Revisiting wild Logan
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finkuoo stein
Sep 27, 2008, 11:01:54 AM9/27/08
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All and fellows in the mortgage business,
Sometime ago, not too long ago, Stephen filled us in about that wild Logan at the end of chapter 33. I thank Stephen for all the info on this subject as well as on a multitude of others. I wish him good luck on satire. I would like to add something on this Indian who had befriended the white settlers only to have his relatives slaughtered by them. I found the following doing a google-book on the subject "Logan-Indian-hollow tree." This Indian was seven-years old when "bewildered and tired, Logan crawled into a hollow tree and slept. In his vision the Great Manitou or Spirit appeared to him, who seemed to say, 'You shall be neither a great hunter nor a doctor, nor yet a prophet, but a warrior and an orator.''' This quote is from Up the Susquehanna by Hiles C. Pardoe (1895).
Melville, likening both Ahab and Logan to bears, stretches Logan's stay in that tree to a season rather than a day, assuming that Melville had some knowledge of this particular event in Logan's life. Ahab likewise is not so much a hunter of whales as a warrior against one whale. One might also make a case for Ahab as an orator. But Ahab acknowledges no Great Spirit. Nevertheless, it is curious that spirit comes into play here.
A man in a hollow tree reminds me of the hermit in a hollow tree in chapter one, which I think is Saint Anthony of the Desert. I wonder whether there might be some kind of loose association of ideas in Melville's mind. In the following chapter, "The Mast-Head," Melville cites the champion stander of mastheads, Saint Simon Stylites. Could we have a general association of spiritual desert fathers here? I am merely asking? Some book used as a source might be revealing. John Gretchko
PS Now that we are in the mortgage business Christine should be able to guide us through. We are blessed.
tamar cummings
Sep 27, 2008, 2:04:00 PM9/27/08
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What baffles me is that there is an assumption the cons are done.
|
Stephen Hoy
Sep 29, 2008, 1:22:09 PM9/29/08
to Ishmailites
I think you're onto something with this Hermit line of thought. What
was it St. Simeon Stylites said when he was asked about the danger of
falling? Something like 'humility brings you closer to the ground.'
If we go through the list of standers-of-mast-heads in Ch 34, Napoleon
was certainly not endowed with humility, but we might wonder how
fellow-warriors Washington and Nelson stand in Pride vs. Humility. I
had a long look recently at a volume by Peter France on Hermits:
Insights into Solitude, which I can recommend to other readers as an
introduction to the eremetiic tradition.
Hermits appear in a half-dozen of Melville's works. I tend to align
these allusions in terms of their Fortress aspects. That is, they are
examples of isolation or protection from the influences of the World.
As to Logan in the trunk of a tree, Pardoe's story seems a post-hoc
embellishment like Washington chopping down a cherry tree to
demonstrate his life-long integrity. It's significant that we don't
find Logan's story in earlier sources where we would expect it. For
example, in Jefferson's second edition of Notes on Virginia, the
author attached a long appendix responding to the controversy of
Logan's oration. Jefferson's main point in including the speech was to
demonstrate to skeptics the inherent oratory ability of native
americans. Readers challenged whether Logan had actually made the
speech, so Jefferson included affadavits from participants like John
Gibson who actually wrote out the speech as it had been delivered to
him..None of these sources mention Logan's teenage vision-dream, which
they surely would have if they had been aware of it, because it
reinforces Jefferson's point about innate oratoric ability.
Thanks to Frrangcon from pointing out "If We Must Die", which has a
half-dozen pages on the mutiny aboard the Tryal, and for noting Philip
Hoare's recent video. Hoare's Leviathan book has received a lot of
attention, but I haven't picked it up yet. I'm interested in deciding
whether Hoare's book is a must-read like Nathaniel Philbrick's Heart
of the Sea.
A pair of recommendations from my own recent reading, which inspired
my abortive attempt at satire (evidently six years passed are too few
to allow serious self-mocking):
Scott Blanchard, Scholar's Bedlam
Carter Kaplan, Critical Synoptics.
