Moby Dick (In Our Time)

this is the BBC this podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK this is the BBC thanks for downloading this episode of in our time there's a reading list to go with it on our website and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter that's BBC in our time I hope you enjoyed the programmes hello Moby Dick by Herman Melville tells the story of Captain Ahab whose leg was bitten off by a great white whale and Ahab wants to hunt it down and kill it in revenge it was published in 1851 but it was over fifty years before Moby Dick became known or thought of as a great American novel as yesterday men in the cold war reader saw a ham as a dictator leading his crew on the Pequod to disaster in pursuit of a mission they didn't sign up for we're discussing my bidding now this autumn as this autumn we asked you to suggest today's topic this one came from James Rogers Michael Redmond Caroline heck Mike Stanley Arizona and Baker drew Kirkland Charlie pullin Mike Metcalf John Rowland's min-koo yonk and Martin Padgett our thanks go to them and all of you for sending in almost a thousand ideas we will plunder those in the years to come with me to discuss Moby Dick are Bridget Bennett professor of American literature and culture at the University of Leeds Katie a magnetic on a lecturer in American literature at Royal Holloway University of London and Graham Thompson associate professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham Brigid Bennett what would Herman Melville's background Melville was born in 1819 he died in 1891 and his story is a story of decline from quite a patrician background into one in which his family had a set of financial crises so by 1830 his father Allen has to liquidate his business and buy the kind of financial crisis of 1837 Melville finds himself working for his brother in his brothers fur and cap store so his education is damaged by this experience he's pulled out of school he finds that he doesn't have the education to which he would expect to have his family moves from New York City to upstate New York and we see this kind of relative of decline one thing that he gains after his father's death is a letter II which his family adds to the end of his name so that it moved from Melville double-l to Melville with the at the end so this is how we recognize him it's Melville why do you look it seems like they wanted a distance themselves potentially from the father and this financial failure so it's not entirely clear but his mother choose to chose to do this was his financial failure one of those things that happened in finances or was he sort of drunk disreputable or something like that it's a period of great financial crises in the United States particularly around 1837 so it just seems to be part of that period in the u.s. life in which that's happening so at this point then Melville his father's dead he has a peripatetic life he's trying to find employment and he within his family history there's a history of men going to see he has an uncle who's gone to sea he's got a cousin who's gone to sea so his brother Gansevoort puts him on a vessel as a cabin boy and he sails over to Liverpool and he has an experience in Liverpool of seeing what port is like seeing what it's like to work on a merchant vessel comes back to the United States and then in the period of the early 1840s he sails once more on a whaling vessel the Acushnet he jumps ship at the Marquesas Islands he has a set of adventures including a period of mutiny comes back eventually to the United States and settles down to write a series of novels over a short period in which broadly speaking they derive from this experience so he writes type II 1846 or mu 1847 Mardy 18-49 white jacket 1850 a lot ya know reasonably successful invention Don was one of German are very successful but he had only one major whirling experience is what you're talking about he did over this period of time yes and how big he was one man what do I mean when I say major well so he embarked on a vessel he learnt all about whaling what it was he worked as a harpooneer so he's literally at the sharp end of what you do on a whaling vessel and he he he knows his ships he knows what it means to be a Whaler he knows what it means to travel where did that ship go it went all over the place over the south see islands he ended up in Tahiti at one point and in Hawaii so it was a it was a great grand period of travel and he everything you learned about did he did he after that did he start to write about his attraction to the idea of whaling to whales themselves did that start then it did but he also that attraction was also boosted by a great deal of research on whaling which he did so his experience on the one hand is his actual experience feeds into the novel but on the other hand it's boosted by the fact that he doesn't huge amount of reading and that's what we get in the novel isn't it that combination the practical experience and that real knowledge coming from reading the text of what whales are yes enormous enormous right Graham Graham Thompson and to carry on from that what have you been reading before he started Moby Dick so back from reading all about whales and by the time if you don't know all about whales you haven't read the book absolutely I think we know that just before he started writing Moby Dick and during the writing it might be dick he was really reading for the first time intently Shakespeare this was a huge influence on on Moby Dick so he calls shakes with the divine William at one point he even says in a letter to a friend that if the Messiah ever comes again it will be in Shakespeare this person so he's smitten by by Shakespeare and you can see that all the way through that through the novel really so those speeches that Ahab gives even the the more meditated moments of a mayhap has particular chapter like the Gilder which is a really moving chapter about the cycles of life and how one grows up as a child and turns into a man and then his return to childhood again the cycle of life it's almost like a Shakespearean soliloquy you know he even goes so far as to put stage directions in some of the chapters and those central chapters the quarterdeck chapter you know it's enter a hub we are on the stage here and that follows on for two or three chapters and then we get a kind of Shakespearean chorus in midnight fo'c'sle where all the crew kind of join in in conversation