English 77 Journal

We tried an experiment in English 77 this year. Studentscould either take the mid-term or they could keep a journalon the first five books. (A journal is different from a paperin that it is written day by day, it can contradict itself, itis more or less spontaneous.)The experiment worked well. Of the 117 students, about40 kept journals; at least 30 were really good. Here is anexcerpt from the one I say is best of all, and ProfessorCox (who hates ranking things) says is one of the top ones.

—NOEL PERRIN, Professor of English

MOBY DICK (Herman Melville)

This book is totally preoccupied with the sea. Maybe it is the sea. The opening takes place on land, but everything - the church and the pulpit, the sermon, the gravestones, the mourners, the sea-hymn - is interpreted in terms of the water and its primal force. The sermon's message gives a conception of God as "delight," ENERGY and the nonrational capturing of truths.

There is a development of the idea of Natural Man in the figure of Queequeg. His non-Christian warmth, prowess, wisdom, his generosity in sharing bed, money, and pipe, his charitable rescue of the mocker and the packet-schooner - he is more a man of God than his baptized white fellows. His self-control and tolerance (as shown in the stories of the wheelbarrow and the fingerbowl) contrast with his fierce aspect: the harpoon, tattoos, and filed teeth which frighten the superficial observer.

Captain Bildad is the same way: naturally educated and raised at sea, he can size up a character's truth without time-wasting superficialities of questions and lie-detecting logic. There seems to be a road to a man's soul, and a deep communion, which the natural world (especially the sea) opens up. In relation to Ishmael, his immediate acceptance of and by these two "natural men" ties him deeply into the story at once. He is not merely somebody along for the ride on the Pequod, whose observations may not always see to the heart of his subject-matter. Rather, he is intimately involved in the world of whaling and the vital characters of the whalers.

The symbolism makes itself known at once. Ishmael spends the night at the Spouter Inn, owned by Peter Coffin. The Try-Pots Inn has a sign that is reminiscent of a gallows. But Melville's disarming open admission of the contrivance through Ishmael's monologue works to both defuse our outrage at such blatant omen-making and still leave the names and their potential for significance ringing in our mind. A stylistic double-guess play. The Pequod seems to be practically built of whalebone, and has in addition an outlandish tent on the quarterdeck: from the outset we know this is a strange ship, almost a symbol of the whole whaling industry. The names are symbolic: Ahab, Bildad, Peleg, Elijah (and his ominous wharf rantings against the Pequod) — the historical significance is not totally clear to me, but the original Ahab was an evil tyrant, the original Elijah a prophet. Melville did not choose his names from a hat. The Bible permeates many aspects of the book, including the symbolic signing-on with the 777th lay. The signing-on is a little comic act of its own, with Bildad and Peleg forming a fine two-man team; they are comple- mentary, one being holy but wordly and the other profane.

Speaking of comedy: Queequeg's Ramadan and the rescuer's hysteria is a beautiful example. There is room in the book for more than a linear narrative or a single serious or doom-laden atmosphere; the characters influence us in every way, both to laughter and to solemnity, and by so doing are made more intimately a part of our consciousness. Ishmael's explanation of Queequeg's faith as a member of the "First Congregational Church," and the mock-sermon accompanying it, manages through the power of comedy to vitiate any trace of Christian parochialism on the part of Bildad and Peleg.

There is some form of foreshadowing, authorial interruption, about the fates of Bulkington and Pip. I really don't feel any need for this; was this a device-in-hindsight which Melville put in to try to tie the sprawling contents of the book together? Or is it a first hint of the tragic formula - almost a Greek chorus?

Ahab is irritatingly mysterious, and this mystery is exacerbated by Elijah's warnings and all the other odds and ends of omens which have piled up; before we even encounter the Captain, we have had to deal with his presence, and acknowledge his essential unknowableness.

Ahab's mystery is a bit ameliorated by the discussion of his motives; by attempting to understand the psychology of his quest, we no longer feel helplessly ignorant of the source of his power. But the mysterious fourth whaleboat and its hidden foreign crewmen, with Fedallah the Parsee (a non-Christian element in the Pequod's microcosm) at their head, begins to build the enigmatic side of the Captain again. After the initial ritualistic oath of "Get Moby Dick - and drink on it, boys," Ahab is most uncommunicative and stays out of sight (or at least range) of most of the crew.

Perhaps the philosophical unity of the book should not be pushed beyond certain limits; in a work of such a magnitude it is easy to find apparently inconsistent passages. But I was intrigued by two excerpts; one is a brief reflection on the island of peace and tranquility in a man's soul, surrounded by the violence and dominating mystery of the sea. The second is where Ahab talks of a correspondence between man and the external world: "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." Coming from Ahab, this is especially significant because he is recognizing the unity of man and nature, but his life has become a quest to destroy nature as emblemized in the White Whale ... what does this suggest about his own fate? Similarly, the "little island of the soul" might be interpreted as faith (in God, or in predictability in general) which succumbs to mystery, the powers of nature in the larger world. Man's freedom as an agent seems pretty severely curtailed; he has an unknowable core of raw nature in him, capable of unfathomable actions or obsessions. Ahab is driven, quite obviously, and everything in the book seems to reflect that fact ...

