whale,” was off-puttingly gruesome on purpose, or whether that’s just unavoidable), but there’s also been a remarkable exfoliation of the text from a story about a monomaniacal sea captain to…well, everything else that’s included. I take my metaphor for this post from Ishmael himself; he excuses his discursiveness at the beginning of ch. 63, “The Crotch” (…I know), with a lovely image to illustrate how the road between one narrative event and the next lengthens under his very feet:

Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters.

Obviously this isn’t the first section of the book where we’ve seen digressions from the plot—I’d call Queequeg’s “Ramadan” the first major one, and that was pretty early—but it seems to me that this week we entered a more technical part of the book, where the digressions took on a different character. Before, they tended to be either apparently disposable set pieces or grand philosophical and historical disquisitions. But starting with ch. 53, “The Gam,” and ch. 60, “The Line,” and then throughout this week’s reading, we get chapters that are more like encyclopedia entries. Now that there’s proper whaling under way, there’s a lot that we reader-lubbers have to learn; and Ishmael has chosen intermittent and telescoping infodumps as the way to solve that problem. These infodumps come in two classes: those about the ship, and those about the whale. In those about the ship, I include explanations of whaling-ship terminology and habits of living, as well as depictions of equipment and techniques (like the chapter-titular explanation in ch. 84, “Pitchpoling”).

The ones about the ship are basically obligatory. The whole action of the book takes place on a ship, and if we didn’t know what things were and how they worked, we wouldn’t be able to understand much of anything. But the ones about the whale aren’t, strictly speaking, necessary. We don’t actually need to know that the sperm whale doesn’t have a real face. Instead of being primarily informative, then, I think the infodumps about the whale serve a different function. I think they’re more in the line of a blazon. On the literal level, it’s true that Ishmael (along with the rest of the crew) is dismembering a whale during this part of the book. He provides a very thorough description of exactly how the whale is butchered and flensed and rendered. But at the same time he takes the opportunity to lavish a lot of poetic language and reverence on the whale and its parts. This isn’t to say anything like “Ishmael is in love with whales”; but in the same way that Ahab sees Moby-Dick specifically as the agent of a mystical force athwart his destiny, Ishmael seems to look on the sperm whale generally as a Romantically sublime creature, imbued with wisdom and power and mystery that make it a fit subject for a blazon, even with the parodic inversion that characterizes (and partly disguises) this blazon.

Ulysses

Daryl L. L. Houston17 Comments

Happy Bloomsday! For any who may have missed my prior brief announcement, the next book queued up for a group read here at Infinite Zombies is Ulysses. It’s a book I’ve started and stopped several times, and so from an Infinite Summer/Zombies standpoint, it represents the first book for me in the true spirit of the original program. It’s one I should have read but have never managed. It’s one I just can’t lug myself up the hill of. It’s one I’m still not sure I’ll be able to get through, even with the help of insightful commentary and cheerleading. With the exception of the (by comparison) light reading of Dracula, I had read and enjoyed all the other books we’ve covered to date. Two of them are among my very favorites. So, a year late, I’m finally taking on a book that represents a known and almost dreaded challenge rather than a reread of a loved thing.

Because I think I’m ill-suited to provide adequate context and background for the book, I’ve asked someone else to coordinate this read. I know Judd Staley because we share an interest in the work of David Foster Wallace. Judd comments with some frequency on the wallace-l discussion list, and he was one of the coordinators of this past November’s Footnotes conference devoted to Wallace’s work. When I measured the temperature of wallace-l a few months ago regarding the possibility of a Ulysses read, he enthusiastically expressed an interest, and when I put out a specific call for help more recently, he answered. A doctoral student working on 19th and 20th century fiction, narrative theory, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, affect, Joyce, and Wallace, Judd was a presenter at the 2009 North American James Joyce Conference, and he’s active in the James Joyce Society of New York. So we’re in good hands.

As we wrap up Moby-Dick, you’ll begin seeing overlapping posts from Judd preparing us for Ulysses. He’ll provide information about differences among the varying editions of Ulysses (if you’re in a rush to buy yours, read the bottom of this, but know that Judd will add some color soon), make suggestions regarding supplemental materials, and provide some literary background. Several of us who have blogged other books here at IZ will continue to write about our reading experience.

Just as we leaped straightway into Moby-Dick after finishing up 2666, we’re not taking much of a break before starting Ulysses. The date by which you’ll want to have finished the first chunk of reading is July 12, and this will be an eight-week read.  Ulysses has no clearly marked chapter breaks but is divided up informally into episodes (about which presumably more later). This will be something of a pain to track across multiple editions. The weekly assignments and approximate page counts will be as follows:

July 12: Episodes 1-3 (~40 pages)
July 19: Eps 4-6 (~50 pages)
July 26: Eps. 7-9 (~80 pages)
August 2: Eps. 10-12 (~ 100 pages)
August 9: Eps. 13 & 14 (~65 pages; ep. 14 is where a lot of people give up)
August 16: Ep. 15 (~150 pages, but it’s a play, so there’s not that many words per page)
August 23: Eps 16 & 17 (~100 pages)
August 30: Ep. 18 (~35 pages of unpunctuated monologue)

I do hope you’ll join in.

