Probable cause
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fin john
Mar 20, 2010, 10:23:54 AM3/20/10
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All,
The first sentence of chapter 88, "Schools and Scoolmasters," reads: "The previous chapter gave account of an immense body or herd of Sperm Whales, and there was also then given the probable cause inducing those vast aggregations." The phrase "probable cause" seems used innocently enough. But is it? It might easily pass, save for the next two chapters which are about laws and legalities. This term is a legalism.
From Wikipedia: "In the United States criminal law, probable cause is the standard by which a police officer has the authority to make an arrest, conduct a personal or property search, or to obtain a warrant for arrest. It is also used to refer to the standard to which a grand jury believes that a crime has been committed. The term comes from the fourth amendment of the United States Constitution." Another way of putting it is that probable cause can be invoked when a crime has been committed, is being committed, or will be committed.
Herman Melville most certainly knew the legal implications of this term. Both his brothers, Gansevoort and Allan, were attorneys, although not criminal attorneys, and had been examiners in chancery. There is evidence that both Herman Melville and brother Allan served as lawyers in a suit which their uncle, Peter Gansevoort, had brought against his brother, Herman Gansevoort, in 1847. This term may have popped into Melville's head when he had anticipated writing the next two chapters. Maybe that's all there is to this. Maybe.
Strange to say, this chapter has a criminal schoolmaster, Francois Eugene Vidicq (1775--1857), "what sort of country-schoolmaster that famous Frenchman was in his younger days, and what was the nature of those occult lessons he inculcated into some of his pupils." The Bryant-Springer edition describes Vidocq as having taught at a country school disguised as a friar where he seduced his female students. The man, according to his own memoirs, was early in life in and out of jail for a variety of crimes. He turned away from crime (sort of) becoming a police spy and informer and eventually establishing a security department within the police. He is regarded as the first private detective and the father of criminology. Purportedly, Victor Hugo based both his characters, Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert from Les miserables upon him.
This brings us to a second theme of France. Three chapters further is the Bouton de Rose or "Rose-button or Rose-bud," a French ship with a French captain. The word ambergris derives from French.
Not to be ignored is that other theme of a "zoned quest." Vidocq, as a schoolmaster, pursued such a quest, as Melville relates, calling it occult. Why occult? To add fuel to this, one must know that the bouton or button of the French ship both in French and American slang means 'clitoris.'
Is Melville suggesting that a crime has been committed, is being committed, or will be committed? If so, what is the crime?
John Gretchko
gordon poole
Mar 21, 2010, 8:05:35 PM3/21/10
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I'm glad
to see Ismailites coming back to life.
While looking forward to what more may come of John Gretchko's musings on "probable cause" and "friar" Eugène Vidocq's brief stint at teaching girls in Faubourg, I would point out that button can indeed be a clitoris, as John says, but in Chapter 91 of Moby-Dick it is assuredly a reference to the anus. Now with this in mind, one may go back to Chapter 88, "Schools and Schoolmasters," where Vidocq's name and schoolmasterly activities are mentioned, and notice, in the paragraph beginning "Now, as the harem of whales called by the fishermen a school...," a certain insistence on "inculcating" and "occult lessons ... inculcated into some of his pupils" that might raise the etymologically alert reader's suspicion (from Lat. inculco, 'trample into,' but to some minds might suggest culus). Especially since in Chapter 91, when the Guernsy-man flies into a sudden passion, Stubb mollifies him by saying, "Oh! keep cool -- cool? yes, that's the word." I am not sure where, if anywhere, this line of research may lead, but maybe John can get to the bottom of it.
Gordon Poole
P.S. By the way, how is one to read the strange observation that the female whales are "hereditarily entitled to en bon point"? And what allegory lurks in the fact, recounted in Chapter 90, that the king gets the whale's or sturgeon's head and the queen gets the other end?
While looking forward to what more may come of John Gretchko's musings on "probable cause" and "friar" Eugène Vidocq's brief stint at teaching girls in Faubourg, I would point out that button can indeed be a clitoris, as John says, but in Chapter 91 of Moby-Dick it is assuredly a reference to the anus. Now with this in mind, one may go back to Chapter 88, "Schools and Schoolmasters," where Vidocq's name and schoolmasterly activities are mentioned, and notice, in the paragraph beginning "Now, as the harem of whales called by the fishermen a school...," a certain insistence on "inculcating" and "occult lessons ... inculcated into some of his pupils" that might raise the etymologically alert reader's suspicion (from Lat. inculco, 'trample into,' but to some minds might suggest culus). Especially since in Chapter 91, when the Guernsy-man flies into a sudden passion, Stubb mollifies him by saying, "Oh! keep cool -- cool? yes, that's the word." I am not sure where, if anywhere, this line of research may lead, but maybe John can get to the bottom of it.