and in song as as well so the tragedy is Lear Macbeth they're very important to Melville's conception of a very HAP but there are other influences as well and they tend to be English and they tend to be from 16th 17th century so Milton is another one so some of a handsome or crazed speeches a clearly based on milton's depiction of Satan in Paradise Lost but he's also attracted to more esoteric early modern texts like Robert Burton's an anatomy of melancholy a strange book which is a collection of verses poetry anecdotes about and melancholy so it's formal structure is very influential so it's this mixture of genres which is exactly what you get in in Moby Dick as well and what influence would you say that the King James Version as it's called in America had on him I think more generally that book is you know the most important book in nineteenth-century American literature probably and clearly Moby Dick's a religious novel I mean the religious allusions starts with call me Ishmael and they go all the way through to the epilogue where we get that quote from jove about you know I'm the only one to escape and I can tell you this story and the story of Jonah obviously but I guess the more important influence of the King James Bible is on the language of Moby Dick so it gives although it's a great American novel I think what's distinctive is the way that it's actually drawing on a very English literary tradition and that kind of archaic nature of the the poetry of the King James Bible gives Moby Dick I kind of reach in a resonance that perhaps it wouldn't have if it was entirely written in a kind of colloquial or American vernacular and you draw more than you or the Old Testament eye on the Old Testament I think and just going back to this point about the the language I think what he really what he really does is to is to bring these different influences together so there's a kind of there's a homogenizing quality really or the ability to bring these different styles together in a way which is uniform and and which works it's not a kind of disjointed novel stylistically many ways that language continues briskly I'm sorry but some of my listeners might not know the outline of the story could you just tell us it it could be summoned up very quickly if you want well I think we have to remember Ishmael so this is the story of a young man who goes to sea on a whaling vessel he ends up on a ship captained by Captain Ahab who's on a revenge mission to catch a white whale and that's the story of the novel and we end up with the white whale crushing destroying the ship and killing everybody apart from Ishmael yes mind if I do a little as we go on but that gives us the bare bones of business Kate Kate McGuigan how familiar would the whaling industry have been to 90 century readers well I think the important thing to remember was quite how vast the whaling industry was in the period that Melville is writing maybe dick it's the fifth largest industry in the United States in the 1840s and 1850s the United States has by far the largest whaling fleet 70% of the world's whaling ships were going out with based in the United States ports largely in New England ports of Nantucket and New Bedford which was where Moby Dick takes place Ishmael sails from Nantucket and 70,000 people's livelihoods were connected to the whaling industry in some way and so it would have been an industry about which people had general knowledge it would have been part of people's life because the products of the whaling industry were parts of people's lives so whale oil is used as a source of a light so it's a sort of crude oil that comes from the whale then the less refined oil from whales like right whales was used by by poorer people because it still had a bit of a smell when he burnt it but sperm sperm whale oil the from the head of the sperm whale that burnt very brightly very pure light and it burnt without a cent so it made the best quality candles so the whaling industry then then spends sort of candle making industry around Nantucket - and whale oil was also particularly important because it was a lubricant for industrial machinery so as the northeast of the United States is industrializing in this period development of things like textile mills in rural Massachusetts whale oil is incredibly important for that too so it's really am connected to all parts of the United States economy in a way that we might not think about now and also it goes on can you give us a few more examples of the way that only what comes from a whale goes into the into the commercial community oh so lots of different ways so from oil oil was obviously the main product the really crude stuff was used to tan leather so it's in that industry the more refined stuff as I said is that it's a machine lubricant is used for lighting and candles parts the way that are also used in the manufacture of perfume amber grace which comes from the bodies of dead whales as Melville talks about in Moby Dick is that it's an important thing in the manufacture of cologne and perfume well then corset tree melville have a lot of fun with imagery about Wellborn corset tree and his in his novel too and also just I mean small things like scrimshaw so the that the Whalers while they're on their voyages would would make artisanal things from the parts of the whale they would engrave on tooth they would make things like snuff boxes and sell those back when they were on shore so it really kind of permeates a lots of different levels how typical would a have shipped Pequod her typical would that have been up ship some the time and well Ishmael makes the point that it's it's a smaller ship and perhaps as usual and I guess it's it's slightly unusual in that it's an older ship that has been refitted with newer things so it is in some ways Ishmael does make the point that it's an unusual ship but it also the occasion of the the ship that Melville went out on his first word was also slightly smaller than a than a normal wedding ship in terms of the crew yeah so the crew of the Pequod that's a hub ship is very transnational there are people from all over the world there are Englishmen Manxman Portuguese South Sea Islanders and that was I mean novel emphasizes and sort of plays up the transnational aspects of whaling cruise most waning cruise would probably not have had that many nationalities when they left port in America those in charge were white Americans there yes