SPEAKER_01 0:02

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, drizny 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.

SPEAKER_03 1:12

My name is Tristan. I'm Meg. And call me Johnny. As this is PequadPod's inaugural episode, it behooves us to give you all a peep into what to expect from the show.

SPEAKER_00 1:20

Starting with Moby Dick, each episode will be a deep dive into roughly a chapter's worth of material from the book in question. We aim to sound the depths of these books with close readings and follow Melville through his tangents, mundane and divine.

SPEAKER_01 1:33

Now, we expect that it's going to take rather a long time to get through Moby Dick in this level of detail, but we believe that our monomaniacal inclinations will power us through. And after Moby Dick, we would prefer to apply the same treatment to other works by the man himself.

SPEAKER_00 1:48

As a supplement to these main narrative episodes, we will also be releasing special guest episodes to discuss all things Melville. If you have ideas for such episodes, feel free to send us a message on our socials.

SPEAKER_03 1:59

Now, onto the show. Okay, well, welcome to the show, everybody. Now, before we get started, I think it makes sense for each of us hosts to introduce ourselves so you can get a sense of who we are and why we're doing this project. So I'll go first. My name is Tristan Bavil Marquise. I'm the originator of the idea for the Pequod Pod Podcast. First and foremost, I'm a father and I'm trained as a linguist. I went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Go Heels. Um and there I uh did uh mainly language documentation work and linguistic field work, uh specifically uh studying a language called Pure Pecha, uh which is from Michoacan, Mexico.

SPEAKER_00 2:40

Um hi, my name is Meg Fancher. I'm uh beaming to you from hotlanta, uh where it is incredibly warm and uh right now rather damp. So if you look out the window, it's really beautiful and sort of uh wet and Oregonian. Um, but if you step outside, it hits you like a linebacker uh and is um either horrible or lovely, sort of depending on your constitution. So that is itself a Melvilian question. Um I got my PhD here very recently from um one of our fine Atlanta institutions, um, and that is where I first encountered the work of our beautiful author, which we can get into uh more in more depth in a in a couple minutes here.

SPEAKER_01 3:25

And I'm Johnny Wiles. Uh I'm predominantly a theater type. Um, I'm an actor and a director. Um, and I also wrapped up on a PhD last year, though not on Melville. It was on medieval Italian literature and mainly on Dante. Um and those two sort of strands of my life feed directly into my love of Melville for reasons that I I hope we'll uh get into over the course of this reading project. I mean, Melville is a wonderfully theatrical writer in many ways, and there's also a real epic strain to his work, and not just in Moby Dick. So uh he's the perfect storm for me uh and uh and for people like me. So that's why I'm here.

SPEAKER_03 4:05

Wonderful. Thank you both very much for introducing yourselves. Why don't we start off by uh talking a little bit about how each one of us first got into Melville and what that first experience of uh reading Moby Dick was like for each of us? So uh my first encounter with Moby Dick was uh in the form of a uh a heavily abridged version of the book uh designed for children uh that my beloved uh grandfather uh George Hilton gave to me. Um he was uh my grandfather, uh a huge Moby Dick fan. Uh it's definitely his favorite book. Um and so I think uh some of my attachment to the text uh stems from that relationship. Um but yeah, uh I didn't actually read the full text of Moby Dick uh until I was in uh uh college. Uh it wasn't for a course or anything like that. It was just uh um I found a copy in a thrift shop, like a a normal copy, so I decided to read it and it blew me away. Um it I I I I think I can safely say that one of the most profound uh uh sort of spiritual reactions to reading any text came from reading Moby Dick and specifically reading through to the end of Moby Dick. And what about you, Meg? I believe it's a case that you read Moby Dick for school, yes?

