I love the way Emerson's sphere of influence is broadened here. I would also like to think of the appearance of "not-Ahab" in Chapter 44 not as an error, but a fully intentional manifestation of the inseparable existence of Ahab with Moby-Dick. The referenced passage from Chapter 42 sets us up for this nicely. Melville admired the "deep-diving" of Emerson; Ahab's out-of-body experience might be viewed as a wonderful anti-transcendental image of Emerson's "transparent eyeball" state. I have also reached the age of Ahab, and may now have to take the journey again myself. Thank you.
Poor Ahab just can't tap into the "perpetual presence of the sublime" that RWE feels under the stars at night. His nighttime meditations take him to much darker places, eh?
My working theory is that Emerson was the advance guard of the American Renaissance—that he saw all the literary possibilities, before anyone else, but maybe because he was trained as a minister, decided on a fairly narrow and abstract path for himself. There's also a series of entries where he basically maps out Thoreau's whole literary and intellectual career long before he even met Thoreau.
I always saw the novel as a metaphor for the USA. Always and for ever searching for enemy’s , always ending at the bottom of the sea. I understand my readings is not even scratching the surface of this great novel. So i will make the journey once’s more. Wish me luck.
For your next assignment, Mr. Crain, I would like you to draw out the correspondences between MOBY-DICK and, ahem, WHITE NOISE.
Have you actually read every word or even most of the words in CLAREL? If so, dude . . . .
Such a lovely piece. Thank you for writing it. Decades ago I put WHITE-JACKET in print in a Signet Classics edition. It is strange how few very literate people are not aware of TYPEE, OMOO, BENITO CERENO, etc.
Lol, it’s been a few decades since I read “White Noise” so I’m due for a re-read! Indeed I have read every word of “Clarel,” and will even argue that it’s great in its very odd and cryptic way. Wrote about it in my essay “Melville’s Secrets.” Once you give in and accept the Miltonic sentence structures and the bristly texture, the weird emotional miasma is mesmerizing. Co-sign on the early Melville novels needing more play!
Good read, but I object to calling Ahab “insane” toward the end. In my view — I’m no literary analyst, but I did once do an analysis comparing Fidel Castro’s mindset to Captain Ahab’s and Don Quixote’s decades ago — Ahab had a “hubris-nemesis complex” that made him seem insanely driven, but without being truly insane.
In the normal Greek dynamic, hubris (the pretension to be god-like) is brought down by Nemesis at Zeus’s behest. Yet leaders sometimes arise who embody both forces. They not only have hubris, they also want to be the Nemesis of an external force they accuse of greater hubris. In brief, they have a hubris-nemesis complex.
In this dynamic, hubris and Nemesis no longer oppose and contradict each other. They become compatible contradictions, fused in a single psyche — mutually feeding on each other in ways that generate enormous energy, ambition, dynamism, and charisma, plus a thirst for absolute power. This complex is more malignant, and dangerous than standard narcissism. For, to be as powerful as their hubris requires, such leaders must act as the nemesis of an outside power; it is part of their hubris to want to play Nemesis.
As I see I wrote at the time about Ahab (who exemplifies the complex) and Quixote (who did not have the psychological complex), “Each is enchanted with his ideal — his reasoned illusion — to the point of madness; but this madness is not insanity, for in all other respects both are entirely sane and capable.”
Plus, “Just as loving thoughts of Dulcinea magnified Quixote's strength and resolve without hindering his general sanity, so did Ahab's hateful fixation on Moby Dick. During the growth of Ahab's ‘broad madness, not one jot of his great natural intellect had perished. ...(H)is special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentrated cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a thousand fold more potency than ever he had brought to bear upon any one reasonable object. (XLI)’”
In my view, Ahab is a (the?) literary archetype of the hubris-nemesis complex. Real world figures abound too: e.g., Hitler, Castro, Khomeini. Today I’d add Trump to the list. They have all been called “insane” as I recall. But take away their hubris-nemesis complexes, and I doubt they’d seem so. Malignantly narcissistic yes, but not clinically insane.
BTW, this is the first I’ve ever asked a literary expert on Moby Dick or Don Quixote about this analysis. I’ll hope for a reply. I still wish I could have done more with “Draft Chapters on Two Faces of Fidel: Don Quixote and Captain Ahab” (1990), but it was not to be.
Wow! I read Moby Dick again several years ago as a well-seasoned adult and was just as flummoxed by the ordeal as I was as a HS senior. I'm all about good dialogue, believable dialogue and admire writers who can craft it so that its doesn't get in the way. Nobody talks or has ever talked the way these characters do. Neither Melville nor Pat Conroy has the knack. I'll stick with Larry McMurtry's earlier stuff.
I love the way Emerson's sphere of influence is broadened here. I would also like to think of the appearance of "not-Ahab" in Chapter 44 not as an error, but a fully intentional manifestation of the inseparable existence of Ahab with Moby-Dick. The referenced passage from Chapter 42 sets us up for this nicely. Melville admired the "deep-diving" of Emerson; Ahab's out-of-body experience might be viewed as a wonderful anti-transcendental image of Emerson's "transparent eyeball" state. I have also reached the age of Ahab, and may now have to take the journey again myself. Thank you.
