The Symphony Part Five

[dan.m...@juno.com]

The Symphony Part Five

 

I believe the chapter The Symphony was properly titled.  When Mr. Melville was writing Moby-Dick, The rather narrow definition of this musical form was not as structured as it is today.  It was still in its formative years and thanks to the classical musical giants it gained it’s modern form about the time of Shostakovitch.  I believe it was Claude Levi-Strauss who wrote what many of us have felt through the ages: music was closer to the mythic experience than either the written or visual expression.  If we take the concept of the symphony in it’s simplest idea, a full orchestral composition that is the some of its parts, we can understand from this five part exercise how Melville provided the reader with clues in The Symphony to determine Ahab was an amalgam of his father and mother.  Ahab was the sum of many parts. Herman Melville fits in this amalgam but that is for another submission.

 

Some time ago there were discussions on a paragraph found in Chapter 41 Moby Dick.  From memory, the discussion centered on Melville’s reference to the Hotel de Cluny.  I believe the thrust of that paragraph is history.  The underground abandoned nature of the hotel suggests a hidden past. The paragraph opens with: “This is much; yet Ahab’s larger, darker, deeper part remains unhinted.” The underground hotel is a reference to this darker, deeper part of Ahab. We have yet to read Chapter 54 The Town Ho’s Story. A chapter that reveals in a kind of nautical way how Steelkilt, the personification of the Ahab we have come to know and love in the main body of Moby-Dick, took over control of the ship from the captain who is Ahab before he received his scar, and Radney, the Ahab after the scar but before the loss of his leg.  The surfacing of these personas becomes more evident if we change the name of the “Town-Ho” to a ship named “Ahab.”

 

One of my favorite chapters is 60 The Line. After a discussion on the terrors associated with the line, the last paragraph contains a point sadly missed in our busy lives above ground. It says in part: “All men live enveloped in whale-lines.  All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle ever-present perils of life.  And if you be a philosopher, though seated in a whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker and not a harpoon, by your side.”

There is a captain Ahab in all of us.

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[dan.m...@juno.com]

The Symphony Part Five

 

I believe the chapter The Symphony was properly titled.  When Mr. Melville was writing Moby-Dick, the rather narrow definition of this musical form was not as structured as it is today.  It was still in its formative years and thanks to the classical musical giants it gained it’s modern form about the time of Shostakovitch.  I believe it was Claude Levi-Strauss who wrote what many of us have felt through the ages: music was closer to the mythic experience than either the written or visual expression.  If we take the concept of the symphony in it’s simplest idea, a full orchestral composition that is the some of its parts, we can understand from this five part exercise how Melville provided the reader with clues in The Symphony to determine Ahab was an amalgam of his father and mother.  Ahab was the sum of many parts. Herman Melville fits in this amalgam but that is for another submission.

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