SPEAKER_00 5:20

Correct. Um so yeah, something that you do um when you're getting, I think, any sort of flavor of like an English PhD is you have to take a big exam called your comps or comprehensive exam. And you're presented uh with a big list of canonical or sort of like quasi-canonical works in English or translation that you need to read to be able to sort of back up the idea that you can put a thought together and sort of compare works and you understand where things came from and you can talk about genre, etc. And one of these books was Moby Dick. And I was like, I've never encountered anything by this man in school. I've never had occasion to do this before. My expectation of it, which I think is the same, to speak broadly, to assume, I imagine is the same expectation, sort of on the street that a lot of people have, which is that it's a giant um mid-1800s novel. So that probably means it's like incredibly dense, very difficult to get through, whatever that means for sort of like any individual person, um, or what um my mother would call a slog. So I was like, all right, I'm gonna, I'll get it, I'll buy a copy because I expect I'll have to take a really long time, and I might have to write a sort of um annotate it as I go along so I know what's going on. Um and then, as everyone in this uh room knows, or perhaps um everyone listening, is that pretty much immediately you're like, wait, this is a deeply strange and way stranger container than anybody told me. Like nobody told me this. Like I feel like when you go in to see a weird movie, someone has told you that it's a little odd, and you're a little bit prepared for that, even if you don't know the plot. And here I feel like I thought I knew the plot, and I think I was you basically everyone is right about that. But to actually open it, you're like, oh, the way we're doing this is I could not, I could not have predicted this. So the experience of reading it was um was so fun. I think it's very funny. The way that it digresses is really beautiful. Weird things are given the joy of like an entire chapter. It was a really crazy experience. And I was like, I feel like the book at least deserves to have like a street reputation as a way weirder thing than it does. So I'm really excited to sort of talk with you guys about um the way that the book, your expectations of it were met, or like the places and the ways that it got exciting in a way you didn't think, or maybe someone did tell you it was weird, and you were like, indeed, this is I I feel like I knew what I was getting into, getting into it. Um, but for me it was a complete surprise. And uh what's really lovely is that a lot of his works are like that. So definitely I will be reading things uh for the first time in the coming months or years. Um, but this one I've read a couple times, so I'm really, really excited to um talk about all the juicy strangeness over the next uh few decades, I think is gonna take us to to get through all of this.

SPEAKER_03 8:24

What about you, Johnny?

SPEAKER_01 8:26

Well, I'm like you two. I never studied Melville at school either. Uh, I came up through the UK education system, and to my knowledge, it's not on any uh UK school syllabus. Um, like you, Meg, I first uh read Moby Dick uh at university, um, though it happened pretty much under duress and not because of any course. Um I studied Italian literature and language for my undergrad degree, but most of my close friends were studying English literature. And the way that their course worked is that they had what what were called author weeks. So they'd spend a week intensively reading the works of a particular author, uh, and then they'd write an essay on the author in the following week. So they had um Wolf Week, for example, and Dickens Week and Joyce Week and so on. And so we'd sit down to have dinner during those weeks, and of course, we'd talk mostly about the authors that they were working on. And uh in the case of the authors that I've named, I I I was just about able to keep up. I mean, I I I'd read a bit of Wolf by then, I did fine with Dickens, I think I'd more or less made it through Ulysses at that point. Um and then we got to Moby Dick Week. And that's not Melville Week, albeit noted, it was Moby Dick Week. No, I hadn't read Moby Dick, and so I was hanging out with these mates, and you you you just could not get them to talk about anything else. So I realized if I'm gonna have any kind of social life for the next two weeks, I've got to read this book. Um, and and and and so I did, and and I I felt just hook, line, and sinker for it just right from the start. I so I know a lot of students in the US are kind of press ganged into reading it at school. I don't know how sort of how to what degree you were pressured into reading it, Meg, when you started your your course. But uh I was pretty much peer-pressured into into reading Moby Dick. Um, but it worked, and that's why I'm here, and we can psychoanalyse that another time. But uh, I'm delighted that it happened. And yeah, likewise, Meg, I'm so excited to talk about the the cumulative weirdnesses of this uh of this of this text that I also was just totally unprepared for. And which we start to get a little inklings of actually in in this very opening chapter.

SPEAKER_00 10:51

Yes, in the very opening chapter.

SPEAKER_01 10:53

Wonderful.

SPEAKER_03 10:54

So uh quick disclaimer for our audience. Uh you'll note that we're starting this pilot episode with chapter one, loomings. But that does not mean we are skipping etymology and extracts. So the second episode we're going to release as episode zero will be on etymology and extracts. So you can put down your pitchforks for now. Meg, would you be willing to give us a brief synopsis of this chapter one, loomings, please?

