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This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
And we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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Let me take a minute here to quote the first few sentences of Joseph Conrad's preface to the Negro of the Narcissus, which pretty much summarizes my feelings about Moby Dick.
A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.
And art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe by bringing to light the truth, manifold in one underlying its every aspect.
End quote.
I would like to think that Conrad learned his art from Melville, yet apparently this was not the case.
The only reference to Melville by Conrad I've been able to locate is disappointing or disillusioning to an extreme.
In 1907 Conrad was asked to introduce the world classic edition of Moby Dick, and he wrote back to the editor.
I quote, "years ago I looked into Taipei and Omu, but as I didn't find there what I am looking for when I opened a book I did not go further.
Lately I had in my hand Moby Dick, it struck me as a rather strained rap city with wailing for a subject and not a single, sincere line in the three volumes of it."
Now I can't account for this verdict since the one writer who out does Conrad at every level of representation, according to Conrad's own rules of engagement is Melville.
I think that Conrad would see in Melville's rap city the highest possible instance of art as he defined it, instead he apparently saw in it a manufactured intentionality.
Why?
My guess is that he mistook sublimity for insincerity, and let's face it, genuine sublimity is always on the verge of precipitating into rhetorical posturing.
Melville in my view walked that very fine line, sublimally and sincerely.
But be that as it may Moby Dick remains the shining ideal or ultimate exemplar of art's vocation as Conrad defines it in his preface.
More than any other work known to me, this novel carries its justification in every line.
I realized this when I re-read it a while back and started writing down in a notebook all the great sentences I came across.
It soon became apparent that I would have to re-transcribe the entire book "Line by Line."
It contains an endless flow of sublime sentences that follow one another like billows, with as much cadence and rhythm as oceanic waves.
No wonder Melville's narrative overflows his first person narrator.
Each mile is too small a vehicle for such justice.
To render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe you must, if you are a writer, not only describe what the I.C.'s, but also bring to light the latent recesses that surround the visible world, the way oceans surround the continents that rise out of their abiseled depths.
To restore opacity to phenomena, you must allow their penumbra to suffuse the realm of appearances.
I opened my copy of Moby Dick at Random and land on the following sentence about the P. Quad's second-mate "stub" who,
quote, "when he dressed, instead of putting his legs into his trousers, he put his pipe into his mouth."
Here is the sentence.
I say this continual smoking must have been one cause at least of stubs peculiar disposition.
For everyone knows that this earthly air, whether ashore or afloat, is terribly inflected, with the nameless miseries of the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it.
And as in time of the cholera some people go about with a campherated handkerchief to their mouth, so likewise against all mortal tribulations, stubs tobacco smoke might have operated as a sort of disinfecting agent.
There are a numberless such ghosts, presences, and shadows that don't themselves come to appearance, but without which the visible universe would remain unjustified in Conrad's sense of the term.
I'll have more to say about the way Melville not only heeds these haunting elements, but makes him the very matter of his extraordinary novel, which, along with the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson,
The Rowan Emerson, make me really proud to be Melville's country fellow countrymen.
But before we descend into the specifics, let me welcome back to entitled opinions by friend and colleague Andrea Nightingale, and solicit her thoughts about this book, Andrea, welcome back to entitled opinions of real pleasure to have you back with us here.
Thanks Robert, it's great to be back.
Now before we came on air, you said to me that you don't think of Moby Dick as a novel per se, but rather something like on the order of an epic or a saga, and yet it's conventionally classified as a novel.
Do you think it's a very, very weird novel if it is a novel at all?
I think it's actually unclassifiable.
I would not call it, I mean it has its epic in its scope.
I guess it's a novel because novels can include just about everything, but the way that he sets it up, I mean you could describe it as a treatise, even a kind of essay on wailing, in the sense of an essay as an attempt in that sense.
But you have 135 chapters and a short epilogue, and those chapters are sort of lapping up against each other.
They don't always, you know, they don't form an organic hole, and yet there really, I think there is a coherence in the book.
The coherence is really provided by the whale, which sort of pulls everything together. So I'm not ready to classify it. Do you want to do that?
No, I like the way you put it yourself and wondering just to what degree the whale is that unifying element of the book, I suppose, that is the case because everything gravitates around the...
I mean I don't mean Moby Dick per se, but I mean that Melville and Ishmael are trying to chop up the whale into so many different pieces, and look at this piece and this aspect, this action, you know, this element, all these different sort of pieces, parts, aspects of the whale.
They chop it all up in order to try to sort of see the whale from different perspectives, and I think that that's reflected in the chopping up of the chapters.
So I think that even though there is a plot, this is not really a plot driven novel, and even though the plot has a closure at the end, the novel as a hole to my mind does not have a beginning middle and end because it's this kind of infinitely large puzzle,
where he gives you a bunch of puzzle pieces, you put it together and you still don't see or know the whale.
