This week: The Etymology, the Extracts, and Chapters 1-3 ("Loomings," "The Carpet Bag," "The Spouter-Inn.")
In the first chapter of Moby Dick, our narrator Ishmael imagines headlines that mention his decision to go to sea:
"Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.
"WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL.
BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN."
Not bad as a synchronicity, no? And so, as we recover from the latest "grand contested election for the presidency," we embark on the Pequod, and on our Great American Novel, Moby Dick by Herman Melville. We'll be trying to cover about 35 printed pages each week, not a terribly difficult pace, so there's plenty of time to hunt up a copy and join us. There are many ways to do so, as I remarked in last week's blog post. No matter which edition you choose to read, I'll be making the "reading assignments" based on chapters, not page numbers, so it should be easy to follow along, and post any comments you would like to make.
Is there any 19th century novel with a better beginning? The start of Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities is justly famous, and I love it, too: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."
But I also love the arresting beginning of Moby Dick: "Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me."
Ishmael of course is a Biblical reference; as the Wikipedia entry reminds us, the Ishmael in the Bible was the son of Abraham and Hagar, banished to the wilderness. See the entry for useful notes.
"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet ..." It's actually a damp, drizzly November as I write this; it is raining outside. But cheer up, fellow readers: We have an interesting novel to read!
I was struck by a couple of things as I read the first passages. The "sub-sub-librarian" credited with finding the various references in whales in world literature must have worked very hard in the era before the Internet to find so many passages.
There are lots of literary allusions in Moby Dick and much philosophical musing, but the book also can be read as an adventure story, and I found the descriptions very vivid: The icy streets of New Bedford, Massachusetts; the dark interior of the Spouter-Inn, with all of its decorations related to whaling; the meals Ishmael eats, including one in which the dining room is so cold the diners "hold to our lips cups of tea with our half frozen fingers"; his bed, which features a mattress which feels like it is "stuffed with corncobs or broken crockery," his fright at first seeing Queequeg.
New Bedford, by the way, has a nice whaling museum; I visited it sometime during the 1990s.
Background posting from last week offering more details about the reading group. I'll be joined by Eric Wagner and Oz Fritz. The plan is to do this once a week, with a new posting every Monday.
Next week: Please read chapters four through 14, "The Counterpane," "Breakfast," "The Street," "The Chapel," "The Pulpit," "The Sermon," "A Bosom Friend," "Nightgown," "Biographical," "Wheelbarrow" and "Nantucket." Sounds like a lot, but these are short chapters! 35 pages in my paperback copy of the novel.
13 comments:
Alas, my time is limited this evening, so I won't include a lengthy quote. But for those who are interested, page one of Moby Dick is referenced in Illuminatus!, The Eye in the Pyramid. It appears in 'Book One', just after the illustration of the Pineal Eye. That's on p. 133 in the omnibus edition, in the Robinson paperback. The illustration makes it easy to locate, whichever copy you have.
I like the line (in Illuminatus!) that describes Leviathan and Moby Dick being the same creature, but it can be seen in two different places at the same time, ‘...but not one reader in a million groks what he’s hinting at.’
Maybe we’ll see old Moby turn up in a couple of months in Bobby and Todd’s TOI.
Sent by Iain Spence
It's a damp and drizzly November day here too; both outside and in my soul. The "Etymology" and "Extract" suggest Moby-Dick as a multiplicity, i.e. it has multiple levels, multiple metaphors, or no metaphor, simply a grand adventure. It seems a perfect vehicle for the practice of model agnosticism. One model I'll be examining = Moby-Dick portraying a Book of Initiation, a story with a tremendous amount of esoteric information.