Blanchard gives a decent background on the use of Menippean satire
through the ages, although his digressions are distractingly abstruse
at times. If you have time for only one of these, Kaplan is a clearer
writer and offers a framework for further analysis. He spends a fair
amount of attention to Melville's employment of Menippean satire in M-
D and C-M.
was it St. Simeon Stylites said when he was asked about the danger of
falling? Something like 'humility brings you closer to the ground.'
If we go through the list of standers-of-mast-heads in Ch 34, Napoleon
was certainly not endowed with humility, but we might wonder how
fellow-warriors Washington and Nelson stand in Pride vs. Humility. I
had a long look recently at a volume by Peter France on Hermits:
Insights into Solitude, which I can recommend to other readers as an
introduction to the eremetiic tradition.
Hermits appear in a half-dozen of Melville's works. I tend to align
these allusions in terms of their Fortress aspects. That is, they are
examples of isolation or protection from the influences of the World.
As to Logan in the trunk of a tree, Pardoe's story seems a post-hoc
embellishment like Washington chopping down a cherry tree to
demonstrate his life-long integrity. It's significant that we don't
find Logan's story in earlier sources where we would expect it. For
example, in Jefferson's second edition of Notes on Virginia, the
author attached a long appendix responding to the controversy of
Logan's oration. Jefferson's main point in including the speech was to
demonstrate to skeptics the inherent oratory ability of native
americans. Readers challenged whether Logan had actually made the
speech, so Jefferson included affadavits from participants like John
Gibson who actually wrote out the speech as it had been delivered to
him..None of these sources mention Logan's teenage vision-dream, which
they surely would have if they had been aware of it, because it
reinforces Jefferson's point about innate oratoric ability.
Thanks to Frrangcon from pointing out "If We Must Die", which has a
half-dozen pages on the mutiny aboard the Tryal, and for noting Philip
Hoare's recent video. Hoare's Leviathan book has received a lot of
attention, but I haven't picked it up yet. I'm interested in deciding
whether Hoare's book is a must-read like Nathaniel Philbrick's Heart
of the Sea.
A pair of recommendations from my own recent reading, which inspired
my abortive attempt at satire (evidently six years passed are too few
to allow serious self-mocking):
Scott Blanchard, Scholar's Bedlam
Carter Kaplan, Critical Synoptics.
Blanchard gives a decent background on the use of Menippean satire
through the ages, although his digressions are distractingly abstruse
at times. If you have time for only one of these, Kaplan is a clearer
writer and offers a framework for further analysis. He spends a fair
amount of attention to Melville's employment of Menippean satire in M-
D and C-M.
finkuoo stein
Sep 30, 2008, 12:33:17 PM9/30/08
to Ishma...@googlegroups.com
Thanks, Stephen, for your observations. As for Logan being in a hollow tree, this might have been folkloric. Since it is written about a child Logan, perhaps this tale would be found in some sort of children's book. John Gretchko
Hardeman
Sep 30, 2008, 4:54:25 PM9/30/08
to Ishmailites
Stephen and John,
You might find this account interesting but there is nothing about
Logan in the tree
<Jefferson and the Indians, The Story of Logan>
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/features/waljef/intro2.html
There are excellent references as for example Brantz Mayer’s <Tah-gah-
jute: or Logan and Cresap 1851>
which might help your search. However the fact that Jefferson
supressed Clark’s letter about the matter of the original massacre and
the politics of reprisal may reveal more about the “Metaphysics of
Indian-hating.”
Hardeman
>
> - Show quoted text -
Scott Norsworthy
Oct 2, 2008, 1:03:01 AM10/2/08
to Ishma...@googlegroups.com
Thanks John and all contributors for calling attention to the Logan reference in Moby-Dick.
Ahab, bears, Logan, Indians, hermits... The cluster of images and associations in this passage does seem important and well deserving of further explication and exploration. It would be great to hear more from Stephen and others on Melville's hermits. Also MELVILLE AND BEARS.
