About : standard furniture essex
Title : standard furniture essex
standard furniture essex
[ silence ] >> all right let's getstarted. actually, i want to beginby thanking everybody who had the last class hourfree and chose to spend it here in this rather stuffyroom with me. thank you very much. i understand it was a sacrifice,having just walked outside, it's nice out for now at least. so thank you.
i think the rest of you, whenyou hopefully have a chance to watch that lecture online. i asked them to make thatavailable by blackboard as well. will find that it's lessterrible then it might have been had i've been speakingsimply to an empty room. so i do appreciate it. and we were speakinga little bit about how for hawthorne [assumedspelling] romance is a kind of integrated mode thatbrings things together.
speaking about, thinking abouta logic of both and as opposed to a kind of eitheror of allegory. and thinking about what kindsof constraints might be in place when you apply alogic of both and. both and means you can'tget rid of either term and there are certainways that in which both than may not be a fullyreceptacle relation. one part of the, ofthe binary may end up coloring towardsthen what's going
on elsewhere in that system. and i think that's somethingwe really want to be thinking about as we finally, finallyturn our attention back to melville [assumed spelling]. bless you, bless you,believe me i sympathize. the, so we're thinkingabout hawthorne as kind of an older writerpioneering in romance as far as melville is concerned. and, and melvin you rememberwhen we, when we turned
to melville on the secondday of class i suggested that we would be thinkingabout moby dick as a kind of framing text cross. and that in many ways wewere going to think about it as summing up, encoding intoit, in that green black sense of a great novel or greatwork of art encoding many of its cultural contextinto its own texterality [assumed spelling]. decoding of lot of what'sgoing on in the united states
in the middle of thenineteenth century. and really in the literaryhistory that takes place in, in the seventeenth tothe nineteenth century is that what we've beentrying to chart. so this is our momentreally to kind of sum things up in the course. and hopefully our reading of moby dick willallow us to do that. you remember last time though,we started off by thinking
about this statement fromhawthorne and his mosque. you remember the story that melville had recentlydecamped from the york. he's gone up to livein the berkshires. he meets with iyahawthorne in a picnic. he's been writingthis whaling voyage. at this time in his career,he's known as somebody that writes narratives of thesea from the most part inflexed by his personal, hispersonal life story.
they tend to be presentingin some since as personal narratives,although there's clearly a, a kind of fictionality [assumedspelling] that's imposed. in fact there's some controversy over rather type p isperhaps too fictionalized or presented underfalse auspices. but he meets hawthorneand the story goes that moby dick changes asa result, and it starts to do something quite different.
and he meets hawthorne, hegoes back and he reads mosques from the old man andhe writes a review. and it's published really, andhe writes it a couple of weeks, really quickly, it'spublished in two parts. and as we said then, itis a kind of program piece for what an americanliterature might look like. so we haven't read to, i haven't to oppose too manyof them on you here. we might have to think of itas something would be an align
of manifesto's thatwould include such things like bryan's tricolavic[assumed spelling] meter essay, emerson's [assumedspelling] american scholar or self reliance, whitman's[assumed spelling] preference to the eighteen fiftyfive leagues of grass. hawthorne in his mosque'sis that kind of piece. it's extensively a review,but what it really is, is a manifesto for thenew kind of literature, an american literaturemasquerading as we review.
he has a particular wayof reading hawthorne. and you know we were justtalking in the last hour about that moment whichyou should all review in the custom house preface whenhawthorne talks about the affect of moonlight on a room. how a room that looks one way,a drearly domestic kind of, very much in cahootswith the kind of numbing that'sthe banality of life in the nineteenth century
in the united states istransformed by the moonlight. become as what hawthornecalls as neutral territory, where the imaginary and theactually imaginary they meet and imbuest [assumedspelling] each other with aspects of one another. melville picks up on that,that imagery of light and dark. so in the course of this essayas this moment he's been talking about the kind of sunnyside of hawthorne. but that doesn't interesthim as much, as this,
despite of the indian summersunlight on the hither side of hawthorne soul the otherside like the dark half of physical sphere is shrouded in the blacknessten times black. but this darkness gives moreeffect to the ever moving dawn that further advancesthrough it, has circum navigates the world. let's think about image[inaudible] i mean half the world is always coveredin darkness
but the world is beingcircum navigated by darkness. in a sense this is a very,this is a very powerful image for melville, whether hawthornehas simply availed himself of this mysticalblackness as a means to the wondrous affectshe makes it to produce in his lights and shades. or whether there reallylurks in him a touch of pure tainted gloom thisi cannot altogether tell. but i'm hoping that by nowa pure tainted gloom means
something different to you. it could be the statethat was induced after your midterms, perhaps. [ laughter ] hopefully we'll be movingtowards a more frankleneon [assumed spelling]mode of perfectionism if that's the casefor the final. but melville saidthat certain as it is to have this great powerof blackness in him
to rise its force from itsappeal so that calvinistic sense of innate depravityan original sin. right, so remember that. it's one of those things that melville isdoing is looking back to puritan inheritance that hebelieves that u.s. culture has. particularly the idea oftotal depravity as a result of original sin ortoo it as long as principles flow out of this.
and the only thingthat happened is that they haven't disappeared. i mean you read emerson [assumedspelling] and you think, oh, i just retrospected, he buildson circles of [inaudible] of do everything again. look start again, don'tbe coward by the pass. forget original sin, webelieve in perfectionism. thank him, we believein perfectionism. hawthorne and melvilleboth never said,
let's wait a minutemaybe that's too fast. like there's the moment ireferred to in the last hour of hester prim urging thedimisdale [assumed spelling]to begin all anew. and that's not possible. that can only happen in theenchanted space of the forest that they all have to leave. and she by the end comes torealize that true wisdom suggest that you cannot begin all anew.
that you are bound to history,and you can be bound to history in a way that's completelyconstraining, or you can be bound in a ways that can be constructiveand forward moving. but it isn't quite soeasy to cut the ties as emerson might suggest. so melville is thinkinga similar things. innate depravity an original sin from whose visitations nodeeply thinking mind is always
unholy free. for the certain modes no man canwade this world without throwing in something, somehowlike original sin to strike an uneven balance. and there's somethingfrankleneon perhaps, maybe even hawthorneit about something, somehow like original sin. which two hundred years lateris not going to be original sin, but we just can't dispose of it.
we need something, thepuritans was on to something. something has totake that place, you know in our imaginations, otherwise thingsare out of balance. the worlds don'twork that way, right. if you think aboutthat image of the glow, the glow was alwayshalf-and-half. half-light, half-dark,it's balanced in that way. original sin is necessarysometimes
to keep us conceptuallybalanced, that's what's melrose arguing. remember when i suggestedto you earlier on therefore that melville is kind ofhaunted by the residue of this puritan imaginationthat the article as we traced from bradford and winthrop[assumed spelling] on, right. so i ask you to then thinkabout the relationship between their modesof using the bible. winthrop and any of the otherpuritan thinkers, wigglesworth
for example, even bradstreet[assumed spelling] or taylor, would they have arelationship with the bible that is mutually supportive. winthrop has something to say because there is abook called the bible. and he is then, you mightas well say the moments in his sermon are authorizedby his engagement with and his apparentknowledge of the bible. he can almost use a kind ofshorthand as can wigglesworth,
just to refer you to the bible. refer you to passages todelegate what he's saying. right, so the twohave a relationship of intertextuality[assumed spelling], you might say that'scomplimentary. is that what's goingon in moby dick? certainly it has arelationship of intertextuality to the bible among a host ofother books, but perhaps first and foremost the bible.
