Moby Dick online reading group, chapters 131-134

 

This Week: Chapter 131, "The Pequod Meets the Delight," to Chapter 134, "The Chase -- Second Day."

By OZ FRITZ
Special guest blogger

Around about the early 1850s Herman Melville predicted that America would be the most powerful country in the world by the turn of the 20th Century and it most definitely required a robust national literature equal to its stature. This goes a long way toward explaining why he put so much into Moby Dick – all the Biblical and Shakespearean references and allusions and a plethora of other academic indicators afforded by a broad, rich and interested education in the arts combined with well-traveled life experiences; his philosophical questions and realizations; the vast panoramic scenes used as a canvas to create his masterpiece. Moby Dick became a cornerstone of the new, American Literature. 

 D.H. Lawrence helped codify this nascent body of writing with the publication in the early 1920s of Studies in Classic American Literature featuring two chapters on Melville, one of them on Moby Dick. According to Deleuze, Lawrence described “the new messianism, or the democratic contribution of American literature” … as a “morality of life in which the soul is fulfilled only by taking to the road, with no other aim, open to all contacts, never trying to save other souls, turning away from those that produce an overly authoritarian or groaning sound, forming even fleeting and unresolved chords and accords with its equals, with freedom as its sole accomplishment, always ready to free itself so as to complete itself.” 

Perhaps we now see this from the other side – having been a Great Power since the end of WW II, America seems to be exiting stage left (as Snagglepuss* might say) from the world stage with its new protectionist policies, trade wars, and threatened abandonment of allies. Not to mention the brutal, scorched earth policy of dismantling government.  American ideals may yet survive in its literature having outlived their existence in the morality of the power possessors who steer the ship of state (currently like drunken sailors).

*Snagglepuss, a pink, anthropomorphic mountain lion with a black tie and upturned collar, was a character in Hanna-Barbera cartoons, known for his catchphrases like "Heavens to Murgatroyd!" and "Exit, stage left!" After reading or watching the news these days I often catch myself exclaiming “Heavens to Murgatroyd!”

Great American literature with its joyful and tragic expressions of freedom from oppression will live on; there appears much to discover.  A case in point, partly built on the template of Moby Dick, is Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon. In the first week of this reading group Jesse Bob commented:

“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.”

Sumatra mentioned in chapter 2 in both novels shows a direct resonance, the same opening note. I will point out more. Pynchon turns the Northern Lights into a communications medium for Jesuits at their headquarters in Quebec to send signals over the North Pole to conspirators. I’m also of the opinion that RAW influenced Pynchon – evident in Mason & Dixon (M&D). 

I find M&D an excellent read after Moby Dick (MD). In one sense, it could be its 20th Century sequel, taken several levels beyond. Like MD, M&D doesn’t concern itself with lot of plot or action. It’s framed around the work and partnership of an astronomer and surveyor. What the former does for whaling and the sea, the latter does for the land, the earth, and drawing precise lines on it. Both novels use the stars to navigate, one on land, the other in the sea; a little more so in Mason & Dixon. The detailing of every aspect connected with drawing the famous Mason & Dixon line including the context that led up to it, from complicated engineering details to a wide variety of human interactions with the locals and their crew and the politics of everything going on in America in the mid 1760s reminds one of the scale of Melville’s comprehensively covered ocean world.

Mason and Dixon has its own Ishmael, the Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke who ostensibly narrates the entire book in the form of bedtime stories to his nephews and nieces and surrounding relatives. He was the  Chaplain on the expedition and, earlier, also happened to accompany Mason and Dixon on their mission to observe the transit of Venus around the southern tip of Africa. Like Ishmael, Cherrycoke sometimes becomes an omniscient narrator, relating things it seems the character couldn’t possibly know or have seen.   

By chapter 4 Pynchon has the two, newly met, on a long ocean voyage aboard the Seahorse (a name combining the sea with a land animal; also horse = Horus) recalling the nautical mood of Moby Dick. The back story of Dixon is that he had a teacher, Emerson, – a sort of incognito magician/wizard and early electromagnetic technician who gives a nod to Moby Dick: “– a Ship to him is the Paradigm of the Universe. ‘All the possible forces in play are represented each by its representative sheets, stays, braces, and shrouds and such, – a set of lines in space, each at its particular angle. Easy to see why sea-captains go crazy, – god-like power over realities so simplified ….”

