ahab as luddite

[Otto]

You ask: "What is Ahab's purpose?" and you are giving the answer a few lines
later yourself, to "convince the crew that their materialist adventure is
inherently spiritual." This is indeed the logic of crusade, colonialism,
holocaust and jihad.

I guess that both Melville and Pynchon are rejecting this view.

Otto

----- Original Message -----
From: Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
To: David Morris <fqmorris at hotmail.com>
Cc: <lorentzen-nicklaus at t-online.de>; <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Friday, February 01, 2002 3:37 PM
Subject: Re: ahab as luddite


>
>
> 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.