usually there are new instances of black wedding ship officers that we know about but most most Linwood were in white Americans but because whaling voyages are so long some of your crew jump ship as Melville himself did people get sick there are accidents so they would end up picking up lots of other people along the way from Port Salut South America from the South Sea Islands it has a sort of strange quality about it when they when they're loading up the ship with the goods they're taking with them you wonder how a small ship can take all that and all those people and leave space for the whales yeah I may cut the whales up it would have been it would have been really really confined yeah it would you know you're spending years and years and very close confines with the crew and I suppose if Melville does make the point that some things you don't have to bring on a whaling voyage so you don't have to bring oil for example because hopefully if the whaling voyage is successful you would get that and you would stop in at ports obviously and pick up supplies but yeah and it would have been a very strange experience to have your whole world packed into a very small space Bridget Bennett um the first chapter when the wonderful sentence call me Ishmael and Ishmael is the only man left standing or rather almost something at the very end can you tell us about Ishmael so Ishmael is the person who we think of it's narrating what grams talked about the the adventure side of the story on the one hand so he's the protagonist of this story of a young man going out to hunt whales but he's also the organizer and the kind of mind through which a lot of what happens in the novel works and that's a strange and slightly conflicted position so on the one hand he tells us things we know that he's there we see how he operates with people and then on the other hand the novel is narrated in such a way that things that he couldn't possibly have seen are told to us so the question about Ishmael the character the protagonist the person that we can see who says call me Ishmael he doesn't we don't know if his name actually is Ishmael right he says call me Ishmael and then this kind of mind that is fascinated by whales that's full of wonder Marvel that wanted to collect information about whales wants to present those to us who isn't driven as Ahab is by this kind of madness of wanting to pursue Moby Dick but imagine that whales are as we know them to be fantastical creatures mysteries Marvel's that we might say things about I knew the process of the book give us a mini encyclopedia on whales indeed and using the encyclopedia is a kind of model for how to do it as well so one of the great things about Ishmael as a narrator is he's profoundly digressive and then he goes to bed with Queequeg how does that go that he decides that he's gonna stand in for the night he arrives it's dark and there's nowhere to stay and the innkeeper said well there's somewhere you can stay but you know someone else is staying there and he finally agrees to do this in some room and not someone else it's a boy not the room yeah and he knows that he'll have to share a bed with someone but he doesn't know who it is and then the figure that he ends up sharing a bed with is this Polynesian man Queequeg who he believes to be a cannibal it's great comedy about this and they develop a very loving relationship a kind of bromance and indeed they when they wake up together their relationship is described has been like a marriage it's like having a honeymoon together it's very strangely innocent the way says that is there's no knowing innuendo just suppose we were and listening their arms around each other and Ishmael thinks well he's good after all whatever he looks like he's tattooed heavy let's Eternity he sharpened his teeth and a harpoon he he's been out that evening selling heads that he has embodies he has eaten and he's got a few heads left he's trying to get rid of them and make a bit of money before he sail so he's a real cannibal person he is but in in one way we see that what we see with each melon's novel he keeps asking more which of us isn't one way or another accountable who might not be a savage what is the relationship between the cannibal and the savage and the civilized that's one of the great questions of the novel right what's the relationship between these and who chooses these categories and also we finally Queequeg great great characteristics of massive loyalty and and bravery and rescuing people and so on so he is I need runs away with an old hymn to my Inn romantically yes well I mean I think yeah what was the character of Queequeg does is into it introduces into I think what Bridget was suggesting here the importance of male friendship onboard ship I mean this is you are sleeping cheek by jowl with men in the in the fo'c'sle the ship relies upon close memory relationships so Melville introduces this to us to this very very very early on in the novel but also the keel the key factor is of course the is across racial friendship which is a tradition in American literature we see in Cooper's leather stocking novels we see in hooker very thin with hookin and Jim and there's a scene where they're walking up Street together wheeling about and the the alarm isn't that they're pushing a wheelbarrow but the white man and the cannibal are walking up Street together amiably as they're going to get under the ship yes but of course this was port life this is what you would find it but in the import life that kind of cross cross racial sort of relationships but I think what's different about the relationship between Queequeg and Ishmael and some of these other examples that we see in American literature is the closeness of that relationship so they are wedded and there's that wonderful monkey-rope chapter where they're literally tied together and then lowered down to bring this well to the side of the ship and an issue well describes this as being wedded to Queequeg and they're they're tied together with the Siamese ligature not they set up just whaling catching whales trying to earn a lot of money as much money as they can buy and bring them on watching them butchering them and so on but Ahab the man with the whale leg and the obsessed man and a man straight out of the Old Testament Plaza persuade them to give all that up and pursue the great white whale how does it persuade them to do that well he used a simple tactics like