Earlier I presented Deleuze’s view that great writers create a foreign language within the language they write in. For Moby Dick that foreign language consists of the ocean and whales. Spookah pointed out that the foreign language of Finnegans Wake often appears more prevalent than the English language it’s written in. Mason & Dixon has the foreign language of 18th Century literature that takes a little getting used to; written as if done circa 1786. So, we find a lot of Capitalization, mostly, but not always nouns; also not all nouns get capitalized – Pynchon has fun with this Style. Often, usually at the end of a word, the letter “e” gets replac’d by an apostrophe. Some words are too strong for the religious sensitivity at the time to spell out completely like the D___l, or d___‘ d.  Famous historical figures turn up like Ben Franklin and George Washington. The details around the drawing of the Mason and Dixon line seem obsessively accurate. He also throws in anachronisms from the future without warning such as having Mason take the Staten Island Ferry which didn’t come into existence until 1817. This recalls the kind of guerilla ontology Robert Anton Wilson puts into his novels. We find overlaps, folds and atmospheric resonance between Wilson’s final Historical Chronicles novel, Nature’s God and Mason & Dixon. The former novel came out in 1991, the latter 6 years later in 1997.  

Learning to comprehend and assimilate the foreign language of great writers like Melville, Joyce, Pound, Wilson, Pynchon, (who, btw, all use Cabala) and others (Burroughs, Kerouac, P.K. Dick, Heinlein, Bester, etc. etc. etc.) seems an entertaining and effective method of Intelligence Increase. Learning this language  comes from frequent reading and re-reading. Often I’ll reread a paragraph or section of Mason & Dixon  right away, sometimes a few times until a flicker of understanding begins to kindle.  Occasionally the brain just kicks in, going inside the language to easily to follow the text. At that point you’ve earned another notch on your neural wings, so to speak. It appears a tautology that solving one maze or puzzle makes it easier to solve others even more difficult. Cracking Joyce might help you to understand Pynchon or vice versa. Reading Moby Dick has made you smarter, possibly helping to open the door upon Joyce or Pynchon or the deeper strata found in Wilson, or now for something completely different. 

Similar to Moby Dick, what I especially love about Mason & Dixon is the frequent Bardo Exploration the reader traverses through. On one level it has all the earmarks of a Book of the Dead. Entry to the Bardo comes through a variety of surrealistic ways like paradoxes of time or dreams or encounters with non-human Intelligence of one stripe or another. The story begins with Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke coming to Philadelphia to attend Charles Mason’s funeral in 1786. He’s late getting there, misses the funeral, but visits Mason’s grave every day for his months long visit. Cherrycoke is able to stay with his sister and brother-in-law, the LeSparks, on the condition that he entertain his young twin nephews and older niece with stories, which of course, turn out to be all about Mason & Dixon. The book ends shortly before Mason’s death.

This form of a postmortem looking back on a main character’s life up to their death bears a strong similarity to another classic of 20th Century American literature, Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry, another Bardo classic with a strong presence of Magick. Lowry’s novel begins on the Mexican Day of the Dead one year after the demise of the main character, Geoffrey Firmin aka the Consul. The rest of the novel looks back on the Consul’s life leading up to his death on the very last page. Pynchon possibly pays homage to Lowry by naming a minor character in M&D, a revolutionary, Captain Volcanoe. Another parallel: Under the Volcano starts with a look at the lay of the land: “Two mountain chains traverse the republic roughly from north to south, forming between them a number of valleys and plateaus.” The lay of the land, how it’s affected by drawing lines upon it and various other telluric effects (ley lines, Fung shui, Geomancy, etc.) appears a major theme of M&D. We see the word “traverse” in Lowrey’s first sentence, a word that Pynchon utilizes in M&D, but rises to great prominence in his next novel, Against the Day, where he makes Traverse, the surname of his primary protagonists. Traverse has bardo implications; one always traverses the Bardo, going from a “death” to a “rebirth,” never remaining in a static or steady-state in that territory; the only constant is change.  Both novels show a strong influence from Moby Dick. According to the AI Overlords, “Lowry's text contains multiple allusions to Moby-Dick," including references to the final words of Chapter 1 of Moby-Dick: ‘one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.’” Lowry would explicitly acknowledge the influence of Melville.