Gordon Poole
P.S. By the way, how is one to read the strange observation that the female whales are "hereditarily entitled to en bon point"? And what allegory lurks in the fact, recounted in Chapter 90, that the king gets the whale's or sturgeon's head and the queen gets the other end?
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fin john
Mar 23, 2010, 10:49:24 AM3/23/10
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Gordon and all,
It is good, Gordon, to hear from you. I will respond in length. But for the time, can you tell us the nature of your essay on the Rose-bud and where it can be found? I cannot find it in my filing cabinet which means that it is somewhere in the house in a stack of papers. Please do not force me to bring order out of this chaos.
To true, chapters 91 and 92 are excremental. Even culus to cool to occult has that suggestion. However, a button is something substantial, whereas an anus is just a hole. Can you prove that rosebud even meant that in other works? No doubt in mid-nineteenth century America all the private parts were odoriferous.
Could the law in violation be a law against cunnilingus in mid-nineteenth-century America? Could that be where the jib-boom noses of the French were?
Walking carefully, John Gretchko
Ackin
Mar 23, 2010, 6:05:55 PM3/23/10
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John,
Gordon is referring to his paper in MSE#92 March 1993, pp.11-13:
"Stubb diddles the Rose-Bud: Melville's dirty joke". And I second his
view on that matter. From a "bouton de rose" to a "fleur de rose"
there's the "rosette" or small rose. Comprenne qui pourra.
Nick
gordon poole
Mar 23, 2010, 5:11:58 PM3/23/10
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Dear John:
“Stubb Diddles the Rose-Bud: Melville's Dirty Joke,” Melville Society Extracts, 92 (March 1993), pp.11-13.
If you cannot lay hands on the issue of the MSE, I will gladly email you the text. By the way, reference is made to it in the Bryant-Springer Moby-Dick in notes to the Rosebud chapter.
As for laws against cunnilingus, I have read somewhere in internet that there are still laws on the books in several US states against "unnatural" sexual relations between people, including women, but that today they are generally not being enforced.
On the clitoris, v. Peter Fryer's Mrs Grundy, where what emerges is the extreme scarcity of any common word for it in the anglophone countries until the late nineteenth century (p.51 and note 135, p.271). The only one earlier mentioned by Fryer is "coral headed tip" from "Harris's List of Covent-Garden Ladies ... 1788." For the "relative paucity of popular terms for the clitoris in European languages" the reader is referred to aticles by Blau and Kanner, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 1943 and 1945 (v. http://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=PAQ.012.0481A and http://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=PAQ.014.0228A). I have not read the articles, but rather suspect that most males in the mid-nineteenth century had no inkling of its existence or even of the phenomenon of female orgasm. In http://www.answers.com/topic/clitoris I find: "The role of the clitoris in orgasm has been the subject of very heated controversy. Although for centuries it had been known by medical and religious authorities in Europe that titillating the clitoris had a beneficial effect on conjugal relations, rendering them more pleasant and more likely to be fertile, from the later eighteenth century this information apparently became increasingly hidden. Popular handbooks which went on being reprinted in the nineteenth century underwent expurgation and referred, if at all, much more generally to the necessity of mutual caresses and pleasure between the married couple." On the other hand, in ancient Rome they knew all about the landica.
Best,
Gordon
“Stubb Diddles the Rose-Bud: Melville's Dirty Joke,” Melville Society Extracts, 92 (March 1993), pp.11-13.
If you cannot lay hands on the issue of the MSE, I will gladly email you the text. By the way, reference is made to it in the Bryant-Springer Moby-Dick in notes to the Rosebud chapter.
As for laws against cunnilingus, I have read somewhere in internet that there are still laws on the books in several US states against "unnatural" sexual relations between people, including women, but that today they are generally not being enforced.
On the clitoris, v. Peter Fryer's Mrs Grundy, where what emerges is the extreme scarcity of any common word for it in the anglophone countries until the late nineteenth century (p.51 and note 135, p.271). The only one earlier mentioned by Fryer is "coral headed tip" from "Harris's List of Covent-Garden Ladies ... 1788." For the "relative paucity of popular terms for the clitoris in European languages" the reader is referred to aticles by Blau and Kanner, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 1943 and 1945 (v. http://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=PAQ.012.0481A and http://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=PAQ.014.0228A). I have not read the articles, but rather suspect that most males in the mid-nineteenth century had no inkling of its existence or even of the phenomenon of female orgasm. In http://www.answers.com/topic/clitoris I find: "The role of the clitoris in orgasm has been the subject of very heated controversy. Although for centuries it had been known by medical and religious authorities in Europe that titillating the clitoris had a beneficial effect on conjugal relations, rendering them more pleasant and more likely to be fertile, from the later eighteenth century this information apparently became increasingly hidden. Popular handbooks which went on being reprinted in the nineteenth century underwent expurgation and referred, if at all, much more generally to the necessity of mutual caresses and pleasure between the married couple." On the other hand, in ancient Rome they knew all about the landica.
Best,
Gordon
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