bribery so he'd nails that to balloon to the mast and when they start to show their support he gives them a round of grog I mean these are these are useful tactics but the key thing the key way that he persuades him is through the power of his of his voice and his oratory so that quarterdeck chapter is the pivotal moment in the novel way where he gets them onside so the only potential opposition is Starbuck who has a very bland sort of a counter-narrative which is this is an economic mission you know that's fairly boring so what a Habs able to do is able to reach into the minds and the hearts of these sailors and he persuades them to make his quest their quest and this idea of striking through the pasteboard masks of reaching outside the prison this is not just my fight and battle this is your fight and battle this row becomes epic on a different scale as he does and and this is where Melville starts to use that kind of Shakespearean literary tradition that really powerful speech and it's it's about what a leader is how how should a leader operate what's the difference between a leader and a follower and I guess one of the major questions the novel asks is what what should a legitimate leader because after all he's captain of the ship so he has Authority but what does he do with that authority okay do you want to come in and yeah I suppose I would just add to that that and that idea of legitimate authority but also how far authority can actually reach is a really important thing in Moby Dick so yes ish Matauri a hub nails the doubloon to the mast and he says you know this is the reward for citing Moby Dick this is whoever cites Moby Dick will get this doubloon so he tries to essentially control the meaning of that that coin in the same way that he tries to control the meeting of Moby Dick tries to control the whole ship and to an extent he can do that but we also have a really interesting later chapter in Moby Dick called the doubloon where we see all the different members of the crew looking at this coin and they all transform its meaning into something different they will take it to mean something else and none of them really associated with with Moby Dick so it says I did that a Hubbs control can only extend so far that perhaps he doesn't quite have the reach you're being a little bit complicated am i yes so can you just unravel that a little bit what do you mean extend so far they don't really notice there's a doubloon now the first person sees the white whale gets the doubloon that isn't very complicated well it's this idea that the doubloon a harvest tried to make the doubloon means something particular to have a single meaning and you spot the doubloon yeah and that's exactly the same thing that he tries to do with Moby Dick that Moby Dick is is evil and that's and that maybe like is evil that's all that Moby Dick is and nothing else can substitute for Moby Dick Andy honey believes that he has impressed this on his crew that they will all they have all joined him in his mission but the fact that they take that coin then that Ahab has said has meant one thing and transform its meaning in their own minds might lead us as readers to question the extent to which the crew are part of this or the extent to which freedom can exist alongside they had kind of all-encompassing well why is it can you tell us how important it is that the Whale is white yes I can so I think the whiteness of the whale is important for two reasons that are kind of in connect interconnected and the whiteness of the whale is particularly important to Ishmael so Ishmael has a whole chapter on the whiteness of the whale and he says you know what what the whale meant to Ahab has has been said but what it meant to me has not and he says that it's the whiteness of the whale that was above all things our Pauling but it's the whiteness that's the most important thing and he goes through this whole catalog of white things and decided that whiteness is both signified value signified power signified things being terrible but the fact is that all this felt sort of it ends up doing is just listing whiteness so the more he tries to analyze what it is about whiteness that makes it so powerful that he realizes that he's just he's just listing things and and he comes up then to the conclusion that perhaps whiteness is powerful because it's a dumb blankness full of meaning the idea that whiteness becomes a surface on which you can project ideologies and I think that's particularly important for racial politics in the United States in this period too rigid rigid Bennett we Starbuck was passed over very likely by your colleague on the Left I think there's a bit more to say about him do you I think there is a bit more to say about him but I also think what Graham said was right I mean trying to counter a hab simply producing that economic argument isn't enough and that's what the crew finds Starbuck is a Quaker from Nantucket he's described as a very kind of thin slightly or stim one of the great things about Starbuck because he understands that whaling is dangerous he's a man with very considerable courage but he also doesn't want to expose himself or the crew to unreasonable risk which is quite the opposite of Ahab he's also a man who's married and he has a much-loved wife who he's left behind and a much-loved son who he's left behind so he and the novel represents something about a man who understands that there's more to life than being on a whaling vessel in conversations with Ahab he reminds Ahab that he too has a wife and I have clearly forgotten this and his great quest for the well and there's a very touching moment towards the end of the novel where it seems like Starbuck has persuaded a hub not to continue his mad pursuit of the whale and an entire chapter seems to be devoted to that and suddenly a hub shifts so Starbuck has this power as a persuader but he's not as persuasive as the mad Shakespearean a hub who has that power of a language and therefore can control the vessel and make men act against their own best interest because that's what I have does repeatedly Graham can I go back to Queequeg I'd rather rush through him [Music] they're very close what can you develop quick quick a bit more than I did in the novel I think one of the key things about Queequeg is that he points America in a different direction so this is not an Atlantic country anymore this is a Pacific country and that's again one of