Session X - June 27, 2007 - Jack London: The Scarlet Plague

Jack London: The Scarlet Plague



Before we went into the text, I tried to get attention back to that frontier issue: around the turn of the century, you already had to go far to find any real frontier that offered frontier hardships. Klondike was one of these - or rather the Klondike River, near the town of Dawson City. London's most famous novel, The Call of the Wild, is set in front of that background of late 19th century Yukon gold rushes.

You certainly can have that feeling at times when you're reading one of his stories - his characters are always in a position where they - what the heck! - could just get up, reign in the dogs to the sled and move out into the wild...to do things. Hunt maybe, fish, or just find a meditative backdrop.

If there is spirituality, it is carved into the sense of adventure he creates, that very physical activism that makes characters go out and do things - I think you can find that in The Scarlet Plague, a post-apocalyptic story: the world has been devastated and effectively cleared by a massive sweep of an ultra-lethal plague (correspondent to level 2 on Jamais Cascio's apocalypse scale), only a handful of survivors remain. And, naturally, they are organized in tribal structures.
Granser makes the case for us:

"Yes, Yes, Edwin; I had forgotten. Sometimes the memory of the past is very strong upon me, and I forget that I am a dirty old man, clad in goatskin, wandering with my savage grandsons who are goatherds in the primeval wilderness. 'The fleeting systems lapse like foam,' and so lapsed our glorious, colossal civilization. I am Granser, a tired old man. I belong to the tribe of Santa Rosans. I married into that tribe. My sons and daughters married into the Chauffeurs, the Sacramentos, and the Palo-Altos. You, Hare-Lip, are of the Chauffeurs. You, Edwin, are of the Sacramentos. And you, Hoo-Hoo, are of the Palo-Altos. Your tribe takes its name from a town that was near the seat of another great institution of learning. It was called Stanford University. Yes, I remember now. It is perfectly clear. I was telling you of the Scarlet Death. Where was I in my story?"

Note that he, the old man, is not the narrator - there is an omniscient narrator pulling his strings, and obviously this narrator is not part of the apocalyptic experience: no need to keep him alive for the sake of the narration, he has it all organized in his hands.

We analyzed the state of pre-apocalypse society in this story and saw that American democracy has been turned into a capitalist oligarchy, where presidents are no longer elected, but called into office by a "Board of Magnates". The state is being run like a business venture from top to bottom. The working population is being held in slavery ("ironically called freemen"), enserviced to the intellegentsia and the economic elite. The coming apocalypse then causes a major transformation, indeed: power has gone to the proletariat, and they are characterized none to friendly - variously termed as animals, brutes, and so on. And obviously, the exercise of power is not one that comes easily to them: once they have it, they abuse it. Thus, the Chauffeur, rather than playing out his power over Vesta van Warden,

"I went on with him to his camp, and there I saw her, Vesta, the one woman. It was glorious and . . . pitiful. There she was, Vesta Van Warden, the young wife of John Van Warden, clad in rags, with marred and scarred and toil-calloused hands, bending over the campfire and doing scullion work-she, Vesta, who had been born to the purple to greatest baronage of wealth the world has ever known."

...kills her in one of his fits of rage -

"It was while he was drunk, once, that he killed Vesta. I firmly believe that he killed Vesta in a fit of drunken cruelty though he always maintained that she fell into the lake and was drowned."

Or does he? Who are we supposed to align with here? Not the hairy Chauffeur brute, probably, but also not Granser, the former literature professor - note how absolutely inefficient his attempts to perpetuate culture are. When it comes to the worst and Vesta's life is at stake, all he comes up with - foolishly - is a ham-handed attempt to barter with the Chauffeur, thereby commodifying the woman. This might seem inevitable in his position, almost pragmatic - all out of a sudden, human existence is being magnified in scope, "embiggened", as the Springfield folk have it. There are only a few dozen individuals left, after all, and each life must needs be secured and linked into the reproductive cycle: women like Vesta are by default called to biological efficiency (= as many births as possible).

