John William De Forest

Transcription

>> Couple of business items before we get started. Let's see, final exam is a week from Monday, a week from today, right? It's late. I'm sorry about that. I think it's what, 2:00? Does that sound right? Good. I will send out guidelines for the exams that you all will know what it is you're getting yourselves into, but it will in some sense mirror the style of the exam that we had for the midterm. It will be an opening section of names, definitions, terms, concepts. All of them will be drawn from "Moby Dick." There will be a second section that will be identifications, and then there-- but the point is not many identifications. It's few identifications on which you will be asked to write about the passages that are there, and there should not be any doubt about which authors are the authors of which-- identification is not going to be the big deal. It's more-- it's going to be very much what you write about it. And this goes for the second part and the third part, as well, which is these are the places where the exam is cumulative. You are not going to be held responsible for the stuff before the midterm in quite the same way that you were for the midterm. But each of the questions in parts two and three will ask you to compare the object that you are analyzing to another object that comes from earlier in the midterm-- earlier before the midterm. So for example, if you're looking at a passage by Stowe, what you'll be asked to do is comment on the-- sort of the techniques, the form, the style of the passage to say-- to talk about how the thematic or other content resonates with, or the larger piece from which this comes from Stowe's work generally, and then you're going to be asked to compare Stowe's handling of that idea or theme to its handling in the work of one author from before the midterm. And I mean for you to do a little bit more than say, well, like Stowe, Phyllis Wheatley was interested in Christianity. Need to have a little bit more. I mean, we need to understand that Stowe will help you to read this other author, and the other author will help you to read Stowe. You don't have to say that in that way, but we want you to be able to term the analytical screws a couple of notches of when you're doing-- when you're talking about the other author, right? So, for example, you might well say that-- if you're doing a piece on Stowe, and you wanted to compare her to Frederick Douglass, for example, you might say that Stowe is less-- Douglass is more concerned with Stowe to show that he belongs with certain kind of literary history, and therefore-- and you might even point out-- refer to one salient moment in the Douglass narrative that'll clinch all the points for you. The rhetoric of exemplarity that we've been using all term is going to have its payoff on the exam. In other words, what I want you to do is think in terms of exemplary moments. All right, so the last part of the exam will be an essay that's basically on "Moby Dick." You'll be asked to talk about "Moby Dick," and then in comparison to two other texts, one from after the midterm and one from before, around one central theme, and it will be a major idea within the course. I mean, you can just think about the things that we've talked about, and there shouldn't be any surprises. I'm more interested in seeing what you-- how you can synthesize things, how you can put things together. So part of the exam will be-- we want to see the breadth of your learning and understanding. You should not repeat arguments that you made in your papers, particularly, not in your final paper. And you should again think in terms of this exemplary way, so that if you are thinking about how the best way to study for this exam would be, I would suggest find a moment in each of the authors, especially after the midterm, but even before the midterms, find a moment that for you sums it up. The best moments-- you could refer to something interesting stylistically, and also something interesting systematically. These will serve as pegs for you to hang your analyses on, right? We don't want you to quote from the text. We don't expect a lot. What we do expect is that you will be able to speak with a certain amount of specificity of reference, right? So that if you are trying to build a case that, you know, Melville's treatment of nature is just as savage as Bradford's, you would want to point to that moment in Bradford's narrative where he pauses, and he brings in the Indians, and he refers to the barbarians, and all that stuff. You know, Brendan will be really impressed if you can-- and so will I, if you can point to that specific moment. You don't have to quote it even, just so that we know that you-- if you had the text with you, you could go to that place and do something interesting with it. In other words, the exam is a certain kind of shorthand. So I want you to think with the idea of exemplarity. Think, if you will, synecdocally [phonetic]. You're thinking about parts that have larger significance. All right, that principal should serve you well on your papers, but I think it also will serve you well on the exam. I will send out a set of instructions and guidelines. Make sure, please, that your email accounts are not over quota. I've had a number of message bouncing back. So I need to be able to get in touch with you between now and the exam, certainly, to send you this set of guidelines if nothing else, but also that timely reminder of when the exam is going to be. Okay. Last thing, I offer graduating seniors the opportunity to take an exam early on Thursday afternoon at 2:00. I need to hear from you so I know what kind of room to get. So I will extend the deadline. You can tell me up until 9:00 tonight by email. All right, after that, you're committed to taking the exam on Monday with everybody else if you're a graduating senior. Okay, any other business questions? Any other logistical questions? All right, when you get these guidelines and instructions, if you have any questions, email me back and ask, okay? I will-- if there are errors or things that need clarification, I will send them out to everybody. So don't hesitate to email me and ask. All right, now let's get started with things-- with the end of things. So I want to take us back on our last day together to our first day together. It's muggy, and