Moby Dick online reading group, chapters 82-87

 

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Moby Dick online reading group, Chapters 82-87, “The Honor and Glory of Whaling” through “The Grand Armada”

By OZ FRITZ
Special guest blogger 

Chapter 86, “The Tail” gets into a detailed discussion about the tail of a whale and its “[f]ive great motions.” At the chapter’s conclusion, Melville laments of being unable to express certain gestures the tail makes then compares these “mystic gestures” to “Free-Mason signs and symbols; that the whale, indeed, by these methods intelligently conversed with the world.” Apparently Melville studied Freemasonry and was involved with a semi-masonic group called the Young Americans Club.

Several of the founding fathers of the United States of America such as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin practiced Freemasonry. Freemasons comprise a fraternal organization whose core value is brotherly love. They apparently influenced the values the went into the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence. The concept of America as a Union of States was realized in Philadelphia (from the Greek: phileo = friendly love; adelpho = brother), the City of Brotherly Love. Philadelphia was named nearly a hundred years earlier by William Penn. Though not a Freemason, he was a Quaker. Quakers also hold the central tenet of brotherly love.

Let’s take a brief look at Moby-Dick as a metaphor for America. The first relationship in the novel describes brotherly love between Ishmael and Queequeg which remains until the end, until something the latter made saves the former’s life. At the end of chapter 26, Melville throws in what appears to be allusions to American ideals in his discussion of “man, in the ideal.” He takes about the empathy found in the essence of man, stripped of his outer character, feeling distraught at another’s misfortune. “But this august dignity I speak of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Thou shalt see it in the arm which wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all hands radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The center and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!” This big G mentioned herein seems less a god of any organized religion and more like a god of American ideals – democracy and equality; perhaps paradoxical on the part of Melville given that the founding fathers intended to keep God out of the whole business of establishing the Constitution for a new country. 

In the piece by Gilles Deleuze I brought up in the comments two weeks ago (“Bartelby, Or, the Formula” from Essays Critical and Clinical), he writes about America and Melville. “America sought to create a revolution whose strength would lie in a universal immigration, émigrés of the world…” The crew of the Pequod form a diverse group coming from all over the world. Also, remember in the opening "Etymology" Usher’s “queer handkerchief” embellished with all the nation’s flags.

Writing of the philosophy America brought to the world, Pragmatism, Deleuze continues: “ . . . we understand the novelty of American thought when we see pragmatism as an attempt to transform the world, to think of a new world or new man insofar as they create themselves. … Is it against Western philosophy that Melville directs his insult, 'metaphysical villain'? A contemporary of American transcendentalism (Emerson, Thoreau) Melville is already sketching out the traits of the pragmatism that will be its continuation.” 

Lauren Becker examines this angle in her 2011 paper, “Melville’s White Whale – Pragmatism’s Role in Moby Dick.” Pragmatism looks to find “our own answers to the questions we deem momentous enough to challenge, and these answers will become our own individual forms of truth.”. . . “Moby Dick is the epic conflict of Melville’s own battle with truth. Melville presents his own pragmatic challenges to readers by leaving his novel ambiguous and with a sense of incompletion. Melville challenges his readers to become empiricists.” She also gives the example of Ishmael interpreting the oil painting in the Spouter Inn (chapter 3). “His interpretation can be seen as a metaphor for pragmatic reasoning at its best.” . . . “Melville attempts to ground the reader in what happens to be the pragmatic method. He makes us experience pragmatic reasoning along with Ishmael, thereby giving us the opportunity to decide whether it is something we can also implement.” 

Deleuze looks at America as an experiment “to constitute a universe, a society of brothers, a federation of men and goods, a community of anarchist individuals inspired by Jefferson, by Thoreau, by Melville. He uses the marine term “archipelago” to characterize this collection of émigré individuals and compares them to a Harlequin’s coat, “an infinite patchwork with multiple joinings.” The patchwork notion comes up in the first paragraph of Moby-Dick in the Etymology section as the “queer handkerchief” of all the flags of the known nations. Also, in chapter 4 “The Counterpane” where he writes: “The counter-pane (bedspread) was of patchwork.” The “cabalistically cut cloth” we discussed a couple of weeks ago may also refer to patchwork.