And still, even decades after the event, Granser can drool on and claim that it was all a matter of private jealousy he cultivated toward the Chauffeur -

"-Bill-that was it; Bill, the Chauffeur. That was his name. He was a wretched, primitive man, wholly devoid of the finer instincts and chivalrous promptings of a cultured soul. No, there is no absolute justice, for to him fell that wonder of womanhood, Vesta Van Warden. The grievousness of this you will never understand, my grandsons; for you are yourselves Primitive little savages, unaware of aught else but savagery. Why should Vesta not have been mine? I was a man of culture and refinement, a professor in a great university. Even so, in the time before the plague, such was her exalted position, she would not have deigned to know that I existed. Mark, then, the abysmal degradation to which she fell at the hands of the Chauffeur. Nothing less than the destruction of all mankind had made it possible that I should know her, look in her eyes, converse with her, touch her hand-ay, and love her and know that her feelings toward me were very kindly. I have reason to believe that she, even she, would have loved me, there being no other man in the world except the Chauffeur. Why, when it destroyed eight billions of souls, did not the plague destroy just one more man, and that man the Chauffeur?

He doesn't seem to acknowledge just what had occured to the planet - or maybe he decides to ignore the post-apocalyptic reality to take refuge in a pre-apocalypse world of concepts where jealousy was an option.

Laying a finger on the outlines of the apocalypse presented, we saw that salvation was not one of its constituents: Granser survives due to his immunity - by coincidence, not by a virtue of a righteous, god-fearing, witch-hunting life. History, and humankind, is longer moving toward a definite goal (that is, it is not teleological), but rather keeps rambling and rambling on, beginning all over again once a cycle has been completed.

Humans are so meaningless

Note: next time, July 4, we'll not be in our regular class room. Instead, we'll meet in MS12/009 - same building, two or three rooms further on.
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On a quick note, I'll throw in the reading texts for next week - this time by horror godfather HP Lovecraft.

Next time, I want to to go into two of his stories - one that we've already heard about today, sort of, the one with the meteor -

The Colour out of Space (1927)

- a grand horror story.

And in addition -

Nyarlathotep (1920) -

an almost fragmentary and disregarded little story that I think holds some potential toward an apocalyptic reading. I'm looking forward to hearing your reactions - he's not quite easy to read, but if his texts are difficult, they are so in a way very different from Melville's Confidence Man, as I'm sure you'll notice.

Session X - June 27, 2006 - Jack London: The Scarlet Plague

A reminder - we'll discuss Jack London this week, a fabulous little story of his, called, "The Scarlet Plague", that I'm sure you'll enjoy reading...

Session VIII & IX - June 13 and June 20, 2007 - The Confidence Man continued

Time won't save our souls, Time won't save our souls.
(Black Rebel Motorcycle Club: Shuffle your Feet)

We did it! We read The Confidence Man and survived this most complex of Melville's novels, his final April Fool's gift to the reading public that had largely ignored most of his novels. We went deep into that most riddled passage - on Indian Killing - which comprises chapters 25-28. For that part of his novel Melville drew largely on James Hall's Sketches of History, Life, and Manners, in the West (the passages we read are here), and we gathered some points on the differences and changes Melville made.

Melville

- black and white – drastic stories

- “Beware of the Indian!”

- “friendly Indians rare”

- The Moredocks in Ohio: John Moredock the only survivor

- the white man not depicted as an aggressor at all – only the evil Indians are

- backwoodmen described as Alexander the Great, which is here meant as a compliment, maybe an ironic compliment of sorts, as Alexander had a rather massive trail of blood in his back when he marched on India.

Hall

- white man: aggressive invader, pushing his expansion

- but also: aggressive Indians (assaulting the Moredock family)

- “an eye for an eye…”

- the white man is to blame first, as he commited the first aggressions

- (white) backwoodmen outside civilization: rather negative image of the backwoodmen

We then read a short passage on All Races: "Made in the Image of God" - actually taken, as the gracious Norton edition informs me while I'm typing this, from a review of Francis Parkman Jr.'s The California and Oregon Trail; being Sketches of Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life, written by in 1849.

Melville was not an Indian hater himself, that much was clear from the passage. Why then does he give us such an unequivocal regime of Indian hating? The headline of crucial chapter 26 runs -

Containing the Metaphysics of Indian-Hating, according to the Views of One evidently not so prepossessed as Rousseau in Favor of Savages.