Looking again at the passage in question from chapter 34:
"...socially, Ahab was inaccessible. Though nominally included in the census of Christendom, he was still an alien to it. He lived in the world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled Missouri. And as when Spring and Summer had departed, that wild Logan of the woods, burying himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the winter there, sucking his own paws; so, in his inclement, howling old age, Ahab's soul, shut up in the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the sullen paws of its gloom!"
Seems to me, the wild thing in the tree is the grizzly bear, not Logan but something like Logan. Ahab is Logan once removed, by association with the bear. In other words, the immediate, chief comparison here is Ahab to bear--not just any kind of bear, but the grizzly, and not just any grizzly, but the last of the grizzlies in the civilized world. Thus, "that wild Logan of the woods" is THE BEAR. Ahab is a loner, like The Last Grizzly. The Last Grizzly is wild, like Logan. So if we want sources and analogues we might better hunt up a story about the lonely last grizzly, hibernating in the neighborhood of Missouri.
For context, here is Washington Irving on the grizzy bear, from Astoria:
"The grizzly bear is the only really formidable quadruped of our continent. He is the favourite theme of the hunters of the far West, who describe him as equal in size to a common cow, and of prodigious strength. He makes battle, if assailed; and often, if pressed by hunger, is the assailant. If wounded, he becomes furious, and will pursue the hunter.... At the time we are treating of, the grizzly bear was still frequent on the Missouri, and in the lower country; but, like some of the broken tribes of the prairie, he has gradually fallen back before his enemies, and is now chiefly to be found in the upland regions, in rugged fastnesses, like those of the Black Hills and the Rocky Mountains. Here he lurks in caverns, or holes which he has digged in the sides of hills, or under the roots and trunks of fallen trees."
Cheers,
Scott
Ahab, bears, Logan, Indians, hermits... The cluster of images and associations in this passage does seem important and well deserving of further explication and exploration. It would be great to hear more from Stephen and others on Melville's hermits. Also MELVILLE AND BEARS.
Looking again at the passage in question from chapter 34:
"...socially, Ahab was inaccessible. Though nominally included in the census of Christendom, he was still an alien to it. He lived in the world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled Missouri. And as when Spring and Summer had departed, that wild Logan of the woods, burying himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the winter there, sucking his own paws; so, in his inclement, howling old age, Ahab's soul, shut up in the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the sullen paws of its gloom!"
Seems to me, the wild thing in the tree is the grizzly bear, not Logan but something like Logan. Ahab is Logan once removed, by association with the bear. In other words, the immediate, chief comparison here is Ahab to bear--not just any kind of bear, but the grizzly, and not just any grizzly, but the last of the grizzlies in the civilized world. Thus, "that wild Logan of the woods" is THE BEAR. Ahab is a loner, like The Last Grizzly. The Last Grizzly is wild, like Logan. So if we want sources and analogues we might better hunt up a story about the lonely last grizzly, hibernating in the neighborhood of Missouri.
For context, here is Washington Irving on the grizzy bear, from Astoria:
"The grizzly bear is the only really formidable quadruped of our continent. He is the favourite theme of the hunters of the far West, who describe him as equal in size to a common cow, and of prodigious strength. He makes battle, if assailed; and often, if pressed by hunger, is the assailant. If wounded, he becomes furious, and will pursue the hunter.... At the time we are treating of, the grizzly bear was still frequent on the Missouri, and in the lower country; but, like some of the broken tribes of the prairie, he has gradually fallen back before his enemies, and is now chiefly to be found in the upland regions, in rugged fastnesses, like those of the Black Hills and the Rocky Mountains. Here he lurks in caverns, or holes which he has digged in the sides of hills, or under the roots and trunks of fallen trees."