I agree. You know, in phenomenology there's a method about the phenomenological reduction of things to their essences, and in...
Whoserl would try to do this with various objects until he got to that kind of reduced essence of something where if you were able to take anything away from that reduced essence, it would no longer be the object in question.
And so if I hear you properly, you're saying that this book, despite the fact that it's a very hybrid genre, it can be an essay, it can be novel, it can be theology and philosophy, all these travel,
I mean it can be also a documentary book about and wailing, but basically if one were to... there's very little that one could take away from it without compromising its essence or its coherence.
Is that correct?
Certainly you couldn't change. I don't think you could change a sentence in this book every sentence is stunning.
So I do think it has coherence, but I would object to the word essence and the reason why is that I actually think that a lot of what's going on in the book is this effort to capture the essence of the whale.
And to me that feels too much about sort of... I mean it's an ontological pursuit to find the sort of whaleness of the whale, the being, the essence.
And so what happens is just when you try to say the whale is this or maybe the whales a god or maybe the whales a devil, all these projections, maybe the whale is a dumb beast, but these is words, the whale is spouting fish with a horizontal tail.
To me these keep collapsing from essence into attributes, parts, pieces, moving pieces. And I'm so I'm uncomfortable with the word essence here.
I love the word essence because I think that...
It's too original.
For all the attempts to dissect the whale into all his various parts and they do that in a physical way in the middle of the book, they'll get into the head, the whalesmen, when they cut it up, the author will describe every distinct part of the whale.
And yet we know and you suggested yourself that this work of analysis is one that ultimately doesn't get us any closer to understanding what I'm calling the essence of the whale, what you might call the wholeness or the integrity of the whale.
No, actually I would agree with you. I don't think he ever kept... He tries to get at the essence but he doesn't.
So the reason I'm resistant to the word is only because I think that we then have to say, well since he never captures the essence, what are we left with?
We're left with appearances coming into being, becoming all sorts of something that is not about essence.
Do you believe as I do that the whale in its living animate form before it's been killed by the whalers is an ambassador of some other realm where it truly belongs in its own element, the ocean or what have you, and that therefore it might have an essence but we just don't have access to.
So I take your point and I think that's what the book is raising that very question.
And certainly every interpreter has tried to wrestle with that issue. Is he trying to suggest that there's something more than just an animal or are we just left with the animal realm?
Again, I'm getting ahead of myself but I'm very uncomfortable with the idea of moving into any kind of platonic dualism, any kind of metaphysical realm that exists beyond the realm of becoming.
And yet I'm also resistant to a kind of monism, a kind of materialist monism. So neither of those work for me, then I start groping for something.
And the thing that I'm sort of working on is some sort of vitalism which even then is not quite right.
But vitalism seems to bring together the kind of physicality of the whale while also allowing for the kind of overflow.
Do you then resist any attempt to find symbolic allegorical or theological meanings associated with Moby Dick in particular because a large portion of the history of the scholarship surrounding the book is an attempt to discover symbolic values, allegorical values and so forth?
Yeah, I mean certainly there's this phrase in the book which says that allegory is hideous and detestable.
But of course that's just one phrase. But I do have to say that you cannot come to groups with this book without taking various seriously the biblical references which are bound in the book starting with the names of the characters.
They have Ishmael, Elijah, small characters like Jonah, Gabriel.
And also I mean it's worth thinking about the fact that the whale himself is compared, I mean I think he's compared, I mean he's compared both to Yahweh and to Jesus.
And I'll just start with if I could one illusion to the Bible that I think would help us out here.
And this is a passage about the whale's tail or fluke.
And the passage starts very humorously quote other poets have warbled the praises of the soft eye of the antelope and the lovely plumage of the bird that never alights, less celestial, I celebrate a tail end quote.
So then he goes on for pages and pages describing the tail, its shape, its ability to propel the whale into the air and then down to the bottom of the sea.
Then we finally come to this amazing passage with the reference to the Bible.
This is chapter 86 called the tale quote dissect him how I may then I go but skin deep.
I know him not and never will but if I know not the tale of the whale how I understand his head much more how comprehend his face when face he has none.
Thou shalt see my back parts my tale he seems to say but my face shall not be seen but I cannot completely make out his back parts and hint what he will about his face I say again he has no face and quote.
And here we have a deliberate illusion to Exodus where Yahweh tells Moses on Mount Horrib quote "Thou shalt see my back parts but my face shall not be seen" end quote.
So here there seems to be a direct comparison of the whale to Yahweh right and yet that passage is embedded in this huge description of the whale and all of its annumality.
So we need to be careful not to make a simple identification.