warm, and humid out. On that day I believe it was, you know, cold and in the dead of winter. And I want to think a little bit about some of the stuff that we talked about on that day, because I suggested to you that we were in part going to frame the course with "Moby Dick" and with a certain set of ideas. And I want to revisit some of those ideas today and think about where-- what we think about them now having read all of these things together. So I started off by quoting from the President, his idea that we are a young nation. It's time to grow. The time, he says, has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit, to choose our better history, to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea passed on from generation to generation, a God given promise that all are equal, all are free, all deserve to pursue their full measure of happiness. This is, you know, a statement of what we have taken to be a set of abiding ideals in the United States. One of the things that people said when they first started thinking about American literature as a serious field is that distinguished American literature from, say, British literature was commitment, primarily, to that set of ideas, to the idea of democracy, to the idea of equality, freedom, right? Ethel Matheson, when he wrote that big tome, American Renaissance, identified a kind of Democratic poetics as being at the heart of the canon of literature that he had a large hand in creating, a canon of literature that has come down to us as something like Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, and Melville as a kind of shorthand. And one of the things I think we've been investigating is the way in which, you might say-- is it the case that the writers that formed the mainstream of American tradition have found themselves engaged with this set of democratic ideas? Have they found them wanting? What does the literary tradition tell us, in other words, about both the power of these ideas and about our abilities, and perhaps our failures, to live up to them? We started, also, by suggesting the idea of cosmopolitanism, right, as something that, in fact, may not be a particularly American idea. There's been a suspicion throughout US intellectual history of the idea of cosmopolitanism. Remember, I told you it was the idea of individuals as citizens of the world owing their primary obligations not to their local organizations, or their hometown, or even their country, but to humanity as a whole, right? So it emerges as a kind of critique of nationalism, and one of the things we suggested is that perhaps, you know, the mainstream tradition of American literature as this course has constructed it, moving from settlement narrative from the puritans on down might well be hostile to this idea of cosmopolitanism defined now as not only in contradistinction to nationalism, but as-- and this is the way in which it was refined in the enlightenment by Emanuel Conn [phonetic], not only in contradistinction to nationalism, but really in contradistinction to something else that we might call universalism, right? So cosmopolitanism is all about the appreciation of difference. And if you look at some of the core texts in this course, you'll see that many of them actually are interested in engaging various forms of difference. Some of them are petrified of difference. Some of them want to stamp out difference. Some, like Emerson, are interested in certain kinds of differences, but are really interested, primarily, in something that we might call universalism, the way in which we're all alike, rather than the ways in which we're different. I wanted to suggest to you that some of the other writers, and I would count Melville among these, are more profoundly interested in the ways in which we are different and don't necessarily think that the ways in which we are different are simply incidental. In other words, maybe for Melville, the most important thing about us is not that we have a soul. Maybe that's an important thing, but another thing that might be important, exactly, our cultural context, our particular mental and physical characteristics. Maybe all of those qualities are not simply contingent. And I suggested to you that one of the current theorists of cosmopolitanism, Anthony Appiah, a philosopher over at Princeton, offers a very useful way of thinking about cosmopolitan theory has evolved now. It's interested in thinking about the interplay of universality and difference. He talks about a slogan form of cosmopolitanism would simply be universality plus difference, right? So in contemporary theory, cosmopolitanism emerges as a critique of nationalism. It starts to become a critique of universalism, in favor of difference. Difference, as I said to you at the time, is conceived not as a problem to be solved, but rather as an opportunity to be embraced. Appiah and others are starting to think that maybe we need a little of the universalism back, or that the universalism can never leave entirely. It's about bridge building, and we might think again of certain of the writers on our syllabus as engaging in what me might think of as the anticipation of a certain kind of cosmopolitan poetics, rather than simply democratic poetics, right? So cosmopolitanism, nationalism, universalism, these are all key terms for us, and I just want to-- remember, we linked them back to a set of things, right? Cosmopolitanism seemed to be linked to urban experience, and it was-- it seemed to be linked to what our President calls the idea of deliberative democracy, that somehow the fundamentally important thing about democracy is that it enables us to engage in conversations, productive conversations in which we deliberate. Another way to put it might be we are willing to engage in conversations in which we will put some of our crucial values up for grabs and be willing to consider an alternative, something that we hold dear. And I want to suggest to you that, in fact, this may be what great literature asks us to do, to engage in these kinds of thought experiments, to engage in conversations over time through the medium of a text with authors and characters, people who have other ways of being in the world than our own, so that literature might be said to be a space of conversation, and at its best, it gets us out of ourselves, gives us a kind of experience of