Melville and his Moby Dick

Melville and his Moby Dick

First things first…

• You need to have a general understanding of the movements Moby Dick was born out of

• This includes a background on:– The Age of Reason– Romanticism– Transcendentalism– Gothic, and– Anti-Transcendentalism

Romanticism

• The first major movement in American literature, Romanticism was a movement in art, literature, and music dating from the late 1700s to the mid-1800s

• Romanticism is characterized by the 5 “I”s1. Imagination

2. Intuition3. Idealism

4. Inspiration5. Individualism

Imagination

• Romantics emphasized imagination over reason and logic

• This was a backlash against the rationalism of the Enlightenment period or “Age of Reason” (1650-1789)– In the Age of Reason, people believed all truth and

knowledge could be discovered through using reason, logic, science, and math.

Intuition

• Romantics placed a high value on “intuition,” or feeling and instincts, over reason

• Thus, emotions were hugely important in Romantic art and literature

Idealism

• Idealism is the concept that we can make the world a better place

• Romanitcs believed that thought (our mind and spirit) makes the world the way that it is; thus, positive thinking actually makes the world a good place (if you think it’s good, then it is)

• They were very optimistic about life

Inspiration

• Romantics believed that artists and writers make their art through “spontaneous inspiration”

• In art (this includes visual art, the written word, and music), they believed it was more important to follow your feelings and impulses than to try to get things exactly correct, or technically perfect

Individualism

• Romantics “celebrated the individual”• They believed people should listen to their

own feelings and their own moral compass to guide their actions and to find what is good and right, rather than just following what society says

• They thought people should “march to the beat of their own drummer”

• There are no universal truths -- we must search for our own truths!

Transcendentalism

• A uniquely American Philosophy; it’s heyday was between 1820 and 1830.

• Transcendentalism drew heavily on Romanticism; its believers valued the same things the Romantics valued (the 5 “I’s”)

• However, Transcendentalists also believed that God was IN nature and humanity

• This divine spirit was called “the Oversoul”

• This belief was a response to the idea of God as a “divine watchmaker,” in which Age of Reason thinkers like Franklin and Jefferson believed

Gothic Literature

• Gothic literature arose around the same time as the Romantic movement (mid-1700s) and was wildly popular up until the Civil War

• Both Gothic and Romantic writers were reacting to the Age of Reason, and both wanted to free the imagination.

• However, Gothics saw POTENTIAL EVIL in the individual, while Romantics saw HOPE in the individual

Gothic Conventions

• Setting: – ancient castles, – decaying estates, – weird or haunted places

• Plot: – strange and terrifying

events; supernatural events

– extreme situations (murder, torture, revenge)

• These situations bring out man’s true nature, and it is NOT good

• Characters:– Supernatural characters

like ghosts, demons, and monsters (such as werewolves or vampires)

– insane male characters– beautiful women who

are dead/dying

Gothic Conventions

• Style:

– “macabre”

ma·ca·bre (adj)

• including gruesome and horrific details of death and decay

– imaginative distortion of reality

– dark atmosphere

• Subjects:

– the unknown,

– the fantastic,

– the demonic,

– insanity

– the human heart and mind

Anti-Transcendentalism

• Moby Dick is an “Anti-Transcendental” piece

• Anti-Transcendentalism was a 19th century (1840-60) literary movement that focused on – the dark side of humanity and – the evil and guilt associated with man’s

sinful nature

Anti-Transcendnetalism

• This focus is similar to the focus of the Gothic writers

• However, the Gothics used very specific conventions (the supernatural, the macabre, and the terrifying) that are not necessarily always found in Anti-Transcendentalist works

Why did this movement begin?

• It began as reaction to a perceived naiveté in the unbridled optimism and idealism of the Romantics and Transcendentalists

• It also challenges Neo-Classical (Age of Reason) notions about order and logic, as the Romantics did


• Many scholars argue that Anti-Transcendentalism was born out of a human tendency to dwell on feelings of guilt and remorse over past sins


• Additionally, writers were discontented with the ills of American society in the 1800s (poverty, mistreatment of workers, slavery, lack of women’s rights)

• Unlike the Romantics and Transcendentalists, these writers viewed society’s moral dilemmas with a negative lens– Romantics thought these problems could be

solved with a little positivity and good work– Anti-Transcendentalists did NOT

Key Ideas

• Man has a great potential for destruction and evil. He is inherently sinful, and evil is an overwhelming force working through the universe

• Man is forever uncertain, forever running into his own limitations, and thus forever ineffective (bound for failure)

Key Ideas

• Like the Romantics and Transcendentalists, Anti-Transcendentalists believed there were no universal truths -- we should all find individual truths

• However, these truths, they believed, were usually disturbing and awful

• Like the Gothics, they believed that extreme situations brought out man’s true nature, and that this nature was not good

Ideas about Nature

• Nature is vast and incredibly powerful• As the creation of God, it cannot be

understood by man• Encounters with nature bring out the struggle

between good and evil– Sometimes man vs. nature conflicts bring out

man’s evil side (“evil” man vs. “good” nature)– Sometimes nature is the evil entity, and man is

trying to work for good, but nature is powerful, and man is weak; thus, he must fail

Writing Style

• Raw and morbid diction (straight-forward, not sugar-coated, gloomy, horrific, and disgusting)

• Strong focus on the inner struggles of the protagonist (interest in the inner-mind and internal conflict)

• Protagonists are often haunted by some mental problem or past sin, and they are usually alienated from society

• Heavy use of symbolism

Now, let’s get more specific…

• What should I know about Moby Dick, specifically?