the things that the Queequeg brings to the novel he's also a mysterious character as well he's covered in tattoos and just come back to this point about that the balloon and the whale in the way he's another if you like a symbol which needs to be read or interpreted so that section that Katie was talking about with it - balloon I think what we see there is the way that this is a novel full of symbols which don't have a single meaning and that Melville is asking us to think about the multiple means that are attached to individual objects multiple mailings as you see in Greek oh well I think it's partly friendship and reliability and loyalty but also a kind of mystery and unknowingness so there's a great chapter the try-works where they're boiling down the blubber and a male is steering the ship at this point and he's watching the harpooners who are in charge of this process and it says it's like a scene out of Dante but at this moment you start to understand that even though Ishmael spends all this time with these men on board ship he's very close to them he knows them well they talked to one another they are something ultimately different and that's partly to do with their racial background he sees them as racial authors in a way at that point and of course then that you know you carry on and get on with the voyage but it's a moment that and I just wanted to pick up on that point about about reading one of the things about Queequeg is that his a non-reader he's not literate and in this great text about textuality Queequeg understands whales he knows whales but he can't even talk to some degree he can't even talk about the symbolism on his own body so there are areas that are mysterious to him letters are mysterious nonetheless he's perhaps one of the most knowledgeable figures on the vessel because he knows whales cage um there's something I I now adays be a lot of people listening to this program or think whaling itself is a terrible thing to do and they're great creatures of the deep and they deserve their own life and they don't deserve to be hunted down in fact their laws against our being hunted are constantly broken by the Japanese but apart from that way they go and we keep the laws and and Melbourne doesn't doesn't hold back in describing it how do you think it reads today I think what you absolutely right in saying that he doesn't hold back I think the thing that Melville exposes time and time again is how visceral the labor of whaling is he describes a one of their happiness stabbing into a whale in churning and churning and that physical kind of slowness of the process of actually killing a whale blood and guts spew into the water sorry to anyone who's having a late breakfast but it's a it's you know this is so much blood and he talks about the Leviathan taking over the whole ship that it literally ends up kind of smeared all over the decks um and I don't think he he hides away from the fact that this labor can be in some senses dehumanizing the try-works the chapter that Graham mentioned earlier which as he said is is hellish he talks about the red hell of the fires and the fact that they reveal the ghastliness of the other men on board and the fact that in some ways what they're doing is is hellish is ghastly it's dehumanizing them but on the other hand the labor of whaling is also presented as something romantic something positive and so the actual work of whaling comes off quite well so there's a chapter called a squeeze of the hand where Ishmael and his his fellow shipmates are squeezing out sort of knots in the in the blubber of the whale to kind of get it as smooth as possible and their hands and meeting and squeezing each other and it becomes this great experience of male friendship almost eroticized all these hands together squeezing so as well as showing that the work of whaling is it's dirty is disgusting it's also something that inspires kind of camaraderie and nobility in the people who do it but it it was taken in in its stride at the time was it just it's one of the many many ways in which we've changed so much it's like we can go on and on but other examples but let's stick to whaling it is unacceptable now whether it was just part of the scenery a fifth fifth biggest American industry then yeah I mean absolutely but Melville does the point to meditate on whether this can continue so he has a chapter about whether the whale will ultimately perish like the Buffalo has in the United States and in some ways I think that that one way that maybe dick speaks to our present moment is as an environmental novel as a novel about over production and consumption of fuel that I think does speak to our particular moment in in sort of argues of petroleum or use of oil today there are many digressions in the book region many think yeah all of a sudden we're off in history whales all of a sudden and it's one of the things that makes it multitudinous and and tests the idea of a novel and and as we know they didn't didn't sail easily at the very beginning one digression is the connection between the whale and the biblical Leviathan and in many many quotations which precede Chapter one of the book he pulls in quotations which keep mentioned to the biased and the violet what what is it about that connection which satisfies him so much well then Leviathan that biblical right at the beginning of the book that before the opening chapter when we hear my name is a Cornish male should say we have a set of extracts and an etymology the set of extracts start with Genesis so we first of all get God created great whales but soon after that we have mentions of the Leviathan the biblical Leviathan which is both a sea monster it's the fish that swallowed Jonah it's also something that's kind of fantastical and potentially it's also an enemy but it also is a gentle creature that's created by God so we have right from the inception of the novel this sense of what Moby Dick might be is he the enemy is he simply part of God's creation is he monstrous and part of it immediately then we're obliged to think through those things obviously Leviathan is also the title of Hobbes is a 1651 great work on political philosophy in which the Leviathan is also the figure for the state so it encourages us to start thinking about the political allegories that might be at work in Moby Dick and the scene that Graham talks about where the men give up their freedom to the dictator figure of a hub is