otherness. I mean, think about that. When you read, if you have the time to read it with any kind of-- without, you know, the extreme haste a course like this demands, but when you read "Moby Dick" and let yourself, you know, let the text flow into you, you kind of get Ishmael in your head. It's a kind of weird thing to have in your head. It's almost like you lose track of your subjectivity and allow Ishmael-- or occupy Ishmael's subjectivity. To me, one of the brilliant thins about "Moby Dick" is that it seems to be aware of this process happening. I think that's part of what's at stake in the dramatization of Ishmael's loss of self in those chapters that follow the quarter deck and move into, finally, that chapter called "Moby Dick," in which he sort of reasserts himself. That same kind of loss of self that Ishmael the narrator experienced is something like, I think, our experience as readers in the face of powerful literature. There is a certain kind of loss of self, and then a recouping of self, and then we think back-- perhaps we recollected in tranquility, we think back to what it is we've experienced and measure our own experience against that. So this idea of urban experience that Tom Bender talks about. He suggested that one of the things about New York, the place where we live, and work, and study, and learn together is actually a kind of cosmopolitan space in contradistinction to the spaces of Massachusetts and Virginia, at least in the cultural imagination, right? So when I think about the ways in which Massachusetts and the puritan tradition are in some sense anti-cosmopolitan, and for Virginia, we don't do very much with Virginia in the course, but you can see that in so far as he identifies the idea of Virginia with Jeffersonians [phonetic], we have had a chance to look at some Jefferson, and we can see that there's a kind of funny interplay between sameness and difference in Jefferson's own writing, just the little bit of it that we have, right? There are certain kinds of difference for Jefferson that do not seem to be bridgeable, but he does-- even though he believes in freedom and equality, he also believes that Africans are different in some essential way and simply do not have the set of talents that Europeans do. So that's a kind of gulf of difference that Jefferson is unable to bridge. And one of the things I suggested at the outset is that maybe one of the reasons that "Moby Dick" begins in New York is to signal an affinity with this historic cosmopolitanism. You could begin the story someplace else, in New Bedford, in Nantucket, below decks of the Pequod itself, as the rather brilliant adaptation of "Moby Dick," in opera form that I was lucky enough to see on Friday in Dallas, does. It's [inaudible] transferred to the-- below decks of a quarter deck were there, and the quarter deck scene comes up right away. You know, the New York setting is lost. We might ask ourselves-- by the way, it's very powerful even without that, but we might ask ourselves what does it mean to begin in New York, right? And part of, I think, what it suggests is that this term-- another useful term from Apia of cosmopolitan contamination becomes something, you might say, that the New York opening does to the text. There's a sense in which New England, the place to which Ishmael goes, and then the ocean, the place that he ends up, are in some sense contaminated by the opening in New York. I wanted you to think about this as a kind of thought experiment. You might think of this as a kind of Hawthorne-like move, in which Hawthorne will put something out there and shift your attention away from it, but that's always going to be in the back of your mind. You know, it's not-- it's like-- reminds you of the virgin child, of course, only by opposite, but both things are in your mind. So to what extent, you might say, is there a kind of carry through of the New York cosmopolitanism into Melville's book. One last thing that I talked about on those opening days was the whole interplay of different kinds of culture, right? And we invoke the new [inaudible] theorist Raymond Williams talks about cultures as being the interplay of dominant residual and emergent forms. Dominant I think we understand. Residual means something that is from the past no longer dominant, most likely once dominant, still exerting a force in the present. And I gave you as an example-- here's his definition of that, but I gave you as an example this from Emerson. In all my lectures, I've taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man. This, the people accept readily enough and allow commendation as long as I call the lecture art, or politics, or literature, or the household. But the moment I call it religion, they are shocked. That would be only the application of the same truth that they receive everywhere else to a new class of fact. This was on the first day of class, I think. I think we have-- we should have a firmer understanding now of what is at stake as we see the kind of long residue of Puritanism all the way through into the 19th century, into the pages of Melville's novel. This wouldn't surprise Melville at all, I don't think, the fact that you can't talk about religion in the same way. So Melville has to find a different way to talk about religion, and that's one of the things that I want to talk about today. You might say that the opposite of residual is emergent, a set of places where new practices are emerging, and I think that there's a certain way in which we can think of some of the literary practices that Melville is using as a forum of the promotion of certain emergent ideas, or certain emergent cultures. So again, culture is the interplay of dominant residual and emergent forms always. Culture is always dynamic. It's always changing. And in the course of our course, I think you can see that. At a certain point, Puritanism is dominant. Then there is an emergent set of ideas. We call it the enlightenment. They take over, and yet, Puritanism remains a powerful residue within enlightenment thought. Powerful figures like Edwards and Jefferson show that interplay of the old and the new that's at stake there, and we see the power of the residual even when, theoretically, enlightenment thinking has taken hold in the 19th century. So that's part of what I want us to be thinking again. One other concept that