Lesson A: Moby Dick is awesome

• Moby Dick is one of the two major works of American literature most frequently cited as “The Great American Novel” (The other is Twains’ Huckleberry Finn)

• As such, it is referenced constantly in popular culture; if you’re looking, you’ll see it everywhere, from The Sopranos, to Mad magazine, to The Onion, to popular cartoons.

• Of the novel, Melville wrote “I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb”. – Doesn’t that give you goose bumps? The man can

write!

• He wrote that he felt this was his true masterpiece. – (Readers, however, did not agree, at least not at

first. He was mostly unknown until the Melville Revival of the 1920s, and his book had rotten sales)

Masterpiece…

Lesson B:Melville’s life-story matters

• Melville’s material is the kind of stuff that could only be born of a particular sort of life experience -- an experience that was precipitated by some key events in his life…

• 1) Melville’s father was unsuccessful in business (importing), and his bankruptcy was too much for him to handle. He fell ill and died when Melville was 12.

Melville’s life…

• 2) As a result of the family’s financial troubles and the death of his father, Melville couldn’t afford to go to college. As it was up to him to support his mother and sisters, he needed a good paying job…

• 3) He joined a merchant ship in 1837 (whaling was hugely profitable, as whale oil was used for fuel). At sea, his adventures included desertion, captivity, and enlistment in the U.S. Navy

Melville’s Life…

• Ishmael says in Moby Dick, “A whaleship was my Yale College and my Harvard”, and this is certainly true of Melville!

• Melville took his experiences and wrote two wildly popular travel narratives, Typee and Omoo.

• These describe his time as a captive among a cannibal tribe in the Marquesas Islands and his experiences an explorer in the Polynesian islands.


• He grew bored of writing popular, but shallow, travel narratives, and began writing deeply philosophical and experimental books full of symbols

• His book Mardi was such a book, and he considered it “great art”, but the public hated it, and he needed money, so he wrote a few more crazy travel narratives


• When he published Moby Dick in 1851, he knew it was his great masterpiece, but it was a commercial failure, and he was extremely disappointed with this. He became very bitter toward the American reading public.

• Afterward, his physical and mental health declined sharply due to his struggle with terrible debt, as he tried desperately to support his family (he had four children!), as well as his mother and sisters.

Lesson C:Melville as Truth-Seeker

• Melville called writing

“The great Art of Telling the Truth”

• He believed that he and his good friend Nathaniel Hawthorne needed to “probe the most profound truths, however dark -- truths most people could not bear to see” (Renker n.pag.).

Truth-seeking…

Thus, we can read Moby Dick as a meditation (an extended and serious study) on truth, or

as part of Melville’s great quest for truth.

Isn’t that cool?

But how does one execute such a reading? What should we be looking for?

Questing for Truth

• Both Ishmael and Ahab (the two key characters) are on a search for truth, and both pursue this truth in the form of the whale

• We can read the whale as a symbol for truth

Ishmael’s Quest

• Ishmael tries to find truth by trying to understand the whale from every angle possible

• At first, it seems that he thinks it is possible, if one studies and thinks enough, to find true understanding (yes, of the whale, but we can extend this out to God, man, the universe…)

Ishmael’s Quest, Part 2

• Ishmael tries to put together a complete classification system for whales, to analyze them from every angle– (This is where some of the boring stuff comes in. But, hey! at

least it has meaning behind it!)

• However, he realizes that this is a never-ending project -- he could study the whale and pursue its meaning FOREVER

• For him, the whale is full of meaning; he describes the search for knowledge and truth as a branching tree that never ends

• This does NOT discourage him

How does this help me?

• We can read the chapters on cetology (the study of whales), which are an attempt to dissect the whale and find its ultimate meaning (truly understand it), as an attempt to DISCOVER TRUTH

Read the whale as truth

• (Hopefully, understanding this will help us avoid whining like babies about how boring these chapters are.)

What does Ishmael learn?

• He finds that the whale is such a huge topic that his study can never be complete

• What he shows us is that the world is so full of meaning that we can’t ever grasp all of it

• However, we should try! The effort is not futile! In fact, it is awesome and worthy!

Ahab’s Quest

• “Ahab’s quest, by contrast, is not one to classify whales in general, but to avenge himself on one whale in particular.

