Pequod's crew "picked and packed"
Stephen Hoy
aboard the Pequod by focusing on two contrasting depictions of their
nature in the final paragraphs of two chapters: Ch 26 Knights and
Squires and Ch 41 Moby Dick.
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If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall
hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic
graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased among
them all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I
shall touch that workman's arm with some ethereal light; if I shall
spread a rainbow over his disastrous set of sun; then against all
mortal critics bear me out in it, thou Just Spirit of Equality, which
hast spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out
in it, thou great democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart
convict, Bunyan, the pale, poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with
doubly hammered leaves of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of
old Cervantes; Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles;
who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than
a throne! Thou who, in all Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest
Thy selectest champions from the kingly commons; bear me out in it, O
God!
- Ch 26 Knights and Squires
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When we discussed Anacharsis Clootz and his deputation a few months
ago, we were universally impressed with Melville's praise of the
"meanest mariners, and renegades, and castaways" at the end of Ch 26
Knights and Squires. We compared the tone and content favorably with a
parallel passage about Clootz and his deputation in Ch 27 Knights and
Squires. Since that careful scrutiny, we've had time to digest the
suggestion that this chapter begins a sequence in which Ahab is
carefully placed atop a hierarchy forming a psycho-social pyramid: the
crew forms the base, boatsteerer-squires stand on the next step, the
three mates/knights rise in sequence to the captain-king at the
pinnacle. With no small attention to detail, and not without dispute,
we have mapped depictions of several of the crew to mythical figures
or constellations, concluding with a remarkable notion that certain of
these figures align with aspects of the mind. When the crew assemble
on the quarter deck, it's very nearly a faculty meeting of a Harvard
or Yale Psychology department.
We've traveled from Joppa to Gades with the Phoenician sun-god,
exploring widely-acknowledgd sources Melville used for Ch 82 The Honor
and Glory of Whaling. We concluded Melville understood the hero
Hercules as a demi-god with many analogs--Perseus, St. George, and
Jonah. [To this list, we can add Krishna with a bit of work, and
Samson without too much trouble; nor do Melville's sources consider
Job the Uzzite beyond the Pale of the Hercules mythos.] In connection
with the chapter's title, we might well turn to the first part of
Romans 2 to see another discourse on honor and glory, in which Apostle
Paul offers a promise of heavenly ascent that recalls the final
sentence of Ch 23 The Lee Shore: "Straight up leaps his apotheosis!"
This links back to Isaiah 24 and the allegorically-charged "deputation
from all the isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth." We've
also pondered the choice of Hercules at the crossroads and wondered
how honor and glory arises from the demi-god's decision to follow an
arduous path of Virtue over a easy path of Pleasure.
To my reading eye, we find an ironic turn in Melville's discourse on
the honor and glory of whaling. The author's purpose is surely a
rhetorical method designed to heighten the tragedy of Pequod's crew.
Yet even as whalemen are glorified, Ahab becomes a scapegoat. (For a
bit more on Melville's strategy of scapegoating, see Giorgio Mariani's
article, "Chiefly Known by His Rod," in Bryant's Ungraspable Phantom.)
We begin to suspect Ahab represents something other than a mad sea-
captain.
But this is not the half of it, so we return from Ch 82 to Ch 41 Moby
Dick.
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Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses
a Job's whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly
made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals--morally
enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-
mindedness in Starbuck, the invunerable jollity of indifference and
recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a
crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some
infernal fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge. How it was
that they so aboundingly responded to the old man's ire--by what evil
magic their souls were possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost
theirs; the White Whale as much their insufferable foe as his; how all
this came to be-what the White Whale was to them, or how to their
unconscious understandings, also, in some dim, unsuspected way, he
might have seemed the gliding great demon of the seas of life,--all
this to explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go. The
subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tell whither
leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his pick? Who
does not feel the irresistible arm drag? What skiff in tow of a
seventy-four can stand still? For one, I gave myself up to the
abandonment of the time and the place; but while yet all a-rush to
encounter the whale, could see naught in that brute but the deadliest
ill.