This will be my second reading of Moby-Dick. The first time occurred some 10 - 15 years ago, I started it while getting ready to leave Paris after working there. I don't recall why or how it happened, but I'd been harpooned with the notion of the importance to read this classic. I had a few hours before leaving to the airport so went on line and found a copy available to purchase at a Brentano's bookstore in an area of Paris known as the Tuileries where the French Royal Palace had been located. The first synchronicity occurred immediately upon beginning to read it when seeing the Tuileries mentioned on the first page of the "Extracts":
" . . . Give it up Sub-Subs! For by how much more the pains ye take to please the world, by so much the more shall ye forever go thankless! Would that I could clear out Hampton Court (former site of the English royal palace) and the Tuileries for ye! But gulp down your tears and hie aloft to the royal-mast with your hearts; for your friends who have gone before are clearing out the seven-storied heavens, and making refugees of long pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael against your coming. Here ye strike but splintered hearts together – there, ye shall strike unsplinterable glasses!]"
I suspect the Sub-Sub Librarian to be Melville himself, though I guess he could have hired a researcher. Whoever it was, they appear extremely well- read.
The subject of Death gets evoked in the first paragraph of the first chapter. Death and a bardo scenario appear again in the 5th paragraph of chapter 2: "... like a candle moving about in a tomb." It comes up again a few pages into chapter 3: "... bustles a little withered old man, who, for their money, dearly sells the sailors deliriums and death."
Here is the passage Iain references:
"Hell," Simon said, "look what Beethoven did when Weishaupt illuminated him. Went right home and wrote the Fifth Symphony. You know how it begins: da-da-da-DUM. Morse code for V—the Roman numeral for five. Right out in the open, as you say. It amuses the devil out of them to confirm
their low opinion of the rest of humanity by putting things up front like that and watching how almost everybody misses it. Of course, if somebody doesn't miss something, they recruit him right away. Look at Genesis: 'lux fiat' —right on the first page. They do it all the time. The Pentagon
Building. '23 Skidoo.' The lyrics of rock songs like 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds'— how obvious can you get? Melville was one of the most outrageous of the bunch; the very first sentence of Moby Dick tells you he's a disciple of Hassan i Sabbah, but you cant find a single Melville scholar who has followed up that lead— in spite of Ahab being a truncated anagram of Sabbah. He even tells you, again and again, directly and indirectly, that Moby Dick and Leviathan are the same creature, and that Moby Dick is often seen at the same time in two different parts of the world, but not one reader
in a million groks what he's hinting at. There's a whole chapter on whiteness and why white is really more terrifying than black; all the critics miss the point"
In chapter one the narrator says that all boys long to go to sea. I don’t recall ever longing to go to sea, but Melville, born in 1819, and Ishmael, born even earlier, lived in a different world than I did.
Moby Dick group reading GO!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veHJYnFtHWc
Very glad to read this “veritable gospel cetology” along with like-minded Sub-Sub-Genii.
And it sure is “a damp, drizzly November” here as well!
I was pleasantly surprised by the humor already present in these first three chapters, as well as the first person narration, which always helps me get involved emotionally when reading fiction literature.
I find myself liking the book already.
Something else that struck me was Ishmael’s attitude of tolerance towards Queequeg. Despite being afraid at first, and somehow believing him to be a cannibal, he ends up reasoning himself: “the man’s a human being just as I am,” and that “for all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal.” Eventually we even get a street-smart piece of wisdom: “better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.”
I also note that in the introduction to the Extracts, the three archangels Gabriel, Michael and Raphael are being invoked, Uriel/Auriel being missing. The latter connects with the element of Earth, which is soon about to disappear as the ship crew will set sail.
Nowadays, only Japan, Norway, and Iceland are practicing commercial whaling. I cannot speak for the other two, but in Iceland, where I live, the issue is very controversial, most people seemingly being in favor of stopping the practice altogether, hunting pretty much still around only due to the lobbying of one stubborn company. The practice isn’t even commercially profitable locally, most of the meat being shipped to Japan for consumption.
For anyone interested in the issue of whaling, I suggest looking up the Paul Watson case in recent news.
Moby Dick for Dummies via The Simpsons
https://youtu.be/2RjYcqSoqzU?feature=shared
In my first comment I left out the word sections after "Etymology" and "Extract."
