The Binding of Ishmael: Autobiographical Consciousness and Tragedy in Moby-Dick
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THE BINDING OF ISHMAEL: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND TRAGEDY IN MOBY-DICK by Christopher Rice Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts at Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia August 2014 © Copyright by Christopher Rice, 2014 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT.......................................................................................................................iii AWKNOWLEDGEMENTS...............................................................................................iv CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION.................................................................................1 CHAPTER TWO MELVILLE'S BACKGROUND: READING AND WRITING EXPERIENCE....................................................................................11 CHAPTER THREE ISHMAEL'S AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL CONSCIOUSNESS........24 CHAPTER FOUR SUBJECTIVITY ON LAND; RECOLLECTION AND VISION...50 CHAPTER FIVE IN AWE; THE TRAGEDY OF AHAB..............................................77 CHAPTER SIX CONCLUSION...................................................................................125 BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................129 ii ABSTRACT Since its publication in 1851, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick has been difficult to pin down in any formal sense. The book's experimental style, which seems to violate literary conventions through Ishmael's immediate presence and subsequent "disappearance" in the Ahab drama, constitutes a significant problem for generic classification. While many critics have noted that the dual-structure of the work is divided largely between personal narration and tragedy, little has been said of their interaction. This dissertation attempts to elucidate the narrative's continuity, and understand the effect achieved through the interaction of the novel's primary generic forms: autobiography and tragedy. Ishmael's recreation of Ahab's quest through the conventions of tragedy helps to clarify his peculiar relationship to Ahab. Though not at all a mere "narrative device," Ishmael is also not to be understood as a "narrator hero" either. The interaction between autobiography and tragedy illuminates Ishmael's function as a choric witness to Ahab above all. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis represents a longer chapter of my life than perhaps I would like to admit. I must thank my family—I do not thank them enough—for allowing me this opportunity; I am also indebted to the readers kind enough to devote their time; as well as both Dalhousie University and the University of King's College—since in the matter of almae matres, I should not conceal that I have two mothers. I recall many days devoted to reading Melville in the Don suite of Middle Bay, where I spent three years of my life. I would like to thank several friends for conversations along the way, especially Mark Dance, Tristan Gray, and Mark Burke (who had the questionable fortune of sharing an office with me). Mark Dance helped me to realize how important Gadamer was to what I was trying to articulate, and also the continuity between this current study and my earlier graduate work. A conversation we had at the end of one summer helped me immeasurably—and not just in an academic sense. Tristan Gray and I have thought together now for over a decade; he made me reflect more on Nietzsche's view of tragedy, a project that still requires more thinking. Mark Burke and I co-taught a class on "Kant and Radical Evil" in the fall of 2013, boldly (or foolishly) including Moby-Dick on the syllabus; the conversations and questions that emerged from this class were of great significance to me personally. I have cherished my opportunity to teach at King's in the Foundation Year Programme, and have learned more from students and colleagues there than I could hope to express. King's also supported Ariel Weiner, an undergraduate in the Classics department, as an assistant for my research into Aristotle, and I have benefitted a great deal from her understanding of antiquity. iv Finally, this thesis could not have been possible without the patience and thoughtful guidance of Dr. Bruce Greenfield, who, when the ship was already full to the brim, still managed to find room for one more sailor. v Chapter One: Introduction If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what then would life be but despair? If it were thus, if there were no sacred bond uniting mankind, if one generation succeeded the other as the songs of birds in the woods, if the human race passed through the world as a ship through the sea or the wind through the desert, a thoughtless and fruitless whim, if an eternal oblivion always lurked hungrily for its prey and there were no power strong enough to wrest it from its clutches—how empty and devoid of comfort would life be! But for that reason it is not so, and as God created man and woman, so too he shaped the hero and the poet or speech-maker. —Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (49) At times, Herman Melville's lively and contemplative whaling voyage, Moby-Dick, can be a rough ride. Since its publication in 1851, certain readers have attested to a kind of sea-sickness experienced over the course of the narrative. Most of these complaints find their source in Ishmael's voice and how it operates within the text. It is nothing new to note that Ishmael's voice is at once wandering, fluid, analytical, and poetic, or to point out the way in which the story it relates seems to be interrupted with everything from stage directions to cetology, drama and action. One early anonymous review finds the narrative an "ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact" ("An Ill-Compounded Mixture" 597); another remarks that the author "spreads his subject out beyond all reasonable bounds" ("Too Much for Our Money" 613). More recently, Glauco Cambon has phrased the problem in terms of "repeated modal shifts [that] make for an instability of point of view which prompts some critics to discount Ishmael as a realized and consistent actor-spectator, and to 1 consider him as a mere narrative device Melville feels free to discard when he sees fit" (517). In this way, interpretations of Ishmael, and ultimately his significance in the story of the White Whale, may have suffered from the demand of a specific kind of coherence. While some have argued that so-called "formal discontinuities” (516) in the narrative are the necessary result of a disjointed writing process on Melville's part, I will show that if properly attended to we can see these shifts as part of Ishmael's act of recollection and coping, and ultimately his attempt to understand Ahab's tragic action. Witnessing this almost incomprehensible act disrupts his very sense of identity and changes him profoundly. Ishmael cannot reconcile his captain's dark vision to his own rational optimism or American worldview. His attempt to interpret himself in the wake of this act is what unities the narrative. There is general consent in Melville scholarship that Moby-Dick consists of two main parts, centered around Ishmael and Ahab respectively. In a way, such an observation is simply one aspect of the larger experience of “discontinuity” in the novel’s narration. Yet even from a purely compositional perspective, George Stewart’s infamous article “The Two Moby-Dicks” highlights the shifting intentions within the evolution of Melville’s whaling book (418). Charles Olson goes so far as to claim that Moby-Dick “was two books,” that “the first book did not contain Ahab,” and that “it may not, except incidentally, have contained Moby-Dick” (34). Implicit in Olson’s claim is that Moby-Dick began as a travel narrative which drew upon Melville’s own experience in the way that his Typee and Omoo did. Yet for both Olson and Stewart, this initial whaling story was interrupted; and what it was interrupted by was nothing less than Melville’s own deep encounter with 2 Shakespeare during the so-called “pivotal summer of 1850” (McSweeney 15). As F.O. Matthiessen contends, Melville "had just begun to meditate on Shakespeare more creatively than any other American writer ever has. This meditation brought him to his first profound comprehension of the nature of tragedy. This was the charge that released Moby-Dick” (17). All of these critics suggest that Melville’s encounter with Shakespearian tragedy resulted in the second part of Moby-Dick: the tragedy of Ahab. Such an encounter “raise[d] Moby-Dick from a straightforward whaling narrative into an epic tragedy” (16). There are powerful textual reasons, and compelling biographical evidence, for thinking about Melville’s act of composition as being divided between autobiographical narrative and tragedy in this way, but understanding what holds these two sides together is another matter. It is my contention that the combination of these two modes is what in large part makes Melville’s whaling voyage such a compelling work of literature. While many have noticed that the narrative consists of two parts, and that the second part involved a formal shift towards tragedy, perhaps surprisingly, little has been said regarding the interaction of the genres of autobiography and tragedy as a means of explaining the extraordinary effect of Melville’s magnum opus. There are many reasons for this.