- which is, of course, an allusion to the French philosopher's notion of the noble savage, pioneered not by him alone. The notion, roughly, describes the "savage" as potentially happier than whites, as he/she knows how to treasure and savor the simple things: "savages" had an innate sense of moral that was not inferior.

Melville doesn't give us a noble savage, or any savage at all: he gives us rather the confidence man in yet another disguise (that reading was first introduced by Elizabeth Foster, in edition of the novel, in 1954, and it still seems valid. The signs are there, at least.

We picked out paragraphs from chapter 26 -

And though, knowing the Indian nature, as he thinks he does, he fancies he is not ignorant that an Indian may in some points deceive himself almost as effectually as in bush-tactics he can another, yet his theory and practice as above contrasted seem to involve an inconsistency so extreme, that the backwoodsman only accounts for it on the supposition that when a tomahawking red-man advances the notion of the benignity of the red race, it is but part and parcel with that subtle strategy which he finds so useful in war, in hunting, and the general conduct of life.

[that is, the Indian may lie to himself and pretend he is friendly and kind, but the backwoodsman will not make the mistake of trusting him, or: giving him his confidence, as he knows about the depravity of the Indian/Confidence Man]

Then -

Years after, over their calcined bones and those of all their families, the chief, reproached for his treachery by a proud hunter whom he had made captive, jeered out, "Treachery? pale face! 'Twas they who broke their covenant first, in coming all together; they that broke it first, in trusting Mocmohoc."

[the chief refers to the covenant of the Wright and Weaver families, explicated in a previous paragraph, namely: that never should all five brothers Wright-brothers come to Mocmohoc's camp together, that is: they made a pact that there should always be a back-up outside the camp - they broke that, and Mocmohoc (nice idea here - to mock - it certainly fits here) derives from that a justification for his killing them. Indians, as the passage describes them, are never trustworthy.]

- and lastly we have the cosmopolitan play Indian himself:

"One Moment," gently interrupted the cosmopolitan here, "and let me refill my calumet."

(all passages taken from chapter 26)

So. Is Melville's Indian just another masquerade of the confidence man? I wasn't quite sure, hence I tried to push that frontier point, going back for a short moment to the Mathers and their image of the Indian as a satanic messenger, deployed to make the Puritan frontier experience just a little more difficult.

We had it that the Fidèle, "our" Mississippi steam boat, was a stand-in, an allegory of the world as a whole and the USAmerican world in particular. I'm sure we noted that somewhere - it is going down the river, to New Orleans: passing through territories that had very recently (prior to the 1850s, in which, as I take it, the action unrolls) been frontier land. Was Melville trying to create a sophisticated, advanced frontier villain here, when he turned the Indian into a diabolic figure? Hershel Parker, editor of the Norton edition, mentions in one of his contributions to the edition ("The Politics of Allegorizing Indian Hating") that one of his ancestors had fought as a volunteer in the Mexican war of 1848. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 had cleared the way for "negotiations" that would help move tens of thousands of native Americans into frontier country west of the Mississippi. Maybe the Indian confidence man, playing tricks on the white man, is a sort of avenger for the crimes acted on the Indian nations even at that time, especially this dubious removal act, see above?

Session VII - June 6, 2007 - Melville Continued: The Confidence Man

The 4 Chevaliers of the Apocalypse! There seems to be the expression - "chevalier of fortune" - the same seems possible in French - see here (link opens Word-Document, and that document is obviously dealing with a Tarock deck, or something like it) - and, taking the knightly connotations into wordlier concerns, chevalier may also mean something like gentleman, and that doesn't get us much closer to the way the word is used in the novel. The Norton Edition - oh mighty, mighty Norton Edition! praise thee, Almighty! - explicates the term as "Swindlers, here engaged in picking pockets", and indeed, a few more clicks get us to the Chevalier D'Industrie, that is someone who uses his (knightly?) virtues (perseverance, stamina, wit, and so on) to a banal, industrial, mechanical, and not too honorable end, I take it.