The emphasis on Death and the Bardo begins immediately in Mason & Dixon. After establishing the presence of Cherrycoke in his sister’s household and mentioning the purpose of his daily visit to Mason’s grave: “– “that like a shade with a grievance, he expected Mason, but newly arrived at Death, to help him with something”, the Revd begins his story of Mason and Dixon:

“’It begins with a hanging.’

‘Excellent!’ cry the Twins.

The Revd, producing a scarr’d old Note-book, cover’d in cheap Leather , begins to read. ‘had I been the first churchman of modern times to be swung from Tyburn Tree, – had I been then taken for dead, while in fact but spending an Intermission among the eventless corridors of Syncope,. . .’”

Corridors appear often in the Bardo domain. Tyburn Tree marks the spot in London of the principal location of public executions for over 650 years. 

For the majority of the novel, Mason is haunted by the death of his wife Rebekah: he experiences multiple Bardo encounters with her, in dreams and alternate realities. In one of the final chapters after completion of the Line, Mason reflects back on his life and her death: 

“That other Tract, across the Border, – perhaps nearly ev’rything, perhaps nearly nothing, – is denied him. “Is that why I sought so obsessedly Death’s Insignia, it’s gestures and forumlæ, its quotidian gossip, – all those awful days out at Tyburn, – hours spent nearly immobile, watching stone-carvers labor upon tomb embellishments, Chip by Chip, – was it all but some way to show my worthiness to obtain a permit to visit her, to cross that grimly patroll’d line, that very essence of Division?” He has another encounter with Rebekah in the next paragraph. She seems to be advising him what to do now that the Line is finished.

It's no secret that Pynchon loves puzzles, codes, cabala, cryptography, conspiracies, secret societies and mysteries of all sorts. The “sc” letter code seems on steroids in M&D particularly in the first half to two thirds of the book. It feels like Pynchon hits you over the head with it, so blatantly obvious does it appear. I don’t fully understand why (I have my guesses as you know) and tend to regard this “sc” ubiquity along the lines of a Zen koan. The code even turns up in the name of our faithful narrator, Revd Wicks Cherrycoke with the last letter of his first name followed by the first letter of his last name.

I’ll leave it here, for now, with one last quote that strongly suggests the influence of RAW:

“The Ascent to Christ is a struggle thro’ one heresy after another. River-wise up-country into a proliferation of Sects and Sects branching from Sects, unto Deism, faithless pretending to be holy, and beyond, – ever away from the Sea, from the Harbor, from all that was serene and certain, into an Interior unmapp’d, a Realm of Doubt. The Nights. The Storms and Beasts. The Falls, the Rapids, . . . the America of the Soul.

"Doubt is of the essence of Christ. . . . The final pure Christ is pure uncertainty.”

This comes from Undeliver’d Sermons by Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke. It can also easily read as the same “Christ” Crowley writes about being able to produce in “Postcards to Probationers” Equinox I Vol. II. Two allusions to Crowley: his initials, AC, at the top of the quote, and “Beasts” later on. Crowley’s oft mentioned and taught by RAW early piece on Skepticism, “The Soldier and the Hunchback: ! and ?” appeared in Equinox I Vol. I.

You may not want to read another difficult and dense novel immediately following Moby Dick, but I highly recommend giving Mason & Dixon a try at some point especially if one likes historical novels. In my opinion, it’s one of the greatest books ever written. Meanwhile, back on the Pequod the pace picks up.

Chapter 131 “The Pequod meets the Delight” foreshadows their final fate. There seems a reason Melville called the other ship the Delight, a paradoxical moniker given the circumstance, he calls it “most miserably misnamed.” 

Chapter 132 “The Symphony” does indeed have a very lyrical prose style reminiscent of Tolkien for its excellent descriptions. Starbuck starts to play the counter-melody of trying to get Ahab to change course.

Chapter 133 “The Chase–First Day”. Ahab smells Moby Dick before she’s spotted. These are some of the more epic chapters in the book . . . the Symphony starts to build to its climatic crescendo. 

Chapter 134 “The Chase–Second Day.” I found this bit very interesting for its synch with Thelema: 

“for of what present avail to the becalmed or windbound mariner is the skill that assures him he is exactly ninety-three leagues and a quarter from his port.

"Inferable from these statements, are many collateral subtile matters touching the chase of whales.”

For the last note of this Symphony I’ll quote different famous literary cetaceans: “So long, and thanks for all the fish.”

Next week: Almost done! Please read  Chapter 135, "The Chase -- Third Day" and "The Epilogue."