Week 4: Queequeg: Comic Hero

Paul Debraski4 Comments

I keep returning to Matt’s question of who is the main character of this book.  While I won’t suggest that it is Queequeg, he is rapidly shaping up to be the hero of the book.

But, like with the near-invisible Ahab, we haven’t seen much of Queequeg recently.

He doesn’t appear at all from Chapter 49 (The Hyena) until Chapter 61 (Stubb Kills a Whale) where he gets two lines.  The first is a bit of wisdom about the squid:  “‘When you see him ‘quid’, said the savage, honing his harpoon in the bow of his hoisted boat, ‘then you quick see him ‘parm whale.'” (281).  And a nonsensical cheer: “‘Ka-la! Koo-loo!'” howled Queequeg, as if smacking his lips over a mouthful of Grenadier’s steak” (284).

And in Chapter 66 (The Shark Massacre) he almost gets his hand bitten off, but in an offhanded sort of way.

So aside from those two brief, inconsequential mentions, Queequeg is out of the action from Chapter 49 to Chapter 72.  (Thanks Moby Diction! for making that easy to discover.)

It’s obvious that Queequeg is comic relief in the story.   In the early chapters, his foreignness is played up for comic relief: his reaction to Ahab Ishmael in his bed (including waking up with his arm around him); getting dressed under the bed (!); spearing food with his harpoon; even his little idol Yojo is seen as a comical thing.

Sure, Ishmael befriends him and even respects him: “Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed” (49), and he’s even impressed by his lineage: “There was excellent blood in his veins – royal stuff” (54).  But most of his scenes to this point have been pure comedy.

But just as we’ve gotten used to Queequeg being formidable and comical, he suddenly becomes heroic.  When the very man that mocks him on the boat is knocked overboard by the boom.  Queequeg wastes no time in tying a rope to the boom, jumping in tho the water and rescuing the very man who mimicked him.  But little is made of it, especially by Queequeg:

Was there ever such unconsciousness? He did not seem to think that he at all deserved a medal from the Humane and Magnanimous Societies. He only asked for water – fresh water – something to wipe the brine off (61).

And then it’s back to comic relief with the insanity of the Ramadan scene.  And soon after, we see him sitting on the unconscious Starbuck.  And of course, there are jokes about him being a cannibal and his ferocious appetite when the harpooners go down to feast: “Queequeg, he had a mortal, barbaric smack of the lip in eating – an ugly sound enough – so much so, that the trembling Dough-Boy almost looked to see whether any marks of teeth lurked in his own lean arms.” (149).

But then, when the action recommences, Queequeg is right there.  When they spot their first whale it is Queequeg who throws the first harpoon (missing, sadly).  But he is essential to the chase.

Then we get the zany scene from this week’s reading.  Queequeg balances on a whale like a log roller while tied to Ishmael with the monkey rope.

The whale be it observed, lies almost entirely submerged, excepting the immediate parts operated upon. So down there, some ten feet below the level of the deck, the poor harpooneer flounders about, half on the whale and half in the water, as the vast mass revolves like a tread-mill beneath him. On the occasion in question. Queequeg figured in the Highland costume – a shirt and socks – in which to my eyes, at least, he appeared to uncommon advantage (317).

This is all in aid of stripping the skin and blubber off the whale.  Despite this comic scene, Queequeg is risking his life (sharks are all around him) for the good of the boat.  And then, Ishmael underscores the scene with sentiment: “Queequeg was my own inseparable twin brother” (317).

But then Queequeg proves himself once again.  In Chapter 78 (Cistern and Buckets), Tashtego falls into the whale’s head (ew) and which then falls into the water.  And, mirroring the earlier scene: “The next, a loud splash announced that my brave Queequeg had dived to the rescue….and soon after, Queequeg was seen boldly striking out with one hand, and with the other clutching the long hair of the Indian” (341).

I don’t want to get too ponderous about this, but there is even the sense, in Queequeg’s recounting of the story that Queeuqeg not only saved Tashtego but gives him a new life:

And thus, through the courage and great skill in obstetrics of Queequeg, the deliverance, or rather, delivery of Tashtego, was successfully accomplished (342).

In all that I have heard about Moby Dick, I don’t know what happens to Queequeg.  But thus far in the book, while others may have proven themselves in different ways, Queequeg is unquestionably the most heroic and selfless.  And, since my first post was about religion, I’m willing to say that with these attributes, Queequeg is proving to be the most Christian.

