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March 26, 2007

All Around the Town: Contrasts & Connections

It's rare that I am uptown, midtown, and downtown in a single evening. What sent me northward was a fancy preview for “Van Gogh and Expressionism” at the Neue Galerie, at Fifth Avenue and 86th Street. The gracious chambers downstairs rapidly filled with mink coats, gold and silver, and other accoutrements of gentility -- as polished hirelings proffered champagne and costly canapés and a sprightly pianist thundered and tinkled away at a baby grand.

Upstairs was a breathtaking exhibition of Van Goghs and dozens of great Expressionist paintings that bear his influence. On a landing between floors was a huge, back-lit photo of Vincent at 18. He had no idea, then, that in one decade he’d become an artist and in two he’d be dead. He never knew how important he would be to the world. In the photo he looks guileless, earnest and somehow alone; psychologically rather like an Outsider artist.

Downstairs, in the gallery shop, I bought a card with a painting by Max Pechstein: a young girl in a verdant setting, sitting in an insouciant position, brown knees raised, a white cat curled at her seat. Then I hurried off to a second opening, this one in Times Square, in an SRO hotel on 43rd -- the home of over 600 “adults in need.”

The artists and some other residents were sitting at small tables along the wrap-around mezzanine. They sipped Poland Spring water from bottles or plastic cups. Everyone had an air of cheerful eccentricity. Unlike the bedizened uptowners, who were equally elderly, these folks seemed enthusiastic and excited. One man, very old, with a long white beard, leaned frailly on a cane and spoke with a Yorkshire-like accent. His right eye and cheek were bright magenta from a recent fall in the street. He smiled and sparkled when I said, “How about the other guy?”

The walls were swathed with talent. One landscape, like a dramatic Vlaminck, portrayed a lone shocked tree in a wild and wasted heath and a furious white sky. The colors and brushstrokes were sharp, dark, self-assured; full of harmony and rage.

One small painting made me gasp: it was so much like the Pechstein in my backpack. Same size, colors, composition, subject. A young girl in a green field, brown knees up. Instead of a cat there was a basketball, on which she sat. The artist was a tall African-American man who also used a cane, though he wasn’t old. I’m sure he’d never heard of Pechstein. I held the card next to his painting and said the original was in a museum. He exclaimed, “Oh, wow.” I gave him the card to keep. He tucked it in a pocket and turned the conversation to his sweatshirt, on which he’d painted an enormous glittery face.

From midtown I went home. I got off at Franklin Street, a huge stretch of which was dug up for pipe work. The street looked like a sculpture park with all those steel plates, fresh tar, sawhorse barriers, traffic cones, iron tubes, and mounds of dirt. The exhumed cobblestones, much thicker than one would think, were stacked in great, respectful piles, like artifacts, and gave off the faint, sewerish tang of spent centuries.

Posted by Jane on 6:13 PM | Comments (0)

March 23, 2007

Kathryn Freeman's Melville Paper (Part II)

Melville and the Deportation of Domesticity in Moby-Dick
(Part 2)
By Kathryn Freeman 12/20/85

Narratively, Perth is associated with Ahab when he works on the new leg. The opportunity for telling his story arises when his limp, due to the frostbite which numbed the extremities of both feet that winter night, arouses the curiosity of the other sailors. His amputation as a consequence of numbness serves as a foil to Ahab’s dismemberment as a result of his confrontation with the “phantom.” Indeed, Ahab tells the carpenter of phantom pains he continues to experience: “when I come to mount this leg thou makest, I shall nevertheless feel another leg in the same identical place with it; the flesh and blood one, I mean. Canst thou not drive that old Adam away?” (600). Ironically while Ahab seeks freedom from the “ivory casket” of mortality, Perth, the benumbed product of a culture of toil, goes whaling to re-gain the pleasure of his early domesticity:

Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men, who still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide, does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life adventures; and from the hearts of infinite Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them—“Come hither, broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them….come hither, till we marry thee! (618)

The lull of “wonders supernatural” appears ironic in contrast with the horror of prophetic vision. Perth does not fear inversion, madness or consequent self-destructiveness that threaten Melville’s seers. He is seduced, not by deadly Sirens or a narcissistic self-image, but by marriageable (but not impregnable) mermaids. Their promise is of immediate gratification, the opposite of the landed code by which “renunciation and delay in satisfaction are the prerequisites of progress” (Marcuse, 2).