SPEAKER_00 11:20

So loomings is essentially um, as Johnny read to us our our opening paragraph, um, our narrator, Ishmael, speaking to us from a sort of non-specified space, talking to us um uh his his listener readers, that he wants, he's been in kind of a funk for a while and wants to go to sea. This has been a pattern that perhaps has hit him a couple times before, and he he recognizes the signs. He wants to go out and start getting into fights for no reason or maybe like do something drastic with himself, who knows? Um, but he's he's in the mood and he he knows what it means. He has to get on, he has to get on a boat. Um he illustrates or he he argues that this is not a um a drive or um a hunger that is unique to himself, but in fact that if you walk around the city of Manhattan or the island of Manhattan, you'll see evidence in the citizens of New York that uh that there seems to be something inside the human spirit or the shared sort of human society that wants to like stare at the ocean or travel by sea or be on a beach or put it in our paintings or talk about it in our religions, where it has the sea as as concept and as literally like physical going and standing in it has a big hold over humanity. And uh he's kind of just like, what's up with that? And like we're we're gonna put a pin in that and we'll come back to it later. And then um at the very end, he sort of says, uh um, is it is it fate that brought me here? It seems like it is, it seems like this is kind of preordained, preordained. Like every once in a while, I just gotta go do it. He compares it to um a bill put out by Providence that this is uh big news. Ishmael's gotten on a boat again, which I think is uh the first uh well, we'll just we'll get into it. Um, but that's very funny. And in in perhaps most intriguingly, because of the expectations that the reader brings to the novel Moby Dick, in our penultimate paragraph, he talks about that he wants to see a whale. It seems like this is not something the way that he speaks about it, it seems like this isn't something that has happened before, but it holds great intrigue over him. And then um chapter kind of ends. He's not in the sea yet, but we know what his quest is. Whether it's a capital Q quest, we don't quite know. Does quest begin with Hugh, yes. Capital Q quest, we don't quite know, but this is the thing that he wants. This is his little mermaid part of this world, I want song. He wants to go to sea. So what's gonna happen next? Who knows? Maybe he'll try and find some way to do that.

SPEAKER_03 14:10

Thanks so much, Meg. So, yeah, let's talk about that. Um, Johnny, what do you think of this protagonist of ours, Ishmael?

SPEAKER_01 14:17

I think he's absolutely fascinating in the first instance, because uh he on the one hand is very, very forthcoming with information about himself. Uh on the other hand, uh he seems to, in equal measure, be incredibly secretive. Uh it's an altruism about that first sentence, call me Ishmael, that uh he seems to be called anything but Ishmael. Somebody who is called Ishmael is not the kind of person uh the person who who says call me Ishmael almost certainly does not actually bear the name Ishmael. It's the kind of thing if I don't my I my my my full name is Jonathan, but I I'm I'm only ever Jonathan when I'm in trouble. So I said immediately whenever whenever anybody sort of said, Oh Jonathan, I said, Oh hi, well, call me Johnny. It's the kind of thing, but Ishmael, to my knowledge, is not short for anything. Um, but it just seems that immediately, while he's being in theory very forthcoming with his biography, with his identity, there is a sense that he is actually obfuscating some fairly um some fairly crucial aspects of himself.

SPEAKER_03 15:21

Yeah, totally. Um, I think it's very important that our protagonist isn't saying, Hi, my name is Ishmael, right? Besides that not sounding nearly as good. Um, I do think there's a real significance to the call me. And sometimes I even hear it more like a call me Ishmael. As if our uh our protagonist is, you know, searching for the right biblical illusion to convey the essence of this character, um, instead of anything biographical.

SPEAKER_00 15:47

And our very first opening lines, we get, of course, our our iconic call me, but then immediately next it says some years ago, never mind how long precisely, which tells us that we are in a rhetorical container of one of my favorite kinds, which is a present-day, past-facing storyteller. So the story in its entirety has already happened. It's not past a lot of novels are past tense, but that's more or less just the present. That's just the verb tense that the author has chosen and it's not a big deal. And sometimes in some of my favorite books, the very first chapter is this happened to me a long time ago. So it tells us, unless we're doing something super radical, that our narrator has survived the events. But for some reason, there's a chronological distance, which usually implies something like maturity or like regret, or I can interpret these in a different way than I would have were this happening to me in real time. So when you pair it's this is a possible reading, when you pair that with a phrase like call me, which is not the same thing as my name is, as you've just said, that can imply something like even further distancing myself from that identity that I had when it was happening to me. Or you can read it as like casual and it's just like, sure, this thing happened to me a long time ago, and a lot of books were kind of written like that, no big deal. But I think there's there's something really juicy and fun about as much ambiguity as you want to put onto that. It seems like the chapter can hold that, and we can sort of be like, what's happened to him in the years since? Does the end of the novel get to present day? It seems like not. It seems like it's been years. So what's going on with sort of that? We see to he seems to give us the uh the inside of his soul, but also we don't know his last name. Is this a person who has a last name? It seems like that's not he doesn't seem to think that that's important. So some of the the challenge or the pleasures for us and in sticking with this guy for 600 pages is are we gonna learn more? Do we want to? And is it something is that something that makes sense for us to ask?