absolutely at the heart of that the digression is a long and testing Graham what have you written excuse me what have you read the book just as a stripped those out and read it as an adventure story sorry such as he'd been writing before this what would you make of that yeah I think it works and venture story and one of the reasons that a novel lives on is that you know publishers have taken out all the whaling bits and just turn the book into an adventure story works in into archetypes I guess so it's a it's a voyage return narrative which is Easter Ishmael story a bit like The Odyssey perhaps it's also the revenge story so slaying the Beast Perseus Theseus even Beowulf so it works and has an adventure story but I guess the one thing about one thing that happens then is that what that's what makes the novel like all the adventure stories it's not what makes it different or unique or or or great do you take them when you is riding it Melville thought I will extend the reach and range of what do you think just think you know I want to put this in well I think it fits in with his working method which is often to come up with a basic story and then to go back to it and expand it and they'll elaborate on on certain things he did that with type ii certainly which started off as a very his first book start off as a very short story which he then supplements with his reading and this is what happens in moby dick as well so I think he's obviously fascinated by the reading that he's doing about whaling at about whales and I think he wants to to bring all that material in as well and that that's what makes it the novel that is without that material it would just be an adventure story like any other but Kate Kate Gilligan the novel as it is was not received in the way G is now thought of is it at the time I've seen at the time the wage is no thought oh no it wasn't it wasn't a great book from the outset and part of this is it's slightly a problem of its publication so Moby Dick was actually published first in England called the whale or Moby Dick so the title was the other way round that was in order to say that Melville could secure copyright in both Britain and America but what happens is a couple of not very good reviews from England at one particularly in a magazine called the Athenaeum that describes the book is kind of disfigured by Mad English and absurd they actually cross over the Atlantic disfigured by mind English meaning the language yeah yeah they just said it it's it's crazy and if that goes across the Atlantic before the books comes out in New York so in some ways that colors the American reception some reviews that Melville was kind of counting on by magazines that were edited by friends are lukewarm mostly people are just disappointed that it's not a kind of rip-roaring adventure story like his first book was they don't really know what to do with with a novel like maybe dick and so it sort of doesn't really come off in the way that Melville wants it to so what does this affect on you drive me wonder come in well I just is curious because when you go back and look at the reviews actually the reviews some of the reviews good people loved the book as well and it's an oddity of the way that listed literary history works that those important reviews you're right do affect our under and another reception well actually the reception was was in large part certainly in Britain probably better in Britain in us you know bets and people enjoyed that the bits about whaling I saw the importance of bringing those genres together so me and other English reviews that just don't crossover are really positive and say that this is novels best book yet Bridget can you tell us in what way this book became thought of it as a book which inspired such awe and why what do some people had appeared to be self-indulgent digressions became part of a development of novel that was welcome I think the novel becomes well far better regarded and then really increases and enhances its reputation in the 1920s one of the things that happens then is there's a reassessment of Melville because it's the centenary of his of his birth secondly modernism is happening and within the context of very different kinds of narratives in which putting things together assembling them in different ways is much more a kind of mode of what the novel looks like Moby Dick stops looking quite so mad in that way but another another thing that happens is his last posthumous piece Billy Bart is published comes out in 1924 I think is picked up by Benjamin Britten who writes a great opera with a libretto by EM Forster and this also is a narrative that is about sailing eh Lorenz have anything to do with enhancing his reputation yes D H Lawrence again of obviously great modernist decides understand that Moby Dick is indeed a great novel identifies it as such and in one of his essays in the early work that he does on American writing which is very influential he praises it so that makes a great difference what time in what terms as he praises what it would bitter of it does it praise the Lord you don't know no I think he praises it as a as a proto modernist acts like Lawrence sees a lot of himself and his sort of struggles of conflicted salford the and struggles of identity that are in his works he finds those in Moby Dick and I think there's also an issue about men and male sexuality here as well but you know clearly and certainly its reception in Britain at the end of the 19th century because people were still reading it it was picked up by a certain kind of groups and one of one of those groups was the homosexual men who read those C narratives as one of the places where you could find out that how male male relationships worked and it's no coincidence that the Britain picks up Billy Budd I think which deals with similar kinds of questions about authority and leadership in morality a mutiny a mutiny this kind of time when America was looking for the Great American Novel as distinct from the great European novel Graham yes so but that came slightly earlier so in the 1860s and 70s so you get an essay by John DeForest who asks the question where is the Great American Novel let's start looking for it so that's the impetus and and you know gradually that that develops and the thing that Moby Dick does is a Great American Novel and in the way there's a template for the Great American Novel is it's one of these mega novels so it has an