Ahab & Merleau-Ponty....Graves....

[jbor]

on 8/2/02 12:25 AM, Terrance at lycidas2 at earthlink.net wrote:

> Is Ihsmael the narrator of M-D? Sure, and
> Wicks is the narrator of M&D, but this isn't saying very much and isn't
> very interesting.

Perhaps not, but it's important to get the basics straight, as I think you'd
agree. And, as many others here have noted there is another narrator
narrating Wicks in _M&D_, and one point I would make from this is that
Melville and Ishmael are in much greater philosophical alignment than Wicks
and Pynchon are in their respective texts.

I think that Emerson's aphorism relates closely to the theme of futurity and
subjunctivity in _M&D_, that the events of time, and particular of future
time, are unknown and unknowable, that it is a "space which may not be seen"
by mortal men, whereas Wicks reappropriates this philosophical/scientific
revelation and insinuates that God, out of "Mercy", chose not to bless
humans with divine ominiscience. I think a similar sort of recognition lies
at the heart of Ishmael's meditation on art and human endeavour in Ch. 57,
and that for him "Christendom and civilization" also provide panaceas to
this *human* drive to know the unknowable, and that this latter drive is the
basis of all art as well as of other obsessions such as whale-chasing.

> We find in texts only what we put into them

Well, I think the author has at least a little *something* invested as well.
But I agree, and note that you have selected critical interpretations which
view _MD_ in a particular light, and which conform to what you are already
bringing into that text. There are many other lights in which that novel has
been viewed and interrogated, as is also the case with Pynchon and even
Milton, by the way.

best