SPEAKER_01 17:57

I think you've hit on several things that are really interesting and important there, Meg. Uh perhaps chief among which you mentioned, well, is this just a casual thing that Ishmael is is doing? We're gonna spend a lot of time with Ishmael, and I think we get a sense that even in this chapter, he doesn't do much casually. Perhaps he doesn't even do anything casually. In fact, he is kind of there's no he doesn't seem to be able to, and that in itself is fascinating. He's very, very quick to search for meanings behind things and indeed to um to ascribe meanings to things. I mean, we even get we get that single sentence uh about halfway through the chapter, surely all this is not without meaning, which could basically be a sort of sub-sub title to Moby Dick. Moby Dick or the whale, or surely all this is not without meaning.

SPEAKER_00 18:48

That's so funny.

SPEAKER_01 18:49

And uh I think you the other thing that is going to be absolutely key to bear in mind as we as we confront this chapter, but also as we confront Moby Dick as a whole, is we have in a sense two Ishmaels, don't we? We have, as you uh as you point out, Meg, we have the Ishmael who is telling us the story, and we have the Ishmael to whom the events of the narrative are happening.

SPEAKER_00 19:12

Happening, yes. The catcher and the rye problem. Precisely think of it in my mind. Yes, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:19

I've immediately stolen that. So I should probably be using that as a phrase throughout these uh throughout these episodes. But for all that he wants to point towards the meanings of things and um the the kind of as close as he can get to the objective significance of things, he's prepared to layer ambiguity upon ambiguity in his own presentation of himself. We've already unpacked call me Ishmael. Well, okay, does that mean that he's called Ishmael? Does that mean that he's called something else? Some years ago, okay, how many? Never mind how long, precisely. Okay, so we're actually not supposed to be concerned about that. Having little or no money in my purse. Well, hold on, is it little money or is it no money? Because there's a big difference. He goes on to talk about the delight of being paid later in the chapter, so we're clearly meant to think about these things. Um, so he is a character who uh is so prepared to steer us towards meaning, but still just just sets himself at so many removes of ambiguity. Um right from the word go. He's a slippery, he's a slippery individual.

SPEAKER_03 20:22

For sure he is, absolutely. Um yeah, and I think uh there's a relationship between like this ambiguity with this protagonist, with what you get in some of uh um Melville's previous works before Moby Dick. So Taip and Omu are supposed to be essentially be autobiographical, right? These are things that actually have the me Herman Melville, um, whether he's called Herman Melville or uh Tom O, um in my actual life and my travels in the Pacific. Um and you know, people attacked him at the time uh with claims that you know these are uh he's lying, basically. And you know, to a certain extent, like uh, you know, there's truth to these stories, but they are fictionalized to a certain degree or or other. Um and he plays this up uh in Marty too, uh, his third book after Taipei and Omu, where he uh basically says, Oh, you know, people uh thought that I was writing fiction when I wrote uh Taipee and Omu. Maybe if I write something that's so outlandishly fiction, uh this you know romance of the South Seas, then people will actually think this is true. Um I think we'd get something a little bit similar here in Moby Dick where um there is increased ambiguity, and like you know, to a certain extent we do see some like clear uh biographical parallels between uh Ishmael and uh Hermann Melville. Uh but yeah, there is this uh increased ambiguity. Um moving in a different direction, uh to what extent are y'all familiar with uh the biblical Ishmael?

SPEAKER_01 21:57

I can try and have a go at uh some. Summarizing the story of Abraham and Hagar, Tristan, but I'd prefer you to do it. Yeah, yeah, no worries.

SPEAKER_03 22:06

For sure. So this is going to go back to Genesis in your uh Hebrew Bible or Old Testament. And specifically, Ishmael is Abraham's firstborn son, but by Hagar. So Abraham and Sarah are married, but Sarah is barren. And so Abraham has a child by Hagar, and Hagar being Sarah's handmaid. And so Ishmael is sort of this firstborn son, but also kind of like a bastard son in a sense. But what what I think is really crucial here is that Ishmael is sort of this bastard, cast off, uh orfin in a sense, uh disinherited person. And I think like those are the qualities that I think are crucial to Melville's Ishmael, right? The sense of being rejected from the world or of being of losing one's birthright, being kind of cast off. Um so I I I think that's the the the critical part of this biblical illusion. And I uh I also think that there's a real resonance between this first line and the very last line in the book. Um but we'll we'll save that for now. We'll we'll save that for later uh when we get to it uh eventually.