meanings of moby dickare not going be complete if you don't know thebook call the bible exist, but what is that relationship. is it a relationship of complimentarythe way this one is, or is it something elseyou remember i suggested that melville inherited from hismother this sense a calvinistic sense, or calvinisticapproach to christianity and therefore he knew the bible.
i mean scholars have said that you know melvilleimagination is bible trends that he can quoted it, you know. yes ok but from hisfather a certain kind of skepticism a willingnessto play along but we think not entire youknow not a really full belief to go thru the rituals but perhaps not believein the same way. and that tensionseem to work its way
into melville's text practicallyin moby dick likewise i told you that the family had aconsiderable hardship. alan melville signs his namewithout an e that because in some sense after his death. maria supporting melvilleas the eve to destroying, in part to distinguishthe family's future from the family's past. they have incrediblefinancial hardship and melville as well has a deep imbeviance[assumed spelling] to the world
of business and finance. he's forced to ceasehis education in order to help support the family,he tried to be a schoolteacher and then he goes to sea. but, moby dick is markedtherefore by a number of context, and one ofthem is the biographical. another context may i sayis the moment in history that we've been talking about. so precisely thatmoment of eighteen fifty,
remember i told you that yetlameul [assumed spelling] shaw, who is melville fatherin-law was the judge who first upheld thefugitive slave law. and felt in, in return theslave named thomas simms back to the south from massachusetts. all right, so there'sthat context as well. and then there's a wholecontext of literary history kind of leading up tothis, all right. melville himself istrying to evoke a
since of contextfor what he's doing. that's why we havethese strange chapters at the beginning calledanemology [assumed spelling]an extracts. and particularly extracts youmight say is setting a kind of intellectual history. and also you might sayputting us on notice that this is not goingto be a standard novel. this is going to be a novel
that has certain kindsof encyclopedic aims. it's going to be a novelthat in some since might like the whale swallowup for a variety of previous forms of writing. so these are signals that thenovel is sending to us again. and i suggested in the last hour that either the scarlett letteris a novel begins three times. it begins with thecustom house preface, it begins with the firstchapter which is kind
of short an anematic[assumed spelling]and focused on the weather beaten door andinvites us to a certain kind of allegorical readingwhich we were able to make immediately problematic. and then it begins again whenhester prim actually comes in the sub narrativeand starts proper. moby dick beginsthree times too, four if you count thededication to hawthorne which for us is acrucial context.
but begins with it hasits anemology section in which you know, it's clearlynot just a list of words, right. he's starting to do someactually imaginative writing here, anematic as it might be,there's the abstract section, and then there'scall me ishmael. right, that chapter calledloomings that i spent a lot of time on last time, and soone of the things that i want to suggest is that thisis a novel that in some since is immediately puttingus on notice that's it's going
to be a strange kind of novel. it begins three timesit seems to set a set of ground rules for us. it's going to havethese encyclopedic aims, it's going to be fictional butmaybe not entirely fictional. and it's going to havethis serious engagement with the bible. so the first of theabstracts is from genesis, and god created great whales.
the first sentence ofthe narrative proper, call me ishmael immediatelyinvokes a kind of biblical context. and i suggested that we oughtto think kind of carefully about what it means to begina novel with call me ishmael. it's different thanmy name is ishmael. this means we don'tknow what his name is. call me ishmael, there'ssomething a little bit chatty about it, maybe, maybe somethinga little bit pushy you can
dramatize it in different ways. certainly ishmaelsuggests the outsider, somebody who is not partof the biblical tradition, the mainstream biblicaltradition, although he is crucialto the muslim tradition. we'll talk a little bitabout melville engagement with islam perhaps in acouple of lectures from now. someone who certainly isa wonderer, all right, so these are someof the context,
of course you don't know that ifyou don't know about the bible. so you kind of need tohave, this is something that melville is immediatelyputting you on notice that he is drawing ona biblical tradition. but that ishmael thingshould give us pause, it's not the sameas call me jacob. i haven't been keepingup with lost so i have no commenton any of that. should i, should i, likefive episodes in the bank,
should i keep writing. yes, ok, i'll blame you. no, i always enjoy binging onlost whenever, i know exactly when i want to do that, maytenth at around five pm. ok, so call me ishmael suggest that we should bea little nervous. and then the implication ofdeath, you know he's being funny but he's trailing aftercoffins and he's talks about committing suicideor not and there's a kind
of weird thing that's going on. so that's part of whati suggested to you. i also told you the storyabout the asters you remember, melville hears about the storyof the essex [assumed spelling], the whale ship inthe eighteen thirties that was famouslysank by a whale. that seemed to sink it withintention, not just by accident or by instinct, but toactually come around and whack the boat deliberately.
and at the result of that wasthat these sailors, the captain, and the first mate wereended up in long boats. the whaling boats, an i'll showyou pictures of a lot of what that looks like andmaybe a little clip of what's called a nantucketsleigh ride when the, when the boat getspulled by the whale. and they do the crazything of trying to get to the western coastof south america, rather than the most closermarkazian [assumed spelling],
because they are so afraid ofmeeting cannibals in markazia. and then of course in oneof those dramatic ironies that life often presents, they become cannibalsin order to survive. and they eventuallymake it home but not after becoming the very thingthat they sought to avoid. melville reverses it, he hasishmael go the other direction and he has him meet thecannibal right away. we'll get our cannibalout of the way,
we'll meet the whale later. so there's something funnythat melville is doing from the very beginningwith the idea of personal narrative as well. and i suggested toyou that at the end of the looming chapter one ofthe things that's being evoked as an addition to the kind of weirdly proleptic [assumedspelling] contested election and battle for afghanistan andall these thoughts about people
on all paranormal had after nineeleven, that this was some kind of like weirdly propheticnostradamus like book. beyond that the extent that ishmael is akind of cosmopolitan. he's interested inthings worldly. what he calls baberish[assumed spelling] shores. he says i love to, thisis on page twenty two, i love to sail forbiddenseas, for that i'm tormented with an everlasting itch forthings remote and landing
on baberish shores, coastsnot ignoring what is good, i'm quick to perceive the horror and could be social witheredwould they let me, since it is but well to be on friendlyterms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in. world is a madhouse orprison, interesting, right. by reason all, all thesegood things he goes away on the voyage. and i suggested to you like,
why does melville begin itonce, what in manhattan. i mean once because i've alreadybegan the book in manhattan, so it kind of pays homage because he already beganthe book in manhattan. but he's only puttingso many aspects of his personal lifeup for grabs. why begin it there? why not just begin in newbedford or in nantucket. why begin in theisland of manhattan.
i wanted to suggest, i suggestedto you that maybe it's a way of signaling a certain drawingon a cosmopolitan history that already is associatedwith new york, and maybe signaling akind of a way of thinking about this novel, which thenquickly leaves the scene of cosmopolitan new yorkand becomes something else. ok, so i want to take alook at some of the chapters that go further on here andwe're think a little bit more about what's going on here.
how much objectivemind, did i talk to you about the spouter inn? does that ring a bell? did i show you that picture? all right, we'll do that then. so, the spouter , so ishmaelgoes, right, and he's looking around for a place to stay. he has this tendency you mightsay to think about the world, at, in not in allegorical termsbut in least in symbolic terms.