we had that I think is very important when we're thinking about Melville is this idea of the horizon of expectations, right? Remember we talked about where meaning resides. I asked if our text means anything if nobody reads it, like that tree in the woods, and one of the things we suggested is that maybe what we need to understand about meaning is that it's a cooperative venture. The author has a lot to do with the creation of meaning, but doesn't control it entirely, and not only because there are things within the author's unconscious that his or her control doesn't completely cover, also because readers are always bringing their own experience to the text. I don't only mean your life experience, or your biography, but even the set of reading practices that you have come to expect, the institution of literary culture that exists when you actually turn to a text, the history of a novel has gotten to a certain place by 1851. Melville's novel tries to insert itself into that history. Stowe's novel tries to do the same thing. It's the same, you might say, horizon of expectations, perhaps, the two authors are construing, yet slightly different from one another, but they're meeting the same horizon. How are they going to meet it? One way to think about that might be to go to the first definition of the idea of the great American novel, which comes from John William Deforest, I guess now considered a minor novelist. He wrote a pretty good civil war novel called, "Miss Ravanale's [phonetic] Conversion." But he coined, as far as we know, the phrase. The great American novel, he said, the picture of the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence. Hawthorne, the greatest of American imaginations, staggered under the load of the American novel. In, "The Scarlet Letter," "The House of the Seven Gables," and "The Blithedale Romance," Deforest writes, "We have three delightful romance full of acute spiritual analysis of the light of other worlds, but also characterized by only a vague consciousness of this life." But he's kind of getting at that kind of weird other worldliness, although I think he maybe overstates is the case. He maybe suggests that, you know, Pearl would be the dominant figure if we had to think of who's exemplary with Hawthorne, rather than someone like Hester. Nevertheless, his argument is that Hawthorne only has a little-- a vague consciousness of this life, and by grasping as a catch little, but the subjective of humanity. Such personages that Hawthorne creates belong to the wide realm of art, rather than to our nationality. He wants an art that's more grounded, in other words, in the local. He says there's something either universal or abstract at Hawthorne. Surprise, surprise, the desired phenomenon is "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 1868. There were very noticeable faults in that story. There was a very faulty plot. There was [inaudible] be a fault, a black man painted whiter than the angels, and a girl, such as "Girls are to Be, Perhaps, But Are Not Yet." But there was also a national breadth to the picture, truthful outlining a character, natural speaking, and plenty of strong feeling. Though cleanliness of form was lacking, the material of work was in many respects admirable. Closest thing, 1868, to a great American novel, "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Seems counterintuitive to us today, but you can see how one of the things that happened was Stowe wrote what she thought was a national text. It was designed to confront a national problem. It was designed to create characters that were drawn from all regions of the nation, at least north and south, ignoring the west somewhat, and you can see that she did the job, right? I mean, she hit that horizon of expectations. Nobody doubted that it was a novel. In fact, people said it was a powerful novel. They were moved by it. To a certain extent, as I said, it's not that antislavery made the novel powerful, but that the novel made an antislavery a powerful problem-- or powerful cause. She hit the horizon of expectations, not just willy-nilly. I think if you look at what she does, you can see a very careful merging of different elements, sentimental fiction, domestic fiction, Christianity, all as the kind of delivery mechanism for a [inaudible] first and foremost, antislavery, but then also anti-domestic slavery [inaudible]. Melville takes a different [inaudible] and in a way, one of the things you might say is that he is writing, as did Hawthorne, over against the tradition that Hawthorne represent-- that Stowe represented, that domestic tradition, and he took his lumps for it. Novel was not appreciated in its day. Melville was bitterly disappointed in the reception of "Moby Dick." He wrote a novel called "Pierre" that had a long section in the middle where he kind of went off about the publishing industry, and editors, and people wrote things like, "Herman Melville crazy," and he died in obscurity having given up novel writing, working for years in a New York custom house writing a little bit of poetry, and he was finally rediscovered well after his death by a set of critics who rehabilitated his reputation. Anybody see the Demi Moore "Scarlet Letter?" Well, that's actually comforting. But if you happen to want, like-- if you happen to want to see a really bad adaptation with lots of, you know, sexy bits, the people that made "The Scarlet Letter" with Demi Moore thought that, oh, it's a Victorian novel that just needs to have its bodice, you know, untied a little bit, let it out. So she lets it out. There's a bathtub scene, as I remember, yes? Okay, so shortly after that, please, never see that movie and then think you can talk about the novel afterwards. You really can't. That had a certain kind of earthiness. Maybe Deforest would have liked it, I don't know, but this came out in The New Yorker shortly afterwards. That's not a very good print. I'm sorry about that. But if you were able to see it better, you would see that here is a guy with a peg leg, and a lance, and a rather buxom lass, bit of cleavage right there. In fact, I think it's described on The New Yorker site as, you know, Ahab standing next to a buxom lass, actually. And you can see here on the [inaudible] there is "Moby Dick" with the requisite cartoon X's, "Caught," and it's "Moby Dick," the Demi Moore