And certainly what interests me is that the description of the whale's face there is a huge long passage dealing with the fact that the whale really has this big forehead this is the sperm whale with the eyes about 30 feet back on the side of the head of course it has no nose.
The ears are way way way way back in our tiny mouth is actually underneath the whale not on the front part of the face.
And so he has the long description of the face and it's a very physicalized description.
So here the idea is hint what he will say about his face I say again he has no face that feels so different from what's actually happening in the Bible.
Well certainly the weirdness of having an eye on either side of this huge forehead means that the whale sees the world in a way that's incomprehensible to us where we see the world with two eyes stereoscopically and it sees two different has two different views simultaneously.
Yeah and he goes on about that it's on length saying that it can take in two different worlds as you say at the same time but it can never see in front of it.
So it has a completely different sort of visual sense of its world.
And so I guess what I'm saying here is the sheer physicality of the description of the whale's non-face as it were.
It seems to preclude the simple move towards the Christian God towards Yahweh or actually the Hebrew God or a metaphysical God.
So once again you're left with the unknowability of the whale.
Yeah it's true and in that regard I understand why you say it doesn't have an essence because the essence certainly cannot be approached frontily and it can't be grasped either through dissection or analysis.
But even though he keeps trying.
Keeps trying but there's the whale does have a wholeness and you spoke about the kind of vitalism and when I look at the description of the physicality of the whale and I try to come to terms with what is the material correlate of its integrity as an animate being.
The one thing I come up with is this very peculiar phenomenon called "Isinglass" which I looked up in the dictionary and this is a membrane that surrounds the whale.
It's a kind of fishy substance and it's a kind of enteglement that figures not as the enveloping skin of the whale but as the crystallization of its contact between the skin of it and the marine element.
So it's a kind of no thing this isinglass that assures that the thing can never be rheified into a mere thing and that its animate transcendence will never be breached.
And for me what I love about Melville is that he'll take an actual physical substance and it's so dematerialized that he'll say as long as the whale is within his isn't glass.
We're never going to know it because he isn't glass even though it's completely on the surface means that we will not acknowledge the whale will never be anything but skin deep but skin deep isn't good enough because skin is where it's all happening in the surface.
Of course, of course. I mean that's a really beautiful point.
He does say that you can sort of see through the isn't glass and that there are markings all over the whale but you know it does feel like sort of through a glass darkly as it were.
And as you say that there's almost a kind of barrier between us and our vision of the whale and the actual whale because of the isn't glass which he calls the skin of the skin.
The skin of the skin.
And would you say that there's something about the whales in habitation of the deep even though we know that whales or mammals will speak about the mammalian nature in a moment.
But the fact that the whale is something that comes up to the surface from depths.
Yeah, yeah.
That it makes one want to know what is the deep meaning or secret or essence and that even ahab I think is obsessed with penetrating.
Very much the depth of this creature in a kind of insane mode but that it's a misguided attempt to go deep into the kind of meaning of it because it's all in the isn't glass if you like.
I know. I've thought about that. I mean that's a beautiful point. I mean there's no question that the elements play such a huge role in the novel and certainly the land and the sea.
And the sea is such a from the point of view of a human such an alien element and it's a Bissell it go it feels bottomless if you're out on the sea.
Yeah, you can't hold on to it. It changes all the time and so you know it has this depth and then the question becomes well you know what's down there right.
And I do think that ahab has this kind of penetration model.
Ishmael says he wants to grow down into the foundations of he uses that word the foundations of the universe.
But groping is I think a little different from penetrating and I think groping is actually what he does sort of metaphorically speaking.
He keeps groping to find this aspect of the well or that aspect. But you know you raise a very interesting question here and you said this in your monologue about sort of the phenomenal realm and it's kind of the the panumbral sort of hidden aspects of the world that we live in and see.
And one of the things that has always been interesting to me about this book is that this kind of meditation on light and darkness and clearly the ocean is a realm of darkness.
And even when Ishmael is trying to come up with a taxonomy of the whales, the whale he talks about trying to he says I'm classifying the constituents of a chaos.
Nothing less here is a seed. So even in classifying the whale he sees it as an effort to grasp chaos. Well if the whale feels chaotic just think what to see it is right.
But back to my sort of light and darkness question which I think picks up on some of the things you said.
You have an association of light in Platonism and in Christianity with with being with divine being whether it be the forms or God light is associated with divine being.
When you come to Moby Dick there seems to be this meditation on darkness. It's complicated because whale oil was that thing which was lighting up Europe and New England before the discovery of kerosene right so whale oil was that thing which brought light.
But in chapter 65 you have this claim that Ishmael finds it's very very strange that quote mortal man feeds upon the creature that feeds his lamp he finds us very strange why are we eating a creature that's bringing light.
Well that to me conjures up Christ as both the bringer of light and the fact that we eat the body of Christ or we drink the body of the Christ of if we're Christians and also in one of the kind of scenes where the whale dies there's a comparison of the whales blood to wine.
