ahab as luddite

[Thomas Eckhardt]

jbor wrote:

> I think that the men, and in Blicero's case, the men and woman, are not so
> much "controlled" as have chosen to follow, and that this is an important
> element in both _MD_ and _GR_.  I don't think that you can sustain the
> argument that either Ishmael or Enzian, for example, is coerced or tricked
> into loyalty, because that loyalty does persist both as vestige and
> remembrance, and neither man ever has their personal liberty curtailed by
> their chosen master.

"I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest;
my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more
did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A
wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab's quenchless
feud seemed mine.  With greedy ears I learned the history of that
murderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our
oaths of violence and revenge." (MD, Norton edition, 155)

"Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses
a Job's whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly
made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals --morally
enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or
right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indifference
and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask.
Such a crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some
infernal fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge.  How it was
that they so aboundingly responded to the old man's ire --by what evil
magic their souls were possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost
theirs; the White Whale as much their insufferable foe as his; how all
this came to be --what the White Whale was to them, or how to their
unconscious understandings, also, in some dim, unsuspected way, he
might have seemed the gliding great demon of the seas of life, --all
this to explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go." (MD, 163)

Ahab does indeed not trick or coerce his crew into hunting the white whale (I
don't think, by the way, that this was what Terrance was saying). Ahab, by means
of charisma and rhetoric, manages to address, bring to light and abuse a
spiritual fear (this fear is what "The Whiteness of the Whale" and quite
probably the whole of MD is about) that is residing in the souls of all members
of his crew, except for Queequeg, and to give that fear meaning and purpose by
turning it into hate against some specific animal nobody else on board of the
ship has ever had a problem with before. Now, suddenly, Ishmael is greedy to
learn the history of "the murderous monster against whom I and all the others
had taken our oaths of violence and revenge". Irony, of course. Eventually Ahab
leads his ship and crew into death and destruction. It is indeed hard not to
think of fascism here, and I think Terrance is perfectly on the mark when he
says: "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."

Ahab says: "Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails,
whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled
hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly, I rush! Naught's an
obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way." (MD, 147) The railroad as a symbol
of material and geographical progress or Manifest Destiny (see for example Leo
Marx, "The Machine in the Garden") may be seen as a metaphor belonging to a
slightly secularized version of the Puritan's straight path to the "Citty upon a
Hill". But anyway, Ahab describes his spiritual quest  in terms of the machine,
a clear sign that his soul is at least as close to death as it is to life. (the
foremost symbol of death-in-life in MD is, of course, his ivory and later
whale-bone leg; Queequeg's coffin turned into a life-buoy for Ishmael, on the
other hand, is the whale-bone's direct opposite). Is Ahab a Luddite?

>  Both had made a deliberate decision that the prospect
> offered by Ahab or Blicero was more attractive than their current lot.
> Certainly they are swept up momentarily in the visionary's "enthusiasm", but
> within the text they also narrate Ahab's and Blicero's quests from a vantage
> of hindsight, and while they no longer envisage their respective former
> "Captains" as gods, it is the man's faults - his *humanity* - rather than
> some malevolent evil which they now recognise and accept.

Ishmael may accept and recognize Ahab's humanity (in fact, this wouldn't be the
novel it is if he he didn't), he even accepts and makes his own his Captain's
paranoid hatred for  a while. In the end, he rejects it. So does Melville.

> I also think that in respect to the narrative cast of _M&D_ the parallels
> with _Don Quixote_ are far more prominent than with _Moby Dick_. For a
> start, Wicks's status as narrator, both in terms of reliability and aspect,
> and his lack of prominence in the actual narrative he relates, do not equate
> at all to Ishmael. Too often in the novel what is related are episodes which
> Wicks did not witness, could not have known, and which neither Mason nor
> Dixon would have confided to *him*, and this is quite different to the way
> Ishmael relates *his* story in _Moby Dick_.

True, Ishmael doesn't mention the fact that he narrates a whole lot of scenes he
couldn't possibly have witnessed. Thematically, I believe, MD is still important
for Pynchon. The representation and the characters owe more to Cervantes and
certainly also to "Tristram Shandy".

Thomas