So I was telling my mom about this go-round here at IZ, and she’s unfamiliar with Gravity’s Rainbow. I started trying to describe it to her, and after hitting the main points (WWII, a star-sticker map of sexual encounters, the desperate kitchen-sink response to the Nazis including even mysticism, lots of bananas) I ended up with almost a whine: “It’s hard.” Not a complaint, really, because I like a challenge in my reading—obviously you all understand, or you wouldn’t be here. But I don’t often even describe a book as difficult. That feels like a value judgment of the work involved in reading, and I just don’t ordinarily think to characterize reading effort in positive or negative terms. It’s reading and understanding, so it’s work worth doing, duh. My point is that GR is taking a lot more work than I—a serial Infinite Jest rereader and Gene Wolfe fan—am accustomed to, and I’m not sure yet that I feel like I’m accomplishing that work successfully.

Some things seem pretty clear to me, though, like Roger Mexico and Jessica Swanlake. (Quick note: Good god do I love the names in this book. Joaquin Stick took me a few minutes, but then I cracked up, and I think Constant Slothrop’s naming his son Variable is one of the funniest onomastic jokes I’ve ever read.) Their relationship lets Pynchon set up a kind of three-sided opposition (although we know what happens to opposites in the transmarginal state) of the war, love, and…what to call it? Math? Truth? Order? I think “order.”

Start with war. It’s Roger’s mother in section 1.6, which is an odd description, and then it’s a laboratory for Pointsman and Spectro in 1.8, but the most striking characterization of it is the political literalization of the “state of war.” In 1.12, Pointsman feels that he’s become a citizen of the war, and Brigadier Pudding thinks of “other named areas of the War, colonies of that Mother City mapped wherever the enterprise is systematic death.” There’s probably a very interesting line of inquiry here involving colonialism and the prosecution of World War II—which would apparently also manage to draw in Südwestafrika and the Herero, chronology be damned, along with whatever the Schwarzkommando turns out to be, and now I’m wishing I’d had this idea soon enough to research it in time for a post—but: the state of war. Although Pointsman and Pudding enlarge the image for us, with the outlands of war and the uncertainty of its successor state, it’s actually Jessica and Roger who introduce it. End of 1.6: “If they have not quite seceded from war’s state, at least they’ve found the beginnings of gentle withdrawal.”

That last stretch of 1.6 is also where we get the second term in this opposites relation I’m spelling out. Roger and Jessica’s not-quite-secession is in the form of their huddled little place together outside of town. The whole section convincingly shows a couple who care for each other. It gets the details right; the ending—“They are in love. Fuck the war.”—feels both earned and disarmingly direct. Its clarity and sincerity make quite a contrast with the bewilderment in every other setting so far. (I’m a little concerned about how the inevitable appearance of Jessica’s Beaver will complicate this situation.) Note that Jessica and Roger understand what they’re doing as, among other things, a kind of protest against the disruptions of the war and its attempt to claim even people’s internal lives as materiel to be mobilized and spent: “Both know, clearly … that, indeed, the Home Front is something of a fiction and lie, designed, not too subtly, to draw them apart, to subvert love in favor of work, abstraction, required pain, bitter death.” The text is pretty specific about the opposition here.

In section 1.9 we find a longer, more intimate bit about the couple. Among other things, it has Jessica but not once Roger succumbing to lovely domestic fantasy. (Could be characterization just as plausibly as sexism, so I’ll move on.) But after one of those phantasmic shifts of scene that help make this such a tough book comes the third term I’m interested in: Roger’s unbending commitment to scientifically or mathematically verifiable phenomena. This is what I’m calling “order.” Roger has no patience for his coworkers at “The White Visitation” and their mysticism. Where the Psi Section people see him as a prophet, he sees himself just plugging numbers into an equation that describes reality. I understand strategies of literary structuring well enough to know that, at least so far in the book, no one of the three oppositional terms I’m pointing out is supposed to be dominant—but I sure do like Roger’s side in all this (as well as his and Jessica’s, I mean). I feel a bit like everyone can see my underwear hanging out in his contretemps with Pointsman, since I’m the one who’s twice insisted “It must mean something,” like Pointsman does here. But he’s being histrionic when he panics that the end of history and even of cause and effect might lie germinating in the simple recognition that independent events…are independent. I’m reasonably certain the rest of the book will give us a remarkable number of wholly contingent events, so Dr. Pointsman should be able to rest secure.

