American Literature I, Lecture Twenty-Three

American Literature I Professor Patell Lecture Twenty-Three: Melville, Moby-Dick (II) April 21, 2010 Names and Terms intertextuality Owen Chase / The Essex cenotaph Points to Remember • How would we characterize Melville’s use of the Bible in Moby-Dick to Winthrop’s or Wigglesworth’s? How does his intertextuality differ from theirs? • Note the ways in which Ishmael’s narrative deviates from Melville’s own biography: Melville sailed west around Cape Horn, while the Pequod sails east around the Cape of Good Hope. • Note the ways in which Moby-Dick reverses the story of The Essex, which is destroyed by a whale in the South Pacific. Its sailors, afraid of cannibals in the Marquesas, elected to try to reach the coast of South America, sailing thousands of miles in open ocean in whaleboats. Ultimately, they are forced to engage in cannibalism to survive. Ishmael meets his cannibal right away; the encounter with the whale comes much, much later. Is this related to the novel’s “cosmopolitanism”? • What perspective on typology does the scene at the Spouter Inn—and Ishmael’s encounter with the “boggy, soggy, squitchy picture” (p. 26)—offer to us? How does the scene suggest that interpretation—and the obstacles to interpretation—will be one of the major topics of the novel? Why is the imagery of crucifixion in the scene unacknowledged by Ishmael? • What are we to make of Ishmael’s relationship to Queequeg? Page 36: “Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.” Page 55: “Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.” Page 57: “Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair.” • Does Ishmael’s comic approach to Queequeg during the land chapters of the novel (especially during their first meeting at the Spouter Inn) make their relationship palatable, or does it undercut the seriousness of the relationship? To what extent does their relationship signal the novel’s desire to overturn mid-nineteenth century ideas about the superiority of whites? • Why does Ishmael attempt to reproduce the cenotaphs in the chapel graphically on the page? In what ways do the cenotaphs, which commemorate a death in the absence of a body to bury, serve a function like a play-within-a-play or an inset story? In what ways may we regard the novel as a whole as a cenotaph? • Melville’s use of names like “Ishmael,” “Ahab,” “Peleg,” “Bildad” invites us to read typologically. Melville, like Winthrop, is using the Bible as an intertext. The difference between Winthrop and Melville is that Winthrop uses typological reference allegorically, while Melville uses it symbolically and, often, ironically. See, Patell / American Literature I / Lecture 23 2 for example, Ishmael’s encounter with Peleg and Bildad (“The Ship,” pp. 74-78). In what ways does the scene demonstrate the cultural uses of typological logic? For Further Thought • Compare the version of the Jonah story that Father Mapple tells to the version that we read in the Old Testament? In what ways is it different? How does Father Mapple adapt it for his audience? Why does Father Mapple focus on himself at the end of the sermon? In what ways can we compare Father Mapple to Captain Ahab? Today’s Music Elliott Smith, “Christian Brothers” Arrested Development, “Fishin’ for Religion” Green Day, “American Idiot” .

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