Moby Dick Chapters 34 and 35
Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2012 7:24 am
I hope Robert won't mind if I say something about these chapters. I think it's true that chapter-by-chapter can be too labor-intensive for this book and that a thematic approach might be better. What struck me about the chapters was the contrast between the minds of Ishmael and Ahab. "The Masthead" was of course mostly digression, as we've come to expect from our narrator. Imagine having him as a college professor. He wants us to know any fact pertinent to whaling. But towards the middle he talks about the kind of dreamy, philosophic, broad-thinking young man that sometimes signs up for whaling voyages. For this man, the duty of standing on watch in the masthead affords the pleasure of contemplation amid the vastness of the sea, and the loss of a sense of the self separate from nature. It's a wonderful passage that Mellville gives us:
A Shakespearean dramatic quality has often been noted in MD, and you can see it here in Ahab's long speech. There is even an aside. The editor of my edition points to Macbeth as a strong influence.
The contrast in the next chapter, when Ahab reveals to his crew--and infects them with--his monomania for the white whale, couldn't be more stark. It's chilling to see him enlist the crew in his mad quest for vengeance and brutally subdue the objecting Starbuck to it. He has a Svengali-like ability to manipulate the mind of the first mate. Ahab is a brilliant theologian and as narrow and devious as Ishmael is broad and honest.In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant the mast-head: nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful. There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes. There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner- for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable.
"Vengeance on a dumb brute!" cried Starbuck, "that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous."
"Hark ye yet again- the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event- in the living act, the undoubted deed- there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike though the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who's over me? Truth hath no confines. Take off thine eye! more intolerable than fiends' glarings is a doltish stare! So, so; thou reddenest and palest; my heat has melted thee to anger-glow. But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat, that thing unsays itself. There are men from whom warm words are small indignity. I meant not to incense thee. Let it go. Look! see yonder Turkish cheeks of spotted tawn- living, breathing pictures painted by the sun. The Pagan leopards- the unrecking and unworshipping things, that live; and seek, and give no reasons for the torrid life they feel! The crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab, in this matter of the whale? See Stubb! he laughs! See yonder Chilian! he snorts to think of it. Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one tost sapling cannot, Starbuck! And what is it? Reckon it. 'Tis but to help strike a fin; no wondrous feat for Starbuck. What is it more? From this one poor hunt, then, the best lance out of all Nantucket, surely he will not hang back, when every foremast-hand has clutched a whetstone. Ah! constrainings seize thee; I see! the billow lifts thee! Speak, but speak!- Aye, aye! thy silence, then, that voices thee. (Aside) Something shot from my dilated nostrils, he has inhaled it in his lungs. Starbuck now is mine; cannot oppose me now, without rebellion."
"God keep me!- keep us all!" murmured Starbuck, lowly.
But in his joy at the enchanted, tacit acquiescence of the mate, Ahab did not hear his foreboding invocation;
A Shakespearean dramatic quality has often been noted in MD, and you can see it here in Ahab's long speech. There is even an aside. The editor of my edition points to Macbeth as a strong influence.