What remains is to show that this order term is actually placed in opposition to both war and love. I suppose it’s obvious enough with regard to war—the absurdism of living in the state of war comes through every page of this book, loud and clear. But also, Jessica understands in 1.9 that she can’t protect Roger “from what may come out of the sky”—for me, a recognition from her (if not yet from him) that his idea of order can’t stand in the random path of war and not be flattened. And as for love vs. order, check Roger in 1.6: “In a life he has cursed, again and again, for its need to believe so much in the trans-observable [possibly spurious hyphen], here is the first, the very first real magic: data he can’t argue away.” Combined with his and Jessica’s mind-to-mind communication in 1.9, I think this shows what’s really a fairly standard depiction of love as transcendent, the great battering ram that overthrows reason.

Looking ahead, I kind of feel like order will be the biggest loser. Anybody else have any predictions?

The other day I read a diverting—if argumentationally (Joyce isn’t the only one who can make up words) lightweight—piece by Annie Dillard called “Contemporary Prose Styles,” in which Dillard plays Linnaeus and classifies “contemporary” prose styles (the article is as old as I am) as either “fancy” (or “fine”) or “plain.” She kind of claims that fancier styles are better suited to modernist projects, and that plainer styles are preferable to contemporary readers for their ostensive presentation of the world as it is rather than as a writer arranges it. Those both strike me as naive, or at least unreflective, positions, but Dillard doesn’t seem wholly attached to them anyway, since she goes on to say that basically all writers work somewhere in between the two poles. Which is fine by me, since I don’t even intend to criticize the piece (more); I bring it up for its relevance to our reading of Ulysses.

Dillard marshals Joyce as one of her exemplars of the fancier styles: “I think fine writing in fictional prose comes into its own only with the modernists: first with James, and with Proust, Faulkner, Beckett, Woolf, Kafka, and the lavish Joyce of the novels.” I think she’s right to mention Ulysses and Finnegans Wake—I assume those are “the novels”—as pyrotechnic displays of writing. In at least some respects, that seems to be the point of some of what we’ve been reading these past few weeks. Can we talk about “Oxen of the Sun”?

But what’s interesting to me is when Dillard turns her attention to the plainer styles. She gives a broad characterization that leaped to mind throughout my reading of “Ithaca”:

This prose is not an end in itself, but a means. It is, then, a useful prose. Each writer of course uses it in a different way. Borges uses it straightforwardly, and as invisibly as he can, to think, to handle bare ideas with control[.] … Robbe-Grillet uses it coldly and dryly, to alienate, to describe, and to lend his descriptions the illusion of scientific accuracy. His prose is a perceptual tool[.] … Hemingway uses it as a ten-foot pole, to distance himself from events; he also uses it as chopsticks, to handle strong emotions without, in theory, becoming sticky: “On the other hand his father had the finest pair of eyes he had ever seen and Nick had loved him very much and for a long time.” (At its worst, this flatness may be ludicrous. Hemingway once wrote, and discarded, the sentence, “Paris is a nice town.”)

Writers like Flaubert, Chekhov, Turgenev, Sherwood Anderson, Anthony Powell, and Wright Morris use this prose for many purposes: not only to control emotion, but also to build an imaginative world whose parts seem solidly actual and lighted, and to name the multiple aspects of experience one by one, with distance, and also with tenderness and respect.

This is “Ithaca.” For all its earthiness and democratic range of subject matter, Ulysses retains a peculiar fastidiousness about its characters’ emotions. (At least so far; I don’t remember whether “Penelope” blows this out of the water.) Maybe I’m just not catching what I’m reading—a definite possibility—but to my mind the book mostly lets its characters feel what they feel without, I don’t know, intruding too much. It gives us their thoughts verbatim, but most of the emotional weight is left to us to register on our own. As the final homecoming, the episode when Bloom at last returns to the privacy of hearth and bed, “Ithaca” is the pinnacle of this reserve.

The somewhat detached tone also accomplishes the other goals Dillard names at the end there, creating a fully realized portrait not just of Dublin in 1904 but of the entire universe and all its contingent particularities that make possible this day for this man in this city. Daryl covers many of the fields this episode brings into play; what I love is how comprehensively it establishes what is the case in this world. It runs up the scale to intergalactic space and down to the corresponding space within the atom. It discourses on both physical and metaphysical principles. And it sets a willed positivity against “the apathy of the stars” (17.2226). A few months ago, I went on about Moby-Dick being about everything; I think Ulysses is similarly encyclopedic, but with an entirely different effect. What we see in “Ithaca” is how a regular old day—nothing any more remarkable about it than about any other day—necessarily includes in it everything else that exists. Every moment is entirely conditioned by everything before it (and this is heading toward the kind of understanding of reality that science was also heading toward at the time of Ulysses; Heisenberg published his uncertainty principle in 1927), every day is the sum of all previous days.

And then we follow Bloom into sleep, with Darkinbad the Brightdayler, to recharge the everyman for his next everyday.