and he always position, imean he's named ishmael, it belongs to a tradition that has a sub imperialism werenames seem to be significant. this is on page 24 for example, he's looking fora place to stay. hah, said i, hah as the flyingparticles almost choked me, are these ashes from thatdestroyed city gomorra but the crossed harpoonand the swordfish, this then must be the sign ofthe trap, doesn't really want
to stay in any of these places. moving on i came outlast keen to a dim sort of out hanging lightnot far from the dock and heard a fro longcreaking in the air. looking up, saw aswinging sign over the door with a white painting upon it, fairly representing a tallstraight jet of misty spray, and these words underneath,the spouter inn, peter coffin. a coffin is actually agood old nantucket name.
so it's kind of one of thesehappy accidents from melville's, what's the name of this guypeter coffin, coffin, spouter, rather ominous in thatparticular connection said i, but it is a rather commonname in nantucket they say. and i suppose this peter hereis an immigrant from there. as the night lookso dim and the place for the time looks quite enough in the dilapidated littlewooden house itself, looked as if it might havebeen carted here from the ruins
of some burnt district. and as the swinging sign had apoverty sort of stricken creak to it, i thought that here wasa very spot for cheap lodgings and the best of pea coffee. all right, so he goesinto the spouter inn. entering, this is the nextpage, entering the gabled, entering the gable of thespouter inn you found yourself in wide low straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscotreminding one of the bullocks
of condemned old craft. on one side hung avery large oil painting so thoroughly besmoked,and every way defaced, that in the unequal crosslights by which you viewed it. it was only by diligentstudy and a series of systematic visits toit, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, thatyou could any way arrive at an understandingof its purpose. now, once again artworkrepresented in a piece
of writing or piece of artwe should pay attention. this is a moment ofwhat's called effaces, the representation ofvisual art in a text. a classic representation itshould be, we should think of it as again a moment when thenovelist is able to comment on acts of interpretation andtherefore suggest to you things about how you maybeshould interpret the text that you're reading. so let's see how hecomes to meaning here.
and this is by the way peoplethink that this is not, not necessarily this one butwhen melville went on his trip to europe, beforewriting moby dick, one of the things he might, hesaw was paintings by the, the, kind of the, theromantic portrait, landscape painter turner. and this seems to be a fairlyreasonable representation of the kind of thing that ishmael is probablyseeing here, okay.
such unaccountable massesof shades and shadows, that at first you almost thoughtsome ambitious young artist, in the time of the newengland hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. but by dint of much andearnest contemplation, and oft repeatedponderings, and especially by throwing open the littlewindow towards the back of the entry, you at lastcome to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild,
might not be altogetherunwarranted. nice hawthornian [assumedspelling] sort of sentence. so how are we going to goabout doing our interpretation. what do we need to do? what most puzzled and confoundedyou was a long, limber, portentous, black mass ofsomething hovering in the center of the picture overthree blue, dim, perpendicular linesfloating in a nameless yeast. let's call those the threedim blue perpendicular lines.
a boggy, soggy, squitchypicture truly, enough to drive anervous man distracted. yet was there a sort ofindefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity aboutit that fairly froze you to it. till you involuntarily,involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out whatthat marvelous painting meant. ever and anon a bright,but, alas, deceptive idea woulddart you through. it's the black seain a midnight gale.
it's the unnatural combatof the four primal elements. it's a blasted heath. it's a hyperborean winter scene. it's the breaking up of theicebound stream of time. but at last all thesefancies yielded to that one portentous somethingin the picture's midst. that found out, once found outand all the rest were plain. but stop, does it notbear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish, eventhe great leviathan himself?
in fact the artist's designseemed this, a final theory of my own, partly basedupon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whomi conversed upon the subject. the picture represents acape-horner, so it's a type of whale ship, ina great hurricane. the half-founderedship weltering there with its three dismantledmasts alone visible, and an exasperated whale,purposing to spring clean over the craft, inthe enormous act
of impaling himself uponthe three mastheads. now, what do we makeof melville? how does he arriveat his meeting? that's the process ofinterpretation here. if this is supposed tobe an act of interpreting of meaning making,how's it working? does he come up withit all by himself? yeah. >> [inaudible]
>> sure, that's good,he brings at it from other kinds of angles. he even has to changethe lighting a bit. he has to throw open a, you wonder how he'sactually standing there, he has to throw open a windowin the back some place. what do you meanby other context? >> i don't know like,he's talking about like the winter scene andbreaking open the ice, and then
>> so there's a lot ofinterpretive possibilities here. how did he settle onhis final meeting? >> he [inaudible]asked others opinion. >> so he asked otheropinions. so there is a kind ofcollaborative moment of meaning making here. i have a theory of my ownpartly based upon the aggregated opinion [inaudible]and then he decides that it's a whale leapingover the mast of a ship.
which seems kindof more outlandish than the other possibilities,again leading you to wonder, to what extent is he, in fact, imposing his own perspectiveon what's going on. he's whale obsessed, maybe everything lookslike a whale to him. he claims to haveconsulted a lot of people. he claims to have testedout lots of things. this would extensivelymake it seem
like an authoritativerendering of the scene. but i think we should askourselves are there limits to the mode of interpretationthat's going on here. there's one possibleinterpretation of course that he doesn't bring up. does that remind you of anybody? or of anything, that picture? no, don't remindyou of anything. >> the three massesof [inaudible]
>> the three massesof sister ships. ok, it could be columbus, iguess, maybe, possible, sure. >> yes, it's possible, imean, whatever we're justspeculating here as it turns out ishmael is [inaudible]. >> kind of like go with a, i used to dramatize itthis way, ship, whale. sinking. but he doesn't say that.
why doesn't he say that? right, i mean it's abible, he's bible obsessed. it's a bible obsessed book. why does he leave out thebiblical interpretation? maybe the professor isjust reading in, maybe not, maybe this is melville havingan end joke you might say at ishmael expense. in any case obviously thescene is an important one. whatever you makeof it, it's a scene
about not only interpretationand modes of interpretation. but you might say the subjectivenature of interpretation and the limitationsof interpretation. and it also mightbe a way of getting at the thing i was talking abouton the second day of the course. which is, how can a firstperson novel know more than its first personnarrator is that possible. and is moby dickan example of that. so that's one of thethings we might want to ask
over the next few times. is there a way in which ishmael,who seems to take up all the air in the room, is it possiblethat there are things that ishmael doesn't know yet, that the novel isconveying to us. i suppose that further iterationmight be ishmael older writer knows them but ishmael characterbeing dramatized here doesn't know them. we want even get intothe further level
of complexity wouldbe are there things that ishmael older novelwriter still doesn't know that tex knows ormelville knows. we'll get to that later,anyway i want you to be in tune to this, there are manyof these in moby dick. moments when we ought to besaying, oh this is a scene, it's a inset story, it'sa kind of dramatization when the novel is selfconsciously reflecting on its own means of generatingrepresentations, and of the ways
in which those representationsare likely to be interpreted. alright, do we needthat, we don't need that, don't want that, okso ishmael goes right, he goes in to the innand he meets peter coffin and he is trying tofigure out where to stay. and peter coffin says, well there's not reallya place for you to stay. well you could staywith this harpooneer. ishmael doesn't reallywant to do that.
bottom of 29, no manprefers to sleep two a bed. in fact, you would a gooddeal rather not sleep with your own brother. i don't know how it is, butpeople like to be private when they are sleeping. and when it comes to sleepingwith an unknown stranger, in a strange inn,in a strange town, and that stranger a harpooneer, then your objectionsindefinitely multiply.