SPEAKER_00 23:50

Yeah. Always be careful what you name your characters. Because if there's been one character, a real person with that name, whether you mean it to or not, that connection is going to be made, and then you have to you have to do something with it. Just keep that in mind.

SPEAKER_01 24:05

I think the other point maybe to make about um where the biblical illusion actually sits within the text of the Bible is really, really important to this opening chapter as well, because it's from Genesis. Um and there are several different ways in which Moby Dick as a whole, but especially Loomings, is setting up a relationship with the Bible as a text. We get what I think is one of the most sublime epithets in all of literature to refer to Adam and Eve a bit later in the chapter, right? Um the act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us, which I just absolutely adore. But so those those references to Genesis um recur in this chapter, and of course they're they're they they abound throughout the uh the text as a whole. The reason I think Genesis is especially important to touch on while we're talking about uh loomings, in addition to all the the brilliant stuff that you've just said, Tristan, is um Genesis is very, very occupied, as as as you two know, and as our listen listeners will know, with the idea of beginnings, right? In the beginning there was the word and the word was God. Here we are starting a chapter which uh immediately sets itself uh with reference to something that happened some years ago. So it's setting itself up actually as a text that very explicitly is not the Bible. Um and uh to compound complexity on complexity there, we're reading this thing that is called chapter one, but it is by no means the start of the book. So Moby Dick as a as a text has a really fraught relationship with its its methods of beginning. Uh and I think part of the way in which Melville is orchestrating that for us is by setting it in um in dialogue specifically with the book of Genesis. Moby Dick almost begins with re with a reference to what it isn't before it has anything to do with with sort of setting up what it actually is.

SPEAKER_03 26:02

Yeah, no, uh, that makes a lot of sense. Um, I do want to note, uh, just because we've got such attentive listeners, uh, that that that uh in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God is actually uh from the gospel according to John. But uh to your point, um that's actually supposed to be reminiscent of and a call back to Genesis. So it makes a lot of sense.

SPEAKER_01 26:22

Oh my goodness, we're we're circling back to circling back to the back.

SPEAKER_03 26:25

Circling back.

SPEAKER_02 26:25

There you go. There you go.

SPEAKER_03 26:27

Yeah, and uh to continue with some of these uh religious themes um and specifically uh Christian themes, um, I see in this chapter Ishmael uh really wrestling with some uh some what what I would consider uh core Christian concepts. Um you had mentioned before, Johnny, here let me find it. About the two orchard thieves uh and paying. Uh here, okay, so uh, but being paid, what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvelous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a money man enter heaven. Ah, how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition. Um, so you've got this uh hearkening back to like really like uh um, especially like thinking about something like uh the book of Acts, um like a really uh crucial aspect of early Christianity is this uh um basically swearing off allegiance to to mammon to to uh to money uh and to to like uh private property, if you will. Um and like uh comparing that to like you know trying to live in this uh like uh early industrial capitalist uh world, right? You know, it's basically impossible to do this. Um and then also you've got uh let me find it. Um I abandon the glory and distinction of such offices to those who like them. For my part, I abominate all honorable, respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever. Um, another sort of you know, uh casting off of uh the the search for worldly recognition and worldly uh worldly status, which again is very crucial to what we might think of a uh an early Christianity, but also specifically in this time period when people are really uh grappling with what it means to live in this uh this changing industrializing uh capitalistic uh world, um, trying to hearken back to some of this like older ideas of Christianity. Um and you you get these sorts of religious revivals, especially in the United States around this time, um, really addressing some of these fundamental uh issues and uh dissonances of uh of this modernizing life.

SPEAKER_00 28:45

I think it's also part of um the like capital R romantic anxieties of the text. What does it mean to uh uh put a dollar sign on every tree, on every trip that you take? Is it possible for me to interact with the world without a job? Um, I hate that I've been brought to a place where I feel better if I'm being being paid. This is a corrupt way to be interacting with nature, but I also like have to be able to feed myself. Like um, these are practical things that a normal person would think about, but in terms of what we put in a book, these are romantic anxieties um as a as a like a reflexive uh reaction to the industrialization and the enlightenment uh coming from us uh a century beforehand. They're things that um our American authors also really liked talking about because then that combines with the idea of like I'm special in this big group. I see these things that maybe other people aren't seeing like the way that I earn money is different. And sort of like I don't know if that's true. Some authors were able to kind of look on that from sort of like God's eyes, and that's certainly something that will be tracking through the novel as a whole. Um, the idea of um of capitalism being having to be the way that you are able to do this wonderful thing, which is go across the ocean. Um, but it's a it's a romantic anxiety, uh, what has happened now that um that we're measuring everything and that everything has a cost, and this is the way that we have to talk to each other. The only way I can get a really good um roasted chicken is if I can pay for it at this bed and breakfast.