Howdy, Zombies! My mother (neither beastly nor dead) came ’round, and my time she flew by. But I’m honor-bound to make it all up, and while it would make sense to jump aboard where the boat is now, I feel I must backfill. That is, what I have to say on “Aeolus” and “Scylla and Charybdis” echoes forward, and I can’t hark back to what I haven’t said.

(I wasn’t kidding about how reading affects my writing.)

To begin, I admit I’m a sucker for scenes behind the scenes in publishing. It’s what I do, and it amuses me. So I enjoyed Bloom at work in “Aeolus,” and felt fondly for Nannetti in his reading closet. But I also think a place where texts are made is a fertile literary setting; events and meanings seem to bloom and multiply. (Paging Adso of Melk.) That’s certainly the case here in Ulysses—indeed, texts themselves start overgrowing their espaliers and covering the style we’ve learned how to read in the first six episodes.

Judd mentions David Hayman’s idea of the Arranger, which I’m not familiar with but sounds right on. Stipulating the Arranger’s existence, then (and the fact that I’m talking out of my hat; any ridiculousness here is my lookout, not Hayman’s), what I’m specifically sniffing after is the way It takes textual models and mashes them down onto the story of this day in Dublin, sometimes pressing so hard that the “original” material gets squeezed into some odd configurations to make room.

In “Aelous,” the arranging is largely a matter of editing and editorializing. It takes work to learn how to sort through Stephen’s and Bloom’s thoughts, and then just as we’ve had three episodes of each to grow accustomed to their styles, Bloom’s newspaper suddenly grabs hold and starts to run away with the book. It’s funny, for sure (“K. M. R. I. A.”), but the heds also create this peculiar space between the narrative and itself, so that what had seemed disorienting but still reasonably straightforward is now doubled and deeply suspicious. The prose that had perhaps pretended to psychological transparency is now making hay of its printedness (and the Arranger is making fun of the characters, at least some of the time). Most striking, I think, is that the arranging here doesn’t clarify anything. Whatever the Arranger’s goals, they do not appear to include simplifying. Instead, It unfolds a whole new broadsheet of meanings and structures between us and what we had taken to be the pages we were reading.

Outside of maybe the Dickensianly vigorous grotesquerie of all the eating, my hobbyhorse here hops right across “Lestrygonians,” but it strikes down hard in the Strait of Messina where dwell “Scylla and Charybdis.” We lay our scene in a library—a book hoard!—and people it with very many texts: Wilhelm Meister, Paradise Lost, Hamlet, Lovesongs of Connacht, King Lear, and so on, plus all the songs and snippets I won’t look up because one of the Ulysses guidebook writers must already have done. Stephen performs an absorbing (if, in my eyes, wrongheaded) demonstration of the biographical fallacy to prove that Shakespeare was in fact one of his own characters; he even hauls in Will’s will’s second-best bed. The Arranger grows impatient with him, and lets Its attention wander: First It reproduces a snippet of notated Gregorian chant, then at line 684 It takes short inspiration from the Shakespearean subject and versifies the matter. Ideas appear to flit across the Arranger’s awareness, sometimes momentarily sticking together to produce name changes like “Mr. Secondbest Best,” “Eglintonus Chronolologos,” and “Sonmulligan.” (Quick leafing shows only “Puck Mulligan” repeated.) It goes all in, formatting just over a page as a play, gives up again, and finally ends with (almost) the end of Cymbeline.

I know I said the Arranger isn’t interested in clarity, but it’s notable that It isn’t blotting out the story It’s interfering with. There’s enough left recognizable that we can even in some sense distinguish what it might have been like “before” the Arranger got Its mitts on. (I know this is a fraught way of thinking.) Post hoc, it seems inevitable that a newspaper office and a library would inspire such shenanigans, but I think that’s only because we begin to discern the Arranger’s concerns through the bizarre palimpsests It makes of these episodes. Now of course we ask the questions that all start with “why,” but I shall take the Arranger’s own authority and defer: Sufficient for the day is the post therof.

We’ve seen a man shaving, two breakfasts, nude swimming, a bath, and a trip to the outhouse; who didn’t see the “Hades” funeral coming? When part of the point is apparently to depict the pure embodiedness of living, death has to hover on the horizon. And notice how almost none of the physical living we’ve seen has been done by Stephen? Bloom gleefully feeds his body on other bodies; the “Odyssey” section, the “Calypso” episode, and in fact Bloom’s whole appearance in the book all begin with an almost Rabelaisian catalog of body parts he loves to devour:

Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish [fun garden path here—condiment or contentment?] the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

Check that out: His favorite flavor comes sauced with piss.