Perth’s fellow laborer, the carpenter, complains more directly about the intrusion of the unshored into his work-place. He, like Perth, provides a foil to the visionary questers. Working on the ivory joist for Ahab’s leg, he says, “Bless my soul, it won’t let me speak! This is what a old fellow gets now for working in dead lumber” (597). Just as he appears unfit to work with the jenseitig material of the “poor little Indian’s casket,” he is equally ill equipped to hold a conversation with Ahab, for as he observes, Ahab does not hold a “conversation”: “Now what’s he speaking about, and who’s he speaking to, I should like to know? Shall I keep standing here?” (599). The problem is that Ahab has been soliloquizing on the situation with the carpenter, drawing oblique references to Prometheus and the Thames Tunnel: Ahab’s de-familiarizing observations on humanity and his lack of social grace have no reference for the wholly landed and hopelessly literal carpenter.

Yet he is fully aware of Ahab’s complete detachment from domesticity, the heart of landed culture. Thus he observes: “Queer, queer, very queer. And here’s his leg! Yes, now that I think of it, here’s his bedfellow! has a stick of a whale’s jaw-bone for a wife!” (601). When working in wood, the more familiar material of land, he feels the right to complain when it is abused aboard the Pequod. He takes great offense when Queequeg’s coffin is converted into a life-buoy, for it threatens the sacred rituals upon which culture is founded:

I make a bandbox for Queequeg, and he won’t put his head into it….It’s like turning an old coat; going to big the flesh on the other side now….It’s undignified, it’s not my place….Were ever such things done before with a coffin? Some superstitious old carpenters, now would be tied up in the rigging, ere they would do the job….Cruppered with a coffin? Sailing about with a graveyard tray….We workers in woods make bridal-bedsteads and card-tables, as well as coffins and hearses. We work by the month, or by the job, or by the profit; not for us to ask the why and wherefore of our work (664).

The absurdity of bringing the vocabulary of capitalism into the floating world of the unshored heightens the parody of the social institutions and rituals represented by the zeugma, “bridal-bedsteads and card-tables…coffins and hearses.”

With this in mind, Ishmael’s early pronouncement that “as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded forever” appears increasingly ironic (25). For both him and Ahab, such domestic language is incongruous since meditation and water form a marriage that begets indeterminacy rather than “a mob of unnecessary duplicates” (593), society’s products that go no further than their roles therein. Ishmael, in such a moment of unshored meditation, contemplates the illusory stages of life assumed in the cultural system:

There is no steady un-retracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations and at the last one pause:--through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’ doubt (the common doom), then skepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If….Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more?….Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them? the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it. (624)

The “If” is the undercurrent of the watery world’s indeterminacy. Ishmael suggests parenthetically that adolescence is the pivotal moment of every life when one questions the secure sense of past and the socially-defined self that one is to become. Perhaps it is for this reason that, though we do not know his age, he comes across as an adolescent: as opposed to Perth’s jaded secularism, Ishmael has a glimpse of the rootlessness under society’s institutions. In light of this, his rescue by the “Rachel,” which artificially joins orphan to childless mother, can be seen as the successful emergence from adolescence, “the common doom,” into a manhood that moors itself to a socially prescribed identity. (This resembles Pearl’s rite of passage at the end of The Scarlet Letter: she is transformed from infant to woman by promising the dying Dimmesdale that she will be a woman of the Puritan community and “do good” in it. The passage is from the rich possibility of allegorical representation, in her embodiment of the Letter, to the colorless “plain speech” of the community. Hawthorne and Melville, in this sense, stand apart from the domestic novelists [Warner and Stowe], whose didactic purpose is to perform that very function of transforming child into adult in highly conventional terms of morality.)

