Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

Moby Dick 223has nailed to the mast of the Pequod. And, just as the doubloon neverdoes find an adequate interpreter on the decks of the Pequod, thesublimities of Moby-Dick are left unresolved after being interrogatedfrom multiple perspectives. By making the classification system ofIshmael’s cetology absurd—equating the different sizes of whales tothe size and classification of books—Melville suggests that applyingmethodological thinking to interrogate the sublime is reductionist.The cetology chapters serve two purposes: they emphasize the grandand storied stature of the whale to increase its symbolic power; theyare a satirical portrait of scientific and, occasionally, philosophicmethods of speculation. The heterogeneity of expository, rhetorical,dramatic, and narrative forms in Melville’s novel, punctuated by thefrequently humorous, “tall” episodes, vulgarities, and absurd opinionshe relates, characterize an author who values the fecund nature ofplay. The obscurity that Burke asserts is necessary for the evocationof the sublime is achieved by the heterogeneity of Melville’s styleand the undercutting nature of Ishmael’s double-edged rhetoric andhis playfully indirect way of approaching the artistic representationof Moby Dick. This logic of negation, of description throughcircumscription (another vortex), is most apparent in the chapterthat deals with Moby Dick’s most appalling quality: the Leviathan’swhiteness. Those who take a simple moral message away with themafter encountering the book fail to do justice to Melville’s supremeambivalence regarding the nature of the cosmos. Though it is hard tosay of Melville what William Blake said of Milton, namely, that hewas secretly part of the devil’s party, it is even harder to conceive ofAhab as a character that deserves our unequivocal moral approbation.A tyrant in search of justice, a victim turned monomaniacal hunter,an educated man ready to punch through the “pasteboard mask” ofreality, Ahab conjures sympathy from any reader who has questionedtheir place in a seemingly unjust universe. Whereas Kant and otherphilosophers of the sublime view it as a guarantor of truth, a linkbetween the real and the ideal, Ishmael’s theorizing and aborteddescriptions suggest that, as literary critic Gerald Bruns opines,“experience is essentially satirical, a self-unmasking, as if reason couldonly discover the truth of things, and so of itself, when it sees thatit is a fool” (Bruns 183). Such a view is also suggested by Pip, whonot only assumes the role of fool on the Pequod after his encounterwith the sublime but also grasps the multiplicity of contradictory