incredible kind of range of characters and themes it ultimately it's about the dysfunction of democracy and you can see how that's important in the 20th century many writers who try to use that template so Dos Passos in USA Thomas Pynchon Don DeLillo even some you might David Foster Wallace rushing those mega novels brutal and what do you think it was pushing against in terms of a took tight and one load good good if Graham's pointed out that they did get very good abuse okay nevertheless he was pushing against the idea of being a great novel for quite a while what was the resistance partly it kind of I suppose the lack of legibility in those terms to some degree if we think of the 19th century is the period of realism in the novel part of that is what the novel is obviously it's realist but it's also we might even think of it as post modernist in terms of that the kind of pastiche is and the collections of different texts and the kind of cut and paste method so this all makes it quite illegible in some kinds of ways and but that's precisely what the novel is about it's about the limits of meaning it's a about what can be done with the novel it's about the extent of the novel and if we think of the great bestseller American novels of the 19th century they're very different Uncle Tom's Cabin Little Women their novels by women actually in those two instances quite different novels that are doing different things that aim at different things a Melville was conscious of the dominance of some women writers in the market whose works just seem much more kind of approachable I guess amenable easy to read perhaps okay okay - good what - I'm getting it I'm sorry what what influence has he had can he be seen to have now on writing on novel writing um I think sort of it was picking up on what Graham was talking about this idea of of the vast American novel is still one that that is it's thought of the Great American Novel has to be a big novel has to be a novel that somehow encompasses a section of society which Moby Dick does despite the fact it takes place in a very small space on board a ship it still has that sense of vastness I also think another way that another theme that the American novel even today is still coming back to is is the individual in the wilderness so we can even see it in a novel that's quite different from Moby Dick Marilyn Robinson's housekeeping which begins my name is Ruth like call me Ishmael and it's about these young women who are similarly in this isolated space and having these transcendental experiences and nature so that idea of an individual's confrontation with the natural world is something I think that American literature is still today going back to you briefly grunt yes no I agree the other thing that I think maybe did givers is the greates antihero and that's what Ishmael is I guess and you can see that tradition following on in the 20th century as well particularly the male antihero he's a he's an ambivalent character in many ways he's not a rebel I mean not a revolutionary he's an antihero well thank you all very much Thank You Graham Graham Thompson Brigid Bennett Katie McGettigan nectary gets the life of Thomas Becket who was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral thanks for listening and the inner time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests Jaime's done a massively brilliant quotation [Laughter] the humor I think yet is a very funny funny knowing lots of ways if you if you kind of got the Air Force and times it's difficult you miss it because you're you you big you're in a different kind of style and then you switch suddenly like acid I read you're saying about humorous it was when Queequeg turned up in the middle of the night in me I was on the side of Ishmael thinking what the hell is going on being sort of more than a little worried it's worrying and especially when he's smoking in bed with him he's gonna set clothes the like a sharpening harpoon the great thing about Ishmael is the way the way that he changes his mind so cautiously on the end to that experience for a provincial young man I mean this is that's the other great thing about the stories it's about provincial man becoming a global citizen and this is his first meeting with it you know in bed yeah Queequeg but he adapts straightaway he's not his pretty she's pretty Shanna soon disappears that I think yeah that's what that's the brilliant thing that Mobile does he doesn't make him a prig all the way through no because he would be tedious and yeah he's also quite he's got a friend and I think if you're a Serb lonely provincial going somewhere trying something out we don't quite know why I don't know he's got a friend and he can rely on this bus then all of a sudden he thinks I can rely on this place and this person wants to rely on me and then Queequeg becomes a complete friend shares everything with shares his money shares everything with its not.but music Don push man he's not lonely anymore yes going to explain the coffee cake yeah so so quit quite partway through the voyage falls ill and becomes briefly convinced that he's going to die so he has a coffin that's made for them and he actually lays out on this coffin and the lids foot on it and again this is one of the moments where the humor comes through uh and and that he doesn't die so he doesn't die but what he does is he transcribes the tattoos that are on his body onto the coffin so it almost becomes an extension of himself and it's on that coffin that Ishmael it becomes Ishmael's lifebuoy at the end of the tack so in some way this friendship with Queequeg is is the thing sustained his ability to make connections across when everybody else is being blown out of the water drag king to the depths and harpoon da harpooning Ishmael has got quick quakes coughing - hold on - and presumably sails to safety he's picked up fire ship record the Rachel who are actually looking for the captain's lost son so in some ways Ishmael it's part of it smells everyman quality that he becomes a substitute for somebody else he's another orphan that gets picked up in in in the past and his name indicates that he is an orphan that's what it smells suggests and so and Rachel is the biblical she's the mother who cries over her children and lost children yes so the fact that ships called Rachel kind of ties in with our biblical sort of narrative I would like to come to grips with that wonderful sermon and my