ahab as luddite

[Thomas Eckhardt]

jbor wrote:

> 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.

My point was that perhaps it is something in between. Ahab's power over his crew
results from his ability to address a spiritual malaise everybody is suffering from.
Yet, the members of the crew would not have chosen to attempt to fill the void/break
through the mask/kill the white whale all by themselves. They needed a purpose and a
leader. Given both, they choose to go on the "fiery hunt". Is this a free choice?
Yes, I guess. They could have said no, after all. The whole thing is uncannily close
to the situation in Germany at the beginning of the Thirties. Melville depicts, as
Dostoevskij does, the dawn of modernity in the soul and the fascist response to the
possible emptiness and mindlessness of the universe that lies at the heart of the
modern view of the world.

> 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.

Yes, and that was a very good and interesting point.

> 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.

Ahab is mainly a self-styled demon. But, given the fact that mythological demons are
nowadays rarely encountered outside the headlines of tabloids, these are the
dangerous ones. See Charles Manson or that "satanic" couple in Germany, now before
court, who brutally murdered a friend. The world-view and the motives of these
people are silly and ridiculous, their acts are not.

> > 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"?

I don't think so. Was there ever a fascist regime that deliberately set out to
destroy machines? Luddism from the beginning was directed against capitalism, no? It
is much closer to anarchism than to fascism, I believe. On the other hand, I am
inclined to think that both MD and GR contain a devastating critique of the romantic
world view, to which Luddism seems to belong more or less. Ahab and Blicero are both
romanticists - searching for original harmony, longing for the mystical experience
of everything falling into place, of everything being connected. They may reach this
kind of epiphany (though Ahab doesn't get quite as far), but it is a wholly
subjective experience: It is what Foppl experiences in V. while slaughtering the
Herero and raping their women.

> > 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.

That was what I meant. Ishmael rejects his captain's "paranoid hatred", which is
indeed "Ahab's response to mortality". He does not reject Ahab's humanity.

Thomas