- Ch 41 Moby Dick
------------------------------
In the above passage, which follows a winding descent into the
Frigidarium of Constantine The Pale's Palais des Thermes (the winding
staircase is an intriguing psychological metaphor--see Eliot
Weinberger, "The Vortex" in Chicago Review, Spring 2006}, we discover
Melville's rhetoric about the crew inverts its tone. With Ch 24 The
Advocate, we marked the beginning of a sequence of favorable rhetoric,
but there is no parallel Ch 36 The Adversary to mark the subsequent
reversal. Nevertheless, with Ch 36 The Quarter-Deck, Melville offers
chapter after chapter of adversarial depictions of the crew. By Ch 41
Moby Dick, we are ready to accept at face that the crew are "mongrel
renegades, and castaways, and cannibals"--familiar words, but now in
an opposite context, we discover that "[s]uch a crew, so officered,
seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality to help
him to his monomaniac revenge." Nor does the narrator escape
deprecation, "I, too, was one of that crew."
So which is it? Are the crew demi-Gods, the best of humankind, worthy
of our praise and admiration? Or are they moral and ethical savages
unable to exert self-control over their animal natures or question the
legitimacy of their quest, thus deserving our disdain?
This duality of depiction, both here and elsewhere in Melville's
writing, is why I always want to say "Yes, but..." whenever I see a
critic invoke Clootz and his deputation as an unequivocal example of
Melville's love of the common man. To those of us who perceive the
desirability--or even the necessity--of displaying empathetic love and
respect for the human condition of Pip, Queequeg, Stubb, Starbuck, and
all the rest, do we also "of necessity" entertain the same compassion
and respect for the human condition of Ahab? Or do we join in the
stoning of the scapegoat?
Ffrangcon Lewis
Many thanks for this careful and artful investigation of Melville's attitudes towards the crew of the Pequod, and by implication of Ahab's status as 'scapegoat'. I like the fairness of the synthesis you make of recent Ishmailite discussions, as well as the observation of Melville's pitting of Ishmael's apparently opposed reactions to the crew against one another. All I can offer are a couple of off-the-cuff inklings.
Firstly, the shift from the democratic 'meanest mariners, renegades and castaways' to the ominous 'mongrel renegades, castaways, and cannibals' may seem a diametrical opposition, but its polarities, though not denied, are twice compromised: not only by the mischievous rhetorical question 'who ain't a cannibal?', but also by the fact that we are already positively acquainted with Queequeg, Ishmael's pacifically cannibal blood-brother, (* ius suum cuique?), to say nothing of the insinuation that even a George Washington might be imaginatively developed 'cannibalistically'.
Secondly, I am (perhaps idly) drawn to that phrase 'picked and packed', which you cannily select for your strapline. I might well be wrong here but doesn't that expression have some precedent in describing corrupt electoral practices, as when a candidate of privilege manoeuvred to 'pick and pack' his electors or his constituents with bribes or threats? If so, then perhaps Ahab may be seen, not so much as a scapegoat, but as a pseudo-democrat who usurps the collective loyalty of his crew to pursue his own perverse yet passionate complaint or crusade against the unseen ruler or rulers of the cosmos? You may argue that to adopt such a view of Ahab functions very precisely to scapegoat him, yet I would suggest that Ahab is too powerful in his monomaniac passion and his intellectual profundity (at least compared with the crew) for either the meanest mariners, or the more privileged passenger-readers, to make of him an easy sacrifice.
At the end of the novel, he is both a ruined tragic 'kingly-commoner' and an almost anonymous old whaling captain lost to the oblivion of the deep; he is both an unyieldingly defiant Prometheus and a damned Faustus claimed by his Mephistopheles. He is a 'grand, ungodly, godlike man', and yet, (or therefore), he 'has his humanities'.
At the end of the novel, we may take the view that Ahab is a human champion wilfully destroyed by visible and invisible forces wishing to oppress mankind, or we may prefer to see Ishmael the sole-surviving but somehow representatively human orphan buoyed up by Queequeg's sacrifice and purged of the 'madness maddened' which had threatened to draw him to that destruction to which Ahab's captaincy has doomed the rest of the crew. Either way, there is something irremediably unsettling in that catastrophe: as readers, perhaps our fate is to be reminded that our efforts at interpretation too are at worst 'midway whelmed', or, at best, bob around on the waves forlornly awaiting a rescue without a guarantee of redemption or regeneration, and with the deplorable possibility of an unceasing recurrence. (Hmm ... Good moment to stop, I suspect!)