The Confidence Man (1857)

The Confidence Man was Melville’s final novel, about the last thing he wrote in prose. As most of his previous novels, this one was no commercial success – and he seems to have cancelled his novel writing also because he was fed up with writing for a market that didn’t honor it in a financial way. At this point, we don’t need to go through a complete list of his novels: there are 11 of these, written over the course of 11 years, and during that time he went from hopeful to less hopeful to completely desperate. By the middle of the 1850s, he was so deeply into debt and financial problems that his wife and his brother took his finances out of his hands.

When The Confidence Man came out in 1857, readers didn’t quite seem to grasp what it was: it was only later, in the 20th century, that readers appreciated the allegorical depth of the book. The print run was small, not many novels were sold, and Melville turned to writing poetry (which he had hardly more success with), to lecturing, and finally to working as a custom inspector in New York City, and that would have been the first time in his life his financial survival was secure. He died in NYCin 1891. At the time his reputation had somewhat drifted into the obscure – it was only in the 1920s that he was re-discovered by literary criticism, and he has been popular ever since, so that by now he’s is (justly!) considered as one of the greatest American writers at all. Scholarly criticism on his work and life keeps coming up at great numbers.


We went into the first two chapters, to sort of give the confidence man a decent admission to the stage - he is that ultra-flashy figure on the ship, Fidèle, and with him faith/the faithful are going down the river...to New Orleans, but also to the end)

AT sunrise on a first of April there appeared, suddenly as Manco Capac at the lake Titicaca, a man in cream-colors, at the water-side in the city of St. Louis.

His cheek was fair, his chin downy, his hair flaxen, his hat a white fur one, with a long fleecy nap. He had neither trunk, valise, carpet-bag, nor parcel. No porter followed him. He was unaccompanied by friends. From the shrugged shoulders, titters, whispers, wonderings of the crowd, it was plain that he was, in the extremest sense of the word, a stranger. (emphasis mine)

He's opening his own hunting season (by installing that placard that draws notice to the mysterious impostor from the East) - and then walks around with his signs, advertising charity. The boat becomes his stage, and his stage only - we read the beginning of the second chapter, where the audience, the passengers utter these curt, hypothetical remarks as to the nature of the fur-hat-wearer, as minor characters in a play would.

We also read that passage from Hawthorne's Twice-Told-Tales, to look at another confidence man, a satanic beggar, as it were -

While the merry girl and myself were busy with the show box, the unceasing rain had driven another wayfarer into the wagon. He seemed pretty nearly of the old show man's age, but much smaller, leaner, and more withered than he, and less respectably clad in a patched suit of gray; withal, he had a thin, shrewd countenance, and a pair of diminutive gray eyes, which peeped rather too keenly out of their puckered sockets. This old fellow had been joking with the show man, in a manner which intimated previous acquaintance; but perceiving that the damsel and I had terminated our affairs, he drew forth a folded document and presented it to me. As I had anticipated, it proved to be a circular, written in a very fair and legible hand, and signed by several distinguished gentlemen whom I had never heard of, stating that the bearer had encountered every variety of misfortune, and recommending him to the notice of all charitable people. Previous disbursements had left me no more than a five dollar bill, out of which, however, I offered to make the beggar a donation, provided he would give me change for it. The object of my beneficence looked keenly in my face, and discerned that I had none of that abominable spirit, characteristic though it be of a full blooded Yankee, which takes pleasure in detecting every little harmless piece of knavery.

[...]

The Class Reviewed & Melville Introduced

Session VI – May 30, 2006 – The Class Reviewed & Melville Introduced


To the early Puritan writers and thinkers, Apocalypse was a matter of survival, a crucial concern that immediately affected the community – the day of doom was coming in any way, and people needed to be prepared for it. That was all the more true as the Puritan settlements were founded into an outstanding position – as John Winthrop puts it in his 1630 sermon:

For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken...we shall be made a story and a by-word throughout the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God...We shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us til we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going.

