ahab as luddite

[Terrance]

David Morris wrote:
> 
> Your likelihood of success in this crusade is about the same as was Lud's.
> 
> >From: lorentzen-nicklaus at t-online.de (lorentzen-nicklaus)
> ... let's stop bio-technology now!

Or Ahab or Blicero. 

We've had this discussion a few times and I will keep the gnostic
reading of both Ahab and B/W out of it for the time being, but both are
gnostics. There is a serious flaw in the transcendentalism of both
characters--B/W's I won't to break out of the cycle and Ahab's desire to
break through the pasteboard masks. 

There are tons of essays and articles to read on these, and the white
rocket and the white whale posts in the archives where I "ride the
ticket" of a dozen or more critical studies. The white whale, so Ahab
argues, is not a dumb brute but like all visible things, a pasteboard
mask that manifests a deeper unknown but still reasoning thing. Ahab's
argument is based on a fundamental duality, the fundamental
transcendental distinction between natural and spiritual facts, base
actuality and sublime ideal, word and thought, practical understanding
and reason. Now, it's important to understand that Ahab does not match
this ontological stance in his aesthetics or in his ethics. 
This is where is gets tricky and B/W is just as slippery. Ahab, rather
than propose an escape form natural fact through poetic or creative act
(Keats "OGU" or Yeats "Sailing to Byzantium" , Romanticism), which is of
course  a major theme in both Pynchon and Melville--the recapitulation
of original creation (in M&D we see the crossroads where America will be
paving paradise and erecting  parking lots crying), Ahab attributes the
"flaws" of actuality (the white whale's malice) to identity itself. 
Ahab deduces a malignancy in reason and proposes to destroy the mask
(the white whale) as if to destroy the evil reason behind it. Certainly,
the logic is understandable, but what is its end? What is Ahab's
purpose? Why the  inversion of the Emersonian optimism into the demonic?
To convince the crew that their materialist adventure is inherently
spiritual. By accepting that whales are not whales but symbols and that
the white whale symbolizes evil, we can justify the destruction of that
symbol and insist that it is a Spiritual act. This is, of course, the
logic of genocide and holocaust.

Not a popular position here, all this talk of technology being an it
with a spirit, a Virgin/Dynamoe/Cross/Rocket, but I contend is the
position of both Melville and Pynchon.