ahab as luddite (Quakerism)

[lorentzen-nicklaus]

Terrance schrieb:

>
> The Great Quail wrote:
> > 
> > Terrance writes,
> > 
> > >>  And only one man can resist it. Oh Adam, forsake me not....
> > >
> > >And that man is a Quaker. And like the Quakers in M&D (including Dixon),
> > >and like almost all the men of religion in this novel, Starbuck is a
> > >Quaker who will recite orthodoxy when it suits him and break the
> > >principle of his religion as easily.
> > 
> > An interesting point, but Ahab is also a Quaker, and no doubt most of
> > the Nantucketers on the ship, including Flask and Stubbs. (Although I
> > can't recall if their "secret origin stories" are mentioned.) I think
> > you are being a bit hard on ol' Starbuck, though. He was faithful
> > enough, in his own way. It's not his fault that Satan would one day
> > appropriate his name to shill $3 cups of coffee....
> > 
> > --Quailqueg

> It's quite important that these men are Quakers who kill Leviathan. They
> are Quakers with a Vengeance. Melville, like Pynchon, does not stress
> this fact just because it is historical. 


>What are we to make of Ahab's black mass rituals and his gnostic sermons? 

  perhaps ahab's black magic is just counterbalancing the whale's archontic 
  whiteness. if so, the spiritual rebellion would not address the real christian 
  god (as manifest in the gospel of john) yet his demiurgic secretary who - this 
  is the breaking of the vessels - somehow fucked up the job...  
 
  (there are christian forms of gnosis; see, for example, simone weil or - since 
  both, melville and pynchon, do mention the kabbalah - dion fortune.)  

  does moby dick's "ontological status" ever become clear? & if not: shouldn't  
  we think it to be possible that the white whale is neither a regular animal 
  nor an huge inverted rohrschach inkblot? there must be a lovecraft expert in 
  the house...        

  according to my impression, the god ahab is calling for blessings in chapter  
  129 ("the cabin"), where he takes care of pip (a scene which seems to be     
  echoed in that spring equinox augenblick blicero and gottfried share in gr, 
  pp.723f), is not an evil entity: "... true are thou [pip], lad, as the   
  circumference to its centre. so: god for ever bless thee; and if it come to   
  that, - god for ever save thee, let what will befall.'" perhaps ahab's 
  religion is something like, well, "post-protestantism" ~

kai 
  

> CHAPTER ONE 
> Ahab's Trade The Saga of South Seas Whaling By GRANVILLE ALLEN MAWER 
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/m/mawer-trade.html
>
> I'm not being hard on Starbuck, he resists.  and yet he too Falls
> Tragically, and so I compare him with Adam in PL. 
>
>
>
>
> Now, Bildad, like Peleg, and indeed many other
> Nantucketers, was a   Quaker, the island having been originally
> settled by that sect; and to   this day its inhabitants in general
> retain in an
> uncommon measure   peculiarities of the Quaker, only variously and
> anomalously
> modified   by things altogether alien and heterogeneous. For some of
> these same  Quakers are the most sanguinary of all sailors and 
> whale-hunters. They are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a
> Vengeance.
>
> And what of Avarice?  
>
> How now in the contemplative evening of his
> days,   the pious Bildad reconciled these things in the
> reminiscence, I do not  know; but it did not seem to concern him much,
> and very probably he had long since come to the sage and sensible
> conclusion
> that a man's religion is one thing, and this practical world quite
> another. This  world pays dividends. 
>
> A bit of Calvinism in your Quakerism? How does one reconcile or
> rationalize the contradictions? The hypocrisies? One doesn't look at a
> coin or at a share to find God, one looks in the heart of each and every
> man. That is, if one is a Quaker. That's what Dixon, for all his
> unorthodoxy, does. 

> >From Weber, on Methodism [schnipp]