Stephen, on the other hand… He’s mostly just unsettled or disgusted by bodies. He seems to appreciate hands, but otherwise the bodies that come up in his episodes have so far been dead mothers, bloated, drowned corpses, a dead dog. Oh, and he wipes some snot on a rock. There’s none of the earthy appreciation for embodied living that fills Bloom’s episodes with such gusto.

Which is why I’m so pleased that it’s Bloom in the funeral carriage, rather than Stephen. We can probably guess what kind of morose, depressed-person, self-centered piece it would be to read if it were focused through Stephen. But with Bloom instead, it’s lively and funny and touching and humane. (I hope to come to feel warmer toward Stephen over the course of the book.) He has both a sentimentality and a pragmatism in this episode that I just love. His wry outsider’s perspective on the Christian burial ceremony is awfully percipient, and there’s an undeniable frisson to his description of postmortem liquefaction and his meditations on maggots and how even a graveyard rat’s gotta eat.

I’m getting a little scattershot here, but it’s because this post is more appreciative than interpretive. I can go through bit and bit describe for you what moves me in this episode and why, but it amounts to the presentation of Bloom as—to quote the man himself, in his private appraisal of Martin Cunningham—a “sympathetic human man.” In all its mundanity and gruesomeness and sorrow and totting up and shallowness and sympathy and bruised pride and sexual desire, Bloom’s internal experience of the funeral of an acquaintance feels entirely real. What most rouses my great tenderness for him here is his repeated return to thoughts of his dead infant son and his father’s suicide. His observation on the pointlessness of staking a suicide’s heart—“As if it wasn’t broken already”—is so sad and so empathetic. Joyce shows him in this episode as a man who, for all the energetic joy he brings to living, carries enormous sorrows with him but still looks out for the sufferings of others. (That’s why he says a sudden death is best: no suffering.) He’ll spend part of his day looking to see whether statues of goddesses have anuses, but he also thinks about how comforting it must be for the dead to hear jokes or fashions discussed by the corteges that tromp over them.

Eh, I’m rambling. My point is: The “Hades” episode is a beautifully empathetic portrait of a normal, everyday, empathetic man who understands that life you love more than your own can begin with the sight of two dogs mating in an alley, and that that doesn’t diminish it even a little.

All right, so I know that in 1922 the stream of consciousness was the very Rubicon that marked the border with the future of literature; but lo these 88 years later, we’re reasonably familiar with the trick. I have a well-loved Mrs Dalloway in one of my boxes of books, and we most of us had to read The Sound and the Fury in high school, or repeatedly for pleasure, right? (And let’s not forget Ken Erdedy and Clenette Henderson.) It’s not a new game. But I’m surprised at how disorienting it is in Ulysses. I may just be rusty, but Joyce’s use of the technique—especially in “Proteus,” although of course that’s no accident—is more thorough and defamiliarizing than I expected.

I caught the switch between third person and first person that Judd notes, so it’s mostly clear when we’re dealing with “the narrator” and when we’re reading a character’s mind. What trips me up sometimes is the comprehensiveness of the stream-of-consciousness bits: In the same way that your thoughts to yourself generally don’t actually narrate your situation and actions, but only your impressions of them, conscious reactions to them, and mental processes that merely happen to take place among them, Stephen doesn’t tell us what he’s doing, only what he’s thinking about as he does it. This makes it difficult sometimes to keep up with the stage business of the story. Among other things, I think this is what makes “Proteus” such a challenge on the first try. Stephen is so wrapped up in his own head that he only notices some of what occurs around him, and what “the narrator” doesn’t explain for us, we often have to riddle out. For instance (to backtrack to “Telemachus”), that seal’s head is Malachi Mulligan, plump double dactyl, ’s, right? Instead of an actual seal’s, I mean.

Then again, it’s Stephen’s imagination and rambling associativeness that drives the most beautiful passages in the first three episodes. His memories that never happened of the milkwoman (1.397ff.) and of Mrs. Sargent’s mother-love (2.139ff.) are magical bits of imaginative creation, and the water-songs (1.242ff., 3.55ff., and 3.456ff.) are gorgeous poetry. I think the most impressive stretch of these first 40-ish pages is Stephen’s remembered dream of his mother at 1.102ff. For sheer psychological condensation, it rivals “My mother is a fish.”