And so this sense of the whale bringing light being some kind of Christ figure again just I'm not saying that he is but I'm saying that there are some references that invite us to think about this.
Yet the whale lives in the dark that that is actually the element where the whale dwells and if we think of the ocean as chaotic which it must be.
The whole idea of darkness and chaos as being as it were the sort of.
Nest of being or the nest of becoming right that thing from which life emerges that seems to me to turn.
Christianity and plainism on its head right where everything is about the light right and we see.
Darkness and being.
But anyway I did want to just read one passage.
About light in the natural world and I'd like your comment on this because I think this is interesting this comes from chapter 42 on the whiteness of the whale.
Quote all dayified nature absolutely paints like the harlot whose elements cover nothing but the charnel house within.
And when we proceed further and consider that the mystical cosmetic that produces every one of her hues the great principle of light forever 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 palsy universe lies before us like a leper.
And quote.
So it's a kind of a strange attack on light as.
You know.
You allowing us to see things in the phenomenal world while concealing this charnel house.
Well that chapter on the whiteness of the whale converges with what you're saying about the ambiguity of the whales.
Relation to light and dark because white is on the one hand the color of the angelic and the innocent and the luminous.
But on the other hand it's also the color of power death the shroud and these antithetical valences that the color white has that are so brilliantly brought out in that chapter.
I think have to have something to do with the way in which the whale can be the emissary of a darkness but in its emissary nature it brings light in the physical sense of the oil that that illuminates us.
So it seems that's why I keep coming back to sort of theological questions while I think he is in so many ways criticizing Christianity.
He is playing with all of the Christian tropes while deconstructing some of them but also maybe coming up with a whole new kind of theology.
And what would that theology look like or how would we begin to lay down some of its fundamental premises?
Well I mean this goes back to the question of essence I it can't be a theology of being or of essence because to my mind that's associated with light with a metaphysical realm and in corporeal realm.
So to me I would move from being to becoming but even becoming feels too general.
So how do we talk about a realm which has this kind of life force which keeps changing and moving?
I mean help me out here I mean do I want to use the word theology of becoming that that still feels too reductive or just not.
Well the reason I would resist not so much the theology but the becoming is because the whale in its own element and when it is not being harassed by human beings with their death tribes.
I might say something about the death tribe and they have in a moment but when the whale is in its own element it seems to have a repose a kind of gatheredness in itself that resembles a state of being of a static flotation or a certain kind of.
Yeah I just call it a gatheredness from within that is not one of constant metamorphosis or change.
There's an antiquity to the animal that goes back to antidiluvian times in our own imagination.
It seems to be a creature that has been around a lot for a lot longer than we have as a species and that we imagine will probably outlive us by several million years.
So there's something about the stability of the beast itself which evokes the pathos of being rather than becoming.
I mean I take your point I like the idea of it being sort of gathered into itself but repose I mean it's swimming all over the ocean.
It's constantly eating I mean it's a huge animal but needs a lot of food so there's so much talk about eating and being eaten in this book.
So I'm not so comfortable with the idea that the whale is a being in repose.
It may be gathered unto itself but it's a moving target.
Well can I tell you why I use the word repose and I'd like to draw attention to a chapter you were very close to it in chapter 87.
I think you were kind of one or two chapters before after that when you read that passage earlier I think it was chapter 86 you mentioned or something.
But here it's chapter is called the Grand Armada and we have a description of the whale in its own element and I think that this is although you and I have agreed
to this point that there is no new manal vision of the whale.
We cannot have an exact vision of the whale in its essence in itself and yet if there is such a vision possible this is as close as we come to it.
And I wish I had time to read the entire chapter because it's the most beautiful chapter in the book in my view.
But since I can't do that I just ask our listeners to reread that chapter for themselves and they'll find that it takes up this image of circling around in an amazing fashion when it describes the way a vast
shole of wave of whales.
They form concentric circles as the shole comes under attack.
That's the way they defend themselves.
So concentric circles, the outer rings are convulsive, thrashing, victim, you know, to a horrible and violent wounding from the whalers.
But each mile's boat navigates us way through these bounding leviathans and gains this pure calm of the protected center of the concentric rings.
And here in the center everything is absolutely still and enchanted.
I quote, "In the central expanse the sea presented that smooth satin-like surface called a sleek produced by the subtle moisture thrown off by the whale in his more quiet moods."
And this sleek, I think, is a very intimate phenomenon or is a kind of phenomenon of intimacy that is very similar I think to the isn't glass that we were talking about that envelops the whale skin.
But anyway, the narrative continues quote, "Yes, we were now in that enchanted calm which they say lurks at the heart of every commotion."
