Reblogged
Me and the mutuals
the other other thing i've been thinking about wrt to the black sails finale is like. well in moby dick the narrator ishmael describes conversations between characters and monologues that they have while alone that he should not have been able to overhear as a a character in his own story. so i think there's a bit of a question of like, assuming that moby dick is in its own universe at least somewhat of an accurate retelling of real events how much of, say, ahab is invented by ishmael? should we assume that the ahab we see is genuinely reflective of a "real" man outside of ishmael and the seeming logical flaws are just a quirk of the writing or is he constructed as an avatar of ishmael's desire to find meaning and narrative coherence in his own tragedy? is there a middle ground between the two, some sort of core truth that's been so embellished by ishmael's narrative flourishes that it's impossible now to tell what has been invented and what hasn't? that's not the important question though the important question is how much should our reading of the text change based on the answer. since it's all fictional and invented.
Reblogged starbuck
Some of my favorite chapters of moby dick were the ones that describe the whale butchery…the way it’s written to be so purposefully horrific and reverent? Everything is described so bloody but ALWAYS while implying a sort of holiness (or a sort unholiness, maybe)
And then not reverent at all. A beheaded leviathan, still grand and colossal but once they’ve stripped it they just abandon the rest of the carcass at sea.
I love the description of desecration…in these chapters Ishmael describes the whale as something not of this world, as a leviathan, as a god, but what does it mean to kill something like that in such an industrial way? and then the rest of the chapter describes the marble body of the whale as a ghost!! Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend? Ishmael asks, the ocean is full of them, he’ll go back to this point several times in the story until you realize the whole crew of the pequod and Ishmael himself are ghosts, too, subject to a similar gruesome end. Universal cannibalism of the sea, indeed
another interesting thing i haven't thought much about before--moby dick is full of weaving imagery, most directly in ch47 where ishmael and queequeg are actually weaving a mat. it reminds me of penelope and how her weaving is connected to odysseus' sea travels and his autobiographical storytelling, things that obviously constitute the narrative of moby dick. it's also explicitly connected to the fates and to destiny, something inevitable but also in a state of being actively created. this might be a reach but is that not also something you could say about the process of recounting a story, of reading a book, of interpreting a text?
Reblogged drinkthemlock
Read Moby Dick
reading emerson's nature and getting the impression that moby dick exists in conversation with it not *just* in the sense of nature and man's relation to it but in the section on language and allegory. like as i see it emerson's argument is that allegory is the highest and most natural form of expression and that nature exists in part in order to serve as a library of symbols through which man may articulate to himself and his species his own thoughts and spirit and capital r Reason. and like moby dick has to exist at least a little bit as a challenge to this right. like ahab is trying to assert domination over the whale (and nature) not just through killing him and rendering him a consumable commodity *physically* but through turning him into a symbol, something that exists not as an independent being who exists of and for himself but as an internal part of ahab's own psychic landscape. something that only exists to represent something else to a human. which of course fails! it's moby dick who consumes him. and i think this could be part of why melville is so ambivalent about symbols. especially if as i have been led to believe this essay typified (white, male) american interaction with nature in ways both descriptive and prescriptive. anyway i looked it up and yeah lol melville was both a big fan and big critic of emerson
