April 27, 1998
AMSH 3002y
Notes for April 27, 1998 -- Moby Dick, II
Three Matters -- Locale, Mates, Moby-Dick himself
Locale
Where the novel takes place -- 22 chapters ashore [ NYC/New
bedford/Nantucket], before "blindly plunged like fate into
the lone Atlantic"
Out into Atlantic and southward to lower SAmerica -- then westward to pass below Cape of Good Hope and into Indian Ocean; then up into S China Sea (ch. 86) and out into Pacific (ch. 111) off Japan (114)
Length of passage indeterminate -- 6 - 10 months??
Left at Xmas -- Season-on-the-Line December to February
No landfalls -- encounters with other ships/whalers -- 7 in all -- very little "gamming"
Albatross/52/Town-Ho/54/Jeroboam/71/Virgin/81//Rosebud/91/Samuel Enderby/100/Bachelor/115/Rachel/128/Delight/130
'Hast thou seen the white whale?"
A protracted state of landlessness -- and what that means
going to sea -- "the transition is a keen one -- from schoolmaster to sailor"
10. "the wolfish world'
23. The Lee Shore -- "In landlessness alone resides the highest truth"
32. Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost in its unshored, harborless immensities"
58. "Man has lost the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it." [Compare with RWE on the aurora borealis -- and world stripped of love and terror" Journal 9/14/1839]-
59. 'For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassedf by allthe horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou cans't never return."
70. Ahab to whale -- "of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest"
89. Fast Fish and Loose Fish
96. the ocean -- the dark side of this earth
111. The Pacific -- Ishmael -- "after the long supplication of my youth… launched at length upon these fatal waters"
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Mates and Companions
-- "crew made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals"
Ishmael -- "a deep, drizzly November in my soul"
"I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts."
Why whaling? -- "To see the world"
No good on masthead -- "With the problem of the universe revolving in me"
51/Moby Dick -- "Ahab's quenchless feud seemed mine."
On writing his will -- "her goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost"
Queequeg --
Impact on Ishmael -- "No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it."
Ahab -- Peleg on -- "above the common; Ahab's been in colleges, as well as 'mong the cannibals. [He has] fixed his fiery lance in mightier, stranger foes than whales"
58 -- with a wife and young child
unsurrenderable willfulness
"My one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels"
He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt from Adam down"
Starbuck -- Nantucketer -- 30 yrs old/lean/careful -- "no crusader after perils"
"Yet cannot withstand those more terrific, because more spiritual terrors"
"I came here to hunt whales, not my commander's vengeance'."
"my soul is more than matched; she's overmanned, and by a madman."
On Ahab's heaven-insultin purpose
Ishmael on -- the incompetence of unaided virtue or rightmindedness of Starbuck"
Stubb -- 2nd mate -- cape Coder -- happy-go-lucky/unfearing/pipe-smoking
Ishmael on "The invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in Stubb"
Flask -- 3rd mate --Martha's Vineyard -- short/pugnacious/ignorant/unconscious fearlessness
"a little waggish in the matter of whales"
Ishmael on -- "the pervading mediocrity of Flask"
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Moby Dick -- a sperm whale
"will stand no nonsense"...