SPEAKER_03 30:35

Yeah, uh better be judiciously buttered. Oh, hell yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:39

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:40

A compote.

SPEAKER_01 30:42

I get the feeling that Ishmael is going to be bitterly disappointed by the bill of fare on the Pequad. Does he really think that he's getting broiled fowl? Surely, surely one would one expect sort of ship's biscuit and and and well and and and steaks and things. I mean, I certainly don't think the uh I don't think the cook on the Pequad is up to broiled fowl. I mean, we'll meet him at some well in quite a few episodes' time, but uh yeah, this this this this sort of green ishmail that we see right at the beginning of this uh of the text is um he's setting himself up for a culinary disappointment.

SPEAKER_00 31:16

For sure. He is about to get some of the best chowder on the planet, though, in a couple of chokers. So don't even don't even play about the clam chatter he is about to have at the hotel. I just thinking about it makes me feel crazy.

SPEAKER_03 31:35

So yeah, so uh to what extent do y'all see um an autobiographical flavor uh to the character of Ishmael?

SPEAKER_01 31:42

Well, there's certainly the biographical consideration that uh Melville was a schoolmaster and then a sailor as uh as as Ishmael was. Um the journey that the Pequad undertakes, mild spoiler, it I believe exactly mirrors or is the exact reverse of a journey, a whaling voyage that Melville went on uh when he was uh more or less just a ship's hand on uh uh or you know, a sort of an everyday sailor on a on a whaling voyage. We might also want to point out that Her Melville throughout his life struggled with uh mental health difficulties, as we very, very clearly see Ishmael doing uh at the opening of the uh of the novel. So there are some very sort of um biographical details in the in terms of deep sort of factual details about their lives, where they went, what they did, but also we might sort of think about commonalities in the in the interiorities of the two individuals as well, how they deal with what what Ishmael calls uh uh their hypos.

SPEAKER_03 32:47

Yeah, uh you also get here. Let me find it. Um it touches one's sense of honor, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the Van Renselaers or Randolphs or Hardekanutes. Uh sorry uh if I butchered butchered any of those uh Dutch names to our uh Dutch list listeners. Um but there's there's an autobiographical aspect to that as well, because uh Melville on his maternal line, so he his grandfather, his uh his mother's father, was a Revolutionary War hero and a well-to-do uh citizen um uh by the name of Gansovoort. And so uh I do think you see here uh both with Melville and with uh this character Ishmael this sense of like uh uh family, uh like a family in decline, or like uh proletarianization, uh, or this like downward uh downward mobility where uh like Ishmael and and Melville, right, is uh taking a job as a sailor, right? Which is far below far beneath what would have been the the class expectations of like his parents or especially his parents' parents.

SPEAKER_01 34:02

Yeah, there's a deep, deep solitude to him. Um and it's another one of those uh sort of paradoxes of his own uh nature, and perhaps it exists within us all as well. I'm I'm really fascinated by that line that one of the first meditations that we get from Ishmael about the ocean, which must in some way m mirror Melville's own feelings, um when he says uh he he he gives the account of um uh the uh the uh uh his hypos and the the kind of the really really strong reactions that he has when he's on shore and uh the idea that getting out to sea is is some kind of cure for him. And then he says, uh there is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, sometime or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me. And I'm really interested in that uh statement of Ishmael's, but potentially also that feeling of Melville's of that desire to be to feel a common feeling with one's fellow individual about the ocean, but also to be slightly different. There's a real battle to simultaneously to belong and also to be an individual, right? Uh very nearly the same feelings, not exactly the same, because that would mean that Ishmael is just another face in the crowd, that Melville is just another face in the crowd.