Chapters 82 contrives a history of whaling based in mythology. The multi-cultural variety of gods and heroes mentioned remind me  of Aleister Crowley’s list of  Gnostic Saints in his Gnostic Mass (Liber XV). Chapter 83 considers the historical veracity of the Biblical story of Jonah and the whale. On the literal level, chapter 84 introduces a new weapon for attacking a whale; it metaphorically hints at a esoteric level beginning with an analogy in the first sentence:  “Queequeg  believed strongly in anointing (making holy) his boat.” . . . “He seemed to be working in obedience to some particular presentiment.” Melville connects this anointing with finding a group of whales who flee, “a disordered flight, as of Cleopatra’s barges from Actium.” By its language, this analogy, based on a real historical event,  seems to come from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra 

Act II Scene II:

“Enobarbus: I will tell you.

The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,

Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold;

Purple the sails, and so perfumed that

The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,

Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made

The water which they beat to follow faster,

As amorous of their strokes.”

In this instance, whales are compared to royalty powered by winds of love. After describing and demonstrating the pitchpoling method of harpooning whales, Melville returns to the esoteric when talking about the whale’s spout-hole which he calls the life spot of the whale. Stubb, holding the weapon, is compared to a juggler, another name for The Magician in the Tarot. After successfully striking the whale: “[i]nstead of sparkling water, he now spouts red blood.” Stubb exclaims: “. . . ‘Tis July’s immortal Fourth; all fountains must run wine to-day!” This presents another allusion to the birth of the USA as well as an allusion to both the occult and religious significance of blood. This metaphor continues into the next chapter, “The Fountain.” Before that, it sets up the blood metaphor some more when Stubb speaks of catching the blood in a “canakin” (drinking vessel) and imbibing it. “Yea, verily, hearts alive, we’d brew choice punch in the spread of his spout-hole there, and from that live punch-bowl quaff the living stuff.” Drinking this blood not only recalls Christian symbolism in reverse with blood becoming “wine,” it also resembles Crowley’s ritual, “The Mass of the Phoenix” found in chapter 44 of the Book of Lies where the practitioner draw blood from their chest (literally and/or metaphorically), soaks it into a “cake of light” then consumes it. 

Chapter 85, “The Fountain,” dives deep into how the whale breathes. It seems one the most esoteric in the book. Chapter 84 ends with a reference to Tiphareth, chapter 85 begins with two numerological correspondences to this central Sephira: “six thousand” and “millions” (a million has six zeroes in it.) For me, this chapter connects with Ishamel’s cabalistic correspondence with the “Fountain of Living Waters” mentioned in an earlier post. First sentence of the third paragraph that ends, “ . . . inasmuch that it withdraws from the air a certain element, which subsequently being brought into contact with the blood imparts to the blood its vivifying principle”, could be word for word straight out of Ouspensky’s book about the Gurdjieff teaching, In Search of the Miraculous which calls air “second-being food.”

Chapter 87 begins by giving us some geographical reference points to these adventures. We find a direct reference to King Lear and encounter families of whales.

I’ll conclude with another passage from Becker’s dissertation where she quotes William James from an essay by James Albrecht: “What’s the Use of Reading Emerson Pragmatically? The Example of William James.” 

“Pragmatists believe that ‘philosophy must be reconceived as ethics: that philosophy must turn away from the traditional concept of truth as accurately or objectively naming the ultimate nature of reality and toward the practice of judging beliefs based on whether they direct our conduct in ways that yield beneficial outcomes.” 

Next week: please read Chapters 88-94, “Schools & Schoolmasters” through “A Squeeze of the Hand”