Even more than through Ishmael, though, it is through Ahab that Melville explores the extremes of domestic “dismemberment.” Ahab’s tenderest feelings are for Pip, the only human from whom he “sucks wisdom.” When Pip mourns the supposedly dying Queequeg, he refers to the coffin-canoe as the means by which Queequeg will find his—and Pip’s own—lost self. Ironically, Starbuck interprets this as a surprising emanation of Christianity out of the little savage who, “in the strange sweetness of his lunacy, brings heavenly vouchers of all our heavenly homes” (611). Starbuck clearly does not “suck wisdom” from Pip, for he himself is homeward bound, epistemologically.

Through Ahab’s obsession, Melville raises the issue of his aesthetic, the novel’s “authorial mission”: “obsession asserts its right to say ‘I’ with full authority….The union of aesthetic with epistemological properties is carried out by the mediation of the metaphor of the self as consciousness of itself, which implies its negation” (DeMan, 256). Melville’s “fictive breakdown” through the structure of the novel parallels the dismemberment occurring literally and figuratively in the plot (Brodhead, 12/11/85). This is most dramatically illustrated by the sequence of events starting with the meeting between the Pequod and the Bachelor, through the Pequod’s encounter with the Rachel, Ahab’s final severing of relations with the landed.

For those aboard the Bachelor, the trip to sea is a cathartic carnival. The name of the ship itself epitomizes this “stag party” phenomenon before the “cursed Bastile” of marriage we have seen through Perth’s story. Indeed, “the mates and harpooners were dancing with olive-hued girls who had eloped with them from the Polynesian Isles” (626). Like Perth, this is merely a flirtation with indeterminacy before a life forever “fixed and arranged” (134): when Ahab asks whether they have see the White Whale, the captain, not surprisingly, replies that he does not believe in him at all (627).

The possibility of Melville’s writerly allegory can be seen through Ahab’s soliloquy following the encounter with the Bachelor: “Thou art too damned jolly….How wondrous familiar is a fool,” he grumbles, and as though picking up on the foolishness of the familiar, he continues, “Thou art a full ship and homeward bound, thou sayest; well, then, call me an empty ship, and outward bound” (627). Melville suggests the project of his novel through the double meanings in Ahab’s speech, namely, to empty his craft of the foolishly familiar, perhaps the domesticity that is at once claustrophobic and integral to the genre of novel.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the “empty ship” metaphor comes just after Ishmael’s meditation on the “If” lurking under the fixed code of society. Ishmael had said, “Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more?” (624). Melville consciously brings the homonyms together to reveal the indeterminacy of language itself, but it is not until this speech of Ahab’s, after the meeting with the Bachelor, that the desire to empty words of their socially fixed definitions is manifested in his desire to “break down” the cultural system.

In this way, the episode in which Ahab breaks the quadrant following this is significant, not so much because he is proud to be “doomed” by God “to this ignorance” (Feidelson, 634), but because the teleology represented by his quest after the White Whale is that of undoing the assumption that “what’s signed is signed.” (This is from a chapter ironically called “The Prophet,” referring to the mysterious stranger who warms against Ishmael’s committing himself to the Pequod’s mission. The character, though important to the building suspense, is most significant as a foil to the prophetic vision of Ishmael and Ahab, for whom what’s signed becomes unsigned (134). Again, this undoing lies behind Hawthorne’s transfigurations of the Scarlet Letter, whose power triumphs over the fixed code of the Puritans until Pearl, the Letter incarnate, breaks the spell and the allegory collapses.)

Further, as though in a narrative cause-and-effect sequence, a typhoon is engendered, “like a exploding bomb upon a dazed and sleepy town” by the precipitating events on the allegorical level. Indeed, this is the same description as that of Ahab’s vengeance on 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 mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it” (247).