version. Okay, it has a happy ending. It has a girl. It has sexy bits, cool. Actually, this version was made. It was, in fact, the first version that was made of "Moby Dick" for screen, really. It existed in two versions. One was a-- I think it was 1922, silent version called, "The Sea Beast," completely silent, and then it was revised in 1929 again starring John [inaudible] as a talkie called now "Moby Dick," because something called the Melville revival was underway. People knew that "Moby Dick" was a book. Hollywood producers knew that it was a book, which meant that many people knew that it was a book. But they didn't have to be too faithful to that book. So what I'm going to do now is show you some clips from this 1930s version. As you're looking at it, I want you to see the irony of what's at stake here. Melville has written over against a sentimental domestic marriage tradition. Hollywood takes his whale hunting novel and puts it right firmly back into the sentimental domestic marriage tradition. There is a character called Faith. There is a brother called Derrick, and there is a dog. [ Silence ] [ Music ] >> I want you to be thinking about the sentimentality of the-- [ Music ] >> Lucas later redid that moment in the Empire Strikes back. [laughter] One of the points of showing that to you is, again, to give us a sense of meanings circulate, right, how "Moby Dick" becomes, you might say, something more than simply a novel. The film adaptations play a role in that, but we also get some sense of an index about the status of the novel in the 1920s, right, when that film was made. We get a sense that, in fact, it was-- you know, all you needed was Ahab, and a whale, and you could do a lot of other stuff with the story and still extensively be telling the story of "Moby Dick." If you ever have a chance to see that, and you probably won't, because as far as I know it is not available. I happened to run into it on TNT years and years ago, I think, and it's not on videotape. "The Sea Beast" is available in a bad archival version from Canada, I think. But if anybody really wants to watch the 1930s version, it is actually quite amusing, let me know, and we can make-- I can get it to you, but you have to promise to actually watch it and send me a comment back about it. But I want you to see that one of the things that's going on precisely in this period is the Melville revival, right? So from "The Sea Beast" to "Moby Dick," the fact of the book, and yet the book is not yet [inaudible]. One of the things that happens during the Melville revival is that Billy Bud is discovered, and Melville starts to have a different kind of reputation. Paul Lauder, who studied the way in which Melville's reputation changes from the 1920s on, suggests that Melville was construct. Now he's talking about Melville. The idea of Melville was constructed during the 1920s as part of an ideological conflict which linked advocates of modernism-- right, we're English majors, modernism, Faulkner, Joiful [phonetic], and a traditional high cultural values often connected to the academy against a social and cultural other, generally, if ambiguously, portrayed as feminine genteel, exotic, dark, foreign, and numerous, a good thing about different kinds of representation in this period. What is modernism taking aim at? It's a certain set of things. It has to do with sentimental writing. It has to do with realist ethnic writings. It also has to do with a certain kind of, you know, drippy romanticism that TS Elliott was very disparaging of. What goes on in this context, a distinctively masculine angle of sex. An image of Melville was deployed as a lone and powerful artistic beacon against the dangers presented by the masses. In other words, modernism constructing itself as elite culture can find a predecessor and an exemplar in Melville. Creating such an image entailed overlooking issues of race [inaudible] democracy and the like, which have been commonplace as a contemporary criticism, indeed, the kinds of things that have interested me, and I think I've tried to bring to the fore in talking about "Moby Dick." So, Melville and "Moby Dick" get constructed as, you might say, the great white father, so much so that when-- has anyone ever read Maxine Hunt Kingston? Maybe you've read "The Woman Warrior." She's one of the first Asian-American novelists to kind of crack university syllabi. People don't tend to read her great novel [inaudible] as much, but one of the things you would see very early on in "Trip Master Monkey" is an artist figure who's an Asian-American, who's thinking about what it means to be an Asian-American artist figure. And at one point, he says, "Okay, when do I say, you know, what my ethnicity is?" Does he announce now that the author is Chinese, or rather Chinese-American, and be forced into autobiographical confession? Stop the music. I have to butt in and introduce and my race. Dear reader, all these characters who you've identified with, Bill, Brooke, and any-- are Chinese and I am, too. The fiction's spoiled. This is what the character is arguing. You who read have been suckered along, identifying like hell, only to find out that you've been getting a peculiar colored slant eyed POV. And then he goes on to say this, "Call me Ishmael." See you pictured a white guy, didn't you? To me, that's a misreading of Melville's novel in many ways, but I think that's one of the things to understand about the meaning of the novel for a writer like Kingston, who finds herself inspired by the American literary tradition, and somehow also antagonistic towards it, feeling like the American canon hasn't left a space, perhaps, for Asian-American writing. You know, Melville, in some sense, becomes one of the fathers that needs to be slain. "Call me Ishmael." See you pictured a white guy. But as Lauder suggests, I think one of the reasons that Melville's novel continues to hold the fascination of critics these days is not simply because it's been constructed in a certain way, but because when you go back to it, it repays reading. I mean, for one thing, it's pretty funny. It has lots of stuff going on that if you are interested in, you know, delving deeply into books, it repays re-reading. But I think when you go back and look at now, you see that it's very attuned to certain kinds of dynamics of otherness that have come to be