The Ulysses “Seen” page for this passage does a fine job of showing the horror that Stephen attaches to the details of his dream’s dead mother—the smells, the physical wasting, the breath coming out of her mouth. The text then begins a remarkable layering process that demonstrates how overdetermined Stephen’s thoughts are, how everything reminds him of other things. He’s looking at his cuff, and remembers (among other things) his mother’s graveclothes; then, as he thinks of the “wetted ashes” smell of his mother’s breath, he sees beyond his cuff the sea, which Buck, quoting Swinburne, has called a mother. (Wetted ashes and the water and horrid breath congeal again at 3.150: “Unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading soles, breathing upward sewage breath, a pocket of seaweed smouldered in seafire under a midden of man’s ashes.”) “Clothes” and “wet” and “mother” lead from his own mother to the sea, where the bay is the edge of a bowl holding a “dull green mass of liquid” just like the white china bowl his mother hacked her bile into on her deathbed, and then “Buck Mulligan wiped again his razorblade,” which reactivates the bowl association to include the first sentence of the book, in which Buck’s shaving bowl parodies a solemn religious accoutrement (I don’t know Catholicism well enough to say which one) so that we remember again what we learned 15 lines ago, that Stephen refused to pray for his own dying mother.

As densely associative as this passage is—and I’m sure I’ve missed some of the connections; at the very least, I suspect there’s something in it of Stephen’s penury (the edge of his cuff is both “fraying” and “threadbare”) and of the contrast between Buck’s “wellfed” voice and the mother’s “loud groaning vomiting”—that’s how Stephen’s mind works. It’s a foretaste of the “Proteus” to come, in miniature and with context, to demonstrate how far we’re going to roam in this book from what we’re accustomed to. Yet it will seem familiar all the same, once we can learn the motions of it, because its abandonment of traditional technique is in the service of a psychological realism in which we can recognize some of the ways our minds work.

“The ‘elusiveness’ of Kafkaesque terror … is maybe the supersaturation of every possible line of allegorical reading (you can’t isolate what is everywhere).”

John Holbo.

(I know Kafka’s a long stretch from Moby-Dick, but he’s not why I used the quotation; I aim to connect the extract and the point below.)

We finally meet the White Whale! And he’s just as vicious as we’ve been led to expect: rocketing up out of the depths of the ocean to chomp an occupied boat in half, swatting at other boats with his tail as if they were flies, pulling a remarkable Three Stooges maneuver with two harpoon lines to smash their boats against each other, single-headedly staving an entire ship so that its whole crew (but one) drowns in a maelstrom. But then, after three chapters of mayhem, there’s a short epilogue and the book is over. That’s it, nothing more to see.

It seems an odd kind of book whose title character only appears in the final pages to kill practically every other character and then vanish. It all happens quickly, but I agree with Paul that it doesn’t feel rushed. Instead it just feels very final, and brutal. Speaking for myself, there’s something about the mystery of Moby Dick and the compactness of his “on-screen” presence in the book that I find irresistibly suggestive. There’s too much weight placed on him through the course of the narration to be borne by that tiny role, so I find myself again saying it must mean something.

It’s not just me, though: Many of the characters, and I would imagine much of the criticism, look to Moby Dick as a symbol of something. For Ahab, he’s an agent or principal of supernatural malice, an implacable nemesis. Starbuck seems to think he is a devil and expresses concern that they’ll get dragged to Hell if they harpoon him. (I don’t know how literally he means it.) Ishmael goes everybody one better and devotes an entire chapter to projecting his own meanings onto the empty canvas of the whiteness of the whale.

As far as that whiteness goes, Melville practically invites us to write our own interpretations onto the blank page that is the whale’s skin. It’s certainly easy enough to grope toward reading Ahab and Moby Dick’s contest as humanity vs. nature, or humanity vs. the greater powers, or will vs. matter, or (at least poetically comprehensibly) even past vs. progress, and probably any number of other allegories. The resonance and capaciousness and complexity of Melville’s writing give us lots of pitons to rope a reading through, and seem to support a great variety of interpretations. The book brandishes an enormous amount of knowledge about whales, and brings to bear on the plot and its giant albino a huge range of human discourses, including economics, biology, anatomy, physiology, oceanography, literature, psychology, and theology. Of course we can make him mean something!

But this is where the quotation I began with enters the picture: allegorical supersaturation. Moby Dick can mean all those things, at least tolerably well; which is too many meanings. The confusion of every possible meaning that can be attached to him cancels out to a nullity—you can’t isolate any one of them, because the others all impinge too much upon it. Consider: After all we’ve read, outside of his great savagery we know nothing significant about Moby Dick except for a probabilistic idea of where he’s more and less likely to be at a given season. He’s visible from a mile or two out, and we know less about him than about the electron. To steal a phrase from Daniel, we still don’t know dick about Moby Dick. He spends the vast majority of the book hidden both figuratively and literally below the surface; for all the psychological effect he has on the characters (and, I admit, this reader) before he appears, he remains wholly unknowable. We can squeeze him into any interpretation we want, but it will teach us no more about the whale and we will have made the same mistake as Ahab and Starbuck and who knows who else: We will have ignored the irreducible fact of the whale in favor of converting him to an interpretive object.