It is appropriate that the distress over the typhoon’s threat is linked directly to Moby Dick by Starbuck, whose reaction is to head away from the destruction toward home: He notes that the storm “comes from the eastward, the very course Ahab is to run for Moby Dick….round the Cape of Good Hope is the shortest way to Nantucket….Yonder, to windward, all is blackness of doom; but to leeward, homeward,--I see it lightens up there; but not with the lighting (637-38).

The lighting is the negative image of Starbuck’s sunlight. The corpusants, whose “white flame but lights the way to the White Whale” contribute the most starkly negative images of the domestic circle (641). Ahab’s father, he soliloquizes, is the lighting—that white flash that defies notions of space and time. This father has destroyed Ahab’s “sweet mother,” whom Feidelson identifies as “the benignant aspect of the universe” (642). The father, imagistically related to Moby Dick through his unpredictable and fatal whiteness, seems to derive from the impulse of the “negative transcendental sublime,” whose path ultimately “leads through the phase of daemonic Romance, with it oedipal anxieties, to a symbolic identification with the father” (Weiskel, 135). Indeed, Ahab wishes that he were his father, the “speechless” lightning, so that he might claim the title “unbegun.”

This is his most significant deviation from Ishmael’s response to the vision of indeterminacy: while Ishmael’s conclusion that all men are orphans in a harborless universe leads him to adopt—literally and figuratively—the Rachel, that childless mother who, homeward bound, throws her arms open to him, Ahab steps further in this shoreless meditation and thrilling with the notion of the “unbegotten,” synonymous with unfixed signs and words, therefore detaches himself completely from the cultural system.

Ahab, identifying himself with the father, thus ultimately identifies himself with Moby Dick, whose genius is “pyramidical silence” (448). The whale itself embodies “the land of spirits and of wails” through the inevitable dismemberment of both man and whale (592). This distinction between himself and Ishmael is a result of their varying degrees of identification with the “phantom”: “What fanaticism threatens…is not so much the truth of reason as the distance between that truth and the empirical self….The fanatic’s identification…is a delusion that falsely collapses…the agent’s safe distance from some threatening object” (Knapp, 80-81). Ahab thus claims himself heir to the fire which Ishmael had rejected in his moment of inversion at the helm. The legacy that Ahab receives is combustion: “Here again with haughty agony I read my sire. Leap! leap up and lick the sky! I leap with thee; I burn with thee; would fain be welded with thee; defyingly I worship thee!” (643).

Pursuing the relation between the plot and the journey through this psychic topography, then, the corpusants’ inversion of the needles of the compass echoes and intensifies Ishmael’s epiphanic inversion at the helm: “In instances where the lightning has actually struck the vessel, so as to smite down some of the spars and rigging, the effect upon the needle has at times been still more fatal; all its loadstone virtue being annihilated, so that the before magnetic steel was of no more use than an old wife’s knitting needle” (654). The domestic inversion returns with the incongruous analogy between the compass needles and the useless virtue of the old wife’s knitting needles. The disorientation of the Pequod away from the dieseitig is precisely what Starbuck sought to avoid on both levels.

Whaling does become “wailing” when the sailors are disconcerted by the “half-articulated wailing of the ghosts.” Significant to the sub-text of undoing the landed, the wailings turn out to be “some young seals that had lost their dams, or some dams that had lost their cubs” (661). These Blakean lamentations can be seen as Melville’s rewriting of the Sires’ song: rather than luring Ahab to his doom by illusion, they point aurally to the ensuing exchange with the Rachel, thus making it a ironic promise of destruction rather than a deception.

Appropriately, the first ship that has seen Moby Dick has also lost its children to him: “separated from the ship during the dark vicissitudes of the chase there had been still another son; as that for a time, the wretched father was plunged to the bottom of the cruelest perplexity” (670). The captain mistakenly attempts to appeal to Ahab’s own paternity, the effect of which is to make Ahab’s refusal irrevocable.