nor was there anyearthly reason why i as a sailor should sleep two toa bed, more than anybody else, for sailors no more sleeptwo in a bed at sea, than bachelor kings do ashore. to be sure they all sleeptogether in one apartment, but you have your ownhammock, and cover yourself with your own blanket, andsleep in your own skin. so, he goes to plan b.landlord i changed my mind about that harpooneer,i can't stay with him.
i'll try the bench here. so he goes and tries to sleepon the bench, this is a scene of comedy, alright so oneof the things to know then about what melville is invokingis, that there is a kind of urging like narrativevoice that ishmael has. it should remind us a littlebit of geoffrey crayon and the voyage perhaps. irving, ishmael had, hejust seems a little bit like a kind of hypochondriac.
he seems a littlebit depressive, but there is also anotherstream of magazine writing that melville seemsto be invoking. it's called down east humor. down east humor typicallyhas somebody with, who is kind of like a countrybumpkin coming to the city and making a fool of himself. and it pretty much uses a kind of ridiculous yankeebiblical names like, hezekiah,
or ezekiel, or ishmael,things like that. that's what's beinginvoked in this chapter. all right, so we get a kindof slapstick moment here. this is the start of it, he'slike, i'm not going to sleep, melville says okay,i'll shave down that, the thing that make him morecomfortable, start shaving it down in between serviceand he hears a knock, which kind of makes itworse and he says forget it, i'll sleep with thedamn harpooner.
so he goes and he sleepswith the harpooner. and i want you to look the wayin which the scene progresses, because it should betelling you something about the way thatishmael thinks. and is it a part that tellsyou something about the way that ishmael thinks,it should make, should give you an ideawhether this is a narrator that you can trust, or not. so he goes back, bottom of 32.
there, said the landlord,placing the candle on a crazy old sea chest thatdid double duty as a wash-stand and centre table, there, make yourself comfortablenow and good night to ye. i turned round from eyeing thebed, but he had disappeared. you know what happens later own,but i always had like a picture in my mind that he's kind of gothis eye on that keyhole looking and listening at the doorsto see what's going on. because clearly there's a sincein which peter coffin is acting
as a kind of stage manager here. this is a moment of dramaticirony which he knows things that ishmael doesn't know andhe's, he's you know setting up a scene you mightsay that's going to play out in front of us. folding back the counterpane,right, the comforter, i stooped over the bed. though none of the most elegant, it yet stood thescrutiny tolerably well.
i then glanced around theroom; and besides the bedstead and centre table, could seeno other furniture belonging to the place, but a rudeshelf, the four walls, and a papered fireboardrepresenting a man striking a whale. of things not properlybelonging to the room, there was a hammock lashedup, and thrown upon the floor in one corner; alsoa large seaman's bag, containing the harpooneer'swardrobe,
no doubt in lieuof a land trunk. likewise, there was a parcelof outlandish bone fish hooks on the shelf overthe fire-place, and a tall harpoon standingat the head of the bed. so far, so good, all things within a typicalseaman's experience. but what is this on the chest? i took it up, and held it closeto the light, and felt it, and smelt it, and triedevery way possible to arrive
at some satisfactoryconclusion concerning it. it might remind you of edgerhuntley and his box, right, he is going to try to useempirical investigation, rational experience to figureout what this thing is. he can't, it's outside therealm of his experience. so again we might, in tyingthings back, you know he talks about the painting is marvelous, he talks about the novel isgoing to depict a wonder world. there's a since in whichmelville is also drawing
on that discourse of thewondrous and the marvelous that we say in some ofthe sentiment narratives. and ishmael portrays the samekind of logic that someone like columbus doesin his letters. we have a template, weapply it to experience. we try to shoehornexperience into it even when it doesn't quite fit. i can compare it to nothingbut a large door mat, ornamented at the edges withlittle tinkling tags something
like the stained porcupinequills round an indian moccasin. there was a hole or slitin the middle of this mat, as you see the same insouth american ponchos. but could it be possible thatany sober harpooneer would get into a door mat, and parade thestreets of any christian town in that sort of guise? i put it on, to try it, and itweighed me down like a hamper, being uncommonlyshaggy and thick, and i thought a little damp,
as though this mysteriousharpooneer had been wearing it of a rainy day. i went up in it to a bit ofglass stuck against the wall, and i never saw sucha sight in my life. i tore myself out ofit in such a hurry that i gave myselfa kink in the neck. all right, againit's a common theme. he sees this prettymat, he's putting it on and he's acting like an idiot.
but he's trying tofigure it out. ok, yes in bed, andthen, bottom of the page. i heard a heavy footfall inthe passage, and saw a glimmer of light come into theroom from under the door. lord save me, thinks i,that must be the harpooneer, the infernal head peddler. because he has been told thatthis guy has been going off and selling headsaround the town. but i lay perfectlystill, and resolved not
to say a word till spoken to. holding a light in one hand, andthat identical new zealand head in the other, thestranger entered the room, and without lookingtowards the bed, placed his candle a goodway off from me on the floor in one corner, andthen began working away at the knotted cords of thelarge bag i before spoke of as being in the room. i was all eagerness to see hisface, but he kept it averted
for some time while employedin unlacing the bag's mouth. this accomplished, however,he turned around when, good heavens, what asight, such a face. it was of a dark,purplish, yellow color, here and there stuck over withlarge blackish looking squares. this is bad, but knowwhere in the realm of my understanding right. yes, it's just as i thought,he's a terrible bedfellow. he's been in a fight, gotdreadfully cut, and here he is,
just from the surgeon. ok frame of explanation one. but it doesn't quite fit. but at that moment hechanced to turn his face so towards the light, that i plainly saw they couldnot be sticking plasters at all, those black squareson his cheeks. they were stains ofsome sort or other. at first i knew not what to makeof this, but soon an inkling
of the truth occurred to me. for readers of tepee[assumed spelling], they would notice this,this is exactly the thing that the narrator intepee is afraid of. that these people, one ofthings while he's most afraid of that they're goingto eat him. but beyond that he's afraidthat the cannibals amongst, what he thinks arecannibals, amongst whom he has, will tattoo him and disfiguredhim, especially his face.
he's happy to have tattooseverywhere but not the face. i remembered a story of a whiteman, a whale man too, who, falling among the cannibals,had been tattooed by them. i concluded that thisharpooneer, in the course of his distant voyages,must have met with a similar adventure. and what is it, thoughti, after all. it's only his outside, a man canbe honest in any sort of skin. now that is a nice platitude.
and in a way if you think aboutit, especially given the context of eighteen fifty andracism and slavery and that's not a bad thing tobe thinking about it seems like, ideologically progressive. can we take it seriouslyin this narrative context? that's part of the challengeof these early chapters. there full of comedy, the comedysubvert what we might think of as cosmopolitanprinciples, or principles of toleration equalityof the novel.
and ishmael seems tobe putting forward. what's the relationshipbetween these moments of philosophicalthought and comedy? to be sure it might be nothingbut a good coat of tropic, but he said, butthen what to make of his unearthlycomplexion, that part of it, i mean lying roundabout cancome completely independent of the squares of tattooing. to be sure, it might benothing but a good coat
of tropical tanning,but i never heard of a hot sun's tanning a whiteman into a purplish yellow one. however, i had neverbeen in the south seas; and perhaps the sun thereproduced these extraordinary effects upon the skin. right again, tryingto be rational, hycephic [assumedspelling], empirical. now, while all these ideaswere passing through me like lightning, this harpooneernever noticed me at all.