SPEAKER_00 35:29

Yeah, I think um I think something that is um um always present in really good boat media, which is a genre that I love, is I was an outcast or I was like a weirdo on land, but in this fake community that we have made on this ship so that we don't go insane, I am critical. And if you put a lot of weird people on a boat and we still have to do the social contract, what happens? Can I still be strange? So, in this first chapter, as you guys have been talking about, um the community that he puts himself in is very abstract. It's like healthy men. Well, that's a big group of people. He doesn't, he's not talking to a friend when he's saying these things, he's talking to us who aren't there with him, and he then he's talking about humanity, which is like fair enough. But he uh he's still the thrust is he feels alone, he does not feel good, that's what he's going to see. Something that's interesting that we're gonna see over these next um the the the new Bedford section is is he able to do anything on land to sort of slack this feeling of almost dangerous isolation? We'll see in sort of the what in what in what interesting ways the answers are are yes and no. Um but then once you're once the boat person is on the boat and we have made this new version of the town so that we can survive and do our job and come back, does he in what in what ways uh or what are the what is the machine, what are the tools that make it cape make it possible for him to be capable of creating a of finding a place in this new family? And um, you know, spoiler alert, uh it involves sperm, we'll get there. It could have on land, what was stopping him? But in any case, um that's that's quite far off. So in for the opening chapter to be so much like I am alone and yet I am part of a huge group of people who all feel the same way, but I have to get out of here, is super interesting and is really um kind of the thrust of a lot of kind of like uh I don't want to say anti-hero um literature, but any of that sort of um like really capital M, I'm doing this a lot, capital M modernist prose that we're gonna get in like a century. It's not that people weren't sad on the page before, but the way that it is put on the page is cool and sort of troubling and like really beautiful in a way that we wouldn't return to for a while. So it feels really um, really contemporary, the way that Ishmael is talking to us about the way that he doesn't feel good incredibly explicitly. I do this so I don't kill myself, feels like we wouldn't be making jokes about that for a long time. Um, it would take a world war. Um but uh um the fact that we get someone whose whose voice almost seems so sprightly, almost like Wodehousian in certain parts, um, but that he is he's the driver of this car. And um it's so it's so idiot, socratic and and and so funny and so beautiful. Um the things that he's talking about as he claims are things that we all feel, but we're trapped in this guy who's gonna be taking us on um a really specific, like rhetorical trip to sea. That if we were on one of the healthy boys on the piers, if he went to sea, it would be completely different. But we know we're stuck with this guy, and that's so important for an opening chapter to uh to cement in in so many ways.

SPEAKER_03 39:07

Yeah, yeah. Let's talk about then. Let's talk about the sea or the ocean. Um, so the ocean takes up such a big uh chunk of this chapter, how people are drawn to it, and and and also to just uh water in general, how people are drawn to that. Um Johnny, what do you make of this?

SPEAKER_01 39:22

I don't know about you two. I've certainly felt that meditative, um, very sort of reflective quality that water and specifically the ocean seems to impart to Ishmael, and indeed the um the the the the manhattos that we get described just on the uh on the edge of the water. Um that resonates enormously with me. I think it was probably one of the first things that um that that that struck me about reading the text, um, especially in a text that actually remains landlocked for quite a while. Um again, minor spoiler, but it takes us quite a while. It takes us quite a few chapters to get to see.

unknown 40:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:02

Very true.

SPEAKER_00 40:03

We're we're in a hotel for a long time. Yeah. Like I thought we wanted to get going. What are we doing? Yeah. It's a nice hotel.

SPEAKER_01 40:11

But what's lovely about that is it's also it it works as a kind of very it's a very protracted leave-taking of the land um until we get to that magnificent chapter that we will do in sort of roughly 19 episodes time, the Lee Shore, um, which is a wonderful kind of farewell, farewell to the land and an embracing of the ocean. But we get a wonderful foretaste of that here. Um this is a very it sounds like the the most obvious thing to say in the world. Moby Dick is a very oceanic text, but I mean that also on in terms of how it's structured, in terms of its ebb and flow, and uh in terms of the the pro style right from the get-go here. So I love the way that this kind of uh the kind of kind of uh uh ebbing and flowing, the way that we've got these wonderful kind of sprawling, almost Prustian sentences that kind of remind one of the kind of the rolling and the breaking of a wave, but then suddenly then we've got those incredibly sort of punchy short sentences. There's a wonderful kind of oceanic unpredictability about the way that this chapter is even put together. So it speaks to the way that yes, this chapter in this text is all about the ocean, but it is just so informed, even in terms of how it seems to be working. Uh it's structured in a very kind of tidal way as well.