Even to Winthrop, the colonies were in an exposed historical position – they were a role model for the world. Note that he is still talking about this world, planet earth – he is not reaching out to a world beyond, to salvation or damnation. When he fears that the Puritan settlers may be “consumed out of the good land whither we are going”, he refers to the Atlantic sea board, not to paradise, and the dangers there were very material and physical: starvation, epidemics, the opposition of Native Americans and French. There were many ways for Puritan settlers to be involved in life-threatening circumstances – but then, of course, they also dealt out blows to their new homeland in a way that made it clear that they were there to stay, and hopefully – to prosper. The first 20-30 years after the landing of the Mayflower in 1620 were a time of harsh dogma and rigor – these Puritans really meant business and tried to curb and stop short any danger that might pose a threat to the Puritan community. We already heard about the Pequot war of 1637, during which the Pequot nation was virtually annihilated – and importantly, this was more about politics and power, and less about a more or less symbolic fight against evil Indians – in their fight against the Pequot nation, the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonists were not above collaborating with Indian allies of tribes other than the Pequot.

More dangerous for the survival of the group as it came to the Americas – as a Protestant elite community – was the resistance from within: Indians could, with any amount of bad will, be degraded to barbaric savages in the way of Christian history, that is: they could be removed and disposed of, if necessary. What, however, could you do with Puritan believers who went renegade and broke the tight community spirit? These heretics had to be kicked out of and expelled from the community – and in a country just barely yet colonized, this was a serious punishment, of course. We heard about the case of Anne Hutchinson, the female renegade preacher who held enormously successful bible classes in her home – and who finally had to go into exile. She may have fallen from the grace of the Puritan fathers, because she was an uncommonly powerful woman, and as such a danger to established male and female spheres: women were not exactly liberated in Puritan society. More importantly, however, she was a heretic – a threat to the dogmatic unity that the Puritans wanted to have preserved: one community of believers linked in a firm opposition against Anglican and Roman Catholic churches who had come to the new world to spread the Protestant gospel.

The appeal to a sense of community surfaces again and again in writings of that early colonial period – it is almost desperately fought for in Michael Wigglesworth’s Day of Doom, parts of which we read: he goes to some length to gather every Puritan of the colonies under his umbrella of sin and damnation, stresses that each sinful settler was obliged to the welfare of the colonies and therefore in a need of reformation..and that included the smallest of the small.

You sinners are, and such a share
as sinners may expect,
Such you shall have; for I do save
none but mine own Elect.
Yet to compare your sin with their,
who liv'd a longer time,
I do confess yours is much less,
though every sins's a crime.

A crime it is, therefore in bliss
you may not hope to dwell;
But unto you I shall allow
the easiest room in Hell.
The glorious King thus answering,
they cease, and plead no longer;
Their Consciences must needs confess
his Reasons are the stronger. (stanzas 180-181)

While the Puritans practiced infant baptism, as Christian Crouch had the good grace to explain, they became genuine Puritans and full community members when they entered their church - a public confession to all the other members included. Only in the church was provided for the baptism they would need to be saved.

The enemy within was more threatening than the enemy without. This was even more so when the Puritan settlers finally discovered the social phenomenon that witch hunts had been in the old world for centuries: it would certainly be wrong to blame it all on Cotton Mather, but still, his case for the whole witch industry is a strong one. Witches existed and had to be found out, which required reflection but also strength and rigor: after all, their masquerades were many, they could easily pretend even to innocence, and before you knew it, they had bedevilled your cattle or sheep! In a way the witch craze, not restricted to Salem, though linked most prominently with it, was a mode of auto-aggression – and now that auto-aggression was no longer executed merely in a rhetorical way, but also in a physical way that included fires, pyres, and stakes.

You always get the feeling that thinkers like Cotton Mather were living under a very conspicuous and forceful impression of an immanent end – the end of all was always only just a step away, and you therefore had to choose your path in a most careful manner.

In contrast, Jonathan Edwards – though only a few decades away from Mather in time – presents an outlook on history that seemed way more promising and optimistic. This was the age of radical progress, and he was writing on the eve of the American and French Revolutions and during the heyday of Enlightenment philosophy: something great was going on, rational, scientific methods seemed like a promise for civilization and Edwards argued that religion would be able to go hand in hand with it. The world would move down an successful road into bliss, and Puritan religion would still be a part of it. Edwards is really creating an outlook on the world and on world history, he’s looking into the future – whereas Mather seemed just barely able to peer behind the colony borders, if at all, and barely able to go beyond that tight and snug and almost at times cozy colonial world that the Puritans had fought for so hard.