interesting to us now in the early part of the 21st century, and I think I want to argue for you, finally, that Melville is aware of this. He doesn't have the language of dominant residual and emergent to draw on, but look at this image at the very end of the book. "It's so chanced that after the Parsees' [phonetic] disappearance, I was he whom the fates ordained to take the place of Ahab's bowsman when that bowsman is soon to vacant post." So this is another one of those moments that should remind you when you get to it of that chapter called "Moby Dick," when Ishmael actually said, "By the way, I was there. I did the oath. I participated in this whole thing." Now we have to rethink the chapters of the chase third day to think about where Ishmael was in this. The same who when on the last day the three men were tossed from out of the rocking boat [inaudible]. So, and this is the phrase that I want to highlight for you, "Floating on the margin of the ensuing scene and in full sight of it when the half spent suction of the sunk ship reached me, I was then, but slowly drawn towards the closing vortex. Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle, like another ixion I did revolve." So picture the image. Apparently, when a ship does go down, it actually does create a kind of vortex that sucks everything in around it. Ishmael has been dropped at the margin of the scene, and because he is at the margin of the scene and not at the center of it, he is saved. His marginal status, in other words, is what has saved him, okay, symbolically. And then when we think back about the role that Ishmael has played in the course of the novel, we see that he has also constructed himself as a kind of marginal person. He's on the outskirts of things. He doesn't ever, per se, say that he's part of the central action. He has, more than even most narrators, a kind of weird observer of function-- a participant observer of function, and I think part of that idea is that Melville is recognizing the power of what we might think of as the margins of culture. At the site, emergent practiced ideas and values can arise. One other thing, symbolically speaking, what is it that saves Ishmael? What is he hugging that allows him to float at the margin of the scene? It is Queequeg's [phonetic] coffin transformed into Queequeg's body by-- you know, once he no longer is dying, puts versions of his tattoos all over this thing. So it's kind of like, you know, a wooden Queequeg and transformed into a life buoy. So out of death there is life, and the life, symbolically, come from Ishmael's embrace of his friend, Queequeg, that embrace of otherness with which Melville begins. Remember I told you the story of the Essex. Instead of telling the story of the Essex again, we have the confrontation of the whale. We go-- we try not to become eaten by the cannibals. We become the cannibals. Melville reverses the story. We confront the cannibal first, and then we have the cannibal motif to use throughout the novel. Go to Gutenberg.org and search for cannibal. Every time you'll see that in crucial places Ishmael is making comparisons between the cannibal and everyone else. Who ain't a cannibal? Everything is cannibal. That's part of culture. Culture, as I suggested the other day, is about domination. We are all cannibalizing one another. Ishmael embraces the cannibal. "Moby Dick," the novel, embraces otherness, and that's part of what the resolution is about. I want to take one other motif very briefly and show you how it works, okay, and from beginning to end. This is that motif of the scar that Ahab has when we first see him, right? Remember that the first thing that Ishmael has heard about Ahab from Captain Peleg is that his leg was taken off on his last voyage by this whale, right, and so it's supposed to-- puts a strike of fear of whales into Ishmael. On page 108 of our edition, you'll remember that Ishmael doesn't notice the peg leg first. What he notices, instead, is this, "Threading its way out from among his gray hairs and continuing right down one side of his tawny, scorched face and neck until it disappeared in his clothing you saw a slender, rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree when the upper lightning tearingly darts through, down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom are running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded." Right, and we talked about that image of branding. We talked a little bit later on about the legends that arose. Was it a birthmark? Did it happen at sea? And it's even liken to a kind of crucifixion. Ahab is somebody who has a crucifixion in his face, and we-- you know, at one point I suggested to you that this novel takes the form of a kind of novel-- of a narration by an apostle, of someone who is a kind of Christ-like figure, perhaps. There's a lot of language throughout that would identify Ahab with Christ and with the crucifixion, although, perhaps, in a Hawthornian way may be the opposite, right? He's somebody who challenges God, rather than carries out God's will. But I want you to see where this imagery goes, right? If you think about the tri-works, the association between Ahab and fire is carried out in the tri-works. There's the image, finally, at the end of that section of the Pequod burning a corpse, right, becoming in some part-- in that way an emblem of its monomania commander's soul. But where the imagery comes to a head, finally, is in the chapter that's called "The Candles." And one of the things that we need to know in order to get-- to understand what's at stake in "The Candles" is to think about a character whom I haven't had occasion to talk much about yet, and that is Fidalla [phonetic]. Fidalla is a Parsee, which means that he is someone who has come-- whose ancestors probably have come from-- if we're taking the strict meaning of the term, have come from Persia and migrated to the Indian subcontinent. In Melville's day, Parsee was also a term that was used for Persians more generally, but what's known about Parsees even then is the idea that they are Zoroastrians. They worship the prophet Zarathustra, who is, in fact, the founder of what is taken to be the oldest still practiced monotheistic religion in the world, however, there was a-- one of the symbols of Zoroastrianism is the fire, because it's something Zoroaster-- takes