father Mapple yeah well I mean he's quit one sermon doesn't know what he's quoting that you know he quotes the King James Bible you know it's quite she uses it from the King James Bible but it's that mixture of vernacular with the King James Bible and I you know I think when I said in marching eyes he was completely wrong word to use about Melville's bringing these styles together but you see it in father Mapple he's got the Salem vernacular he was a whaler hmm but he's you know he's a preacher as well and he's quoting from the Bible and he brings these two things together in that wonderful wonderful sermon about about Jonah in the wild and that's where you see women - yeah and I think that's important because this is a novel in which there are very few women characters but you see the wives and the sisters and the mothers in that Chapel listening to this looking up at the monuments to dead men you and it's an extraordinary juxtaposition of these women sitting there listening to this and knowing that's the future mm-hmm yeah and that story about mothers and women comes back in the way that he thinks about whales as well as chapter moderate whales and about these mothers in there and there and there coughs coughs sobs yes yeah very touching and yeah moving chapter I think is wrong we didn't talk about the other harpooneers either Tashtego and daggoo so the three harpooneers of the three great non-white you know very significant heroic characters of the novel and they're all depicted beautifully with great sympathy with great admiration and that's a remarkable thing to see in a novel of that period by an American writer where whiteness is actually the thing of horror actually white masculinity is something that he's very anxious about whiteness is an ideology something that has no meaning in and of itself that can be bought into can be made to mean something can be made as a source of power even though there's there's nothing really intrinsic intrinsically powerful about whiteness it simply becomes a surface onto which you can project the ideas that you want to project which is quite a radical thing to be saying about race in the Mid America well just after the Fugitive Slave Act Lee in the run-up to the civil war we nobody talked about slavery also just one other thing and it's an obvious one if we think of the 19th century novel and if we think of how we talk about the 19th century it's all about land it's all about expansion it's all about moving across the frontier this is a novel that is about the United States but takes place on the sea it takes place on the water land is scarcely part of it and that seems to be an absolute transformation of how we might understand what American novels are about in the 19th century so American history happens offshore yeah and it's transnational and it's diverse and it's all of those things the novel reminds us soft I mean I suppose it's the other thing we didn't think about is the you know Moby Dick isn't it standalone as that kind of sea narrative it was a very popular genre in the 19th century Melville you know read and understood how sea narratives work so Dana's book two years before the mast is a it is an important know you know and all these whaling ships had libraries as well yes so reading was incredibly important whilst you were at sea and you can see lists of the books that were were on the ships that they look at Salem and if you're reading you may be using the oil of a whale to read by it's absolutely next to you at you at all times but one of the thing about we perhaps would have been interesting to talk about is the way the you know you talks about the labor of whaling yeah but the job of a whale is an odd one it's a physical job but you get those great moments where you're in the middle of the Pacific Ocean yeah the middle where you know and you go to the top of the mast and you can see the universe almost it's that combination of the the physical labor but the meditative space so whalers and Shipman more generally were both labourers and thinkers at the same time almost yeah and he has he talks about that in that chapter on Starbuck where he introduces Starbuck and he basically says you know this is a man he's a flawed man men are flawed but in the abstract men are divine and he has that moment of spiritual democracy where he talks about the abstraction the beauty the wonders of humans men it's exactly that it is exactly that type of moment and then we look at Starbuck who's flawed as as all the characters are flawed but nonetheless represents something that he wants to celebrate I think that's a that I wish I'd said that about Starbuck because that's really important I think I guess one of the questions which is never resolved is to what extent that sense of community that's created on board ship can survive you know how is it a novel about the importance of brotherhood of community democracy or is it about the failure of community brotherhood and democracy to restrain a figure like a happen is that that tension which Melville I think sensibly never goes one way or the other it leaves us kind of thinking about the question because it reoccurs in so many other situations in politics and particularly come but unleash the producer on you hello I'm Neil MacGregor in my series living with the gods we've looked at how throughout human history believing and belonging have gone together we've covered everything from Vestal Virgins and human sacrifice to why we love singing together and spiritual entities that live just on the other side of the leaf it's not just about living with the gods or celebrating shared beliefs it's also about living with each other and building communities you can now download whole series search for living with the gods wherever you get your podcasts from you

Channel: BBC Podcasts

Views: 3,531

Rating: 4.7073169 out of 5

Keywords: moby dick, audiobook, dick, moby, in the heart of the sea, trailer, led zeppelin, herman melville, audiobooks, music video, david garber, stephen fiske, gun videos, action thrillers, rene oconnor, paul bales, action adventure, dr michelle herman, beach videos, weapons videos, carlos javier castillo, creature features, adventures, horror movies, 2010 moby dick trailer, 2010 moby dick, matt lagan, nakeyjakey, jakey, recreations, funny history, history buffs, fun history

Id: ZQjomLfukVw

Length: 51min 20sec (3080 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 13 2018