Moby Dick online reading group, chapters 105-109

AI generated image of Melville, right, and Hawthorne in the former's study.

This week: Chapter 105, “Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish? – Will He Perish?”

to Chapter 109, “Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin”

By Oz Fritz
Special guest blogger

The question of creating an American Literature with a distinctly separate identity from its British counterpart appeared of great interest to Melville before, during and after he wrote Moby Dick. He expressed thoughts about this in a critical essay titled “Hawthorne and His Mosses” a review of a collection of stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne called Mosses from an Old Manse.  The review also addresses the subject of literature as a whole and Hawthorne’s place in it. Melville wrote the piece not long after meeting the elder writer for the first time. The two were part of a group of hikers along with other literary figures including Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. walking up Massachusetts’ Monument Mountain in August, 1850. Melville and Hawthorne were forced to take shelter from a storm under some rocks for two hours. The enforced intimacy formed and sealed a fast friendship between the two lasting the remainder of their lives. 

At the time of the hike Melville was in the middle of writing Moby Dick. Hawthorne’s publisher, a friend of Melville, encouraged him to review Mosses from an Old Manse which had come out a few years earlier. Melville took a break from writing his epic novel to do so. According to Wikipedia, the close encounter with Hawthorne led Melville to reexamine, reconsider and revise his monumental work in progress.  One scholar, Walter Bezanson declared the essay, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” to be "deeply related to Melville's imaginative and intellectual world while writing Moby-Dick" and should be "everybody's prime piece of contextual reading" for said novel. Indeed, Melville writes: “[b]ut already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germanous seeds into my soul.” In winter of that year, Melville unexpectedly paid Nathaniel a visit only to be turned away as he was busy writing and didn’t want visitors. Melville came back another time and was received. Later, Hawthorne surprised Herman by visiting his farm known as Arrowhead. The two spent the day “smoking and discussing metaphysics.” Historical accounts don’t clarify what they were smoking. Of course, we know that Moby Dick is dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne. This essay can be found in The Portable Melville, inexpensive copies of which can be had online. Another Melville expert speculated that he wrote it in part to help prepare readers to receive Moby Dick. 

He sets the literary bar high in the second paragraph of the review with the egolessness of a Saint:

“Would that all excellent books were foundlings, without father or mother, that so it might be, we could glorify them, without including their ostensible authors! Nor would any true man take exception to this – least of all, he who writes. When the Artist rises high enough to achieve the Beautiful, the symbol by which he makes it perceptible to mortal senses becomes of little value in his eyes, while the spirit possesses itself in the enjoyment of its reality.”

In attempting to substantiate the body of American literature, Melville compares and contrasts Hawthorne with Shakespeare saying that the distance between their greatness is not immeasurable. Writing about “The Old Apple Dealer,” a sad, melancholic story concerning a man who sells gingerbread and apples at a railway station, Melville says:

“Such touches as are in this piece cannot proceed from any common heart. They argue such a depth of tenderness, such a boundless sympathy with all forms of being, such an omnipresent love, that we must needs say that this Hawthorne is here almost alone – in his generation at least – in the artistic manifestation of these things.”

He continues, and this, I believe, applies to Moby Dick as well: 

“Such touches as these – and many, very many similar ones, all through his chapters – furnish clues, whereby we enter a little way into the intricate, profound heart where they originated. And we see that suffering, some time or other and in some shape or other – this only can enable any man to depict it in others. All over him, Hawthorne’s melancholy rests like an Indian Summer, which though bathing a whole country in one softness, still reveals the distinctive hue of every towering hill, and each far-winding vale.” 

It seems that Melville believes a great writer can transmit and engender a sense of compassion and empathy in the attentive reader. Related to the above, responding to other opinions about Hawthorne, he writes:

“He is immeasurably deeper than the plummet of the mere critic. For it is not the brain that can test such a man; it is only the heart. You cannot come to know greatness by inspecting it; there is no glimpse to be caught of it, except by intuition; you need not ring it, you but touch it, and you find it is gold.” 

I regard intuition as a form of Intelligence of the Higher Emotional centrum; Leary’s C6. Intuition grows and becomes stronger as one explores that territory. It seems that one of Melville’s points holds that great literature can help get one there. 

Melville prepares readers for Moby Dick by extolling the virtue and making a case for the dark side of Hawthorne’s writing so that they might be able to appreciate and more easily digest the shadow side of his own forthcoming (published slightly more than a year later) masterpiece. “For spite of all the Indian-summer sunlight on the hither side of Hawthorne’s soul, the other side – like the dark half of the physical sphere – is shrouded in a blackness ten times. But this darkness but gives more effect to the ever-moving dawn, that forever advances through it, and circumnavigates his world. Whether Hawthorne has simply availed himself of this mystical blackness as a means to the wonderous effects he makes it to produce in his lights and shades: …” 

Coincidentally, a few days before reading “Hawthorne and His Mosses” I commented on this technique of blending light and darkness in regard to chapter 12 in the Sex Magicians by RAW as part of the discussion group working with that book (https://dovestamemoria.blogspot.com/2025/02/is-god-sex-magicians-chapter-twelve.html scroll down for my comment). I also mentioned that Pynchon uses this technique multiple times in Gravity’s Rainbow. (The first time I typed it I mistakenly called it Gravity’s Whale.) Some people maintain that not only did Moby Dick influence Gravity’s Rainbow, but that the latter novel represents a re-imagining of the former. I haven’t researched this enough to have an opinion, yet. I call the blending of literary light and darkness “chiaroscuro” after the artistic technique that does this visually. 