Just before he himself dies and steps irretrievably into the jenseitig, he seems to recall the words of the Rachel’s captain: “For you too have a boy, Captain Ahab—though but a child and nestling safely at home now—a child of your old age too—Yes, yes, you relent; I see it” (67). Now that his fanaticism has brought him to the moment of release from the landed, he wonders at the distance of such a thought as family: “Mary, girl! Thou fadest in pale glories behind me; boy! I seem to see but thy eyes grown wondrous blue” (714). This, perhaps, can be seen as Ahab’s phantom pain. When he had asked the carpenter, “Canst thou not drive this old Adam away?” he did not expect a cure. In this case, his turn away from attempting a rescue of the Rachel’s children resembles the apocalyptic writer for whom

Adam’s sin arose out of his own nature…and this he received from God. God had put into him the evil heart, and He had left it in Adam’s descendants….The awareness of the truth could not hold its ground against the “bad seed.”…There exists for [the apocalyptic writer] no possibility of a change in the direction of historical destiny that could proceed from man, or be effected or coeffected by man….The proper and paradoxical subject of the late apocalyptic is a future that is no longer in time. (Buber, 182-83)

Ahab is the only character who can see this Truth at the moment of apocalypse. Stubb, for instance, calls for “cherries! Cherries! Cherries! Oh, Flask, for one red cherry ere we die!” (720). Stubb’s fantasy recalls the aspect of the departing Rachel whose “masts and yards were thickly clustered with men, as three tall cherry trees, when the boys are cherrying among the boughs” (671). The sub-textual message of longing to return home to the idealized pastoral of dieseitig is continued in Flask’s response: “Cherries? I only wish that we were where they grow. Oh, Stubb, I hope my poor mother’s drawn my part-pay ere this; if not, few coppers will come to her, for the voyage is up.” Gutting through the idealization with grim irony is the vision of the culture of toil.

The structure of the novel is a cycle without resolution. Though Ishmael returns to the dieseitig having protected himself against the “phantom of life,” he brings home Ahab’s apocalyptic vision in which such “life-long fidelities” as Starbuck’s cannot stand up to the “unappeasable brow” of the phantom (720): when the destruction is complete, Ishmael observes, “then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand year ago” (723).

The “collapse” refers not only to the floating fraternity of the Pequod, but by association, to the “authorial mission” itself. “The enabling power of one who sees the prophetic role of authorship” is charged with Ahab’s obsessive plunge into apocalypse (Brodhead, 12/11/85). Behind Ishmael’s adoption of the Hegelian notion that Spirit can empty itself into Time in an act of self-mediation looms Ahab’s apocalyptic message that “man cannot achieve [the] future, but he also has nothing more to achieve” (Buber, 183).

WORKS CITED
Buber, Martin. On the Bible. New York: Schocken, 1982.
Carlyle, Thomas. “The Hero as Prophet. In: Lecture on Heroes. Ed. P.C. Parr. Oxford: Clarendon, 1920.
DeMan, Paul. “Anthropomorphism and Trope in Lyric.” In: The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia, 1984.
Fletcher, Angus. The Prophetic Moment. Univ. of Chicago, 1971.
Hegel, Georg. The Phenomenology of Mind. Trans. J.B. Baillie. New York: Humanities Press, 1977.
Heschel, Abraham. The Prophets. (II) New York: Harper and Row, 1975.
Knapp, Steven. Personification and the Sublime. Cambridge: Harvard, 1985.
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. Boston: Beacon Press, 1966.
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. Ed. Charles Feidelson. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964.
Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime. Baltimore: Johns-Hopkins, 1976.

Posted by Jane on 11:30 AM | Comments (0)

March 17, 2007

ESSAY ON MOBY-DICK BY KATHRYN FREEMAN

My sister Kathryn Freeman gave me permission to print her essay, “Melville and the Deportation of Domesticity in Moby-Dick,” (Dec. 1985), which she wrote as a graduate student at Yale. I divided it into two parts because of length; the paper, including bibliography, will be continued.