Cheers,
Scott
finkuoo stein
Oct 2, 2008, 9:40:58 AM10/2/08
to Ishma...@googlegroups.com
Bravo, Scott. Yes, that sounds right. However, Melville might have used this metaphor of Logan while remembering a folklore tale of a child Logan who had once slept in a hollow tree. If so, he could be satirizing this folk tale. John G
Stephen Hoy
Oct 2, 2008, 12:32:38 PM10/2/08
to Ishmailites
Nice work, Scott, chasing down this Grizzly lifted from Irving's
Astoria, which Irving in turn lifted from Robert Stuart's notes.
Stuart was the leader of the overland expedition returning from
Astoria to St. Louis, sort of a one-way Lewis and Clark expedition.
Stuart settled at the fur trading site at Mackinaw--excuse me,
Mackinac--Michigan, where he acted as the Astor Trading Company's
agent. Stuart's oldest son David shows up in a note to Melville's
poem, The Rebel Color Bearers at Shiloh. He's the brigade commander
who declined to open fire at the "too brave men to be killed." Anyway--
Stuart's journal was proprietary information, corporate secrets if you
will, until Irving was provided a copy for a book commisioned by
Astor. Recent notice of Stuart's journals can be found in a couple of
books, one by Laton McCartney, Across the Great Divide (which I've
read), and another by Philip Rollins, The Discovery of the Oregon
Trail (which I haven't read). I can recommend two more of Irving's
late books which receive very little attention these days, Tour on the
Prairies and The Adventures of Captain Bonneville. Astoria completed
Irving's American travel trilogy.
One item which puzzled me til now is how Melville evidently mis-
located the grizzly in the state of Missouri (1821 statehood,
concurrent with Maine). I commonly think of the upper reaches of the
Missouri as the Dakota Territory, but this name wasn't applied until
the 1860s. In Melville's youth, this region of Jefferson's Louisiana
Purchase was effectively unorganized, but typically labeled Missouri
Territory on maps. Its area increasingly diminished as Missouri, Iowa,
Wisconsin, and Minnesota achieved statehood. Evidently Melville's use
of "settled Missouri" refers to this territory rather than the state.
West and south of this territory, maps show a "Great American Desert",
then the Rocky Mountains. So we have a connotation of desert-ness in
this portion of the American wilderness.
And yes, it's important to focus on Ahab's nature as the referent of
the grizzly analogy, but wild Logan the orator-warrior is also
ironically/satirically likened to this same grizzly, which then aligns
with numerous similar undercuttings of M-D's surface readings which an
attentive reader might reasonably be expected to notice and respond to
with emotional outrage, just as a decade later Melville would
implicitly note how the miners and sappers at Petersburg undercut the
surface of that city's fortress before it, too, exploded. "So then,
the earth's a crust." To draw this point closer to home, recall the
emotional outburst in response to my recent intentionally equivocal
words about pigs. This gives some small idea how Melville's readers
reacted.
I hope John will find a mid-century storybook with a morality tale
about a teenage Logan hiding in a tree trunk. This was a great era for
childhood morality tales, attested by the popularity of Jacob Abbott's
Rollo books.
Astoria, which Irving in turn lifted from Robert Stuart's notes.
Stuart was the leader of the overland expedition returning from
Astoria to St. Louis, sort of a one-way Lewis and Clark expedition.
Stuart settled at the fur trading site at Mackinaw--excuse me,
Mackinac--Michigan, where he acted as the Astor Trading Company's
agent. Stuart's oldest son David shows up in a note to Melville's
poem, The Rebel Color Bearers at Shiloh. He's the brigade commander
who declined to open fire at the "too brave men to be killed." Anyway--
Stuart's journal was proprietary information, corporate secrets if you
will, until Irving was provided a copy for a book commisioned by
Astor. Recent notice of Stuart's journals can be found in a couple of
books, one by Laton McCartney, Across the Great Divide (which I've
read), and another by Philip Rollins, The Discovery of the Oregon
Trail (which I haven't read). I can recommend two more of Irving's
late books which receive very little attention these days, Tour on the
Prairies and The Adventures of Captain Bonneville. Astoria completed
Irving's American travel trilogy.