That’s what I find the most compelling about Moby Dick. He comes out of nowhere, without warning (dare I say “like a thief in the night”?), does whatever he is going to do, then vanishes. There is no taming him or managing your encounters with him or even understanding him. He’s almost like a Lovecraftian monster in his assault on the idea that human beings can master or even comprehend the world. He is purely sublime, and although he will bear a great number of interpretations, none of them will encompass him. For someone as intellectual and Enlightenment-infatuated as I am, it’s an exhilarating thing to read such a stimulating book and then get my face slammed right up against the wall of human understanding. I look forward to it every time.

“A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.”

William Blake.

Ah, “The Doubloon.” This is my kind of chapter (ch. 99). It’s all about interpretation, or the search for (and imposition of) meaning. It explicitly dramatizes the process we all go through every day, where we take notice of part of the world (something that is the case) and create a way of understanding it as it relates to our lives. This is a very normal part of the way human beings interact with our surroundings, and is in fact necessary to formulating the narratives we recognize as our selves and our lives.

Note that this is not the argument Ishmael makes in favor of interpretation. He says, “And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher.” In his view, what gives the world worth is the significance in it that can be divined by human beings; the world has meaning insofar as it means something to people, but no intrinsic value. This seems to me an extreme anthropocentric view, but not necessarily an uncommon one. Just an unreflective one.

So in the course of this dramatization of interpretation, we see eight different characters all try their hand at “reading” the doubloon that Ahab nailed to the mast at the beginning of their voyage as a guaranty to the sailor who first raises Moby Dick. (Other than the obvious meaning, of course, which is the one they all drank to during that weird ceremony.) Ahab’s interpretation, while dramatic and almost mythologically Norse in its pessimism, is also kind of funny: Looking at the various devices on the coin—mountains with fire, a tower, and a crowing rooster, and a segment of the zodiac—he sees Lucifer, Ahab, Ahab, Ahab, and the unrelieved misery of life, which begins in pains and ends in pangs. But also, it’s not for nothing that Ishmael keeps calling Ahab “monomaniacal.” This is very nearly solipsism in action.

Starbuck starts out as a foil to Ahab in his reading—he sees the mountains as a symbol of the Trinity, so that even when he passes through the dark valley between them, God still strengthens him and the “sun of Righteousness” still shines down on him—but then he remembers that the sun is only up about half the time, on average, which leaves human beings looking for hope and comfort much of the time (wait for it) in the dark. So even though he finds some devotional meaning in the doubloon, it is on the whole a somewhat depressing exegesis for Starbuck. Nonetheless, it’s a pretty clear application of the hermeneutic method involved in reading the Book of Nature, whereby everything created has a theological lesson within it, if you can just find the key.

Then Stubb gets up and sneaks in two interpretations. In the first one, he sees the doubloon as a piece of money, just as good for spending in commerce as any other piece of money. It’s a wonderful puncturing of the portentous mode Ahab and Starbuck both operate in, but it’s also a welcome nod to the fact that objects and experiences are embedded in the world and entangled with other people and places. Both Ahab and Starbuck find insular, self-centered meanings in the doubloon, but Stubb instead immediately recognizes how the doubloon is enmeshed with the rest of the world. Then he looks more carefully, convinced by Ahab and Starbuck’s long faces that there must be a deeper meaning, and descries a very long zodiacal version of the Sphinx’s riddle that supposedly charts a universal course for the life of man. (Women don’t count for much on a whaler, you might have noticed.)

When Flask looks at the doubloon, he literally sees nothing but the monetary value of it. (A special note from my Norton Critical Edition, on Flask’s line “It is worth sixteen dollars, that’s true; and at two cents the cigar, that’s nine hundred and sixty cigars”: “The arithmetic seems shaky.”) Unlike Stubb, he doesn’t seek a deeper meaning; he’s satisfied with his pragmatic observation of “a round thing made of gold.” I see this version as an important recognition of the thingness of the doubloon, regardless of what meanings a more reader-response-type approach yields.

The Manxman uses his special training in esoterica to identify the doubloon as half of a zodiacal prophecy of when the ship will encounter Moby Dick. I read this one as a small parody, actually. Daryl brought our attention to prophecy in the novel, and there’s always the possibility that’s at play here, but this one is so general that I suspect it’s much more like an ancestor of Maslow’s hammer. The Manxman knows something most people don’t, and everything he sees tends to be through that lens.