but, after some difficultyhaving opened his bag, he commenced fumbling in it,and presently pulled out a sort of tomahawk, and a seal-skinwallet with the hair on. placing these on the oldchest in the middle of a room, he then took the new zealandhead, a ghastly thing enough, and crammed it downinto the bag. he now took off hishat, a new beaver hat, when i came nigh singingout with fresh surprise. there was no hair on his head,none to speak of at least,
nothing but a small scalp-knottwisted up on his forehead. his bald purplish head nowlooked for all the world like a mildewed skull. had not the stranger stoodbetween me and the door, i would have boltedout of it quicker than ever i bolted a dinner. again, that's a kind of therovian [assumedspelling]moment right, but it's part ofthe comedy here.
so look what's goingon ishmael is trying to make himself comfortable. he's put himselfin a new situation, thinks he can handle it. he looks for the mostcomfortable frame of explanation. staving off what heknows is the truth, and what we already haverealized is the truth about this person here.
even as it was, i thoughtsomething of slipping out of the window, but itwas the second floor back. i am no coward, but what to make of this head peddling purplerascal altogether passed my comprehension. ignorance is the parent of fear,and being completely nonplussed and confounded about thestranger, i confess i was now as much afraid of him asif it was the devil himself who had thus broken into myroom at the dead of night.
in fact, i was so afraid of him that i was not game enoughjust then to address him, and demand a satisfactoryanswer concerning what seemed inexplicable in him. alright, so he's going on,he's got this tomahawk, ishmael is scared you know,blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. we go on to the next, let'sgo on to the next page. we'll go to the bottomof the page, next page. in the interval i spentin deliberating what
to say, was a fatal one. taking up his tomahawk fromthe table, he examined the head of it for an instance, andthen holding it to the light, with his mouth at the handle, he puffed out greatclouds of tobacco smoke. the next moment thelight was extinguished, and this wild cannibal,tomahawk between his teeth, sprang into bed with me. i sang out, i could not help itnow, and giving a sudden grunt
of astonishment hebegan feeling me. stammering out something, iknew not what, i rolled away from him against the wall. and then conjured him, whateveror whatever he might be, to keep quiet, and let me getup and light the lamp again. but his guttural responsessatisfied me at once that he but ill comprehended my meaning. who e debel you? he at last said, you nospeak e, dam me, i kill e.
and so saying the lightedtomahawk began flourishing about me in the dark. landlord, for god's sake, petercoffin, shouted i, landlord, watch, coffin, angels, save me. speak e, tell e mewho e be, or dam me, i kill e. again growledthe cannibal, while his horrid flourishings of the tomahawk scatteredthe hot tobacco ashes about me till i thought mylinen would get on fire.
but thank heaven, at thatmoment, and i tell you, he's outside at the doorlistening, the landlord came into the room light in hand, and leaping from thebed i ran up to him. you can imagine him doinga yogi barra and like, you know putting all hislegs around him perhaps. don't be afraid now,said he, grinning again, queequeg here wouldn'tharm a hair of your head. stop your grinning, shoutedi, and why didn't you tell me
that that infernalharpooneer was a cannibal? i thought ye know'd it, didn't itell ye, he was a peddling heads around town, but turn flukesagain and go to sleep. queequeg, look here,you sabbee me, i sabbee you this mansleepe you, you sabbee? humph, me sabbee plenty. grunted queequeg, puffing awayat his pipe and sitting in bed. you gettee in, headded, motioning to me with his tomahawk, and throwingthe clothes to one side.
and now look at what's happened. think about ishmaeltrain of thought. he's tried to makesince of the situation in which things are justbeyond his experience. he has no idea what thesecannibals possessions are, he tries to keep theknowledge that he's with a cannibal offas long as possible. he finally has to admitthat's what it is. and then all of a sudden there'sa really quick about face.
he really did thisin not only a civil but a really kindand charitable way. i stood looking athim for a moment. for all his tattooings hewas on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal. what's all this fuss ihave been making about, thought i to myself, the man'sa human being just as i am. he has just as muchreason to fear me, as i have to be afraid of him.
better sleep witha sober cannibal than a drunken christian. ok, that sounds likegood advice, i guess. landlord, said i, tell himto stash his tomahawk there, or pipe, or whateveryou call it. tell him to stopsmoking, in short, and i will turn in with him. but i don't fancy having aman smoking in bed with me. it's dangerous.
besides, i ain't insured. so he makes a joke. he takes the thing that'sworrying him an deflates attention away from it to something else that'sextensively the thing that worries him the most. now, again this is just a littlething, but its characteristic, and we'll see this in a moment, of the way in which thenovel shows us characters
who for various purposes ofpersuasion, shift the ground of debate from onearena into another. so he's worried aboutcannibalism but he claims to be worried about, youknow, smoking in bed. and this you might sayis a kind of technique that we will see otherpeople use in novel. the novel is sort ofmaking us attune to it at this particular moment. this being told toqueequeg, he at once complied,
and again politelymotioned me to get into bed, rolling over to oneside as much as to say, i won't touch a leg of ye. good night landlord,said i, you may go. i turned in, and neverslept better in my life. now, i want to ask you whatyou think of that scene. alright its meant to be funny. so that's one of thesignals that the novelist that the novelist done, thiscan actually be a funny novel.
if you can get beyond thefact that it's all these pages and it's this nineteenthcentury american classic that everyone talks about. and it's been assigned in thisridiculous course that's going to have an exam at the end, ifyou can get beyond all that. you can realize it's actuallyfun to read this damn thing. and its irreverent andhas some social overtones which push the boundariesof, of the exceptual ideas in the nineteenth century and itis blasphemous in many places.
it makes fun of the bible, ithas a lot of kind of dirty jokes that are based onbiblical culture. and the fact that peopleprobably don't bother to look things up, ordon't know it quite as well as melville does. ask yourself how we aresupposed to take this idea. better sleep witha sober cannibal, are we supposed totake that straight up, or with a grain of salt.
are we suppose to thinkthat ishmael has come around to the right way ofthinking that this is a kind of image of cosmopolitantolerance, or has he been too quickto rationalize things. has he not actually thought allthis through, is he too quick to jump into something new. is there a problem here withthe narration that we're seeing. ok, that's one seen ithink is somewhat iconic for this narrative.
and i think it says a lotof things in play for us to be attune to as we go on. ok, let's take alook at the chapel, the chapter that'scalled chapter seven. the cenotaphs, imean the chapel. and what it does is presentus with a set of cenotaphs. a cenotaph is a kindof funereal marker in the absence of a grave. so he goes to the whale man'schapel there in new bedford.
