This week: Chapters four through 14, "The Counterpane," "Breakfast," "The Street," "The Chapel," "The Pulpit," "The Sermon," "A Bosom Friend," "Nightgown," "Biographical," "Wheelbarrow" and "Nantucket."
By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger
I had forgotten Ishmael had a step-mother.
One might view the novel as Ishmael’s tribute to Queequeg.
Thomas Pynchon has an interesting discussion of Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” in his essay “The Deadly Sins/Sloth; Nearer, My Couch, to Thee”. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-sloth.html?mcubz
I have read this novel five times before. The last four times I reread it while teaching it to high school students. The first three times I taught it the students complained about it all year. In the 2019 – 2020 school year, I asked my creative writing class if they wanted to read Moby Dick as one of their textbooks since 2019 marked his centennial. I warned them that my previous three classes had complained about reading it. The students said no, they wanted to try it. All year long they didn’t complain once. When we finished the book, I had them write an essay on whether they considered reading the book worth their time. They all said no.
The thing is, I thought they all wrote terrific essays telling me why they didn’t consider Moby Dick worth their time. I felt like their writing had really improved since the beginning of the school year. However, it broke my heart, because I had kidded myself that they had enjoyed the novel since they hadn’t complained at all.
I find it interesting to reread the novel again this year. I find myself slowly opening up to it. I look forward to meeting this fellow Ahab again.
Next week: Please read chapters Chapters 15-20, e.g. "Chowder" through "All Astir."
10 comments:
Taking upon the obligation to teach something seems the best way to learn about that subject, in my experience. This marks my second journey through Moby-Dick. Some books, like this one, I don't feel I've read until at least the second go-round.
I wonder if Melville introduced the character of Queequeg to present a completely different culture and way of life to American readers. The plot line that Ishmael, bred and brought up in the Christian culture, becomes very fond of Queequeg, maybe even falls in love with him, and accepts his odd ways perhaps promotes tolerance for those of radically different habits and beliefs.
I agree with everything you just said, Oz.
I'm sorry assigning "Moby Dick" hasn't worked out well for Eric, but I just wanted to mention that many books that teachers made me read had a positive effect on me. For example, my creative writing teacher in high school assigned us to read "Despair" by Vladimir Nabokov, and that launched a lifelong love of Nabokov's novels for me.
Cool about Nabokov. I think a few students enjoyed Moby Dick. A number of them told me they felt glad they had read it even if they didn't enjoy it that much. A number of them said they wished the whole book was like the last fifty pages.
Chapter 4 begins: "Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg's arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner"
Four pages later, in the same chapter, we find: "But Queequeg, do you see, was a creature in the transition state – neither caterpillar nor butterfly."
This could be said of virtually every seeker on a path of Initiation. The "transition state = the bardo – the space in between; in this case, starting off as the caterpillar of an ordinary C1-4 person on a journey toward a butterfly body in the higher dimensions. As I see it, Melville reveals a primary intention of Moby-Dick, a journey through the bardo toward transformation. It would explain why we get reminded of death so much so far, even with the name, Peter Coffin.
The way I pronounce "Queequeg" rhymes with and sounds like "we egg." The egg recalls the Alchemical Orphic Egg, found in the The Lovers Tarot card, Atu VI, as numbered, which can represent the alchemical growth and transformation of the soul. Commenting on the card Art, Atu XIV, Crowley writes: "To sum up, the whole of this card represents the hidden content of the Egg described in Atu VI. It is the same formula but in a more advanced stage. The original duality has been completely compensated; but after birth comes growth; after growth, puberty; after puberty, purification" (The Book of Thoth).
Taking out the Qs in Queequeg gives a close sound alike to "we egg." Q = The Moon, the lower, illusory, lunatic aspect of it as described in the Tarot; or in the Gurdjieffian sense of "food for the Moon", mechanically behaving and reacting to illusions that keep us "alseep."
Circling back to the first sentence in chapter 4, "Counterpane" quoted above, one might interpret this as the beginning of Ishmael's Initiation. Even his name has sonic similarity with initiation.
I can get behind the idea of Ishmael falling in love with Queequeg, but at least so far it looks to me more like a bromance. I do not find anything in Ishmael’s first person narration that suggests romantic feelings, and even less sexual attraction. It is still early in the book, though. It could be that Ishmael himself, at this point, do not yet see what is happening. It could also be that Melville, writing during different times, would not have want to be too explicit regarding a homoerotic subtext, and leave the reader guessing. But I do not find this idea convincing from what we’ve read thus far.
For instance this business of finding Queequeg’s arm around him upon waking up. Ishmael seems pretty unfazed. He writes “you had almost thought I had been his wife”, as if implying that it might look this way to an outside observer, but not particularly to himself. I would be more suspicious if his reaction had been along the lines of ‘yo bro, no homo!’ He seems more interested in the tattoos on the arm, and the memory an association of peculiar feelings has brought back to his mind.
Even later, the both of them get “married” and become “bosom friends”, but as I see it, it looks more like a ‘blood brother’ type of connection.
I was last week saying that Ishmael appears to have a very rich inner life. I suspect that he’s not your typical 19th century lower class sailor, he does not quite fit the type. I would advance that, in meeting someone as outrageously different as Queequeg, Ishmael has in effect Found the Other. Maybe that could be why he is falling in love, he intuitively recognizes the synchronicity of Destiny knocking up at the door of his life.
