Subject: Re: the lterary man & the whale
Omlor@aol.com
Date: Sun Jul 29 2001 - 10:32:42 GMT
My short answer, Scottie.
And my opinion, of course.
Moby is not a symbol.
Rather, for me, Moby and the big bunch of stuff between the covers that bear
his name, can effectively and thoroughly get the reader to reconsider their
own expectations about things like symbols and literature and writing and
narrrative and how they all work. Moby, as the whale, I think is challenge
to the very idea of a symbol or the idea that something simply stands for
something else.
The book is fairly explicit about this, and two chapters in particular,
"Moby-Dick" and "The Whiteness of the Whale" insist on the way in which Moby
is defined and redefined, each time so differently and tellingly, by those
who tell their own stories, by those who speak and write and pass on the
rumors about the whale. The book repeatedly and explicitly and directly
demonstrates the utter insucfficiency of thinking of this whale as only a
symbol or only a whale or only a spirit-spout or only a demon or only a
target for revenge or only a commodity or only anything. It inists, for
instance, that the debate about whether the whale is "agent" or "principle"
is, by definition, unsovlabale and at the same time inevitable. (see the
Capter called "Moby Dick" for this insistence and for Melville's jabs at the
insufficiency of \b{both} empiricism and idealism as a way to capture the
idea and the being of the whale).
Melville's chapter on "The Whiteness of the Whatle" makes a similar point.
Readers will be desperately discouraged if they expect that Melville is going
to use the whiteness to signify something about the whale or about innocence
or about horror or about something else in particular. Melivlle gives us a
chapter of contradictions and multiplicities and a lesson in how a sinlge
quality (whiteness) can repeatedly cast into the mind both one thing and its
opposite and demand that we hold them both.
Moby is, in many ways, a ghost.
The whale of this book, for me, swims right on that edge between categories,
between symbol and referent, between object and idea, between agent and
principle, between life and death, between mute beastly innocence and
ubiquitous evil, between the desire for things to mean something and the
refusal of things to mean something, between shallowness and depth, between
writing and life, between presence and absence, between the lee shore and the
deep, wide, and white oceans.
Moby Dick haunts.
He haunts Ahab and Ishmael and company and he haunts the reader, the way a
ghost does, in an uncertain space that demands us to rethink everything we
expect from a book and everything we think we know for sure about how
literature works and how meaning happens (two questions with which Melville
was self-admittedly obsessed).
So no, Moby is not symbol. I believe that to make him a symbol (even "a
symbol of everything") would be to reduce him to single function or
operation, and that to impose such a singuar notion on him and on the reader
is a form of literary-critical fascism. "He stands for this. Period. Write
that on the test or you get it wrong." That's nonsense. It's not the way
words work when they are put together in such a manner and its not the way
reading really happens, is it? It's also, explicitly not what the book says.
Howver, it should be mentioned that the book contradicts itself over again.
It says one thing and then changes its mind later and says something else.
Its filled with contradictions and inconsistencies. Characters fade away
never to be seen again without explanation, the cetology chapters are written
in an unidentified narrative voice and Ishmael's own voice changes
dramatically from the opening chapters to the final near apocalypse.
And, at one point, after showing us time and time again how Moby, like the
gold doubloon nailed to the mast on the Pequod, is many different things to
many people and all things to at least one, the book does come right out and
boldy assert that Moby is also a symbol.
For what, you might ask?
Fine, I'll leave you with the book. (I spent a full semester, 16 weeks, just
reading this one book with two classes of 20 students each a couple of years
ago, by the way. We read it page by page in class, slowly and deliberately
and patiently and with a completely open mind to whatever anyone wanted to
advance, and because of the book we were forced also to learn history and
philosphy and the history of philosophyand literature and whaling and
Shakespeare and Milton and more stuff than I can name -- the book is its own
encyclopedia of provocation.)
Here is Moby as symbol. Melville on whiteness:
"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 Christian's Deity; and yet should be
as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most apalling to mankind.
"Is it that by its idefiniteness it shadows forth from 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 an essence, whiteness is not so much a color and the
visible absence of color, 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 philosphers,
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 prinicple 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
palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in
Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring 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?"
--John
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