and you know like frederickdouglass reproducing his past and his marriage certificate, he attempts to reproducefor us the cenotaphs. so again, like the boggy, soggy,switchy picture, this a kind of, i don't know, sort of meditictual [assumedspelling] moment, in which we're askedto consider something that in this case not anartwork but something has, that has the same, where we havethe same kind of relation to it
that ishmael has to the artwork. in other words, he isalso a spectator looking at these things. and he's also lookingat the people who are looking at these things. and what would we, whatcould we find out about them. for one thing ifyou are about to go on a whaling mission i supposethey should give you pause. sacred to the memoryof john talbot, who,
at the age of eighteen, waslost overboard near the isle of desolation, off patagonia, november first eighteenthirty six. this tablet is erected tohis memory by his sister. sacred to the memory ofrobert long, willis ellery, nathan coleman, waltercanny, seth macy, and samuel gleig[assumed spelling], forming one of the boatscrews of the ship eliza, who were towed out of sight bya whale, on the off shore ground
in the pacific, december thirtyfirst, eighteen thirty nine. this marble is here placedby their surviving shipmates. sacred to the memory of thelate captain ezekiel hardy, who in the bows ofa boat, of his boat, was killed by a sperm whaleon the coast of japan, august third eighteenthirty three. this tablet is erectedby his memory, to his memory by his widow. these are men whodisappeared at sea.
their stories aren't necessarilyincomplete, all we can sort of tell about them,the bare facts, and there put there on the wall. so the novel is inviting usto think about certain things. one of the things that i want tosuggest to you as a possibility, is that maybe whatthis novel is, is in fact one of these things. it's a cenotaph. if you haven't gottento the end yet,
i may have spoiled somepart of it for you. it's a cenotaph that does morethan a cenotaph possibly could. in other words, it's as ifwhat if we looked at one of these stories andwere able to tell it in all of its fullness. so there's a kind of memorialfunction that this novel has. but the other thing wemight say about it is that it may well bea record of a trauma. think about a cenotaphicfunction.
these are people who havelost love ones at sea, they don't know exactlywhat happened to them. somebody was killed by a whale,body disappeared or something. they were towed out of sight. god knows what happened to them. we know about theessex, we took that type of thing didn't happen to them. we need stories, but more than that we need a placecommunally to morn them.
that's what these things served. there's a kind ofcommunal function that these cenotaphs have. maybe there's a cenotaphicurge within the novel itself. its self forming a kind ofcommunal function as a way of dealing with trauma. so one of the things iwant to suggest to you is that maybe this is a novelthat would benefit very much from using a kind of interpretedlens that today is a,
is identified withtrauma studies. what does it meanto be a survivor? that's part of what isat stake in this novel. in this chapter i thinksuggest that to us. ok, so what, i'm going to try topoint out things that i want you to use as tools for interpreting as we go a littlebit further on. i want spend time on thepulpit and the sermon today. instead i would like to look
at the chapter that'scalled a bosom friend, this is on chapter ten,this is chapter ten. now again i suggested to you insome since the novel is kind, this is, is a thoughtexperiment. so it is going to be dramatizinga number of philosophical ideas and asking us to thinkdeeply about that. so one of the things iwant to suggest to you, is that it is a novelthat poses a lot of what i would call heuristics,or a lot of what ifs?
so here is one of themon page fifty five. we're starting with thinkabout queequeg alright. he returns from the spouter innfrom the chapel and he finds that queequeeg is now lookingat a book, assuming the bible, and kind of, these thingsbecome defamiliarized as if western culture becomesdefamiliarized when we see it through queequeeg's eyes, or at least when we watchqueequeeg consuming it. and this gets ishmaelto thinking.
so, this is into the second, first full paragraphon fifty five. through all his unearthlytattooings, i thought i saw the tracesof a simple honest heart. and in his large, deepeyes, fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare athousand devils. and besides all this, therewas a certain lofty bearing about the pagan, which evenhis uncouthness could not
altogether maim. he looked like a manwho had never cringed and never had had a creditor. whether it was, too, thathis head being shaved, his forehead was drawn outin freer and brighter relief, and looked more expansivethan it otherwise would, this i will not ventureto decide, but certain it was his headwas phrenologically [assumed spelling] an excellent one.
right, this is the moment whenpart of the way of thinking about the relationship betweenappearance and capabilities, obviously linked toa discourse of race in the nineteenth century. for now it just seems to lookat the shape of the heads and the place ofindentations in it and think that you can tell somethingabout the capabilities about the person who hadthat particular shape. it may seem ridiculous,but it reminded me
of general washington's head, as seen in the popularbusts of him. it had the same long regularlygraded retreating slope from above the brows, whichwere likewise very projecting. like two long promontoriesthickly wooded on top. queequeg was george washingtoncannibalistically developed. now, again i thinkthis is a little moment when i think it isagain an invitation to a thought experiment.
what would it mean for georgewashington to be developed in a cannibal context? alright, what would it meanfor someone who is a cannibal to be a better exampleof christianity than most christians, who areyou know drunken and misbehaving and doing whatever else, right. these are the kinds oflittle thought experiments that i think thenovel is inviting us to consider all the way through.
and that's one of thethings that i wanted to point out to you here. now, this chapter isinteresting and iconic as well because it givesus another example of ishmael's religious thinking. and you might say hiscommitment to toleration. he's trying to understandqueequeg's different practices right, and so he talksto him about them. and then at the top offifty seven we have this,
it's the end of chapter ten. i was a good christian. born and bred in the bosom of the infalliblepresbyterian church. and we're going to talk a lotabout the presbyterianism here, but it has, for our purposesit has certain things in common with the period andculture that we look at. and the footnote will tell youwhy this particular passage was a little bit controversialafter the novel was published.
how then could i unitewith this wild idolater in worshipping hispiece of wood? right, i mean if yourcosmopolitan you want to reach out, you want tobridge gaps, you want to. but what is worship? thought i. do you suppose now, ishmael,that the magnanimous god of heaven and earth,pagans and all included, can possibly be jealousof an insignificant piece
of black wood, of black wood. to do the word, will of god? that is worship. and what is the will of god? to do to my fellow man whati would have my fellow man to do to me. that is the will of god. do onto others as you wouldhave them do onto you. that goes by a name.
what is that? >> the golden rule. yes, do onto others as youwould have them do onto you. ok, now queequegis my fellow man. and what do i wish thatthis queequeg would do onto me, do to me? why, unite with me in my particularpresbyterian form of worship. consequently, i must thenunite with him in his,
ergo, i must turn idolater. so i kindled the shavings, helped prop up theinnocent little idol, offered him burntbiscuit with queequeg. salaamed before him twiceor thrice, kissed his nose, and that done, weundressed and went to bed, at peace with our ownconsciences and all the world. but we did not go to bedwithout some little chat. how it is i know not, butthere is no place like a bed
for confidentialdisclosures between friends. man and wife, they say,there open the very bottom of their souls to each other,and some old couples often lie and chat over old timestill nearly morning. thus, then, in our heartshoneymoon, lay queequeg, laid i and queequega cozy, loving pair. now that is a very juicyan ripe set of paragraphs which we can think about alot but i want to ask not about the ending of it,but the beginning of it.
what's wrong with thelogic that ishmael implies? complete with argo,looks and logistic. what's wrong with it? golden rule invoked. golden rule says, do ontoothers as you will have them do onto me, that's the rule of god. so, he, i want him to be likeme, i'm going to be like him. what's wrong? yes, all the way in the back.