Edwards died in 1757.

19 years later, the Declaration of Independence was drafted. 30 years later, the US Constitution was ratified. 32 years later, the French Revolution kicked off: all of these major events are, in their own respective ways, closely linked with the development of American apocalypses.

The Declaration of Independence of The United States of America
IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America
[it's unanimous: the colonial community still expressed its unity, but now it is unity on a democratic cause that would require a violent struggle - the War of Independence - but against very material political forces, not, say, against witches. The supernatural no longer has the importance for creating a community spirit it still had for Mather]

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God [laws of nature and of nature's god: rational thought and religion go together here] entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, [for example: by means of a vote. When Puritans disagreed with their community's overall direction, the choices open to them all somehow led into exile] and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.—Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. [out with thee! - King of Britain: French and Indians had lost the privilege of being the most important carriers of evil, as they had been to the Puritans, now action was also taken against the British king and his servants]

To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

What did all this mean to the concept of apocalypse?

To begin with, it became smaller in scope: the survival of the community was now in the caring hands of a government chartered under a democratic constitution – apocalypses received a more individual face, there was no longer what you might call one coherent apocalyptic movement united in the belief that certain steps were necessary in preparation of and for the end. At the same time, the community was enlarged – there was no way to depend on Puritans alone to colonize that giant and vast land: people of all creeds and non-creeds had to be recruited as settlers to still largely empty land. As population became more diverse, apocalypses became more diverse, as well.

And with Melville apocalypse is finally entering the realm of the humorous...



First, the case for Moby Dick as an apocalyptic story...

The story follows the whaling voyage of a ship name – tadaa! – the Pequod. Driven by mad-eccentric-choleric Captain Ahab, who had a leg severed by Moby Dick, the infamous white whale, the crew finally launch a battle royal against the monster whale – and everyone dies in the attempt, except of course – the narrator, Ishmael.

The novel is more than a bit drawn out in allegorical terms – no dates are given, all crew members have symbolic names – but it is also unmistakably American. Melville describes the whaling voyage at length as an American enterprise, the whaling industry as an American sphere of influence, and he also gives us all kind of quaint details on the impact the whaling trade has on coastal communities like Nantucket Island, off the coast of Massachusetts. Also, the ship is home to an American microcosmos - with all ethnicities (black, white, Indian) gathered into one confined space: the Pequod stands in as a symbol for the US, and its final destruction - is an apocalyptic turnabout of the world into destruction.

There are some points to follow if one wants to draw out the apocalypse the novel is presenting –

The Individual, Ishmael

The sense of community will come only as an afterthought. At the beginning, the narrator Ishmael is on his own, following his impulses in a Romantic manner:

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago- never mind how long precisely- having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

The Apocalyptic Beast

The narrator is at pains to show that Moby Dick is not just a whale, but a beast – taken from some fable or, rather, straight out of the Bible. His common byname throughout the novel is Leviathan - that name is applied to all whales in the book, but our whale, Moby Dick, has some extra special powers: to begin with, he is able to reside at several places all over the world – at one and the same time, like a fabled beast, or like a New England witch. Also, these Leviathans are a big issue in world literature, as Melville presents it - and that one special whale has a massive novel all of his own, thank Melville.

The whale no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler? Who wrote the first account of our Leviathan? Who but mighty Job? And who composed the first narrative of a whaling-voyage? Who, but no less a prince than Alfred the Great, who, with his own royal pen, took down the words from Other, the Norwegian whale-hunter of those times! And who pronounced our glowing eulogy in Parliament? Who, but Edmund Burke!

The Apocalyptic Community, finally

I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab's quenchless feud seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that murderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of violence and revenge.

Finally, Captain Ahab manages to swear the ship's crew in on the fight against the beast - and it doesn't come easily. They are far from enthusiastic at first: it takes a charismatic man/preacher like Ahab to do the trick. Once, however, they have entered the apocalyptic movement, they follow through with it to the bitter end. All men go down. Moby Dick is alive.