ahab as luddite

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
> on 2/2/02 4:23 AM, Terrance at lycidas2 at earthlink.net wrote:
> 
> > So from where does Ahab derive the power to
> > control the men? Same question for Blicero/Weissmann? How does Melville,
> > like Pynchon, fuse the Fox and the Lion? Language is one answer. Both
> > Blicero (with his corrupted Rilke) and Ahab have the rhetorical skills
> > of Milton's Satan.
> 
> 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_. 

Yes, to a certain extent, the men, like Adam, have free will, but Ahab
like Blicero, is a high priest and a god. Don't know about that freedom,
Ace.  Doesn't Enzian say something like this to Slothrop? 

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 disagree. I'll make the argument. 
Sure terrance, knock yourself out. 
No Worries mate.  

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.

I disagree. We've been over this many times and I don't know if it's
worth going back to GR? Again, I think the most important text here, on
free will, because I think P remains constant on this from V. to M&D, 
is Augustine. It goes back to P's V., Manicheanism and Faustus. 


> 
> 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_. As well, the pairing of the
> knight of the rueful countenance and his comic offsider in Cervantes' novel,
> and the way that more often than not it is the offsider rather than the
> knight who has his finger on the pulse and is the one who actually keeps the
> venture going, speaks a lot more to the way Pynchon has articulated the
> exploits of Mason and Dixon. I also think there are more particular
> resonances, such as the "captive's tale", the "Ghastly Fop" etc.
> 
> best


Yeah, OK, but I'm not sure you are crediting Melville with a radical and
experimental narrative in M-D. DQ's influence on M-D and M&D has been
established, but the two American tales have far more in common with
each other than with either DQ or TS. And this includes the narrators.
This would be a good discussion to have on the side of M&D. 


To the Luddite question: 

Kai wrote: 

ahab's destruction of the quadrant (chapter 118), though perhaps not
"luddite" 
 in the classical sense, is condemning modern technology for its
misleading  
 promise of control and the corresponding social inequality: "'foolish
toy! 
 babies' plaything of haughty admirals, and commodores, and captains;
the world 
 brags of thee, of thy cunning and might; but what after all canst thou
do, but 
 tell the poor, pitiful point, where thou thyself happenest to be on
this wide  
 planet, and the hand that holds thee: no! not one jot more! thou canst
not tell 
 where one drop of water or one grain of sand will be to-morrow noon;
and yet   
 with thy impotence thou insultest the sun! science! curse thee, thou
vain toy 
 ..." hallways of pynchonian echoes here ... let's stop bio-technology
now!

Let me just add a few words from the text: 

Then gazing at his quadrant, and handling, one after the other,
its numerous cabalistical contrivances, he pondered again, and
muttered: "'foolish toy! 

Cabalistic? (I'll return to this) And to Oil, Electricity, and the Sun. 



The smashing of the Quadrant is not like the smashing of a weaving
machine. Is it? Why does Ahab smash it? Because it doesn't work. Or it
does, but it doesn't do what he wants. It can't find the white whale. 
And something has happened to the ship, the stage, America, the Ship,
the instruments. The world has been turned upside down. The poles have
reversed (one of Pynchon's favorite motifs-crossing the equator). 

"In vain!" cried Ahab; "but, maybe, 'tis well. For did ye three
but once take the full-forced shock, then mine own electric thing,
that had perhaps expired from out me. Perchance, too, it would have
dropped ye dead. Perchance ye need it not. Down lances! And now, ye
mates, I do appoint ye three cupbearers to my three pagan kinsmen
there- yon three most honorable gentlemen and noblemen, my valiant
harpooneers. Disdain the task? What, when the great Pope washes the
feet of beggars, using his tiara for ewer? Oh, my sweet cardinals!
your own condescension, that shall bend ye to it. I do not order ye;
ye will it. Cut your seizings and draw the poles, ye harpooneers!"
  Silently obeying the order, the three harpooneers now stood with the
detached iron part of their harpoons, some three feet long, held,
barbs up, before him.
  "Stab me not with that keen steel! Cant them; cant them over! know
ye not the goblet end? Turn up the socket! So, so; now, ye
cup-bearers, advance. The irons! take them; hold them while I fill!"
Forthwith, slowly going from one officer to the other, he brimmed
the harpoon sockets with the fiery waters from the pewter.
  


Standing behind him Starbuck looked,
and lo! the two compasses pointed East, and the Pequod was as
infallibly going West.
  But ere the first wild alarm could get out abroad among the crew,
the old man with a rigid laugh exclaimed, "I have it! It has
happened before. Mr. Starbuck, last night's thunder turned our
compasses- that's all. Thou hast before now heard of such a thing, I
take it."
  "Aye; but never before has it happened to me, sir," said the pale
mate, gloomily.
  Here, it must needs be said, that accidents like this have in more
than one case occurred to ships in violent storms. The magnetic
energy, as developed in the mariner's needle, is, as all know,
essentially one with the electricity beheld in heaven; hence it is not
to be much marvelled at, that such things should be. Instances where
the lightning has actually struck the vessel, so as to smite down some
of the spars and rigging, the effect upon the needle has at times been
still more fatal; all its loathsome virtue being annihilated, so
that the before magnetic steel was of no more use than an old wife's
knitting needle. But in either case, the needle never again, of
itself, recovers the original virtue thus marred or lost; and if the
binnacle compasses be affected, the same fate reaches all the others
that may be in the ship; even were the lowermost one inserted into the
kelson.
  Deliberately standing before the binnacle, and eyeing the
transpointed compasses, the old man, with the sharp of his extended
hand, now took the precise bearing of the sun, and satisfied that
the needles were exactly inverted, shouted out his orders for the
ship's course to be changed accordingly. The yards were hard up; and
once more the Pequod thrust her undaunted bows into the opposing wind,
for the supposed fair one had only been juggling her.






What is Ahab's problem with the Sun? Is he a vampire? Or is he Lucifer?
Or is he a high priest of some new religion? Or some old religion? 

Thomas wrote: 

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
Ø modern view of the world.

See: 

Eddins, Dwight  *The Gnostic Pynchon *
Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis 1990. 

http://www.itap.de/homes/otto/pynchon/eddins.htm

Voegelin, Eric *The Collected Works Of, Volume 5, "Modernity Without
Restraint: The Political Religions, The New Science Of Politics; And
Science, Politics, And Gnosticism


Harold Bloom, ed., Herman Melville's Moby Dick, (New
Haven: Chelsea House, 1986) 9 and Braswell, 62ff. give good illustration
of Ahab's gnosticism. 

Henry A. Murray, "In Nomine Diaboli," in Melville: A Collection of
Critical Essays, ed. Richard Chase, (Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall,
1962) 66-72 portrays Ahab as an antichrist and also notes some practices
of pagan religions he engages in. Whatever else you can say about
Thompson (139), he offers a good discussion on Ahab's Zoroastrianism and
Manichaeanism. 

The Murray Eassy is also included in the Bloom Modern Critical
Interpretations

Tanner, Tony *The American Mystery* Cabridge, 2000, 67-75 for an brief
but very insightful essay, that connects Nietzsche, "The Modern View of
the World," and the anti-democratic totalitarian Manichaeanism of Ahab
in M-D. 


 The men on the ship come from every corner of the globe, the ship is
the stage and all the world (Shakespeare) and the Ship is America  and
while Ahab may not quite  control its fate,  he has sway over its lower
half. Again, critics have demonstrated that Melville added Milton's
Satan to his Ahab. What of Ahab's lower half? His Electrikal arts? 

 


To be continued....