And I think that this is the quiet heart of the entire commotion of the book, a-haps commotion, the peak wads and the stories in general.
And what is the scene?
It's the scene of pregnant and nursing whales in the depths of transparent waters, which each mile calls the enchanted pond.
So all the sin, guilt and violence of the perimeter here turns to a kind of innocence and redeem nature as the cows and calves, quote, "events a wondrous fearlessness and confidence."
And it's Qui Qui, actually, who first notices in very excited accents, quote, "the long coils of the umbilical cord of madam la viethen."
And then Melville adds a footnote to this describing the way in which when a whale's tits happen to get cut by a hunter's lance, quote, "the mother's pouring milk and blood, rivingly to sculler the sea for rods."
The milk is very sweet and rich.
It has been tasted by man when overflowing with mutual esteem, the whales salute moore-ominum.
So just to this vision of the maternal whale, this young Leviathan amours in the deep, is as close as each mile, Melville, or we will get to a numinal vision of the whale.
And it's this umbilical cord that symbolically, for me, links the visible and the invisible worlds.
And it's the severance of that cord, which I believe Ahab suffers from.
And his metaphysical nihilism is really at bottom of a perverse quest for a reconnection or a revenge on the world in which this reconnection is denied to us or to him.
And so...
I mean, that's a very, very beautiful reading, and you're persuading me in all sorts of ways.
Although, I mean, he does mention that this is the whale in one of its moods.
Yes.
And it's a kind of enchanted mood, and it's an enchanted chapter.
The chapter is so moving and so beautiful.
And I think the umbilical cord is crucial.
But we also have to point out that he says, quote, "There's no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like, the only mode in which you can derive, even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by going awayling yourself."
But by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally stow and sunk by him."
So I guess I'm saying that in one of its moods, the whale is a kind of...
In repose.
In others of its moods, even when humans aren't there, the whale is getting around.
Getting around thrashing and violent and eating.
But I mean, I take your point and I think that the umbilical cord is something that we should meditate on.
But I'm still not ready to say that there is some kind of essence here in this one scene where we find some kind of core of the whale.
We don't.
The whole point is you can't get at the essence of the whale.
And even in these enchanted scenes, you're sort of torn away, and then there's the blood in the milk.
And it all becomes...
Even if you want to say that there's this kind of center with this kind of bloody violent periphery,
I'm again hearing you move towards some sort of metaphysics.
I mean, you use the word "nul" which just gives me the shivers.
Yeah, well, of course.
It's a bad word, but not for me because...
Well, it doesn't have to be a metaphysics, Andrea, if you think of the maternal imagery.
And you could say that it's rather than being this disembodied, transcendent concept or idea.
Perhaps it's what Freud referred to as an image of Dassadin.
Yeah, okay.
Now, Dassadin is the thing around which all desire revolves in Freudian theory.
And you know, I'm not a Freudian, I'm not...
I don't deploy psychoanalytic criticism very often.
However, it's the umbilical cord in the maternal imagery that makes me invoke Freudian order to say that
if you really want to literalize what the thing is, and you really can't name it,
that you don't have a concept for, but it's very closely associated with the mother,
or with the kind of hyperbolic concept that operates in the unconscious of the mother, in a particular person.
And when desire revolves around that the thing, if it gets too close to its source of Jewish sauce,
as like all we call it, it becomes death.
And therefore, you have to keep a safe distance from it.
But if the...
What the dark undercurrent of desire is actually a desire to get draw close to the thing,
and perhaps even remeld with reconverge with it, you were in dangerous waters.
You are, you are.
I mean, I'd like to hear more about what you have to say about that,
but let me just inject one point here that certainly in the case of giving birth,
that to me is about, again, it goes back to the question of becoming and coming into being,
rather than repose.
To me, giving birth, even if it's, you know, a whale birth, which is probably more comfortable than a human birth,
is a bringing something into being.
So, I'm, again, resisting the notion of some repose, and I'm going to stick to my idea that there's something coming into being,
this vitality, this vitalism.
The issue of the umbilical core, however, I think would bring us into the human realm,
in terms of...
I mean, you're Freudian, you're coming about Freud and Lachael,
raises the question of the human relation to the whale, right?
And that's, of course, a key question in this whole epic.
We've been, I just called it an epic, didn't I?
We haven't even mentioned the human characters.
Certainly Ahab, as you mentioned before, seems to have this desire to penetrate and to get near the whale.
And yet, I'd like to hear more about this, the cutting of the umbilical cord, which actually happens in one of the scenes,
because during this scene where a whale is giving birth, there's a discussion of the fact that oftentimes that umbilical cord gets caught on one of the whale lines and snapped.
Yeah. So would you like to comment on that?
Well, yeah, sure. I think severance is a baso-continoal here in the novel as a whole.