Of course, I’m not sure where Melville is going with that exactly.

I’m now very curious to see how the Queequeg story gets wrapped up.

The Two Moby-Dicks

Daryl L. L. Houston2 Comments

In my preparation for this group read, I ran across a number of references to an article entitled “The Two Moby-Dicks.” I have myself mentioned a couple of times in comments that some have proposed multiple modes of composition for Moby-Dick. Only this weekend did I get a chance to sit down and read the whole article (written by George Stewart of UC Berkeley and published in American Literature, Vol. 25, No. 4, Jan. 1954). Stewart posits that there’s an unmissable contrast between the first fifteen or so chapters of Moby-Dick and the rest, and he seeks to investigate by internal evidence (ie, the text itself rather than evidence from what few revelatory letters and other documents exist external to the text) what this unmissable contrast may mean.

I won’t say that I had missed the contrast, but I had surely never articulated it. Looking back on what we’ve read so far, though, it is a pretty stark contrast. The first few chapters have Ishmael and his particular adventures at their heart. We hear his stupid chowder jokes, his weird memory of being punished as a child, a detailed account of his misadventure turned bosom friendship bedding with a cannibal, and so on. But as we make our way deeper into the text, Ishmael becomes more a mouthpiece than a central character. He becomes omniscient, telling us things that the Ishmael of the first few chapters wouldn’t have been able to know. In the first lowering, he seems to be in first one whale boat and then another, so detailed and intimate are the accounts he gives of what the mates are saying. Stewart provides 20 or 25 pages of internal evidence for multiple modes of composition, and many of his arguments are convincing. He suggests that the book be divided into three sections, delineated as follows:

  1. Chapters I – XV. These represent an original story, very slightly revised.
  2. Chapters XVI – XXII. These chapters represent the original story with a certain amount of highly important revision.
  3. Chapters. XXIII – Epilogue. These represent the story as it was written after Melville reconceived it, but may preserve certain passages of the original story, doubtless somewhat revised.

In considering a shift in style as an indicator of the composition shift, Stewart provides a partial answer to one of my questions about ornamentation seemingly for its own sake (“UMD” stands for Ur-Moby-Dick, or the first fifteen chapters; “MD” is section 3 described above):

In style of writing there are great differences between UMD and MD. UMD is plain, even prosy and colloquial. It contains such dialectal expressions as “says I,” “says he,” and “thinks I.” Moreover, these occur not in conversation, but in the narrative itself. These colloquialisms are not characteristic of MD, and are, in fact, wholly lacking, as far as I have observed. In addition, UMD differs from MD by lacking almost entirely the elements of the conventional poetic style of the nineteenth century, ie., the use of thou with the corresponding pronominal and verbal forms, and the use of such devices as apostrophe, personification, and figurative language in general, including the Homeric simile.

He goes on to suggest that though Melville sought in the beginning to provide an account of a shabby whaling voyage, he ultimately needed to amp things up a bit and transform the narrative from a shabby account to something epic. The formal devices Stewart lists above go some of the way toward doing that. So too do the chapters on cetology (Stewart notes that two of these occur near the opening of the third section he enumerates), which give the book more the feeling of a great inquiry than of a simple travelogue. The extracts (I posit) probably contribute to the epic tone as well.

Stewart and others have pointed to a number of details — among them various sudden disappearances and appearances and doublings — that seem to indicate that Melville may have intended to take the story in one direction and wound up taking it in another, with rather shoddy patchwork editing to bind the two stories together. This may also account for some of the problems of narration in the book. Perhaps Melville wasn’t a visionary willfully writing an unreliable narrator but was merely trying to salvage what he could of an original story while finishing his book in a grander mode than originally planned.

The ramifications of the shift with respect to who the hero of the book turns out to be are pretty interesting, and thinking about these ramifications takes me back to Matt Bucher’s post from week one, in which he wrote the following:

Who is the main character of Moby-Dick? Is it Ishmael, Ahab, or the whale? How is Melville playing upon traditional ideas of the hero or the hero’s quest (the odyssey) by having Ishmael appear to be a passive observer throughout much of the book?

Now that we’re well over halfway into the book, I wonder what people would answer to Matt’s question (and I hope I’m not running away here with something Matt had planned to follow up on). I also wonder what people might think (without spoilers) about who the hero of the book might have been, if it turns out (as Stewart suggests) not to have been one of the suspects Matt proposes.