Ahab's address to the slaughtered head marks it as a representation of the sea as Witness, an historical entity. History is important to Melville: consider the acres of references to whales before the narrative even gets under way. Past lore is cited frequently; the long passages on "Cetology" are an effort to acquaint the reader with all the systematized knowledge of past experience that has been preserved. There seems to be this deliberate emphasis on man's knowledge, sounding out the intelligence and its limits, so that in the final confrontation with the sea and its denizens - the Universe in its unrefined state of pure chaotic energy and unknowable purpose - the insufficiency of man's power and intelligence will become inarguable.

Gabriel's fanatic possession of the Jeroboam could be seen as some kind of ominous hint of the Pequod's fate. True, Ahab has a plausible front of "profit motive"; as long as he commands the ship as an economically governed entity, he will enjoy the obedience and confidence of the crew. But behind this motive lies his mysterious behavior, and his unfulfilled bitterness, his loss. Just how far is he to be trusted? When, if ever, will he show his hand, and how will his men react? Gabriel the Shaker is an extreme example of the mad tyrant, and Ahab will never be so blatant - but the Jeroboam awakens, or re-awakens the awareness of the possibility of Ahab's obsession turning the ship to his own private ends. Our eyes are opened.

The Sam Enderby's appearance, and the Gam between Ahab and Captain Boomer is another very significant passage. The enormous difference between Ahab and his counterpart from the Sam Enderby is told in a highly comic way (which does not detract from the ultimate seriousness of the problem being considered) - one man resigned and facetious about his lost arm, the other man dour and determined to achieve revenge for his missing leg.

The comic pervades not only the dialogues of the crewmen (such as the discussion about Fedallah and his imagined devil's tail between Stubb and Flask) but also the scholarly passages. There are parodies about a certain Mr. Scoresby, whose name pops up as "Fogo Von Slack," "Dr. Snodhead," and so on. There are, as well, numerous jokes of more basic appeal - the "Archbishoprick" and the equivalence of the doubloon nailed to the mast with the golden screw in the world's navel. The expression of humanity, both light and dark, is necessary to Melville in order to give the sense of total destruction at the end. Other comic incidents are the duping of the French ship for ambergris, and the Great Race with the Dutch ship for the capture of the whale.

Pip talks of himself in the third person after he's gone mad. Does that have any importance except to dramatize his sense of detachment from self (that is, his usual shipboard self) and hence isolation from the crewmen on a normal plane, isolation from normal reality? It gives him a strange insight into the fate of the ship and the characters aboard it. The juxtaposition of the mad and the sane, the foolish and the wise, in an ironic way - truth comes from unexpected quarters, and Pip's new role allows Melville a new angle on the world he is creating, a new narrative voice.

Queequeg, after his near-death, is the proud possessor of a coffin: he uses it as a tablet to transcribe his own tattoos, which are said to be a summarized schema for the plan of heaven and earth and are compared to the signs of the Zodiac by Ahab in the strange scene of the "Doubloon" chapter. The coffin is later used, ironically enough, as a lifebuoy which saves Ishmael. The book ends as it began, with Ishmael embracing the cryptic body (or surrogate-body of the coffin) of Queequeg, and by extension, the living universe.

Ahab and Starbuck are not on the most friendly of terms: the dictatorial life-style of the ship is challenged in the problem of the leaky casks, and this is only the tip of the iceberg of opposing beliefs. The most obvious and crucial episode is Starbuck's failure of will as he contemplates shooting Ahab through his cabin-door. The microcosm is not at peace; Ahab's monomania does not go unquestioned; but the strength of will which his obsession grants him demoralizes his opponents.

Toward the end of the book, there is a new and dominating stylistic device: staging. The chapters on the "Carpenter," the "Nightwatch," "the Storm" all use this: it suddenly gives another tone to the writing. Now patently dramatic (both in content and in form), the events have a stronger emphasis. These chapters, and others (Ahab's soliloquies, his talks with Pip) come immediately after the Pequod enters the Pacific. It is as if this geographic translation has permitted a heightening of style as Ahab begins his sudden descent into atavism.

And atavism it is. The fire and blood and baptism of the ritually forged harpoon head; the rejection of science and its quadrants; the Shaman-like curing of the compass (scientifically feasible but it awes the crew as a work of magic); the speech to the "corpusants" during the storm; what clearer evidence for Ahab's denial of rationality, of logic, as his central passion for revenge unfolds and infuses everything with a new energy? His talks to Pip and the Parsee, and to the dying whale, show Ahab as he finally is to be defined - deeply concerned about the universe, intricately related to both the mad, strange fire-(energy) worshippers and to the natural world of the whale. Caught by both, unsure of his fate, he yet surrenders to it.

This book is too big to discuss without frustration. Enough.