'Moby Dick' online reading group, chapters 35-42

A monument to John Cleves Symmes Jr. and his crackpot hollow Earth theory, in Hamilton,  Ohio, released into the public domain by the photographer, Christopher Roehl, details here.  For how Symmes' crazy theory helped lead to Moby Dick, see below. I live in Ohio, but I haven't seen the monument yet;  Hamilton is kind of on the other side of the state from Cleveland. 

These chapters are a pretty impressive section of the novel. The chapter describing Captain Ahab's vendetta against the great white whale,  "The Quarterdeck," Chapter 36, is pretty dramatic stuff ("Drink, ye harponeers! drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat's bow -- Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!").

But I have only so much time to do this blog post, so you'll have to forgive me if I write mostly about the "Whiteness of the Whale" chapter. It's mind blowing, and I'm going to quote a couple of writers I really like, Robert Anton Wilson and Scott Sumner. 

When I re-read Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger 2, one of my favorites of his books, some weeks ago, I was struck by how much he wrote about Moby Dick in the book. This next series of chapters is the appropriate place to bring that up, as  you will see. 

RAW gives one of the origin stories for the novel. 

In the CT2 chapter Cosmic Economics "A Great Saving of Stuff," Wilson writes about John Cleves Symmes Jr., who advocated a hollow Earth theory. He relates that Jeremiah Reynolds, influenced by Symmes' theories, led a sea expedition to Antarctica that "had to turn back before they were south of Chile" because of a mutiny. Wikipedia says this is not quite true, that  "Encountering much danger, the expedition reached the Antarctic shore and returned north, but at Valparaíso, Chile, the crew mutinied."

In any event, Wilson relates, "Reynolds consoled himself by writing a melodramatic and popular book about the cruise, including all the good sea-yarns he had heard along the way. Herman Melville read it and one chapter -- about a great white whale that had almost incredible cunning and good luck in escaping whalers again and again -- inspired Moby Dick."

In Wikipedia's telling, this was actually a magazine article: "The Knickerbocker of May 1839 published 'Mocha Dick: Or the White Whale of the Pacific', Reynolds' account of Mocha Dick, a white sperm whale off Chile who bedeviled a generation of whalers for thirty years before succumbing to one." And here is Wikipedia's article on Mocha Dick and Reynolds' piece about the whale. Wikipedia does indicate the piece influenced Melville.

Also in the same chapter of Cosmic Trigger 2, Wilson writes about Chapter 42 of Moby Dick, "The Whiteness of the Whale," in which Melville attempts to explain why whiteness is uniquely terrifying. 

Writes Wilson, "The whale, of course, symbolized all sorts of ghastly and mysterious aspects of the world, but mostly, I think, he symbolized the "colorless allcolor" of the materialist reality-tunnel which Melville hated, because it made art meaningless, and feared, because it might be true."

Here is the relevant passage at the very end of  Chapter 42: 

But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous—why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

In another chapter of Cosmic Trigger 2, "The Square Root of Minus One & Other Mysteries," Wilson writes about his discovery of "the concept that we are living in a colorless world." Wilson explained that while colors seem real to him, "All of this is hallucination, according to physics. What is actually out there consists of clusters of colorless atoms and photons, and all the 'colors' are my brain's way of reacting to various wave-lengths of light carried by the photons bouncing off the atoms.

"Melville understood, and felt profoundly disturbed by this aspect of modern science. The phrase from Moby Dick that I mentioned earlier, 'the colorless allcolor of atheism,'  summarizes the horror that most artists feel at this bleached-out, emotionally empty view of a monochromatic world -- which also terrorized Blake and Dostoevsky and absolutely nauseated Whitman. (See his 'When I Heard The Learn'd Astronomer.') This colorless, seemingly 'abstract' world reappears in the pale dead white decor of some of the gloomier films of Bergman and Woody Allen." 

One of my favorite bloggers, Scott Sumner, quite recently wrote about Chapter 42 of Moby Dick. In a postscript to an unrelated article about monetary theory (Sumner is an economist who also has a wide range of interests) Sumner writes:

"Postscript: Off topic, but have you ever noticed how common it is to be thinking about something, and then a day or two later find the exact same idea being discussed in a novel you are reading? This occurred to me a few days after my clumsy attempt to express the depressing thought of a colorless universe devoid of life. BTW, stories with this sort of existential dread are much scarier than tales of ghosts or vampires, which I suspect explains the popularity of Lovecraft among intellectuals.

"This morning I read chapter 42 of Moby Dick, entitled The Whiteness of the Whale. In the chapter’s final paragraph, Melville evokes a colorless inhuman universe much more effectively than I ever could:

[Sumner quotes the last paragraph I just quoted in italics, then adds:]

“ 'all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot' I’d cut off my right leg and replace it with a whalebone if I could write like that.

"I certainly won’t claim this is the best paragraph ever written, but:

"Which novel is better than Moby Dick?

"Which chapter in Moby Dick is better than The Whiteness of the Whale?

"Which paragraph in Chapter 42 is better than this one?

"None of those are easy questions to answer."

See also Scott Sumner's piece "The tambourine men" which compares Herman Melville and Bob Dylan. ["Even though I am generally more receptive to the visual arts, Melville and Dylan are my two favorite American artists. The next eight on my top ten list would all be architects or film directors."]  It includes this observation about Melville: "He surely understood that in Moby Dick he had written a masterpiece.  I have trouble even imagining how disappointing it would be to see this sort of novel flop with both readers and critics."

Here are the lyrics for the song "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream," which includes mentions of a "Captain Arab." 

Off topic, but in "The tambourine men," Sumner also tosses off this observation:

"PS. Someone with more knowledge of music than I have should do a post on how pop music blew up in 1965. Major albums that came out in 1966 (Revolver, Pet Sounds, Blonde on Blonde, Aftermath, etc.) would have been inconceivable just two years earlier. In 1965, you have musicians starting to adopt the attitude that would eventually lead to punk (in songs like "My Generation," "Satisfaction", "Get Off of My Cloud," "Maggie’s Farm," "Highway 61"). You have the beginnings of the sort of clever wordplay (and intentional misspellings) that would later be associated with rap ("Subterranean Homesick Blues"), and a lot of other interesting experiments. Has pop ever evolved so much in such a short time, either before or since 1965?"

Revolver is my favorite Beatles album and is arguably the best rock music album of all time.  As much as I love RAW, it's hard to keep up with everything, and he was arguably a bit oblivious to what was going on in popular music in the mid-1960s. Robert Shea was really more of a Beatles fan. Dylan said of Elvis Presley, “Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail.” People following rock music in the 1960s must have had a similar feeling of revelation. 

Next week: Please read Chapters 43-48, "Hark" through "The First Lowering."