MDDM Comparing Wicks and Ishmael as narrators

[jbor]

on 10/2/02 10:54 PM, Thomas Eckhardt at thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de wrote:

> Rob wrote:
> 
>> There is no intervening narrative agency between Melville and Ishmael in
>> _MD_.
> 
> What about chapters 37-39? They are being told from the inner POV of Ahab,
> Starbuck, and Stubb.

Quite right. With the stage direction which opens Ch. 36 we start to shift
into a theatrical mode. 37-39 seem to be interior monologues, soliloquys
almost, and then there is the full-on playscript at Ch. 40. Ch. 41 begins:
"I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my
oath had been welded with theirs ... ", so it appears from this
reorientation that he is conscious of, and perhaps even had a hand in, the
composition of the preceding chapters, the "play". In other words, unlike
Wicks, Ishmael is aware of the process and upshot of the narrative in those
preceding chapters; whoever narrates (or *directs*) those four chapters (and
I don't think 37-39 are entirely isolated from the chapters on either side -
the transitions to an alternative narrative frame are much less disruptive
and disorienting than in _M&D_) is closely aligned with Ishmael's point of
view, and overtly so. (I'd suggest that Ishmael is the playwright, that
these are in fact the literary manifestation of *his* imaginative flights,
but there is no hard evidence for this speculation.)

> Quite modernist, I'd say.

I'm not sure. If my theory about the continuity of narration holds, then
it's Ishmael rather than Melville who is the "modernist". (And I'm inclined
to view Melville's mode, like Sterne's and Cervantes' - and Pynchon's - as
"postmodern".)

>> 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.
> 
> Yes it is. And fairly often so. Apart from chapters 37-39 compare, and I am
> merely
> skipping through the book at random, the beginning of Chapter 44. In the
> fourth
> paragraph, for example, it says ""But not so did it seem to Ahab", who is
> alone in
> his cabin. Certainly an omniscient narrator?

But consider the opening of Ch. 45: "So far as what there may be of a
narrative in this book [...] the foregoing chapter, in its earlier part, is
as important a one as will be found in this volume. [...]"

Again, the "I" in Chapter 45 sounds suspiciously like Ishmael to my ear. It
may not be, but Ishmael and this narrator certainly share similar interests,
attitudes, opinions, perceptions of Ahab, and are acutely self-conscious of
the role of narrator they have assumed. If not one and the same, they are
very closely-aligned.

> Look at chapters 120 to 122, at
> Chapter 127 ("Ahab to himself."), at Chapter 129 etc. etc.

Yes, the same playscript format reappears at intervals throughout the text.
I guess my point is that Ishmael is very conscious of these apparent shifts
in the way the narrative is articulated, whereas the conversations in the
Philadelphia drawing room in _M&D_ simply intrude abruptly, seemingly
spontaneously, unbidden by and unbeknownst to Wicks. And even within the
substantive content of what is supposed to be Wicks's narration there are
events and incidents, let alone attitudes and allusions, which come from
vantages that are well outside his frame of reference. (I think this
narrative illogicality in Pynchon's text is a deliberate strategy, by the
way, and that Melville aspires to somewhat greater narrative cohesion.)

> "Moby Dick" may be
> mainly told from Ishmael's POV, but we also have the personal POV, drama with
> stage
> directions and all, and quite frequently an omniscient narrator who is not
> Ishmael.

Again, I'm not so sure. As well as the playscript scenes, what is narrated
could conceivably be events and conversations witnessed or overheard by
Ishmael, or his later reconstructions or imagination of those events. Even
if not, he certainly seems to be cognisant of what transpires in those
scenes (both the event itself *and* the subsequent recount of that event).
So I don't think narrative agency is ever "outside" Ishmael in the same way
that it is extraneous to Wicks in _M&D_.

> In other words: There is an intervening narrative agency between Melville and
> Ishmael, and some scenes in MD "are obviously narrated by an agency *outside*"
> Ishmael.
> 
>> 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_.
> 
> Generally, this is my impression too. Most of the time Melville's POV seems to
> be
> pretty close to Ishmael's.
> 
> Perhaps it is just the explicit irony, the foregrounding of the "narratedness"
> (hope this sounds postmodernist and not silly) of the story of M & D that
> allows
> Pynchon to frequently make Cherrycoke a spokesman for some opinions he himself
> may
> hold? Pure speculation, of course.

I'd say that the ironic distance between Pynchon and Wicks is considerable,
and that the intervening narrative agency is a more clearly-defined and
conspicuous category in _M&D_ than in _Moby Dick_.
 
> In terms of tone, if not in terms of "the way the narrative is articulated", I
> think GR is much closer to MD than M&D. The real predecessor for the narrative
> trickery of M&D to me still seems to be "Tristram Shandy", written,
> coincidentally,
> during the time Mason and Dixon were in America, drawing that line.

_Tristram Shandy_ contains a number of direct references to Cervantes'
novel, and Tristram describes his father's "*Cervantic* gravity" during the
latter's exposition about knots. (v. III ch. 10) So, there is a definite
genealogy there. (Though I think that Sterne owes quite a large debt to
Rabelais as well.) And Smollett's English translation of _DQ_ appeared in
1755, with a corrected edition in 1770, which also places it right amid the
fray of Pynchon's narratives in _M&D_.

I think the way that the fictional tale of 'The Ghastly Fop' becomes
enmeshed in the "real" exploits of Mason and Dixon - the ontological
destabilisation this enacts - is very reminiscent of _Don Quixote_. I also
think there are similarities in tone, in the attributes and relationship of
the central duo, and in the picaresque mode and mood of the narrative.

> Perhaps I should add that the implied author or narrator of MD does not tell
> us
> anything about Ishmael.

Yes, all description of Ishmael is self-portraiture. In _M&D_ Wicks is
introduced by a separate narrator. (6.29, 8.7)

But now I'm a little confused about what you mean by the "implied narrator".
I'd taken it to refer to what I would call unidentified or unattributed
narrative agency within the text, such as that voice which describes how
Wicks "has linger'd" at the LeSparks', how "he had intended to be gone weeks
ago, but finds he cannot detach", and not to Wayne Booth's concept of the
"implied author", what Booth envisages as a "created 'second self'", or the
"implied-image of the artist". Booth: "'Persona, 'mask', and 'narrator' are
sometimes used, but they more commonly refer to the speaker of the work who
is after all only one of the elements created by the implied author and who
may be separated from him by large ironies." (Booth, _The Rhetoric of
Fiction, 73) 

Anyway, I think that there is a separate narrator narrating Wicks in _M&D_,
but that this narrator isn't necessarily a stand-in for Pynchon, or the
"implied author" in Booth's terms. In _Moby Dick_ I think that Ishmael is
the narrator for the greater part of the text, and while I accept that there
are certain chapters which Ishmael could not have witnessed, my suspicion is
that Melville has *Ishmael* create the separate narrative voice or frame
which relates these sections of the text. I don't think that Ishmael stands
in a 1:1 relationship to Melville, but the alignment there is also much much
closer than that between Wicks and Pynchon. There is substantially closer
alignment between Pynchon and the intervening narrator/s - the one who
narrates Wicks, and who at times takes over from Wicks within his recounts -
but the rift between Wicks and Pynchon is enormous, in my opinion.

best