>> he's using likesyllogistic [inaudible] in order to take one identical[inaudible] and make it [inaudible]against the other one. >> ok, what's the otherone. >> the, isn't thatthe first commandment. >> which is? >> you basically don'tworship idols [inaudible]. >> so, yes the firstcommandmentis, i am the lord thy god, thou shall have noother god's before me.
when jesus revisesthe old testament and recreates the laws, hedoesn't take that one away. right, you've heardof jesus would say, you've have heard it say, an eyefor an eye a tooth for a tooth, but i say to you,turn the other cheek. the golden rule comesout of that. but it's still second, the firstis always, i'm the lord thy god. one of things thatyou might say is that, that ishmael here is perhapshaving, making a joke,
or melville is making,using ishmael to make a joke about popular understandingsabout literature. i mean and a popularunderstanding of the bible right. what's the most famousthing, the golden rule? we talk about the goldenrule because it's hard to do, but also because maybe we take for granted the firstcommandment. of course no othergods before me,
would never apply the goldenrule in this context right. so what does it mean toignore the [inaudible]. i mean this is an exampleof blasphemous thinking set in a kind of comic way. that should give us alittle, we should think about what's at stake here. what does it mean thatour narrator is willing to write this, in asince believe this, and try to get usto believe this.
is he pulling our leg, is heegging us on, do we just say, oh yes on the other hand it'salso a very nice statement of tolerance andcosmopolitan principles. is the comic way and the kind ofslightly dodgy logic, does that, does that invalidatethe idea of toleration that comes along with it. is this a sign, maybethat ishmael and the devil can quotescriptures for their purposes, should we become more suspiciousof ishmael as a result of this.
again, i think these arethe moments in the novel that questions arebeing opened up. we might link this tothe first acquaintance with queequeg right. there's a similarityin the logic between, a kind of rationalization that'sgoing on with, better sleep with a silver cannibalthan a drunken christian, and i must turn idolater. and this is also the moment
when queequeg an ishmaelbasically become this cozy loving couple. i mean, they assumethe character of an old married couple, andas one of, one of the things to note as, as weembark on a voyage in which they are basicallygoing to be no women that there is a kindof invocation of what we would think ofas homo social relations. relations between men thatare complete without women.
and we might want to think aboutthat, should that give us pause. should that be somethingwe understand as a kind of radical suggestion aboutthe future of society. is there a literary historicalway of thinking about it, i mean, maybe thisis melville's way of dramatizing the necessity, to get away from all thosedamn scribbling women, right? the way hawthorne talksabout it, maybe this is one of the things he's promoting.
what would it mean to havea world without women, would it be a betterone or worse one? some of these again,things that we will go on, the homo social train of thoughtyou might say is something that starts here with queequegand get continued later on. and these questionsabout the advocacy of tolerance no matterhow you get to it, is there something disturbingabout ishmael modes of thinking, what does it mean tobe able to play fast
and loose with the bible? all these are questionsthat the novel continues to explore as it moves forward. alright, we'll start, we'll endwith one more little bit here. this is a chapter that'scalled, a ship, here, and this is a chapter that'sfunny also, but it takes some of the patterns thatwe've seen already, especially this shiftingof ground from one mode of discourse into another.
and takes, and has to be takena little bit more seriously, and part of what's at stake youmight say is the cultural uses of religious modes of thoughtand discourse and speech. so they are in bed again and there concocting theirplans for the morrow. but to my surprise and no smallconcern, queequeg now gave me to understand, that he had beendiligently consulting yojo, the name of his blacklittle god. and yojo had told himtwo or three times over,
and strongly insisted uponit everyway, that instead of our going together amongthe whaling fleet in harbor, and in concert selecting ourcraft, instead of this, i say, yojo earnestly enjoinedthat the selection of the ship shouldrest wholly with me, in as much as yojopurposed befriending us. and, in order to do so, hadalready pitched upon a vessel, which, if left tomyself, i, ishmael, should infallibly light, herepeats the word that he uses
to talk about presbyterianism,infallibly light upon, for all the world as thoughit had turned out by chance. and in that vessel i mustimmediately ship myself, for the present irrespectiveof queequeg. this is providential logic,what does it mean that comes out of a little block of wood. what do we thinkabout the relationship between faitiveness [assumedspelling]and free will here? these are huge topicsfor the culture,
huge topics for thenovel as well. ishmael has alreadytalked about being part of a larger programs set by thefaiths in the first chapter. this is another comicinvocation of province. are we supposed to takeit seriously or not, because of the comedy? anyway he goes and looksat all these ships, and he finally does find one. and this is on page sixty,page seventy of the novel.
he's talking about thepequad, which he has, i suppose we should go back. on page sixty nine he talksabout some other ships that disturb him because oftheir names, the devil dam, the tit bit, the pequad. devil-dam, i do not know theorigin of, tit-bit is obvious. a little humor in that,aromatic actually. pequot you will no doubtremember, was the name of a celebrated tribe ofmassachusetts indians;
now extinct as theancient medes. yes, because thepuritans killed them. so what does it mean, youknow again, the spouter inn, what does it mean tochoose the name of this. ok fine, does namemean something, or do names not mean anything. and when he goes on hedecides that, that one is ok, and he goes and hemeets captain peleg. top of seventy.
old captain peleg, manyyears her chief-mate, before he commandedanother vessel of his own. and now a retired seaman, andone of the principal owners of the pequot, this oldpeleg, during the term of his chief mate ship, had built upon her originalgrotesqueness, and inlaid it, all over, with a quaintnessboth of material and device, unmatched by anything exceptit be thorkill-hake's carved buckler or bedstead.
this was appareled like anybarbaric ethiopian emperor, his neck heavy withpendants of polished ivory. she was a thing of trophies. this was a kind of barbaricship, it's all festooned with ivory and whale bits. it almost look likedthis kind of, it's something deeply barbaricabout the way that it looks. ok, so he goes up hereon the quarter deck, because where the captains are.
he goes up there to thequarter deck of the pequot and he talks about, talks tothe two people that are there. this is the top of seventy one. is this the captainof the pequot, said i, advancing to the door of thetent, which was pitched there. supposing it be thecaptain of the pequot, what dost thou wantof him, he demanded. i was thinking of shipping. thou wast, wast thou?
i see thou art nonantucketer [assumed spelling], ever been in a stove boat? no, sir, i never have. dost know nothing at allabout whaling, i dare say eh? nothing, sir, but i have nodoubt i shall soon learn. i've been several voyagesin the merchant service, and i think that,merchant service be damned. talk not that lingo to me. dost thou see that leg?
i'll take that legaway from thy stern, if ever thou talkest[assumed spelling] of the merchant serviceto me again. merchant service indeed, isuppose now ye feel comfortable and proud of having servedin those merchant ships. but flukes man, what makesthee want to go a whaling, eh? it looks a littlesuspicious, don't it, eh? hast not been a pirate,hast thou? didst not rob thy lastcaptain, didst thou?
dost not think ofmurdering the officers when thou get test to sea? i protested my innocenceof these things. i saw that under the mask ofthese half humorous innuendoes, this old seaman, as aninsulated quaker nantucketer, was full of his insularprejudices, and rather distrustful of allaliens, unless they hailed from cape cod or the vineyard. now again, in so far asishmael is going to be this kind
of voice of cosmopolitismhailing from new york. he's immediately in conflictwith these quakers here as [inaudible] to be somewhatinsorbed [assumed spelling]. and you'll see that therequakers that seem to have a lot in common with puritans. but what takes thee whaling? i want to know that beforei think of shipping ye. well, i want to seewhat whaling is. i want to see the world,again, a cosmopolitan impulse.
want to see what whaling is, eh? have ye ever, have yeclapped eye on captain ahab? who is captain ahab, sir? aye, aye, i thought so. captain ahab is thecaptain of this ship. i am mistaken then. i thought i was speakingto the captain himself. thou art speakingto captain peleg, that's who ye arespeaking to, young man.