the fire worshipping practices, which were dominant in Persia, and creates an emergent monotheism that still recognizes the residual power of some of these old practices, and therefore, transforms fire into a symbol of purity and light. And it becomes-- it's a dualistic religion in which the powers of God are wholly separate from the powers of darkness and evil, and human beings are enlisted along with-- created by God and then enlisted by him to combat powers of darkness and chaos, which don't arise from God himself. Now, Melville read a lot about this in Pierre Bale's encyclopedia, right, and very drawn, we think, to the kind of dualistic thinking that's embodied there, that there are certain ways in which you look at the way in which the-- if you look, for example, at the chapter on the whale's head, you'll see there's something approving about the idea that the whale manages to keep [inaudible] in its mind at the same time, right? It sees where its ears are-- where our ears are, or where its eyes would be. So you might say it sees what's on the side, doesn't see what's in front, and has to synthesize to opposite kinds of perspective. I mean, think back to your Emerson. You remember that thinking about contradiction is a mark of genius. Being able to hold two things in the mind at once is perhaps beyond what most human beings are capable of, but apparently, it's what the whale has to do every waking moment. So, Melville and Ishmael are drawn to loads of binary thinking. You might say that for-- you know, for someone who is thinking about what's wrong with Puritanism and its account of evil and depravity, that it all has to originate with God-- Adam is, you know, sort of set up to fall. This provides an interesting possible solution. If you were to pursue this ending, you'd see that what Melville does with all of this Persian imagery that's in there is to create an alternative to Christianity, a way of getting outside of the straight jacket that sometimes Christianity seems to be, you know, in this novel. So, finally, we get to "The Candle." That's right, you'll remember this chapter. This is a chapter where they are very near the whale's ground. They've gone through a storm. Ahab has turned them right into the storm, and as a result of this electrical storm, they have this phenomenon that more commonly, I think, is known as St. Elmo's Fire, but it's referred to in the novel as a corpasance [phonetic]. It's when the lightning-- electrical and discharge from lightning works its way up on the top of the masts, right? So you can imagine here, we again have a certain kind of what looks like Christian imagery, masts topped by fire. It might be a kind of light version of the boggy, soggy, squitchy [phonetic] picture. Take a look at page 382, Ahab here. Stub says in the middle of 382, "The corpasance have mercy on us all. At the base of the main mast full beneath the deblune [phonetic] and the flame, the Parsee was kneeling in Ahab's front, but with his head bowed away from it, while nearby from the arched and overhanging rigging where they had just been engaged securing a spar [inaudible] arrested by the glare, now cohered together and hung pendulous like a knot of numbed wasps from a drooping orchard twig. In various [inaudible] like the standing, or stepping, or running skeletons in Herculaneum. Others remained rooted to the deck, but all their eyes up cast. 'Aye aye,' cried Ahab. He recognizes the opportunity for another ritual. 'Look up at it. Mark it well. The white flame but lights the way to the white whale. Hand me those main mast links there. I would fain feel this pulse and let mine beat against it, blood against fire.'" And then look what he says. "Oh, thou clear spirit of clear fire, who on these seas I as Persian once did worship, 'til in the sacramental act so burned by thee that to this hour I bear the scar." And now we have his example, at least filtered through Ishmael's report, of where that scar comes from. It comes from worshipping outside the bounds of Christianity. It goes farther barbarous shores, right? Remember, Peleg said Ahab has fixed his lance and things more strange than whales. He's gone outside the bounds of western culture to worship as a Persian. What happens? "I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance." One of the things we might say is that Ishmael is a cosmopolitan figure. I suggested this at the outset, right? He embraces Queequeg. He embraces difference in others, but so is Ahab. Ahab had actually gone out, tried to get outside of Christianity. He's gone to these strange seas. He's worshipped as a Persian. He's given himself over to otherness, but there's something wrong with Ahab. Perhaps you might say that Ishmael's cosmopolitanism is finally validated and empowered by a sense of outwardness, a sense that he is not always turning inward, that he's more interested in other people in narrating-- in opening himself up to others. So he becomes subsumed into his own narrative and disappears [inaudible]. Ahab is always about Ahab, and ultimately, there's a certain kind of selfishness or egotism that short circuits, quite literally, this cosmopolitan impulse. It becomes about Ahab. It becomes about Ahab's revenge. It becomes about Ahab fighting against the divine, rather than working with it. "To neither love nor reverence will thou be kind, and even for hate, thou can but kill, and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power, but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional un-integral mastery in me." Right, and so he goes through another ritual here where he allows-- where he basically has a crew re-consecrate its oath, right? This is a chapter that you should look at. I think it's one of the important places where much of the imagery of the novel comes together, and we start to see what it is that-- in some sense, if Ahab, as I suggested to you, is sort of branded by Calvinism, even if he's a Quaker, there's a kind of mutated form of Calvinist fundamentalism that structures his engagement with the world and with God. You might say he's never fully able to get outside of that box, perhaps. And in the end, he can react only, in some sense, as a fundamentalist would. Think of him as a version in the end of Roger Chillingworth [phonetic], perhaps. It's like all one thing or another, and therefore, it can only be this kind of contentious relationship with God. Another chapter that you should pay attention to as you're thinking about this novel is chapter 132, "The Symphony." It's a moment where Ahab and Starbuck, in short, have a moment. And one of the things you should see is this is the place where some of that domestic imagery is tied up and tied off. Remember, Peleg's saying, "Oh, Ahab has his humanities. He has a wife and child." And I said, oh, that's kind of flimsy ground. If we're good readers and we know our literary history, we know that this novel is, in some sense, designed to shoo away that tradition, or to minimize its impact. Here, Starbuck is evoking that same kind of tradition. This is, in fact, a sentimental moment that Ahab almost gives in to. Page 405, "Oh, Starbuck, it is a mild, mild wind and a mild looking sky. On such a day, very much such a sweetness as this, I struck my first whale, a boy harpooner of 18. 