To build up from what Oz Fritz wrote, Ishmael might here unconsciously be seeing an opening for becoming “a creature in the transition state” like his new friend. By being so otherworldly to his eyes, Queequeg promotes Ishmael’s consciousness expansion and spiritual growth. He takes him out of his habitual reality-tunnel.
In the Tarot, the Moon is also associated with the zodiac sign Pisces. Although technically a mammal, a whale could be seen as a giant fish. In the Book of Thoth, Crowley writes of the Moon: “it represent the last stage of winter”. Moby Dick started in November, and since chapter II we are now in December.
“It might be called the Gateway to Resurrection” and “in her higher aspect, [the Moon] occupies the place of the Link between the human and divine”. This, to me, echoes the transition state between caterpillar and butterfly.
The Moon also connects with the tarot trump II the High Priestess, which crosses the Abyss and makes Crowley quote from his Book of Lies: “they come from the Great Sea, and to the Great Sea they go.” The Thoth tarot depiction of the Moon shows highly troubled waters, mixed with blood, like a premonition of what is to come in Moby Dick. I also suspect that Ahab will turn out to be quite the lunatic. But Crowley ends up with saying that “the best men, the true men”, “whatever terror may assail their mind”, always say “how splendid is the Adventure!”
In chapter X, I laughed at the line “Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.”
I attended the World Science Fiction Convention in Phoenix in 1978 just before starting eleventh grade. I remember the guest of honor Harlan Ellison castigating the audience for not having read "Moby Dick". I started it in 1979 but gave up after about 100 pages. In college I once again started it and gave up. I didn't read it all the way through until this century.
E.J. Gold posts a blog most every day. Yesterday I commented on Queequeg being "a creature in the transition state." I identified the transition state as the bardo. Gold has often said his life work concerned helping people navigate the bardo or something to that effect. He and his students would sometimes refer to the bardo as the transit state. The headline to his blog this morning reads: "How do you get Smooth Transitions?" Below the headline is a photo, from the 1980s I'm guessing, of Gold with his good friend John Lilly. The first sentence in the post says: "A constant subject for discussions with John and Toni Lilly was the general effect of transitioning between quantum and newtonian experiential data."
This probably oversimplifies things a little, but I connect newtonian experiential data with C 1-4, the caterpillar, as I wrote yesterday, and quantum experiential data with the higher circuits – the butterfly. Note that Gold talks of transitioning between quantum and newtonian experiential data – in the view here, from the higher to the lower. Also note that Gold, a user of Cabala, has "Smooth Transitions" capitalized in the headline. S + T = 69, which by the shape of the numbers, indicates a reversal or to look at something backwards.
John Lilly, well-known for his work with dolphins, also studied whales in the wild. The last two sentences of his N.Y. Times obituary reads:
"he spoke of a time when all killing of whales and dolphins would cease -- 'not from a law being passed, but from each human understanding innately that these are ancient, sentient earth residents, with tremendous intelligence and enormous life force.
'Not someone to kill, but someone to learn from.'"
The obituary also mentions that Lilly's brother David lived in Nantucket.
In the book The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century, D. Graham Burnett writes that the sperm whale, possessing the largest brain of any animal that ever lived, was considered at least by Lilly—as “a god in our midst”
Gold and Harlan Ellison were also friends originally meeting through his father, the legendary S.F. editor Horace Gold. Ellison and E.J. were once on the same panel at a S.F. convention in the mid to late 1970s, I don't think it was the same convention Eric attended. I digitized a cassette recording of that panel some years ago, but don't recall any mention of Moby-Dick.
Except for participating in 2 or 3 zoom meeting workshops with Gold and a few dozen others, I've had no conventional contact with him since just before the pandemic lockdown. I thought all these "coincidences" worth mentioning.
Gold's full blog can be read here:
https://www.gorebaggsworld.com/2024/11/how-do-you-get-smooth-transitions/#more-33911
There's a little more on Lilly there then a bunch of math way over my head purporting to show the transition between Quantum and Classical physics which he abbreviates as QM for Quantum Mechanics and CM which I assume stands for Classical Mechanics. Below the math is a photo of Timothy Leary and his wife in front of a ganja shop - go figure.
Towards the end of the A Bosom Friend chapter, I liked how Ishmael finds a way, intellectually speaking, of rationally joining Queequeg in his religious practice and ritual.
"What do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn idolator."
Not only this seems very open-minded of Ishmael to me, it also looks like some kind of proto-model agnosticism in my view.
The next chapter finds a pearl of wisdom which illuminates their relation, explains Ishmael's thinking, and, I suspect, might have pleased RAW:
"See how elastic our prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them."
http://www.hilaritaspress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/RAW-Memes-featured-image.jpg
Sorry Eric, I'm running behind. I agree that these chapters especially can be viewed as a character study of/tribute to Queequeg. I'm interested in how scholars have handled his character over the years. Coming from a fictional culture and having Ishmael use a hodge podge of terms to describe him makes Queequeg a nebulous character. More of a conception of how a white-American would perceive a foreigner than an honest attempt at depicting someone from a different culture. I can see how there's more utility in this approach if the author is trying to convery their ideas, rather than paint a realist or sociological portrait.
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