Queequeg comes in for comic relief, mistaking the doubloon for a fancy button. There may be a point to make here about constructed reality—if Queequeg’s pants lose a button and he sews a doubloon on in its place, that doubloon is now a button (as well as a doubloon and whatever else it may be)—but I wouldn’t want to strain that one too much, so I’ll just say it’s possible.

And then Pip. Pip is a character who makes me very sad, so I’m uncomfortable reading his mad babble anyway, but here it also feels to me like the kind of thing that might mean something if you try very hard to interpret it, but then probably won’t turn out to have been worth the trouble. So I don’t try. (My white flag, I wave it.) His reading of the doubloon can, however, illustrate the troubled extremity of personal meaning-making, since the significance he finds is available to him only. That is, even though he apparently finds some meaningful content in the doubloon, he can’t share it with anyone, because he spends most of his “on-screen” time in an interpretive community of one.

It’s very interesting to me that this chapter comes so late in the book. In a way, it’s kind of a programmatic chapter; it announces the book’s concern with meaning and interpretation by showing characters interpreting an object to create meaning. (I love that trick.) But I have a feeling that passages doing this work so explicitly usually come much earlier in books where they appear, to give the reader fair warning of what’s afoot—and to give us a chance to play along. Curious, then, that it’s only near the end that we’re asked to start looking for Rashomon Dick, the Allegedly White Whale.

“And now the plant, resigned
To being self-defined
Before it can commerce
With the great universe,
Takes aim at all the sky
And starts to ramify.”

Richard Wilbur’s “Seed Leaves.”

Here in the heart of the book, it should be clear by now why some of us read it as a book about everything. There’s been plenty of plot, and we’ve had some exciting action (although I wonder whether ch. 61, “Stubb Kills a Whale,” was off-puttingly gruesome on purpose, or whether that’s just unavoidable), but there’s also been a remarkable exfoliation of the text from a story about a monomaniacal sea captain to…well, everything else that’s included. I take my metaphor for this post from Ishmael himself; he excuses his discursiveness at the beginning of ch. 63, “The Crotch” (…I know), with a lovely image to illustrate how the road between one narrative event and the next lengthens under his very feet:

Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters.

Obviously this isn’t the first section of the book where we’ve seen digressions from the plot—I’d call Queequeg’s “Ramadan” the first major one, and that was pretty early—but it seems to me that this week we entered a more technical part of the book, where the digressions took on a different character. Before, they tended to be either apparently disposable set pieces or grand philosophical and historical disquisitions. But starting with ch. 53, “The Gam,” and ch. 60, “The Line,” and then throughout this week’s reading, we get chapters that are more like encyclopedia entries. Now that there’s proper whaling under way, there’s a lot that we reader-lubbers have to learn; and Ishmael has chosen intermittent and telescoping infodumps as the way to solve that problem. These infodumps come in two classes: those about the ship, and those about the whale. In those about the ship, I include explanations of whaling-ship terminology and habits of living, as well as depictions of equipment and techniques (like the chapter-titular explanation in ch. 84, “Pitchpoling”).

The ones about the ship are basically obligatory. The whole action of the book takes place on a ship, and if we didn’t know what things were and how they worked, we wouldn’t be able to understand much of anything. But the ones about the whale aren’t, strictly speaking, necessary. We don’t actually need to know that the sperm whale doesn’t have a real face. Instead of being primarily informative, then, I think the infodumps about the whale serve a different function. I think they’re more in the line of a blazon. On the literal level, it’s true that Ishmael (along with the rest of the crew) is dismembering a whale during this part of the book. He provides a very thorough description of exactly how the whale is butchered and flensed and rendered. But at the same time he takes the opportunity to lavish a lot of poetic language and reverence on the whale and its parts. This isn’t to say anything like “Ishmael is in love with whales”; but in the same way that Ahab sees Moby-Dick specifically as the agent of a mystical force athwart his destiny, Ishmael seems to look on the sperm whale generally as a Romantically sublime creature, imbued with wisdom and power and mystery that make it a fit subject for a blazon, even with the parodic inversion that characterizes (and partly disguises) this blazon.

• 2 years Before Narrating Present (BNP): The Town-Ho mutiny occurs.
• “Not very long” BNP: The Pequod speaks the Goney.
• NP: The Pequod gams with the Town-Ho and one of the latter ship’s sailors tells Tashtego what has transpired on board.
• 1 day After Narrating Present (ANP): Sleep-talking Tashtego spills what beans he hasn’t already in the night.
• Who knows how long ANP: Ishmael, now an experienced sailor, spins the Town-Ho’s yarn to his Spanish friends at the Golden Inn.
• Still longer ANP: Ishmael, having completed his inaugural whaling voyage on the Pequod, decides to tell the story that he denied his Spanish friends in the form of a remarkable book.