And what is severed from what? Land is separated from, from see the human is separated from, you know, the animal.
Perhaps the invisible, the realm of the invisible is separated from the realm of the visible, or at least in someone like Ahab's mind it is.
And there's, I agree with you that Ahab might have this kind of insane expectation that he can forcibly penetrate, as you said, you know, the foundation, the actual depths of the mystery.
But going back to the nature of the whale, I think there's the mammalian nature of this creature of the sea is where all the paradoxes come together.
Because it's on the one hand completely other to us, because we are landwelling animals.
And the sea is almost a hostile frontier. We need to bring the land with us in our boats and so forth in order to even exist on the waters.
But the depths are certainly mean death for human being. No, we're not like whales.
On the other hand, the whale is from an evolutionary point of view mammal.
And there is this distant remote kinship, which is all, all the more uncanny.
Just amazing when you think about it. Yeah. Yeah.
And when we speak of mammals, we're speaking about a kind of genre of living things in which the maternal, the mothering of the young plays a hugely dominant role compared to other species.
So the whale's mothering, the way of elephants, you know, mother is something that must have evoked distant echoes of a certain kind of, you know, connection with the mother that has been lost and in Freudian,
He's a human, like anian psychoanalysis being human means to have lost that connection. The sort of oceanic oceanic one, the sort of the womb as soon and the womb might be the ocean.
And to be human means to be tossed out of the womb and tossed out of the ocean that we're and landed landed and that connection we suffer from the loss of it are our whole lives insofar as we're human and finite and so forth.
So it could be that Ahab is for all his hatred is on the trail to this kind of insane sort of Jewish sauce with with dasadim, the thing and Moby Dick has been obsessed his consciousness as a result of the losses that he feels that he's suffering from and the loss that he suffered from,
proximately is the loss of his leg and perhaps even the loss of his penis because he mentions that he has been dismasted and there's a suggestion if I can find it about how he, let's see.
He says in chapter 37 about himself gifted with the high perception I lack the low enjoying power.
The low enjoying power, I think, you know, it could be repetition but it's more likely probably a sexual thing and he's anhedonic.
He can't even enjoy his pipe tobacco anymore, which is the ultimate he throws it off his pipe into the sea.
So there also says I would dismember my dismemberr and I think member here has to have some feelings.
So if he's lost his member in the male psychology that member is the one kind of vehicle of connection.
Yeah.
Certainly, you know, with the other gender and so forth.
And he has suffered more than most of us, a certain kind of severance.
We don't know all the details but he's pissed off his hell about that.
And he sure is. And he might be trying to restore some kind of metaphysical connection because he's gifted with his high perception.
So maybe with his higher faculties he can penetrate to a lost unity.
Well, I mean, he would make him a metaphysical.
Yeah, it would.
I mean, he does sort of talk about sort of striking through the mask.
Yes, he does.
But then he says I don't know if there's anything on the other side of the mask and this is what so appalls me.
But I still need to strike through it just to somehow find out.
But we have to add that, you know, his leg is inside a whale and his former leg and his present peg leg is made up of a whale bone.
Exactly.
So there's this strange kind of inter indebtedness between ahab and the whale.
Not, I mean, of course, you know, they're both on the food chain as it were, but there's this kind of peculiar pairing of ahab and the whale.
So I mean, I'm wondering now whether, you know, based on what you're saying, is this either a return to the womb?
You know, to kind of recover, you know, that early oceanic phase or is it an attempt to be a grown-up man who penetrates into the depths, right?
So there's different ways of looking at this.
Certainly his leg, the artificial, you know, the whale bone is an inverted pyramid because it comes to a point.
And it bores downwards into the ship literally, into the underworld of the sailors.
But there's a boring kind of, his transcendence is directed downwards, not upwards into the depths of where the whale is.
And the depths are dangerous for human beings.
I actually think that that point is really crucial, that this whole effort that I've been sort of trying to talk about is a kind of effort to find some sort of being or essence.
But it's a downward move as opposed to the traditional upward heavenly move up into the light, up into the heavens.
So that downward move to find transcendence in chaos.
And I mean, we do have to focus on the fact that what is down below is the abyss.
So what does it mean to find transcendence in a chaotic abyss?
I think it means that you find death.
And that's why I think a certain Freudian psychoanalysis is not misplaced here because one has to identify a death drive in this man.
You do, yeah.
In ahab.
And obviously he brings it about by the end and involves all his shipmates with it.
But it's clear that he is on a mission to bring about his own sort of tragic demise, whether he's aware of that or not.
And the hatred, this downward transcendence you're referring to takes the form of hatred rather than love.
In his case.
It's the opposite of love.
And I can read you one of the most chilling passages about his hatred of the whale where he says the narrator says, all that most maddens and torments, all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain, all the subtle demonisms of life and thought, all evil to crazy ahab,
or visibly personified and made practically a saleable in Moby Dick.