Melville and the Deportation of Domesticity in Moby-Dick

Melville’s opposition of the landed and the unshored in Moby-Dick is analogous to the German diesseitig (on this side, in our world) and jenseitig (on the other side, yonder). One who has access to the jenseitig is traditionally called a prophet, the mantle of the evangelical orators of Melville’s own day. These figures emulated the Biblical prophet who is firmly grounded in his culture despite the visionary power which separates him from others. He “is not moved by a will to experience prophecy. What he achieves comes against his will. He does not pant for illumination….Prophecy is a vocation, an act of charisma and election” (Heschel, 138-39). Melville, however, complicates the role of the prophet by creating a vision of godless indeterminacy behind the veil of society’s fixed epistemology.

Because this vision, in its absolute state, would threaten the foundation of such a system, Melville presents two alternatives available to one who is compelled to “look through the shows of things into things” and find nothingness (Carlyle, 50). Melville’s two visionary questers, Ishmael and Ahab, though never personally or dramatically in conflict with each other, represent the two responses to prophetic vision: while Ishmael holds fast to his social identity despite his knowledge of the “phantom” that looms behind it, Ahab tears the veil in an unwavering confrontation that annihilates himself and the figure of absolute vision, Moby Dick.

Melville further complicates prophetic vision by associating it with the Romantic concept of sublime self-consciousness. Ishmael and Ahab, respectively, can thus be seen to represent Kant’s distinction between partial identification, “which depends as much on difference as it does on identity,” and total identification, in which “the collapse of all difference … is figured in the issue of fanaticism” (Knapp, 79). Ishmael, as the figure of partial identification, more closely resembles the traditional prophet: he “has an eye for the world….he brings home still, to our heart, the thing his own heart has been opened to” (Carlyle, 53). Yet the thing he brings home is the novel itself, a tale of the struggle to retain the protective mediation of the cultural system against the visionary horrors of the unshored.

Thus, while suspended on the mast-head, he realizes that “while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror….And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever” (214-15). The fact that Ishmael maintains his ingenuousness in the face of the “phantom” affords him the balance of vision and self-protection as he journeys through the unshored. He, therefore, dares to “wander” farther than the typical sailor. As he meditates on the power of the sea, he realizes, “Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of the story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drown….It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life, and this is the key to it all” (26). This vision is of a self-conscious sublime. Wordsworth asks in “Grasmere Lake,” “Is it a mirror—or the Nether Sphere?” Ishmael realizes that it is both, but his answer is not Ahab’s: he returns to “landed” mediation by holding fast to the mast-head.

Granting a long pause between the first two sentences of the novel, then, one can detect a double image of Ishmael from the novel’s inception: “Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mid how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.” No sooner are we introduced to the Biblical pariah than the tone shifts: a congenial voice drops us back into the immediacy of our own world. This second voice appeals to us through the familiar: financial frustrations, the claustrophobia of routine, and most important, the ease with which the speaker initiates the truant’s escape from toil. The narrator thus introduces himself paradoxically as both pariah and hero-as-citizen. Unlike the traditional prophet, Ishmael’s vision implicates him as a social outcast: the first sentence foreshadows the ominous message from the unshored, a threat that he himself must bear to society despite his allegiance to the system.

Ishmael, we come to learn, is far from his Biblical namesake. His hold on the mast-head of civilization is an act of self-preservation reminiscent of Odysseus’s preparation for hearing the Sirens’ song: rather than covering his ears from their seduction, he has his sailors tie him up so that he can hear them without the danger of hurling himself to his death in an effort to find them. The opposing archetypal figure is Narcissus, whose unmediated yearning for total identification is the model for Ahab’s response to the phantom vision.

