ahab as luddite

[jbor]

on 3/2/02 12:46 PM, Thomas Eckhardt at thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de wrote:

snip
> 
> 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).

Terrance asked from where Ahab derived "the power to control the men". My
point was that the men chose their course freely (or, as Ishmael has it in
Ch. 1, it was part of "the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a
long time ago", or the playing out of "some infernal fatality" as he laments
again in Ch. 41), and most of them in full awareness of the likely
consequences of their choice, both the job aboard the Pequod in the first
place, and then in following Ahab's obsession with the white whale
thereafter. Another thing to keep in mind is that Ahab's personal quest is
quite separate and even counter-productive to the commercial whaling
enterprise which the men had signed up for, as is also the case with
Blicero's 00000 and the Nazi war machine.

> 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."

And of jihad, as Otto noted - it is also the "logic" of religious
fanaticism, and of the mortal desire to transcend mortality. I don't
disagree with the points you make here, but think that the warning is
somewhat broader. The obsessions of Ahab and Blicero are *human* obsessions;
they are men, not mythological demons, nor abstractions of evil incarnate.
 
snip
> Is Ahab a Luddite?

No, I don't believe this is necessarily a 1:1 match, or an identification
which Melville intended, though the quote Kai posted certainly portrayed one
aspect of the Luddite mentality: the instinctive and obsessive distrust of
anything which is outside the bounds of the purely subjective experience of
the individual. The question posed for me is something like, "can this
aspect of Luddism become manifested as fascism"?

>> 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'm not sure how you go about "rejecting" humanity once you've recognised
and accepted it. It's something which is *shared*, after all. It's Ahab's
quest, his response to mortality, which Ishmael rejects.

>> 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.

These are in fact few and far between I think. To my recall just about
everything Ishmael narrates comprises scenes and events he has witnessed, or
stories told to him by others, or things he has researched.

> Thematically, I believe, MD is still
> important
> for Pynchon. 

Yes, I agree, but think _MD_ is more relevant to _GR_ than to _M&D_.

> The representation and the characters owe more to Cervantes and
> certainly also to "Tristram Shandy".

best
>