• His quest for truth is not generative [it doesn’t create more branches, like Ishmael’s], but destructive. It zeroes in on ONE target” (Renker)

Ahab’s Quest…

• Ahab is ENRAGED by his inability to understand Moby Dick (which he views as the same as understanding the absolute truth of the universe (just as Ishmael did))

• He views the whale as a malicious force (thus, for him, the universe is evil)

Ahab’s Quest…

• Ahab calls the white whale “the inscrutable thing” (inscrutable means hard to interpret)

• He is furious about the limits of understanding we have as humans (he calls this limitation a “wall,” and he wants to break through it)

• Notice that “wall” and “whale” echo each other (Cool, huh? Yes, it is.)

How does this help me? The Cliffs Notes Version:

• Both men view the whale as holding the ultimate truth

• Ishmael can live with the understanding that the whale (read: life, the universe, God) is both incredibly meaningful AND ambiguous (can be understood in more than one way; has an unclear meaning)

• Ahab CAN’T live with that

What we learn:

• Everything has many meanings: truth is ambiguous

• The universe is so vast as to be incomprehensible to man

Lesson D: Multiple Meanings

• This brings us to the fourth key point…– EVERYTHING CAN BE INTERPRETED IN MANY, MANY,

MANY, MANY, MANY WAYS

• Early on, Ishmael writes about the Sperm Whale’s eyes; it can see two different views at once, unlike man

• Obviously, this invites us to read the story in multiple ways and see everything in it from multiple angles.

Look For:

• Multiple interpretations of– the painting in the Spouter-Inn– the doubloon– Moby Dick himself– something else? (be cool and find other

items with multiple meanings and multiple interpretations)

This Lesson Is Long

• Yes, I know, this lesson is getting hella long. It’s a hella long, hella meaningful book.

Lesson E: Form Mashup

• The novel is like an encyclopedia of forms!• You’ll see: dictionary, whaling manual, comedy,

tragedy, epic, prophecy, sermon, soliloquy, drama, bawdy humor and tales within tales, as wells as A BILLION allusions from Shakespeare, Milton, the Bible, adventure narratives, and technical books

(don’t write all this down, just write that it uses MANY forms (duh))

Why so many forms?

• Melville is trying to look at the whale from EVERY ANGLE POSSIBLE.

• He’s also trying to look at the novel as a literary form from every angle possible.

• In this way, Melville pursues that crazy generative (ever-building and growing) tree branch of knowledge that Ishmael talks about

• He shows that knowledge is vast and can (and should) be pursued among bajillions of different avenues

• HOW AWESOME IS THAT? So don’t complain about how boring the dictionary-like chapters are.

Lesson F:The Novel as a Reaction to the Times

Number One: Religion

• Early theories of evolution, increasing scientific developments, and a new study of the Bible as a product of history rather than divine revelation have created a crisis of faith in the Western world. People are asking: “Is there a God?”

Religion…

• Melville uses Ishmael (an outcast named after the Biblical outcast (Abraham’s son)) as a metaphor for a humanity that has lost its sustaining beliefs and is now in search of new meaning

Religion…

• Moby Dick himself (the whale) is constantly compared to God– In a sermon, “God came upon Jonah in the whale”– The whalemen believe Moby Dick is a supernatural,

immortal being– A sailor-prophet says Moby Dick is God reincarnated

• Thus, we can read the search for Moby Dick as a search for God, or a search to understand God (in addition to reading it as a search for truth)

Two: Politics

• In 1850, the nation was in crisis over slavery, and we were continuing to subjugate and exterminate Native Americans

• “Both forms of subjugation were underwritten by smug assertions of the ‘civilized’ of their supremacy over ‘savage’ races” (Renker)

• Melville’s novel explores this issue…

Race in the Novel

• At first, Ishmael accepts American racial hierarchies -- he is repulsed by and afraid of Queequeg, a South-Sea islander, cannibal, and pagan.

• Soon though, he chooses the kind and heroic Queequeg over a hypocritical Christian civilization: “I’ll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy”

• Ishmael and Queequeg form a loving friendship.

Race, continued

• Little Pip is subjected to the fearful and violent power of racism…

• Pip, a small African American cabin boy “trembles in fear before the ‘big white God,’ Moby Dick [and] this passage asks us to see not only a spiritual but also a racial dimension to Moby Dick’s whiteness” (Renker)…

So what?

• We are meant to read Pip against Moby Dick -- Pip represents what it means to be African American in this time (he is small and helpless), and Moby Dick (representing whiteness) is a fearful and omnipotent force

• Notice: there are MANY ways to interpret Moby Dick (this relates to that point about multiple interpretations)

Re-Cap• A) This is an awesome book• B) Melville had actual whaling experience,

and his book was a failure at first• C) This is a book about TRUTH• D) Everything in it has multiple meanings• E) It borrows from multiple forms to represent

the vastness of knowledge and truth• F) It’s also a response to a crisis of faith in

the 1850s and a crisis of morality in the form of racism

Documents

Melville and his Moby Dick