Illustrating ‘Moby-Dick’ – the Pequod and others

mattkish878 Comments

For some reason, even though I have read the novel multiple times, Melville’s description of the Pequod surprises me every time. I’ve seen so many pieces of historical nautical and whaling art that eventually the ships all seem to look rather similar. The same sort of planked sides, railings along the deck, lots of ropes and masts and so on. Honestly, this kind of imagery is now so common to most people that it’s not uncommon to see it on everything from beer bottle labels to tractor trailer trucks.

I think most readers come to the Pequod expecting just that same kind of beer bottle label, tractor trailer truck wooden sailing ship. Something they, in their mind’s eye, can see so clearly that the mere presence of a rather detailed description can seem a little surprising. It’s the nature of that description and those details though which always surprises me and ignites my imagination. For rather than a simple, dull whaling vessel, Melville describes the Pequod as “a ship of the old school, rather small if anything; with an old fashioned claw-footed look about her.” Let that sink in for a moment. “Rather small, if anything…” Small! Given its central role in a story as massive, as epic, as Biblical in scope as Moby-Dick, who would imagine that the outer boundaries of this wooden island that becomes the sailors’ entire world would shrink to the size of a “rather small” ship for years on end?

Melville then goes on at length about her “antiquities” such as the bearded bows, the stiff Japanese masts standing up like the “spines of the three old kings of Cologne,” her ancient decodes wrinkled “like the pilgrim-worshiped flag-stone in Canterbury Cathedral where Beckett bled” and so on. But then it starts to get really interesting, and the Pequod begins to seem a thing of fantasy. Melville describes how Peleg has “built upon her original grotesqueness, and inlaid it, all over…” This Pequod is “appareled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor…a thing of trophies. A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies.” Now let the mind slowly turn, imagining a machine built for the sole purpose of sailing the seas, battling whales, and rendering them into oil. Take this machine and inlay it with grotesque designs. Upon those inlays, set the bones of the very leviathans the machine has slain. A magnificent image should even now be forming in your mind.

Melville finished the description beautifully by describing how these same whale bones and teeth are not just grotesque, not simply design elements, and not even just trophies of the Pequod’s brutal hunts, but functional tools and devices themselves. The bulwarks are garnished “like one continuous jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the Sperm Whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her old hempen thews and tendons to.” And the all important tiller is “in one mass curiously carved from the long narrow lower jaw of her hereditary foe.” The very jaw of a whale steers that same ship which hunts and destroys whales. The whole, beautiful, grotesque paragraph concludes with the line “A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.” Quite a description and a rather daunting task.

As always, when beginning an illustration, I simply unmoor my mind and let thoughts and images roll unbidden through it. Again, betraying my admittedly less-than-fine art background, my first thoughts were of the astonishing pen and ink art of Ian Miller, particularly his spot illustrations for the early mass market paperback edition of Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead, the beautifully stylized comic art of Philippe Druillet, and, for some reason, the ship that Elric, Corum, Hawkmoon and Erekose sailed on in Michael Moorcock’s The Sailor on the Seas of Fate.

An aside here. When Daryl invited me to post on this blog, I was honored but nervous. After several posts, those feelings remain. I have been awed by the level of discourse and critical analysis evident in so much of this writing. At times I worry that these crude simple illustrations of mine as well as my own level of engagement with the novel and its themes seem pedestrian at best and immature at worst. And in this post, given my own comparison of the Pequod to a ship from a 1970s pulp fantasy novel series as literarily complex as Conan and, well, you can probably understand some of my nervousness. Nonetheless, one of the things which has sustained me through 274 pieces of art and counting has been an honest commitment to my own personal vision uncluttered by deconstruction or comparison to the greater body of Melville-related art. I’ll leave that part to the experts.

So with Miller, Druillet and Moorcock in mind, I began to craft my own Pequod. Again layering the images over an electrical diagram, I started with a ballpoint pen mostly because I wanted the color of the ship to stand out just a bit against the color of the background. I knew I would have a dismal time of it if I tried to keep things realistic, so I again threw all caution to the wind and drew the ship exactly as I saw it. I knew it would have planks and masts and decks and chains but the rest was up to me. I wanted my Pequod to seem savage, barbaric, exotic, and alive. An old, wily, hungry, jaded killer. Nothing about the Pequod seemed to me to be gentle, kind, or even necessarily noble. It was a creature of function, every line and every element had to contribute to creating an image of violence and predation. It had to be squat, rather ugly, yet still lethal and fearsome. Here’s what resulted…

Later I had the opportunity to expand on the details of the craft so I chose to rather elaborately highlight the strange sea beast skull that I had adorned the prow with…

Even though I’ve only been able to lavish this level of detail on the Pequod in two pieces, I have enjoyed the task of visualizing each of the ships described in the text so far. Here is the Goney…

…and here is the Town-Ho.

And I look forward to the Jeroboam, the Rose-Bud, the Bachelor, and of course the doomed Rachel. But those are stories for another day.