MDDM Comparing Wicks and Ishmael as narrators

[jbor]

on 8/2/02 10:03 AM, Terrance at lycidas2 at earthlink.net wrote:
 
>> 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 don't know how you make this point. How does one go about
> demonstrating that Ishmael's philosophy is closer to Melville's
> philosophy than Wick's philosophy is to Pynchon's?

There is no intervening narrative agency between Melville and Ishmael in
_MD_. By contrast, the interaction and conversations in the Philadelphia
drawing room scenes in _M&D_ are obviously narrated by an agency *outside*
Wicks. Further, even those episodes which Wicks *is* ostensibly narrating
contain events, descriptions and ideas that Wicks could not have witnessed,
has not been told of, or which are otherwise beyond the scope of his
purview. This is not the case with Ishmael in Melville's text. The
differences in the way that narration is articulated in either text are
significant imo. 

Wicks is satirised, both by the other family members, by Mason and Dixon, as
well as by the intervening narrative agency or agencies. Ishmael, by and
large, is not, certainly not to anywhere near the extent that Wicks is.
Wicks's editorialisations and expository interventions in _M&D_ are
generally ironicised, often extremely so, Ishmael's in _MD_ much less so,
more gently when they are, and far less often. Or, to put this another way,
the "implied narrator", to adopt Thomas's useful phrase, in Melville's text
is very close to Ishmael's perspective, certainly much closer than the
corresponding category in Pynchon's text is to Wicks's perspective.

My example was Ishmael's philosophical meditations in Ch. 57 of _MD_, which
I cited. I believe these sentiments are quite close to the author's, and
that the passage might also be read as a reflexive commentary on Melville's
own endeavours as an artist-"savage", his attempt, in his "lively sketches
of whales and whaling-scenes", to capture and circumscribe every single
scrap of data about whales, and *the* whale, in order to "leap the topmost
skies". As a direct contrast to this, the moral which Wicks attempts to draw
at the close of Ch. 32 misconstrues the import of Emerson's lesson to his
protege, Dixon. As it is reported in the parenthesis, Wicks "cannot refrain
from commenting" (326) on Emerson's PS - by using this phrase the mediating
narrative voice very deliberately casts doubt upon Wicks's paraphrase, as
well as on his *motive* for appropriating the Emersonian maxim thus, and
thereby effectively contests the philosophical ground which the character is
trying to stake out at this point.
 
> I would say, it is a mistake to try to argue that either Wicks or
> Ishmael (both unreliable narrators) is aligned philosophically with the
> authors of their respective texts.

Fair enough, except that no-one is arguing this. I said that I think Ishmael
is in much greater philosophical alignment with his author than Wicks is
with his. And I've also said that I think the way narrative is articulated
in _M&D_ is dissimilar to that of _Moby Dick_.

best
 
> That being said, I think it is possible to discover the applied author
> of both of these texts and to demonstrate that the philosophies of the
> "basic" narrators (Ishmael and Wicks) of both M-D and M&D are not those
> of the authors.