Thank-you Iain and Tom for the Illuminiatus! extract. I see it as affirming my view of Moby-Dick as an esoteric novel. It seems obvious that Wilson/Shea suggest Cabala and to look at the initials of words for that (Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds), a type of Cabalistic transposition known as Notarikon. With this in mind, I'll take a crack at the first sentence's connection with Hassan i Sabbah.
MD starts: "Call me Ishmael" By Notarikon CMI = 70 = Ayin = The Devil (Tarot). The Devil represents raw male energy (among other things), the most male card in the deck. MD appears to consist almost exclusively of male characters. I think a couple of minor female characters appear in it. That's not to say that feminine aspects and energy don't appear, we see the whole thing about water near the beginning. MD also has a male homo-erotic component between Ishamel and Queequeg becoming apparent as soon as chapter 4. Hassan i Sabbah = HIS, a male pronoun.
Looking at the Notarikon of the second two words in the first sentence, m + I = 50 = Nun = Death (Tarot). Combined with the first word = Call Death – I've already pointed out how death appears right away in our adventure. The word "assassin" derives from Hassan i Sabah, a connection with death there.
Comment Pt 1:
What strikes me most about the first three chapters of Moby Dick is the transition from first-person narration in the opening line of the first chapter to third-person narration in the opening line of the third -- from "Call me Ishmael." to "Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide, low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft.".
This shift in perspective seems hypnotic in effect, drawing the reader deeper into the tale until the text implicates the reader in its point of view. The hypnosis of the text reminds me of The Illuminatus Trilogy with its disembodied narrator shifting through multiple perspectives until settling into the body of Saul Goodman -- "any notions about being a stranger in this body have vanished with my dreams into air. Into thin air.". I believe the hypnotic rhythms of this section in Illuminatus Trilogy first came to my attention thanks to Eric Wagner's Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson.
The parallels between Moby Dick and The Illuminatus Trilogy don't end with mind-altering prose. The Illuminatus Trilogy explores American history and politics deeply. Many know Moby Dick as one of the great American novels. The Illuminatus Trilogy has a nautical adventure at the core of its narrative. One of our main characters in The Illuminatus compare the captain of our nautical adventure -- Hagbard Celine -- to Captain Ahab himself.
The Illuminatus Trilogy makes other allusions to Moby Dick such as when Simon Moon observes "Eisenhower's Moby Dick face on one wall and Nixon’s Captain Ahab glare on the other" wall of his childhood classroom. I wonder if Simon Moon means to say that Eisenhower's America represents a white whale that Richard Nixon pursues toward a mutually destructive end. Later, as other commenters have mentioned, Simon connects Moby Dick's chapter on the color white to the white light of the Illuminati. I'd like to expand upon that comparison when we get to the aforementioned chapter.
Comment Pt. 2:
Ishmael, Moby Dick's narrator, in his effort to explain the compelling allure of the ocean, mentions "mystic vibrations" one experiences while sailing. The Illuminatus Trilogy explores the mystic vibrations of parapsychology. Both novels explore the depths of metaphysics while the characters traverse enormous bodies of water. Perhaps life's mysteries compel us to adventure as much as the call of the ocean does.
Lately, I've had my nose in another American novel that explores America's history, and many mysteries of metaphysical, existential and Fortean nature: Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon, who influenced Robert Anton Wilson, but perhaps not as much as Moby Dick influenced both of them. Mason & Dixon presents itself in the style of an 18th century novel -- more Gulliver's Travels than Moby Dick -- but one can nonetheless detect the influence of Melville in its pages. Mason & Dixon places our heroes in Sumatra to chart the transit of Venus in its second episode. Moby Dick has Lazurus reaching for the Northern Lights before placing him in Sumatra in its second chapter.
Mason & Dixon, a journey of astronomical surveyorship, drawing upon knowledge of the stars to measure the Earth, and, via their adventure and encounters with astrology, the heroes explore moral and spiritual space as well, ultimately drawing the Mason-Dixon line which makes the difference between freedom and slavery -- an arbitrary but materially significant line across American history.