Synchronistically, we find a taste of this literary chiaroscuro in this week’s assigned section, in chapter 106, “Ahab’s Leg.” “For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heart-woes, a mystical significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur;” It continues a bit further in this vein. I consider this a synchronicity because when I started this piece, I thought I would write more about the establishment of American literature, not the chiaroscuro technique. Reading RAW’s use of chiaroscuro in Sex Magicians prepared me to recognize it when Melville makes the argument in the Hawthorne piece, but I was surprised and astonished to find Melville continuing his point here in chapter 106.

The two phrases, “all heart-woes, a mystical significance” recalls the concept of betrayal in the poetry of the Sufi mystic, Rumi. Rumi held that emotionally painful experiences can lead to inner growth and transformation. I tell people going through a rough romantic patch that when the heart gets broken, it can grow back stronger if one doesn’t completely capitulate to the pain. The passages in and around what I quoted reminds me of Nietzsche’s valuation of tragedy in The Birth of Tragedy published slightly more than 20 years after The Whale. Previously I mentioned that Ralph Waldo Emerson influenced both Nietzsche and Melville. Some scholars say that Moby Dick influenced the maverick German philosopher.

The title of chapter 105 seems pretty self-explanatory – “Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish? – Will He Perish?”.  Some of the size measurements given appear quite exaggerated as is a typical whale’s life-span. Melville appears to believe literally in Adam as the first human. The second half of the chapter considers the question: will humans kill all the whales and render them extinct like they nearly did with the buffalo? Some weeks ago, Tom mentioned a book called The Manifesto of Herman Melville by Barry Sanders that considers Moby Dick a warning about humans destroying nature. This chapter aligns with that premise.

Chapter 107, “The Carpenter” starts by asking the reader to shift their perspective to way out in space, specifically to the moons of Saturn. This resonates with Arthur C. Clarke's’novel, 2001 A Space Odyssey where the ship Discovery travels to Lapetus, a moon of Saturn. Kubrick changed it to Jupiter in the film because he wasn’t satisfied with the attempt to represent the rings of Saturn. The description of the duties and abilities of the unnamed carpenter sounds quite extensive and remarkable. Melville sums him up thusly: “this omnitooled, open and shut carpenter, was, after all, no mere machine of an automaton. If he did not have a common soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow anomalously did its duty. What that was, whether essence of quicksilver, or a few drops of harthorn, there is no telling.” Omnitooled recalls the language of Buckminster Fuller and his fondness for using “omni” as a prefix. Fuller was the nephew of Margaret Fuller, a friend and literary colleague of Emerson. The two possible “subtle somethings” seems metaphorical and suggest the concept I associate with the number 68. Quicksilver = Mercury (Hod 8). Harthorn is an archaic term for the chemical compound ammonium carbonate, a kind of ammonia used in baking, medicine and smelling salts. Looking at “harthorn” as a Joycean type of pun we can see “heart” (Tiphareth 6) plus “horn.” Also, recall the famous, mythical carpenter that corresponds with Tiphareth. We’re told, three times in this final paragraph, that the carpenter is a soliloquizer “talking all the time to keep himself awake.” I’m reminded of Sufis who use the metaphor of being “awake” to indicate consciousness that transcends the automatic (automaton), mechanical consciousness which they call “sleep.”

The term “soliloquy” gets frequently used in plays to indicate a character’s speech to the audience. The next chapter, 108, “Ahab and the Carpenter” gives what appears to be stage directions suggesting the form of a play without directly imitating one. This chapter has a nod to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Ahab calls the blacksmith Prometheus then orders from him a fifty-foot tall “complete man after a desirable pattern.” The full title of Shelley’s early 19th Century novel is: Frankenstein Or, The Modern Prometheus. In esoteric circles, Frankenstein often appears as a metaphor for the alchemical creation of higher bodies. Mel Brooks’ hilarious film, Young Frankenstein, gets highly recommended for this reason.  Bob Dylan uses this metaphor as the central theme in the song, “My Own Version of You” from his album Rough and Rowdy Ways. For example, in the lyrics we find:

“If I do it upright and put the head on straight

I'll be saved by the creature that I create”

Can you look at my face with your sightless eyes?

Can you cross your heart and hope to die?

Got the right spirit, you can feel it, you can hear it

You've got what they call "the immortal spirit"

You can feel it all night, you can feel it in the morn'

It creeps in your body the day you were born

One strike of lightning is all that I need

And a blast of electricity that runs at top speed

I wanna bring someone to life, turn back the years

Do it with laughter, and do it with tears”

It works better with the music, but you get the idea. I highly recommend listening to it multiple times over time. 

Chapter 109 presents a revealing confrontation between Ahab and Starbuck about the ship’s priorities. Ahab lets him know who is boss, then ends up following Starbuck’s suggestion after initially and forcefully resisting it. 

To bring it back to Melville, I’ll leave you with the comment Sophia Hawthorne said after reading Herman’s essay for her husband:

"the first person who has ever, in print apprehended Mr. Hawthorne." She called him "an invaluable person, full of daring & questions, & with all momentous considerations afloat in the crucible of his mind."

Sophia, of course, means “wisdom.”  Some branches of Gnostics considered her the feminine aspect of the Divine, and she was also known as the “Bride of Christ.”

Next week: please read Chapter 110, “Queequeg in his Coffin” to Chapter 116, “The Dying Whale.”