*Ius suum cuique (Queequeg?): 'to each man his due or his rights'. There might perhaps be worse mottoes to commemorate Labor Day? Or would 'Farewell to thee ...' do a better job?
Best wishes,
Ffrangcon Lewis
--- On Mon, 9/1/08, Stephen Hoy <steph...@yahoo.com> wrote:
Phil Walsh
> and packed', which you cannily select for your strapline.
Having spent this afternoon picking grapes and packing jam into canning
jars, I'm compelled to spread some more information around. Here's a quote
from John Bunyan's _Works_, as reprinted in "The Life, Times, and
Characteristics of John Bunyan," by Robert Philip:
"It is a text made up of words picked and packed together, by the wisdom of
God: picked and packed together, on purpose for the succor and relief of the
tempted..."
I can't tell from what I've found so far whether or not Melville is known to
have owned or read the particular work this quote comes from. (I found it
via Google Books.)
Phil Walsh
Stephen Hoy
surely broad awareness of Bunyan's picked and packed words in the
nineteenth century. Melville's own words seem picked and packed as he
developed his points in Ch 41 Moby Dick.
In this chapter, Melville develops three ideas essential to his tale.
First, he demonstrates how an irrational fear of the unknown
transforms into a concrete object of intelligent malignity. He
develops this idea carefully in paragraphs 2 through 18. In doing so,
he first shows that it is a universal process which affects ordinary
crewmen as well as erudite experts. From par. 19-20, we see how this
universal process is also a particular process in the way it afflicts
Ahab by means of a specific traumatic experience.
Second, Melville points out that Ahab does not exercise conscious
control over his own inner secrets: This is the focus of par 21-24:
"his dissembling was only subject to his perceptibility, not to his
will determinate." In par. 22, the "grim sire" and "old state-secret"
suggest Ahab's particular secret has universal potency.
The third idea Melville develops in this chapter is that Ishmael, the
crew, and Ahab are on the same essential quest. He does this by
framing the entire chapter with reference to the crew in par. 1 and
25. We begin with "I, Ishmael, was one of that crew"; "Ahab's
quenchless feud seemed mine". In the middle, we see how crewmen in
general are affected by the same process that afflicts Ahab, then we
conclude with a "picked and packed" crew, and a reminder--if we ned
one--that "[t]he subterranean miner that works in us all".
In light of this careful demonstration of the universal nature of this
process, why do we so readily give our respect and compassion to the
crew while we withhold it from Ahab?
Phil Walsh
> In light of this careful demonstration of the universal
>nature of this
> process, why do we so readily give our respect and
>compassion to the
> crew while we withhold it from Ahab?
I'll state what's probably obvious to all by pointing out
that there are certainly those of us who give the lion's
share of respect and compassion to Ahab, and who believe
that Melville did as well.
Phil Walsh
Stephen Hoy
Bunyan, who famously applies the phrase in one of his sermons, "The
Unsearchable Riches of Christ." Bunyan applies the phrase to the text
of the Bible, while Bunyan's 19th c. editor Robert Philip (editor of
the volume Phil Walsh cites, first published 1839) applies the phrase
to Bunyan's method of writing. After this date, we find examples of
the phrase extending to other carefully developed ideas. The
expression fades from view at the beginning of the 20th century.
The phrase "picked and packed" as a harvest image calls to mind
Starbuck's final words: "Cherries! cherries! cherries!" This phrase
has its own history--but what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, so I
won't pursue it into the 20th c. In context, "cherries" is often read
as an appeal to the walled garden of a Persian paradise. I ran across
an article the other day looking at Coleridge's use of the Walled
Garden in his poem "Kublai Khan" but the metaphysical details escape
me momentarily.
In the general sense of concept formation, "picked and packed" bears
on the body of Melville criticism that considers the relationship
between Melville and the written page. For example, Anathasius
Christodoulou in "The Tragicalness of Human Thought" takes a letter
Melville wrote to Hawthorne and shows how HM understood the self-
destructive nature of concept formation. In this sense, a "picked and
packed" crew on a path of destruction suggests "picked and packed"
words or concepts whose destruction is necessary before a new concept
can emerge.