We are now in the final third of Moby Dick; 93 chapters in 43 to go and if you thought my last post was a bit random and rambling, baton down the hatches because this one is going into some very rough winds.
Melville is setting up the final battle between Ahab and the whale and needs to describe whaling norms and culture so that Ahab’s final plunge into the sea makes sense; in this chapter he does just that, describing poor Pip’s leap of faith, or more accurately faithlessness, and the consequences.
The first thing we need to deal with in this chapter is Melville’s racism. It’s there, though not in a mean-spirited way, rather just the every day type of racism that black folks still experience. Though it is admittedly not my place as a white man to describe the experiences of black folk, but I found Melville’s condescension toward Pip’s “brilliance” and the paternalism of his statements like “For blacks, the year’s calendar should show naught but three-hundred sixty five Fourth of Julys and New Year’s Days. Nor smile so, when I write that this little black was brilliant, for even blackness has its brilliancy; behold yon lustrous ebony, paneled in kings’ cabinets” uncomfortable.
I raise this as a general point of discussion. We often see people say that books like Moby Dick should be ignored because they contain many examples of racism, sexism, or don’t fit our current moral code. But I feel we need to read these books to understand where we have been and how people thought and acted in the past. We are a product of these older generations and much of the racism people experience today is rooted in this exact type of “benevolent” racism.
It would also be a shame to throw out this chapter on the basis of Melville’s prejudices because it contains some of the most lyrical and insightful lines in the book so far. And there’s the not-so-small issue of the whaler’s code which Melville needs us to understand before we get to the final battle.
When Pip jumps from the boat the first time, he is dragged into the ocean by the harpoon’s line. Stubb hesitates to cut the line but eventually acts and cuts the poor kid free. After hauling him back aboard Stubb lectures Pip on the code:
“Stick to the boat, Pip, or by the Lord, I won’t pick you up if you jump; mind that. We can’t afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama. Bear that in mind, and don’t jump any more.”
Harsh words from Stubb but very true for the time and Melville delivers his aside in the next sentence as an uncritical excuse for human cruelty:
“Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that though man loves his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.”
At first glance a grotesque excuse for what will come next but how true do these words ring 169 years later?? We are all sat in the middle of a pandemic which is indiscriminately killing people and yet there are so many calls to “open the economy back up” and even Christian pastors suggesting that grandma would be happy to sacrifice her life for the betterment of the economy. I’ve read the beatitudes many times and still cannot find where Jesus said “blessed are those who lay down their life so billionaires may buy another yacht.”
But we are all in the hands of the Gods! says Melville next and sure enough, Pip jumps again. This time Stubb leaves him to the sea. There Pip floats for an hour as the whaling boats pull away from him in search of prey. Pip is left to “The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity.”
Stubb never does go back for the child nor do the other boats, instead pursuing their marks. It’s the ship itself, the Pequod, which picks him up and after floating in the seas for an hour, staring up at the endless blue sky, Pip is changed and Herman Melville delivers us this elegant (if misguided) final stanza:
“The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.”
Melville is a romantic son of a bitch but I don’t think Pip actually went mad. What Melville is describing here is what us soldiers used to call “the hundred mile stare”. One you’ve seen the infinite, faced death, or even experienced near death, you can for some time after just lose yourself in the horizon. It’s a place between reflection and action; a place where time stops; a place where you can just be for a moment while the tempestuous Atlantic of our being swirls around us.
Qq
Not just my favourite Arsenal blog, but my favourite blog on any subject. Bread, Melville, social commentary and ornithology. Every day a new surprise.
Huge thanks!
Appreciated your point about content that is offensive to modern norms. Remove it? Don’t read it? Take it off the syllabus? If so, this is how echo chambers are created and how strategies of censorship hamstring our students / readers by providing them only with content with which they have no disagreement. In a world in which there is so much division of viewpoint, the worst strategy for change or progress is to remove from one side of the debate any and all exposure to the other. For example, if Melville or similar is removed from the curriculum, readers don’t need to formulate any reason for understanding this history of a conception of race, nor for why one might object to its presentation of race given this history. This amounts to the fomentation of extreme division, because in the absence of reasoning — of people understanding and talking to each other from a set of shared perspectives — what matters is not whether you can make a good argument; what matters is how well you signal affiliation to a particular ideology.
“ not my place as a white man to describe the experiences of black folk”
You’re a white “man” but black people are “folk”?
Yeah, that’s not racist at all, Tim.
And by that I mean it is.
You once called out someone from
AFTV for calling Elneny “Tutankhamen“ so I’m calling you out now.
That was racist, just as this is.
Really? Well I am a man and I intentionally used man because that’s my gender identity and it matters. I also say folk for everyone, regardless of color, and you can see that in my years of writing. But I’ll keep it in mind in the future that it could be offensive. Thanks for the suggestion. As for the Tutenkhamun comment, that was directly racist again an Egyptian man, so, I feel these two are different uses but again, I’ll pay attention to my own uses.
Have a great day.
to refer to people a folks is not racist, tim…at least not for a country boy like me. sometimes, things can be lost in translation, ie. if ryno is african, he may not understand folk in american culture. likewise, folk doesn’t refer exclusively as “men” but includes women and other pronouns alike (still trying to get my head around the pronouns part but i digress).
some people take offense to terms that can appear to verbally subjugate. that lack of clarity may be the reason for ryno’s objection. however, the good “folks” here at 7am, including ryno, know that racism is not what you do.
btw, apologizing for saying “folks” is might white of you, lol…although i’m probably sexist for declaring my confusion with pronouns. in the words of the late curtis mayfield, “don’t worry. if there’s a hell below, we’re ALL gonna go!”
This. Nicely put.
Hi RYNO: I’m wondering why you wouldn’t place equal or mitigating moral weight on Tim’s phrase “not my place” as you did on the associations that may be in play with “man” and “folk”? (Associations I’d love to discuss beyond the singular / plural grammatical functions.) Unrelated, maybe, but I think this also gets at the current controversy about intention vs. impact. Does it matter that Tim did not intend to come off as racist, as one might suggest is the case based on his use of the phrase “not my place”? On the other hand, if his intentions don’t matter, what’s the standard? How can anybody be non-racist if the deciding factor is the impact of whomever perceives it as such? I guess my broader question would be: is the interest of justice served by call-out culture?
So the “that’s all, folk” at the end of a cartoon, that was racist! I’ll be damned!
ahhh…i knew there was something i didn’t like about that stuttering pig!
There’s a conversation to be had for sure. I’m sure some people do use ‘folks’ in a kind of infantilizing way when talking about other races or cultures, but if ‘white folks’ is just as much a part of your lexicon as ‘black folks’ then that’s ‘equal’ in my book and not racist or condescending.
What people like Ryno need to understand (in my opinion) is that coming at people in this aggressively wokescoldy manner that immediately assumes bad faith is exactly the kind of behavior that makes even regular people not just HATE the ultra woke left, but to be wary of the left in general because they see the left as a bunch of humourless disciplinarians who automatically think that everyone who isn’t up to date on whatever the newest woke terminology is is automatically acting in bad faith and is a ‘bad person’ who needs to ‘do better.’
(The fact they reference Tim having a go at someone on AFTV makes me suspicious that they might even be someone who hates identity politics themselves, but is willing to weaponize it against people they disagree with.)
I suspect that Ryno was not arguing in good faith.
“What people like Ryno need to understand (in my opinion) is that coming at people in this aggressively wokescoldy manner that immediately assumes bad faith is exactly the kind of behavior that makes even regular people not just HATE the ultra woke left,”
That’s what got us Trump