(Incidentally, the mention of “Dame Isabella’s Inquisition wan[ing] in Lima” suggests that NP is in about the early 1800s, since the Inquisition in Peru pretty much ended with the Peruvian War of Independence [1809–1821].)

“Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.”

Adrienne Rich.

It’s funny the way this book works on me: It spends 35 chapters deferring any revelations on the plot, and just as it finally establishes what’s really at stake, I go haring off after the narrator. Specifically, I want to look at the way our whole second section of the book communicates the extent to which the story is mediated through Ishmael’s narration.

Obviously, I’m not saying anything controversial when I note that no narration can be taken at face value. For all that some literature tries to pretend otherwise, there is no such thing as pure, direct truth in any narration; narration is always the result of choices and omissions that inevitably shape it. (Like I said, not controversial.) But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing interesting in the ways a narration differs from The Truth. And in Ishmael’s case, we get such a self-consciously artificial narration that I think it fairly makes the case for meaning as mostly constructed, rather than transcendentally existent.

Paul carefully traces the buildup of suspense about Ahab, and I agree with him, but I think it’s also important to recognize it as part of Ishmael’s narrative strategy. Melville foregrounds the mediated nature of the book by beginning with a narrator who refuses to vouch for the name he gives us. This is explicitly going to be Ishmael’s arrangement of events and his conclusions on their import. Paul describes Ahab as Melville’s “master creation,” which is true, but Ahab is only ever depicted as Ishmael’s creation. The whole book is Ishmael’s telling, the whole story Ishmael’s dramaturgy.

And I use the word “dramaturgy” advisedly—chapters 36 through 40 are all explicitly theatrical. “The Quarter-Deck” (ch. 36), which is by far the most eventful and dramatic chapter up to that point, begins with a stage direction. Then we get three monologues and an unwelcome premonition of Ulysses‘s interminable “Circe” episode, fully formatted as a play. At first I found this chunk of text almost inexplicably strange. I went along for the ride and enjoyed it, but I didn’t know where it came from. Then I looked back and saw that Ishmael had been patiently laying his groundwork for a couple dozen pages at least. Chapter 29 is the first with a stage direction (“Enter Ahab; to him, Stubb”), and as a title, no less. Two pages later comes the “Cetology” chapter (of which more anon)—which truthfully doesn’t much advance my dramaturgy argument, although it does foreground the artificiality of the narrative (that wasn’t the anon I was talking about)—and then at the end of chapter 33, “The Specksynder,” Ishmael gives us a straight-up statement of his mission:

Nor, will the tragic dramatist who would depict mortal indomitableness in its fullest sweep and direst swing, ever forget a hint, incidentally so important in his art, as the one now alluded to.

But Ahab, my Captain, still moves before me in all his Nantucket grimness and shagginess; and in this episode touching Emperors and Kings, I must not conceal that I have only to do with a poor old whale-hunter like him; and, therefore, all outward majestical trappings and housings are denied me. Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air!

“I will invent what I have to,” Ishmael says, “to tell the story I want.”

And then a whole chapter that he must have invented! “The Cabin-Table” (ch. 34) describes a whole scene that Ishmael is forbidden to attend. He gives himself a possible out with a throwaway line about “peep[ing] at Flask through the cabin sky-light,” but I’m not convinced. (Chapter 35, “The Mast-Head,” avails me nothing in the line I’m taking, so I have nothing to say about it outside these parentheses.) After all that preparation for the dramaturgical angle Ishmael intends to approach on, I shouldn’t really have been surprised to see overt drama.

Now: “Cetology.” I love this chapter, because it’s so assured and almost absurd at the same time, and because it’s so obsessively detailed, and because it’s so delightfully bibliophilically artificial. The man categorizes whales by size like paper, and breaks his categorization down by books and chapters. The note on the classification scheme is a pure pleasure: “Why this [Octavo] book of whales is not denominated the Quarto is very plain. Because, while the whales of this order, though smaller than those of the former order, nevertheless retain a proportionate likeness to them in figure, yet the bookbinder’s Quarto volume in its diminished form does not preserve the shape of the Folio volume, but the Octavo volume does.” The whole scheme is arbitrary; Ishmael announces a definition of “whale,” then proceeds to lay down a division without any express authority. It’s pure ipse dixit, presented as science. This cetological plan is only barely more organized or sensible than the classification in the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. If Moby-Dick, as I’ve asserted before, wants to be about everything, within that ambition is an anti-totalizing recognition that meaning is always constructed, no matter how comprehensive it aims to be. The “Cetology” chapter stands as a perfect symbol of that tension, which is why it’s always meant so much more to me than just a dry taxonomy.