40, 40, 40 years ago, 40 years of continual whaling, 40 years of privation." He starts to think about what might have been. It's almost a little thought experiment here. Can he give up the cherished value of whaling, really be what we would think of now as a cosmopolitan, open himself up to something else. Starbuck sees his opening, right? He's going to invoke all of this domestic experience, try to make a connection to Ahab. He wants nothing better than to-- nothing more than to turn the boat around and go home to wife and child. Forget the logic of the marketplace or business. It's the logic of sentimentality and domesticity that Starbuck wants at the end. Ahab gets close, and then no. Bottom of 406, "What is it? What nameless inscrutable, unearthly thing is it? What causing hidden lord and master and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me that against all natural lovings and longings I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time, recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart I durst not so much as dare?" And then the crucial sentences, is Ahab, Ahab? And think about what that means. What does that mean? Why the repetition? Is Ahab what, the Ahab of old? Is Ahab himself? Who is Ahab? "Is it I, God, or who that lifts this arm?" Now, you'll have to compare this soliloquy to what happens in the quarter deck and afterwards. Ahab seems to come around to a certain final fatalism. "If the great sun move not of himself, but is an errand boy in heaven," again, the language of agency, "nor one single star can revolve but by some invisible power, how then, can this one small heartbeat, this one small brain think thoughts, unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in the world like yonder winless, and fate is the hand [inaudible]." It's done. Now Starbuck realizes that it's done. Ahab has locked himself into this vision of fadedness, and later on, when there is one possible last moment in chase, the third day, Ahab talks about being-- or chase-- I think it's the second day. Ahab talks about being the fate's lieutenant. This is on page 418 at the very bottom. He says, "Starbuck, of late I've felt strangely moved to thee ever since that hour we both saw," you know, that sentimental thing, he can't even bring it up, "thou knows what," in one another's eyes, "but in this matter of the whale be the front of thy faith to me, at the palm of his hand a lipless un-featured blank. Ahab is forever Ahab, man. [inaudible] which was rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool, I am the fate's lieutenant." That's Ahab's final self-revelation. Once that happens [inaudible] is ready to happen. Moby Dick comes. It's everything that we've been led to believe that it is. It breaches. It's majestic. It's amazing. It looks as if [inaudible] agency, and in the end, it drags everybody but Ishmael down to the bottom of the ocean with it, along with all the answers that we would want to have. Ahab's ending, you might say, is closed. Ishmael's ending, as we've seen already, by being at the margin of the scene, is open. And I think that's one of the things that have drawn people to Moby Dick over and over again, is the fact that there are these continual thought experiments, and beyond that there is a kind of openness in the novel that allows you to find new things in it every time you look at it. It's very difficult for me to lecture on it, actually, with a book open, because then I kind of notice things that I want to bring to your attention, and it kind of derails my train of thought. I'm trying to be very disciplined today. So I'm going to take you to the one last place that I want you to see before we leave each other. It's in the chapter that's called "Queequeg in His Coffin," and I think what it does is it gives you a figure for the novel itself, and for Ishmael, the practice of romance. This is the bottom of 366, "With a wild whimsiness, he now uses coffin for a sea chest, and emptying into it his canvas bag of clothes, set them in order there. Many spare hours he spent in carving the lid with all manner of grotesque figures and drawings, and it seemed thereby-- that hereby he was striving in his rude way to copy parts of the twisted tattooing on his body. And this tattooing, those hieroglyphic marks had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth, so that Queequeg, in his own proper person, was a riddle to unfold, a wondrous work in one volume, but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them. And these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to molder away with the living parchment where on they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last. And this thought, it must have [inaudible] to Ahab that wild exclamation of his when one morning turning away from surveying poor Queequeg, oh, devilish tantalization of the gods." That image of the wondrous work in one volume, I think, is an image of the book, but what you see happens to that coffin is that it has another life. Ishmael embraces it, and out of that embrace comes this novel. I've been teaching this novel now for probably 20 years, and every time I look at it I see more stuff in it. I hope you will come back to it at some point in your future, not just on Wednesday-- or Monday of next week, but at some point beyond, and I hope it will look different to you. So, thank you very much for listening, and I'll see you in a week. [applause]