He piled upon the whale's white hump, the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down.
And then as if his chest had been a canon, he burst his heart's heart shell upon it.
It's amazing.
But I mean, it's interesting because that last passage where he talks about bearing the rage that goes back to Adam and Eve.
So it's the sort of human rage against nature.
But he seems to have something even more extreme than the ordinary human rage against nature, unless you want to argue that we are all ahabs, which is arguable.
But he seems to be so full of hatred.
I mean, he takes it a step further by that.
I mean, our love-hate relationship with the earth, because the earth is the place where we die, still includes love for many of us.
But for ahab, it's all hate.
It's hate, but it's a hate that is driven, and insofar as it's driven, it is all over his own bliss.
Yeah, there's a desire that is driving him.
It's partly revenge.
It's his re-sauce.
But it is, I think it is the only thing is that, as you say, he's anhedonic.
So...
Well, he can't take pleasure in the lower, say the lower repetition.
So I think I get what you mean.
What you mean is if he can kill Moby Dick, that's his bliss.
He will have a metaphysical gratification, he thinks.
Or some kind of...
Yeah.
He will have exorcised something that has identified as a personification of all evil.
Right.
Exactly.
But to sort of kill the whale, even if he had, of course, he would not really get what he wants.
No, he wouldn't.
And this is where there's brilliant metaphoric in chapter 36, I believe, about...
Ahab always going around and around and around, which is the figure for a compulsion.
Yeah.
And this going around is in relation to this breaking through that you were referring to, is also his desire to penetrate.
And if you look at that chapter, it opens with Ahab pacing the deck, like a country gentleman,
"taking a few turns in the garden."
He, "paces his old rounds."
And he goes in so doing round, round his own obsession.
And in fact, the text says, "You could almost see that thought turn in him as he turned."
Wow.
And later in front of his men, we find Ahab, "half revolving in his pivot hole," as if he would bore through the foundations of both his deck and his soul, which the latter is compared to dented geological stones.
Dented.
So, and then he calls his men around him, "I, my heart, my hearties, all round me."
And he vows to chase the whale, "round good hope and round the horn and round the Norway maelstrom and round perditions flames before I give him up."
And he declares that, "Even if, quote, the globe were girded with guineas, my vengeance will fetch a great premium here, namely his chest."
Which, remember in that other thing, it's going to be the cannon.
And then there's the flaggin, which at the end of this extraordinary scene, you know, they pass around.
He says, "round with it, round, it goes round excellently, it spiralizes in ye."
And that finally, you know, there's that ceremony with the harpooners and officers who gather around him in a ritual packmaking or bonding.
And he says, "ring me in," that they call it kind of surround him.
So, this going around and around in obsession is juxtaposed to that other metaphor, which is breaking through a boundary or a membrane.
And in fact, Stub says of A, that the chick that's in him pecs at the shell to will soon be out.
And this sets up the terms for his, what I would call the metaphysics of the mask.
We've earned something that you mentioned earlier about the, he says that this whole visible world is just a mask.
If we could call it a kind of metaphysics of the mask, but he does believe, quote, all visible objects are but paced board masks.
But in each event, in the living act, the undoubted deed, there's some unknown, but still reasoning thing puts forth the molding of its features from behind the unreasoning mask.
If a man will strike, strike through the mask.
How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?
That's his agenda, no?
Yeah. To break out of this prison and strike through, pick at the shell.
He's also, he's also compared to not only Prometheus, but he is both the vulture and Prometheus being eaten at.
He's both.
So that, I mean, that just adds to this whole, to this whole.
But if you're right, when you say that there's no essence to the whale, or if there is no metaphysical, numinal truth, then this guy is insane.
He is.
Because he's trying to penetrate into something which is nothingness.
That's true. I mean, unless, of course, I mean, it depends on how you read the book.
Certainly he's a madman.
We can all, I think, agree. He's constantly called a monomaniac.
But for Ishmael, for the reader, for, you know, people who are not Ahab, there is still this desire to find out whether there's something more than the reality that we live in.
So that quest isn't just Ahabs. It's just that Ahab takes it to such a degree and manifests it in violence against a being that, you know, in some sense, is an innocent.
Yeah.
Well, I like the suggestion that we have to see ourselves to a certain extent in Ahab.
And he kind of goes to an extreme. There are other characters, of course, in the book. There is Starbuck, who is the kind of hero of self-imposed limits.
Yeah.
I do not want to penetrate the ultimate essence of things. It's my wife and children.
That's right.
That's for me or sacred.
And at the end he's saying, "Let's go home."
Let's go home.
And family is back at home. He's really not interested in -- and that's also true of stub and flask.
We're also almost hilariously uninterested in these, you know, penumbral issues.