it belongs to me and captainbildad to see the pequot fitted out for the voyage, and supplied with all her needs,including crew. we are part owners and agents. but as i was going tosay, if thou wantest to know what whaling is, asthou tellest ye do, i can put ye in a way of finding it outbefore ye bind yourself to it, past backing out. clap eye on captain ahab,young man, and thou wilt find
that he has only one leg. ok, so this is the thingwe are going to find out about captain ahab, he hasonly one leg, remember that. what do you mean, sir? was the other onelost by a whale? lost by a whale. young man, come nearer to me,it was devoured, chewed up, crunched by the monstrousestparmacetty that ever chippeda boat, ah, ah.
right o, i was a little alarmed, [inaudible] alarmedby his energy. perhaps also a littletouched at the hearty grief in his concluding exclamation. alright, so he goeson and he says this. very good, now, art thouthe man to pitch a harpoon down a live whale's throat,and then jump after it? answer quick, i am, sir,
if it should be positivelyindispensable to do so. not to be got rid of, that is, which i don't taketo be the fact. good again. now then, thou not onlywantest to go a whaling, to find out by experience whatwhaling is, but ye also want to go in order to see the world? was not that what ye said? i thought so.
well then, just step forwardthere, and take a peep over the weather bow,and then back to me and tell me what ye see. so he says go to theback sir, take a look, go to the front, take a look. ok, well, what's the report,said peleg when i came back. what did ye see? not much, i replied,nothing but water, considerable horizon though,
and there's a squallcoming up, i think. well, what does thou thinkthen of seeing the world? do ye wish to go round capehorn to see any more of it, eh? can't ye see theworld where you stand? now this is funny i supposebecause something in that right, that's a versionof emerson's idea that traveling isa fool's paradise. it's not a good enoughreason says peleg to want to see the world.
the world mostlylooks like that. you go on a whaling ship that'swhat you're going to see mostly. a lot of horizons alot of open ocean. why do you really want to go. well ok he finally lets him signup and then finally we get this, and this is extensivelyabout bildad and peleg but really it should be,were getting a foreshadowing of ahab himself, this ison page seventy three. now, bildad, like peleg, andindeed many other nantucketers,
was a quaker, the islandhaving been originally settled by that sect. and to this day itsinhabitants in general retain in an uncommon, in anuncommon measure peculiarities of the quaker, only variouslyand anomalously modified by things altogetheralien and heterogeneous. for some of these samequakers are the most sanguinary of all sailors andwhale-hunters. they are fighting quakers, theyare quakers with a vengeance.
and then again he's punning hereright, an almost oxymoronic, fighting quakers, quakersare suppose to be pacifists. there are quakers with avengeance, which means what, they're really, really, quaker,or there quakers who have, who labarbera [assumedspelling] chilling [assumed spelling] wrote. one of the things we mightsay here is what melville is dramatizing for us isexactly the dynamics of dominant residualin emerging, right.
these quakers have been mutatedby their contact with others, with these barbarics[assumed spelling] customs that they have becomeaccustomed too by whaling, by whaling itself,they've changed. so that there are instancesamong them of men, who, named with scripture names,a singularly common fashion on the island, and in childhoodnaturally imbibing the stately dramatic thee and thouof the quaker idiom. still, from the audacious,daring, and boundless adventure
of their subsequentlives, strangely blend with these un outgrownpeculiarities, a thousand bold dashesof character, not unworthy a scandinavian seaking, or a poetical pagan roman. we're invoking norsemythology, or epics, or perhaps classical tragedy. and when these thingsunite in a man of greatly superior naturalforce, with a globular brain and a ponderous heart, whoalso has by the stillness
and seclusion of manylong night-watches in the remotest waters, and beneath constellationsnever seen here at the north, been led to thinkuntraditionally and independently. again, this might remind us ofhester prim thinking to herself by her seaside cottage. thinking by herselfof the pressures that may have been done to her,
comes to think things she'sreally not suppose to. receiving all nature's sweetor savage impressions fresh from her own virgin voluntaryand confiding breast, and thereby chiefly,but with some help from accidental advantages,to learn a bold and nervous lofty language. that man makes one in a wholenation's census a mighty pageant creature, formedfor noble tragedies. i want you to rememberthat image,
the mighty pageant creature,formed for noble tragedies who speaks a bold andnervous lofty language. that's ahab, and we'regetting a little taste of what ahab is goingto be like. now, peleg and bildad,those are biblical names. bildad is one of thequestioners of job, one of the self righteousones who tells job, oh if he's punishing you, you must have did somethingwrong, think about it.
peleg a little bit moreobscure, deuteronomy i think or maybe exodus, he is one of the begets [assumed spelling]his name actually has the derivation, i used to think itmeant nothing and then i found out that it actuallykind of means a river that divides two lands,or something like that. so in fact there's somethinggoing on there about division. ok these two guys are goingto decide ishmael's salary, and we'll end here with that.
ishmael decides that he's goingto have a certain amount of pay. this is on the bottomof seventy five. he talks about the way whalesmen are paid according to lays. he says that what youget is one fraction of the total netproceeds of the voyage. right, in which casegetting half would be good, getting twenty fifthwould be good. he expects something like thetwo hundred seventy fifth lay. this is at the bottomof seventy five.
i made no doubt that from all ihad heard, i should be offered at least the two hundred andseventy fifth lay, that is, the two hundred andseventy fifth part of the clear netproceeds of the voyage, whatever that mighteventually amount to. and though the two hundred and seventy fifth lay was whatthey call a rather long lay, yet it was better than nothing. so he goes to these guysexpecting to get at least that.
what do they offer him? they start to offer him, welllet's see, the seven hundred and seventy seven lay. captain bildad suggests this,he happened to be reading, oh coincidently, apassage from matthew. that passage from matthew ischrist sermon on the mound, he's talking about how tobehave and there seems to be a, yes it says, lay not up foryourselves treasures upon earth, where moth, well,captain bildad,
interrupted peleg, what ye say? what lay shall wegive this young man? thou knowest best, wasthe sepulchral reply, the seven hundred and seventyseventh wouldn't be too much, would it, where moth andrust do corrupt, but lay. so he's making a pun, he'sreading a passage that says lay, and it's about how youshouldn't want worldly things, but only should lay uptreasure up in heaven where they really count andnot corrupted by moth and rust.
and he uses that as an excuse to say give him this biblicallysignificant number for a lay. since worldly possessionsdon't matter, how about the sevenhundred and seventy seventh. lay, indeed, thoughti, and such a lay, the seven hundredand seventy seventh. well, old bildad, you aredetermined that i, for one, shall not lay upmany lays here below, where moth and rust do corrupt.
it was an exceedinglylong lay that, indeed, and though from the magnitudeof the figure it might at first deceive a landsman, yet the slightestconsideration will show that though seven hundred and seventy seven is a prettylarge number, yet, when you come to make a teenth of it, afraction, you will then see, i say, that the seven hundredand seventy seventh part of a forthing is a gooddeal less than seven hundred
and seventy sevengold doubloons; and so i thought at the time. they go on and stagethis kind of mock fight. what does ishmael end up with? what's the final laythat he gets promised? he gets the three hundredth lay. that's worse than whathe expected to go in, but he leaves glad to get it. ok, so as we departtoday, ask yourself
of what's at stake there. what just happened toishmael to make him glad to get the three hundredth lay? how did the dynamics ofthat conversation work, and how we think might thosebe implied to what ahab does when we finally meethim on the quarter deck. and we'll take it up from therewhen we come back to moby dick.