This week: Chapters 49-54, "The Hyena" through "The Town-Ho's Story."
This section of the book was dominated, at least for me, by "The Town-Ho's Story," a narrative that includes another fateful encounter with Moby Dick.
I was intrigued by the passage which loops back to the main story:
“It was just between daybreak and sunrise of the morning of the second day, when they were washing down the decks, that a stupid Teneriffe man, drawing water in the main-chains, all at once shouted out, ‘There she rolls! there she rolls!’ Jesu, what a whale! It was Moby Dick.
“‘Moby Dick!’ cried Don Sebastian; ‘St. Dominic! Sir sailor, but do whales have christenings? Whom call you Moby Dick?’
“‘A very white, and famous, and most deadly immortal monster, Don;—but that would be too long a story.’
“‘How? how?’ cried all the young Spaniards, crowding.
“‘Nay, Dons, Dons—nay, nay! I cannot rehearse that now. Let me get more into the air, Sirs.’
That self-referential passage seemed rather modern to me.
I was also startled that in the same chapter, Melville suddenly writes about the part of the country where I live (I live in a suburb of Cleveland, which is in northern Ohio, on the Lake Erie shore):
For in their interflowing aggregate, those grand fresh-water seas of ours,—Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan,—possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the ocean’s noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of races and of climes. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles, even as the Polynesian waters do; in large part, are shored by two great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long maritime approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East, dotted all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by batteries, and by the goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they have heard the fleet thunderings of naval victories; at intervals, they yield their beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash from out their peltry wigwams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs give robes to Tartar Emperors; they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer, and the beech canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew.
The Great Lakes state of Ohio was fully settled by 1850-51, when Melville wrote Moby Dick, but it was very much a frontier about 40 years before, when the War of 1812 was fought, as this passage suggests. The "fleet thunderings of naval victories" is surely a reference to the Battle of Lake Erie, a naval battle in Lake Erie near Put-in-Bay, west of Cleveland and east of Toledo. It was arguably the most important battle of the War of 1812 and was a decisive American victory. Melville's readers would have been familiar with the famous message of Oliver Hazard Perry, the victorious American commander: "We have met the enemy and they are ours."
A couple of other bits in the text:
As Ishmael is telling his story to his friends in Lima, they guzzle chicha. I didn't know what that is, so I looked it up. Wikipedia helpfully explains that chicha is a drink native to Latin America, sometimes alcoholic and sometimes not, sometimes made with corn. I'm guessing Ishmael is fueled by the alcoholic version as he spins his yarn.
In the "The Gam" chapter, Ishmael remarks that when whale boats meet in the ocean, they sometimes pass along letters. I wonder how often letters to seamen in whale ships were actually delivered? "At any rate, she will be sure to let her have some papers of a date a year or two later than the last one on her blurred and thumb-worn files." I took it that this passage referred to newspapers; imagine getting a newspaper, months out of date, and knowing it was the latest news available. This reads very strangely to the modern reader.
Bonus blog post!
For his contribution to Maybe Night, Oz Fritz has posted a new essay at his "Oz Mix" blog, "Moby Dick and Finnegans Wake," which argues that there's a passage in Finnegans Wake which refers to Moby Dick. I think Oz makes a pretty case, although as he admits it's not ironclad. "Let's call this circumstantial evidence," Oz write. There are also some comparisons between the two classics.
Next week: Please read Chapters 55-59, "Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales" through "The Squid.”
That's going to be covered by Oz, and apparently he's been waiting for weeks to write about the "Squid" chapter, so I'm looking forward to it.
4 comments:
Terrific post. The mention of Lake Huron made me think of the Huron tribe in "Last of the Mohicans."
Thanks for this great slice of history. I was born and raised for 9 years in Cleveland and didn't know this.
The Town-Ho's Story leads to the death of the ship's mate Radney, but mostly concerns the mutiny on the Town-Ho led by one Steelkit. Radney and Steelkit seem like polar opposites and adversaries of sorts. It's interesting to me that the story is told in the Golden Inn. Melville makes sure the reader knows this by making it the subtitle of the chapter. Radney and his "brutal overbearing" nature seems to karmically indicate he had it coming, though he did have some "good-hearted traits."
The description of Steelkit looks very interesting:
"Steelkit was a tall and noble animal with a head like a Roman, and a flowing golden beard like the tasseled housings of your last viceroy's snorting charger; and a brain, and a heart, and a soul in him gentlemen, which had made Steelkit Charlemagne, had he been born son the Charlemagne's father."
Melville seems to intentionally use the SC combination that originally appeared in Rabelais. You don't see many "flowing golden beards" these days.
"Town-Ho" was the ancient cry when a ship spotted a whale then went to hunt and kill it. In this case, a ship named Town Ho descends into chaos (karmic retribution?) beginning when leaking sperm (dead whale wares) is noticed. The Town Ho's fate appears sealed after seeing Moby Dick who gets away with the mate Radney clenched in his jaws, never to be heard from again. Score one for the whales.
A typo crept in to the quote about Steelkit. It should conclude: "...had he been born son to Charlemagne's father.
From this week’s assignment, what struck me the most was the very beginning, the Hyena chapter: “when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own.”
Follows a description of a mindset that reminds me of a Stoicism of sorts, but coming from a place of radical acceptance rather than a practice of burying pent-up emotions in the subconscious.
I see “this free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy” as being pretty close to what RAW called ‘Hilaritas’. Recognizing that the Cosmic Joke is on you, and deciding to laugh along with it.
This goes as far as Ishmael seemingly freeing himself from the fear of death: “I felt all the easier; a stone was rolled away from my heart.” He compares himself to Lazarus and then a ghost, suggesting that by putting death in the past rather than the future, one feels more alive than ever.
I thought of the Cosmic Trigger III subtitle, “My Life After Death”.
And Ishmael already encountered the ‘Amor’ part in his (greater than romantic) Love for Queequeg.
The next chapter reminds us that “according to Genesis, the angels indeed consorted with the daughters of men.”
The line from Genesis 6:4 says “the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them.”
I knew of the matter of the sex of angels, but was not aware that according to the Bible itself, angels not only have genitals but used them to impregnate Earth’s women. This sounds to me a lot like modern stories of alien abductions.
I admit that I sometimes get lost by the tortuous and meandering paragraph-long sentences that Melville indulge in. But I then realized that this practice is also reflected on a larger scale, with entire chapters that appear to be digressions from the main story. It feels as if the book is chock-full of rabbit holes. This almost has a stoner quality to it, like being taken by a certain train of thoughts, before suddenly wondering ‘wait, where was I again?”
But, like Ahab himself, the book always comes back to its main driving force, or perhaps attractor, the Whale. Maybe Melville envisioned this as having to do with the ineluctability of Destiny (I alluded a few weeks ago to Death being preordained due to the very etymology of the word whale). At the same time, I cannot help but think of the importance of maintaining single-pointed focus in order to make it through the bardo.
In conclusion, and although I might be projecting, Melville appears to recommend to live with Amor & Hilaritas, and to abandon oneself to the Tao while keeping a strong focus throughout.
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