But Ishmael is. Ishmael is very interested in this question.
But he goes at it differently. I mean, to my mind, there are times when Ishmael seems to be almost overwhelmed by Ahab's obsession.
At other times, Ishmael steps back and looks at the whale with almost with the eyes of love in a very different way than Ahab.
So I actually think that -- I mean, Ishmael, his descriptions of the whale and his discussions of, you know, finding skeletons and dissecting them, even though those whales are dead, when he encounters a living whale.
And he sees the wonder of it and arguably the beauty of it.
So that's a different kind of -- I don't know if I want to call it an obsession.
Maybe Ishmael is obsessed as well, but it's a different obsession.
I think his obsession, if we even want to use that word, has to do with this desire to come to know the whale and its oceanic habitat.
Which -- not too many people in the world would want to do.
Do you have any explanation for why it took such a long time for Moby Dick to be recognized as one of the great American masterpieces?
Well, I mean, part of the problem was it was originally published in England without the epilogue.
Now, the epilogue, of course, is this short little chapter which explains that Ishmael survived, you know, floating on the coffin, and that he could come back to tell the tale.
And so they just couldn't understand how everyone seems to die in the last chapter, right?
And yet Ishmael is the narrator, so it was not welcomed.
But I also just think that, you know, generically speaking, it was just too bizarre.
And so I mean, I think it was untimely in a very sort of deep way.
Yeah.
And readers, I would imagine that they would have been disappointed if they thought they were going to get a documentary description of the life of wailers or others who thought that they were going to get a novel with a story with beginning, middle, and end, and others who were expecting whatever the expectations were.
But we're going to have to wrap up our discussion, but I'll tell you what I love about our hour so far is that like Moby Dick itself, he got completely obsessed with the wail.
And that's what makes Moby Dick such a weird book is that the wail takes over the book, and those all those central chapters about his different parts and his anatomy and taxonomy, everything else.
This is a way that you justify the phenomenon by allowing it to reveal all its enigma's and its wonder and its complexity and its inability to actually be reduced to concepts and Melville to his credit allowed the wail to take over the book and to cause it not to conform to the standard rules of narrative that his friend Hawthorne would have been held to, you know, religiously as it were.
And I imagine that in the first decades of the serious kind of scholarly criticism of Moby Dick, few people were really speaking about the wail, the way we are, maybe it's something about the age that we belong to.
I think there is.
And there's something about the wail that commands this kind of curiosity, if not a certain kind of reverence.
Also, we have 28 species of whales on the endangered species loose now, so the whales have a different meaning for our culture.
But if I can ask you one last question, since you say it goes back to the whale and the phenomenon, I'm still curious to know whether you think that there's something more than the phenomenon.
In the whale itself?
Or the whale, the ocean?
Well, here, I guess I can answer this question by quoting an ungloss sentence of Ahab, which occurs in, I think, chapter 36.
And this is Ahab being lucidly self delusional, but he says, "Ahab truth has no confines."
Which is interesting because if his mission is to penetrate to the other side of something he has to get to the shell,
but if truth has no confines, then you're right that you don't penetrate to an essence, an ultimate essence.
But it's also the case that's the A-payron.
It's the A-payron and that for me, our planet is in its mystery without confines.
We know that it's a finite planet and that its resources can be exhausted and soon will be facing a certain depletion.
But the whale belongs to one of those opaque eruptions in the visible world, which shows that when we think we know what the boundaries or parameters of truth are,
we are, again, once again, be weildred and realizing that truth doesn't really have any confines and Moby Dick, as a narration.
Or as Melville would say, we are weaned. He doesn't say overwhelm, we are weaned.
It weaned exactly. And in that regard, I think the book does fulfill Conrad's vocation of the artwork,
which is to render the highest kind of justice to the visible world by showing just how boundless is the truth of that world.
But also the invisible world. He includes that too.
Exactly. Well, the invisible world is part of the truth, part of the justice, and that because if you don't bring the, what doesn't meet the eye together into the realm of the appearance of the phenomenon, then you're not doing justice to the phenomenon.
See, this is the genius of the book, is that he allowed all of that opacity and wouldn't just bring it to the reader, bring it into light. He let it stay in the dark.
Right. And that's what the whale oil does, ultimately. It brings us light through its power to light into the darkness.
Right. Well, let me remind our listeners, we've been speaking with Andrea Nightingale, Professor of Classics here at Stanford about the novel Moby Dick,
and I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions. Andrea, I'm going to leave you with a song by the band Glass Wave. You may have heard of that band glass wave.
I even know the guitar player. You know the guitar player. And you know that there's a song on that album, which is...
It's actually my favorite song on the album. Moby Dick, so I chose well. Thank you.
All right. You take care. Thanks for coming on. Bye-bye.
[music]