One item which puzzled me til now is how Melville evidently mis-
located the grizzly in the state of Missouri (1821 statehood,
concurrent with Maine). I commonly think of the upper reaches of the
Missouri as the Dakota Territory, but this name wasn't applied until
the 1860s. In Melville's youth, this region of Jefferson's Louisiana
Purchase was effectively unorganized, but typically labeled Missouri
Territory on maps. Its area increasingly diminished as Missouri, Iowa,
Wisconsin, and Minnesota achieved statehood. Evidently Melville's use
of "settled Missouri" refers to this territory rather than the state.
West and south of this territory, maps show a "Great American Desert",
then the Rocky Mountains. So we have a connotation of desert-ness in
this portion of the American wilderness.
And yes, it's important to focus on Ahab's nature as the referent of
the grizzly analogy, but wild Logan the orator-warrior is also
ironically/satirically likened to this same grizzly, which then aligns
with numerous similar undercuttings of M-D's surface readings which an
attentive reader might reasonably be expected to notice and respond to
with emotional outrage, just as a decade later Melville would
implicitly note how the miners and sappers at Petersburg undercut the
surface of that city's fortress before it, too, exploded. "So then,
the earth's a crust." To draw this point closer to home, recall the
emotional outburst in response to my recent intentionally equivocal
words about pigs. This gives some small idea how Melville's readers
reacted.
I hope John will find a mid-century storybook with a morality tale
about a teenage Logan hiding in a tree trunk. This was a great era for
childhood morality tales, attested by the popularity of Jacob Abbott's
Rollo books.
Scott Norsworthy
Oct 3, 2008, 2:42:29 PM10/3/08
to Ishma...@googlegroups.com
For sure, Melville's reference to Logan seems full of meaning. I wonder how Logan the orator-warrior fits with other aspects of the Native-American theme, visible for instance in the name of the doomed ship, The Pequod, and in the characterization of Tashtego with his unforgettably prominent role in the novel's closing tableau. Yukiko Oshima has a marvelous essay on this theme, "The Red Flag of the Pequod/Pequot" (published in Melville "Among the Nations" at 254-64).
The background on Irving's Astoria is good to have--thanks, Stephen. The Stuart connection is new to me. I did know that Irving's three "far-west" narratives were immensely popular during Melville's youth. They were reviewed and excerpted in many newspapers and periodicals including the Albany NY papers. Also the 1837 library catalog of the Albany Young Men's Association lists a 12 vol. set of Irving's works. Gansevoort Melville's 1837 Index Rerum (now at the Berkshire Athenaeum in Pittsfield MA) contains multiple citations from Latrobe's The Rambler in North America. Charles Joseph Latrobe had accompanied Washington Irving on his "Tour on the Prairies" and dedicated The Rambler to Irving.
Irving's Adventures of Captain Bonneville and Astoria are especially interesting to me as prime examples of a common practice in Melville's day, the "editing" or re-writing of eyewitness travel narratives by a professional maker of books or "magazinist." Even the journals of Lewis and Clark were for many years only available in popular abridgements done by "ghostwriters" (as we now call them).
Cheers,
Scott
The background on Irving's Astoria is good to have--thanks, Stephen. The Stuart connection is new to me. I did know that Irving's three "far-west" narratives were immensely popular during Melville's youth. They were reviewed and excerpted in many newspapers and periodicals including the Albany NY papers. Also the 1837 library catalog of the Albany Young Men's Association lists a 12 vol. set of Irving's works. Gansevoort Melville's 1837 Index Rerum (now at the Berkshire Athenaeum in Pittsfield MA) contains multiple citations from Latrobe's The Rambler in North America. Charles Joseph Latrobe had accompanied Washington Irving on his "Tour on the Prairies" and dedicated The Rambler to Irving.
Irving's Adventures of Captain Bonneville and Astoria are especially interesting to me as prime examples of a common practice in Melville's day, the "editing" or re-writing of eyewitness travel narratives by a professional maker of books or "magazinist." Even the journals of Lewis and Clark were for many years only available in popular abridgements done by "ghostwriters" (as we now call them).
Cheers,
Scott
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