Great idea to put Ahab's madness in parallel with the "transparent eyeball" passage. Thanks!
Poor Ahab just can't tap into the "perpetual presence of the sublime" that RWE feels under the stars at night. His nighttime meditations take him to much darker places, eh?
Those correspondences are really kind of eerie… The American undermind.
My working theory is that Emerson was the advance guard of the American Renaissance—that he saw all the literary possibilities, before anyone else, but maybe because he was trained as a minister, decided on a fairly narrow and abstract path for himself. There's also a series of entries where he basically maps out Thoreau's whole literary and intellectual career long before he even met Thoreau.
Please tell me you're writing a book that will elaborate this theory?
I’ll add it to the list of books I should write!
Hahah... Heard. This one should get pride of place, though.
I always saw the novel as a metaphor for the USA. Always and for ever searching for enemy’s , always ending at the bottom of the sea. I understand my readings is not even scratching the surface of this great novel. So i will make the journey once’s more. Wish me luck.
For your next assignment, Mr. Crain, I would like you to draw out the correspondences between MOBY-DICK and, ahem, WHITE NOISE.
Have you actually read every word or even most of the words in CLAREL? If so, dude . . . .
Such a lovely piece. Thank you for writing it. Decades ago I put WHITE-JACKET in print in a Signet Classics edition. It is strange how few very literate people are not aware of TYPEE, OMOO, BENITO CERENO, etc.
Lol, it’s been a few decades since I read “White Noise” so I’m due for a re-read! Indeed I have read every word of “Clarel,” and will even argue that it’s great in its very odd and cryptic way. Wrote about it in my essay “Melville’s Secrets.” Once you give in and accept the Miltonic sentence structures and the bristly texture, the weird emotional miasma is mesmerizing. Co-sign on the early Melville novels needing more play!
Good read, but I object to calling Ahab “insane” toward the end. In my view — I’m no literary analyst, but I did once do an analysis comparing Fidel Castro’s mindset to Captain Ahab’s and Don Quixote’s decades ago — Ahab had a “hubris-nemesis complex” that made him seem insanely driven, but without being truly insane.
In the normal Greek dynamic, hubris (the pretension to be god-like) is brought down by Nemesis at Zeus’s behest. Yet leaders sometimes arise who embody both forces. They not only have hubris, they also want to be the Nemesis of an external force they accuse of greater hubris. In brief, they have a hubris-nemesis complex.
In this dynamic, hubris and Nemesis no longer oppose and contradict each other. They become compatible contradictions, fused in a single psyche — mutually feeding on each other in ways that generate enormous energy, ambition, dynamism, and charisma, plus a thirst for absolute power. This complex is more malignant, and dangerous than standard narcissism. For, to be as powerful as their hubris requires, such leaders must act as the nemesis of an outside power; it is part of their hubris to want to play Nemesis.
As I see I wrote at the time about Ahab (who exemplifies the complex) and Quixote (who did not have the psychological complex), “Each is enchanted with his ideal — his reasoned illusion — to the point of madness; but this madness is not insanity, for in all other respects both are entirely sane and capable.”
Plus, “Just as loving thoughts of Dulcinea magnified Quixote's strength and resolve without hindering his general sanity, so did Ahab's hateful fixation on Moby Dick. During the growth of Ahab's ‘broad madness, not one jot of his great natural intellect had perished. ...(H)is special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentrated cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a thousand fold more potency than ever he had brought to bear upon any one reasonable object. (XLI)’”
In my view, Ahab is a (the?) literary archetype of the hubris-nemesis complex. Real world figures abound too: e.g., Hitler, Castro, Khomeini. Today I’d add Trump to the list. They have all been called “insane” as I recall. But take away their hubris-nemesis complexes, and I doubt they’d seem so. Malignantly narcissistic yes, but not clinically insane.
BTW, this is the first I’ve ever asked a literary expert on Moby Dick or Don Quixote about this analysis. I’ll hope for a reply. I still wish I could have done more with “Draft Chapters on Two Faces of Fidel: Don Quixote and Captain Ahab” (1990), but it was not to be.
Onward.
Interesting way of looking at Ahab, thanks!
I cheered for the whale.
Before overthinking further , read the Knickerbocker original and spend a winter in Bequia learning the harpooner's trade
https://x.com/RussellSeitz/status/1955814987651272870
Wow! I read Moby Dick again several years ago as a well-seasoned adult and was just as flummoxed by the ordeal as I was as a HS senior. I'm all about good dialogue, believable dialogue and admire writers who can craft it so that its doesn't get in the way. Nobody talks or has ever talked the way these characters do. Neither Melville nor Pat Conroy has the knack. I'll stick with Larry McMurtry's earlier stuff.