One way which Ishmael clings to the mast-head is by importing domestic vocabulary into unshored situations. From the beginning of the novel, he makes clear his consciousness of this self-protective act: “Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it—would they let me—since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the places one lodges in” (30). Yet no sooner does he make this happy pronouncement—directly foreshadowing the humorous encounter with his “jolly bedfellow,” Queequeg—than he envisions among the paired animals of the whaling version of Noah’s ark one disturbing figure alone and ineffably white: “two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.” Like Noah, he responds to the “flood” of the unshored by preserving domesticity, but what he foresees is the defiance of the solitary figure of indeterminacy.

Because of his paradoxical nature, Ishmael interprets signs in such a way that they simultaneously point him toward and yet protect him from the terror of the unshored. His first palpable sign, for instance, is a literal one, “with a white painting upon it, faintly representing a tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words underneath—‘The Spouter-Inn—Peter Coffin” (33). Angus Fletcher observes of the prophetic quest that “resemblances met in this meandering life often strike the hero as uncanny, unheimlich” (29). Ishmael muses, “Coffin?—Spouter?—Rather ominous in that particular connexion” (33). Though he assuages himself with the rationale that Coffin is a common name in Nantucket, his prophetic intuition proves right: Coffins reappear off-shore as ineluctably as the whiteness itself.

The signs lead him directly to Queequeg, whose horrific aspect proves, comically in the coming episode and with grim irony late in the novel, to be a red herring in Ishmael’s anticipation of dread: The hieroglyphs etched on Queequeg’s face and blanket will be seen again on his “coffin,” that vehicle of salvation for Ishmael standing as a foil to Ahab’s “ship as hearse…Its wood could only be American” (720). Here, though, the momentary comfort Ishmael takes after the sign connecting whiteness, whaling and coffins does not impair his prophetic impulse, as it might a more fully laded character. When he tours Nantucket, he hears and retains one seemingly insignificant detail about the first settlers’ discovery of “a empty ivory casket,--the poor little Indian’s skeleton” (97).

This unheimlich, pre-historical negative image of the casket as skeleton appears as one strand of the “Weaver God,” leading Ishmael through the “labyrinth” of his prophetic quest like Ariadne’s thread. Perhaps the uncanniness of finding this initial association of coffins with skeletons, containers of life and death, leads Ishmael to Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, whose power is gained by inverting what is familiar:

The familiar, just because it is familiar, is not cognitively understood. The commonest way in which we deceive either ourselves or others about understanding is by assuming something as familiar, and accepting it on that account….Subject and object, God, Nature…are uncritically taken for granted as familiar, established as valid and made into fixed points for starting and stopping….[Spirit] wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself….Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face and tarrying with it. (18-19)

This “tarrying with the negative” is most dramatically enacted by Ahab, of course. But more subtle, perhaps, is Melville’s complication of Ishmael’s prophetic role, for narratively and psychically, Ishmael must “contain” Ahab’s obsession in order to recount it.

He comes closest to losing his balance and “tarrying with the negative” inexorably in a visionary moment during which he is steering the Pequod. Again, the vision is heralded by an association of whiteness with danger: “the jawbone tiller smote my side….I could see no compass before me to steer by.” He thus inverts himself, believing that the tiller is inverted—Indeed, the power of the bone-tiller, like the Indian’s skeleton, has the power of inversion. After surviving the trace, he characteristically warns, “Never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass (541-42).

Though he “saves himself by reasserting his belief in the natural sun, the principle of universal life,” the message with which he returns to society uproots and de-familiarizes its epistemology (Feidelson, 542). Ironically, then, as Ishmael mediates his proximity to the “negative” through domesticity, the unshored “dismembers” it through disorientation. The experience teaches him a distrust of landed orientation. When he later describes Ahab’s first encounter with Moby Dick, before the time of the novel, the irony of his inverted domesticity is intensified:

Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of his more desperate hunters were impelled, where amid the chips of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the white curds of the whale’s direful wrath into the serene, exasperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal. (246)

The vivid description of dismemberment figures Ahab’s obsession with the whale: it tears man limb from limb the way the knowledge it brings dismembers the familiar, in this case, the ritual celebrations of birth and marriage.

