Moby Dick

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

London Review of Books, Oct. 31, 2002
Call me Ahab
Jeremy Harding

Moby-Dick, or, The Whale by Herman Melville ed. Harrison Hayford and
Hershel Parker | Northwestern, 573 pp, £14.95

Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the
World We Live in by C.L.R. James | New England, 245 pp, £17.95

Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival by
Clare Spark | Kent State, 744 pp, £46.50

Lucchesi and the Whale by Frank Lentricchia | Duke, 104 pp, £14.50

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Many of Ishmael's deepest insights are provisional, which saves him from
becoming tiresome. But among his definitive truths is that freak piece
of driftwood, the extraordinary descriptive passage in Chapter 96, 'The
Try-Works'. Long before the end of the book, with about forty chapters
and an epilogue to go, it puts Ahab's role in the ecological story, and
the Pequod's with it, almost beyond doubt.

The try-works is the name for the pair of massive rendering furnaces
built of brick and set on the deck of a whaleship between the foremast
and mainmast. Two large pots sat in these twin kilns. After a kill,
gouts of blubber were cut into strips and lobbed into the pots. Once the
oil had boiled off, the remnant, known as the fritter, was used to stoke
the fire beneath them. 'Like a self-consuming misanthrope,' says
Ishmael, and it's obvious who he has in mind, 'the whale supplies his
own fuel and burns by his own body.' The smoke was foul. 'It has an
unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the
vicinity of funereal pyres. It smells like the left wing of the day of
judgment; it is an argument for the pit.'

The hellish character of a real try-works was vividly described by John
Ross Browne, an Irish émigré adventurer and one-time Indian agent, who
had done a brief stint on a whaling ship. Browne pictured the try-works
at night with 'dense clouds of lurid smoke . . . curling up to the tops,
shrouding the rigging from view . . . There is a murderous appearance
about the bloodstained decks and the huge masses of flesh and blubber
lying here and there, and a ferocity in the looks of the men, heightened
by the red, fierce glare of the fires.' Melville may or may not have
read this account, published in 1846, but he would in any case have
conceived the Pequod as a satanic mill with sails and a tiller, hauling
the technology out to the frontier so that the raw material could be
processed in situ. Ishmael's description, also at night, evokes
Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg's Bedlam Furnace: a Coalbrookdale
afloat, churning out fire and smoke on a lunatic industrial quest to the
ends of the earth.

In the following passage from 'The Try-Works', the 'white bone' is the
play of the waves at the prow of the boat, the 'savages' are everyone -
the non-white harpooners (Ahab's troubleshooter Parsee, Fedallah, and
his eerie squad) plus the rest of the 'cannibal' crew, led by their
Captain; the corpse is that of a whale killed a few hours earlier by
Stubb, the Second Mate who, in giving chase, had abandoned Ahab's
cross-racial double, Pip the cabin-boy, to his madness in the middle of
the ocean:

"As the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and
dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into
the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white
bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the
rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning
a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the
material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul."

Moby-Dick is a torrent of rhetorical figures. Assimilation, metonymy,
analogy and metaphor swirl about the reader like brine. By and large
it's a success. But something jars in that image of the fiery Pequod,
which 'seemed the material counterpart' of Ahab's soul. The 'seemed' is
what doesn't quite hit the mark. It's a 'was' got up in collar and
tails. What it means to say - what the passage as a whole means to say -
is that however distant from the proper enterprise of whaling he is,
however fierce his contempt for production and profit, Ahab is in the
end its most refined emanation: he is the essence, rather than the
semblance, of the whaling business taken to its logical extreme. Man and
industry are inseparable not because of the method in Ahab's madness,
but because of the madness in the method - the violence, if you like -
at the heart of an epic pillage which, when American whaling was at its
height between the 1820s and 1840s, put eighteen thousand people to work
on seven hundred vessels at a capital investment of $20 million, and
fetched in 'a well-reaped harvest of $7,000,000' per annum. Multiply the
try-works scene by seven hundred - each sturdy sailing vessel tagged,
like a coal-steamer or a modern diesel-engine ferry, with a powdery
trail of filth (in this case animal soot) - and you have the measure of
it. 'Butchers we are,' Ishmael concedes, 'that is true.' But then - he
turns the argument back on itself - so were the great generals. Ahab is
'madness maddened': the grandest of the generals, leading a symbolic
assault on the ungovernable alliance of Nature and fate, perfectly
embodied in the white whale. Ahab's relationship with fate is, to say
the least, a special one. In his hostility to Nature, however, the
renegade is indistinguishable from the livelihood he betrays.

full: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n21/hard01_.html

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