Moby Dick also takes through American history, contrasting the blackness of African American churchgoers faces and the ominous darkness of their church against the white purity of the whale. The racist implications linger. We also have the Indigenous Peoples who the novel calls upon the illustrate the mythopoetic draw of the ocean -- the compulsion to chart the world and hunt the whale. The novel goes onto touch upon topics of sexuality and gender. Ishmael has his curious encounter with Quequeg in bed at the end of chapter three. We may notice a conspicuous lack of women in these chapters. These topics have mystical as well as social and cultural implications.
All of this, and only three chapters into the book. I think Moby Dick exists at an interesting intersection between Christian theology, American history and weird fiction. Its white whale at times seems Satanic or Lovecraftian in nature. Other times, the whale may seem like God or the Illuminati.
I look forward to exploring these topics further as we continue to read the book together as a team.
The description(s) in Chapter 2 of the New Bedford environs on that dismal Saturday were strongly reminiscent of Lovecraft's descriptions of Kingsport and Innsmouth, at least to me. This is probably because I just finished up my Lovecraft unit, the sense of dread and the New England setting.
The surrealistic atmosphere of Chapter 3 really struck me- I loved the description of how the Spouter-Inn's common room creaked and shook like the cabin of a ship, the ornamentation, the unexpected party and Ishmael's pervasive thoughts about sleeping with the harpooner. The description of the Innkeep using the planer on the bench was a cherry on top of the scene.
I'm very embarassed I haven't actually read this novel before now and happy you're doing this- it's one of those classics whose plot I thought I knew so well that I never sat down and actually picked it up. As someone who very much would like to go out into the street and knock people's hats off right now, I think I might need to trade schoolmaster for sailor.
Thank you Jessebob for the parallels with the Iluminatus! Trilogy, much appreciated.
Interesting remarks as well concerning the first and second person narration. Only the beginning of chapter III uses "you", before suddenly shifting back to "I". This, together with the flowery descriptions and flights of the imagination, makes me picture Ishmael as having a rich inner life. He appears fairly unfazed by his modest situation and financial limitations ("I had sounded my pocket, and only brought up a few pieces of silver"), seems able to make do with whatever comes his way, and accept life with amused stoicism or equanimity.
In fact, he embellishes and gives depths of interpretation to everything that grabs his attention. He is having FUN turning the mundane into the mythical. Perhaps we could even say that in magickal terms, he has the power TO GO. As he fights off depression by taking to the sea, he also colors the greyness of the world by purposefully deciding to see beyond mere appearances.
Ishmael seems to me more educated than your average 19th century sailor, and somehow reminds me of George Orwell in Down And Out In Paris and London
(pressed 'publish' by mistake)
As I was saying, Ishmael reminds me of Orwell in Down and Out in Paris and London in that he appears an intellectual trying out the hard life just to mingle and get a taste of something different.
Towards the end of chapter II, "he too lives like a Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs" made me think of Superman in his fortress of solitude, although if Clark Kent feeds on "the tepid tears of orphans", I do not know.
My copy of Moby Dick is second hand, actually I found it in the streets of Berlin a couple of years ago in a 'grab any of this' box, along with Infinite Jest. A previous owner had underlined the sentence "surely all this is not without meaning" in chapter I. I'll keep that in mind.
Continuing from my previous comment: the mythology of Hassan i Sabbah holds that he would program people to be assassins then have them became sleeper agents in foreign courts or centers of power. When needed, Sabbah could activate the assassin to do their job, i.e. call death on the enemy.
Interesting sync: I've been intending to reread Mason and Dixon going so far as to pick it up and start it then deciding to get through Moby-Dick first. Thanks for the parallels, Jessebob.
Ishamel's trepidation and fear with sharing a bed with Queequeg and with Queequeg himself reminds me of a lot of the same emotions and reactions expressed by Harris voters, myself included, over the results of the election and getting into bed with a new Trump administration.
I once recorded the bass player for an old San Francisco psychedelic group called Moby Grape. He told me he came up with the band name when he and a friend were drinking and staring at a very large bottle of wine. They liked the name and kept it. I think, like a lot of people, they reckoned Moby as a synonym for huge or gargantuan because Moby Dick is the name of a whale. That seems a misnomer.
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