Melville comments on the cultural system not only by inverting it through the prophetic vision of Ishmael, but by including characters who are so mediated from “Absolute Spirit” that they are deaf and blind to the unshored. They are no more satisfied with such a system, and in fact, are less successful in coping with it than those who can transcend it. Perth, the blacksmith aboard the Pequod, epitomizes America as the culture of toil. His story bears a striking resemblance to Freud’s reality principle:

Happiness must be subordinated to the discipline of work as full-time occupation, to the discipline of monogamic reproduction, to the established system of law and order. The methodical sacrifice of libido, its rigidly enforced deflection to socially useful activities and expressions, is culture (Marcuse, 2).

One can here appreciate the ease with which Ishmael escapes the tedium of landed life in the second sentence of the novel. Perth is like Ishmael on the literal level of truancy, yet he cannot achieve a vision which de-creates culture.

Perth’s early domestic situation had been Edenic: “He had been an artisan of famed excellence, and with plenty to do; owned a house and garden; embraced a youthful, daughter-like loving wife” (616). His estrangement from this paradise of domesticity is figured elliptically through a walk one “bitter winter’s midnight, on the road running between two country towns.” The claustrophobic and numbing image underscores the gradually imprisoning feeling of the landed world. “Plenty of work” becomes “stout labor’s iron lullaby,” which cannot assuage the weeping and hungry children. The alcoholism by which he tries to escape is figured as “the Bottle Conjuror,” an imagistic foil to the sensitizing rather than numbing “genius” by which Ishmael penetrates the veil of the landed. Thus, Perth’s collapse on that midnight walk is in a “leaning, dilapidated barn” where the “deadly numbness” sets in. The daughter-wife now “sat frozen at the window, with tearless eyes, glitteringly gazing into the weeping faces of her children; the bellows fell; the forge choked up with cinders.”

KATHRYN’S ESSAY (and bibliography) TO BE CONTINUED

Posted by Jane on 2:15 PM | Comments (0)

March 12, 2007

A Blog on Collage

Preparing to give a collage workshop at the end of the month, I went out to Elizabeth, NJ, to Ikea, to buy $2 picture frames for one of my projects.

We meet collages every day, but do we perceive them as such? Any collection of stratified effluvia is a collage, like the scruff in the weed-fields out the window of the bus, with their impression of purple against dun, like heather on a moor. A collage is a superimposition of disparate objects or impressions, perceived all-at-once. It may be homogeneous, like the ripped layers of ads that scale a billboard. Or it may be heterogeneous, a collection of incongruities – like a violent scene filmed atop the most tranquil music.

A chorus is like a collage, as is a chord. In fact every successive moment of a symphony is a kind of collage, but not the symphony itself. A moment at rush hour in Grand Central is a sound-collage. But most collages are visual, like an envelope pasted with stickers, stamps, tape, words. Or a suitcase clad in decals, tags, markers of identification. Scrapbooks are collages, as are bulletin boards. The boxcars that lie out in the Jersey fields are a collage of red, yellow, green orange, and white geometries, like stacked Rubik cubes. These industrial yards of electronics, which look so much like giant circuit boards, are collaged with splashes of patinaed ponds of gummy green. Scaffolds of bridgework are pasted against a scudded sky, a collage of iron Xs: cross-outs, cancellations, kisses.

With plenty of 5x7” picture frames in my backpack, I boarded the crowded Red-Grooms-collageish subway at Port Authority. My thoughts were and still are mostly on Moby-Dick; however, they were distracted by an entrancing month-old baby next to me. Since thoughts (being linear) cannot be collaged (at least by the average person), I momentarily forgot about the white whale and asked what the infant’s name was. Wouldn’t you know? It was Ishmael.

My sister Kathryn, a literature professor at the University of Miami (18th and 19th century literature), sent me a paper on Moby-Dick that she’d written at Yale. It’s full of breathtaking insights; I’ll share it here, next time, with my fellow Melvillephilians.

Posted by Jane on 3:49 PM | Comments (0)