SPEAKER_00 41:31

Yeah, I think um, I think the way that you're talking about um uh the thing being described is also the metaphor for the the way it is being described, is um that needs to be pinned to the top of sort of our discussion of the book as a whole. Um my favorite part of um him talking about this this whole thing, which is so beautiful in the middle where he's he's making his argument that we all want to get to see at some point, or it's important for us to stand in front of it, I think is which I think he's completely right. If you feel crazy, this is why people were taking like what are they called, like um rest stays, or something like this woman is going crazy, put her by the ocean. It's like, well, maybe for you were wrong for the right reasons, but yes, maybe she does need to go to the ocean. Um, as everyone knows, meditation and water are wedded forever. And I think it's so funny. What's about to happen is when we're actually on the ocean as we take on a giant meditative project, which we'll see in like eight years when we get to that section. Um, the promises he's making here are quite big. So on the one hand, we're like, are are we going, is are we gonna do anything we're on this boat? Are we just gonna look at the sea? Because it almost seems like he I think I think it's fun to sort of think about the idea that he just wants to be on a boat, but in order to do that, to circle back to something we were talking about before, is that he has to be paid to do it. He doesn't want to travel somewhere, but he also can't be a cook. So he basically needs to do like a job. Um, and the way that he's gonna interact with the ocean has to be through that way, and that's a kind of a shame, but he also takes pride in being able to do a task. So, like, whatever, that's gonna be fine. Um, but the ocean physically below, but also like all around him, is going to almost in spite of anyone's better judgment or the things that they they think that they can do when they're out there, is it will sort of like infect. Infect is not the right word, sounds unpleasant, but sort of like it, you be you become an ocean citizen, and that is different than your the land version of yourself. We could say something like maybe your the metaphor would maybe be like elevating or like purifying, which we know is not true, and that's something Melville's gonna do with like the way that we interact with the ocean in the whaling industry is not good. But that's the way that this guy can get to sea. But if the ocean is built for meditation, what does that do to the soul to be out there trying to meditate? Like your heart is like, I gotta meditate, I gotta meditate. But your your brain is like, I gotta kill a whale, because that's why I'm allowed to be on the ocean. These kind of like cross purposes and which one is gonna be stronger. You wanna say it's the ocean because it's the ocean, but like who knows? These are some big questions that he's posing. And Johnny, like you've said it's funny because we're not gonna get on the sea for a while. And yet it's a sea town. Everybody's thinking about it all the time. We don't leave these considerations, even though we aren't on the sea yet. But the the um the actions he has to take and the people he has to talk to and the relationships he has to enter into in order to get onto the boat are also intriguing and part of that larger sort of meditative where do I belong project.

SPEAKER_01 44:59

There's something wonderfully Shakespearean about that as a technique, and yeah, that we have to wait to actually get out onto the ocean, the thing that's been talked about an awful lot. You know, people spend uh a quite a long time talking about Macbeth until he actually sets foot on the sea, you know, brave Macbeth, you know, um, roughly on seeming people from the Nave for the Chaps and all that kind of thing. The same the same thing happens in Othello, but less in King Lear. But that's the we we are made to form our own opinions about the protagonist of a of a Shakespeare Poe or in a Greek tragedy. Um and then the the person actually appears on stage, and then we have those opinions either confirmed or denied for us. And I think exactly the same thing is happening here with the ocean and also crucially with the whale. The whale.

SPEAKER_00 45:43

We're like, I know we're not gonna see that whale until we're on the ocean, so let's go. And he's like, no, no. For singing a roommate.

SPEAKER_01 45:51

And we and but and we we come back to to what you were saying so brilliantly earlier, Meg, about the way that this uh the way that the text is is is so wonderful at kind of mirroring the experience of what the text is about. Suppose in in kind of academic jar jargon we call that mimesis, right? The the the the text is mirroring the experience that is being narrated in the text. Um, so much of whaling is about not seeing whales.

SPEAKER_00 46:17

Uh and 98% of the time, I think it's about not seeing whales.

SPEAKER_01 46:20

Oh, and the rest, exactly. And and and so, you know, and and and we get right out the gate here um with having to do an awful lot of thinking about going to sea, thinking about whaling, um, which um for those of you uh reading along for the first time at home, uh you will you'll want to strap in because there is gonna be a fair bit of that.

SPEAKER_00 46:42

Including when we're at sea.

SPEAKER_01 46:44

Oh, especially when we're at sea.

SPEAKER_00 46:46

Because you're still like, where's Hobby Dick? Okay, we gotta see him like eight or ten times. Because like I know how movies work, and it's like, this is not a movie. This is a 700-page book.

SPEAKER_03 46:53

Yeah, uh, one of the things I find really interesting is uh sort of this dividity that uh Melville imputes to the ocean, to and it's to water in general. Um here, let me find it. Uh uh, why upon your first voyage as a passenger did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Uh and he also talks about uh the the Persians and the Greeks all having uh uh gods of the water. Um and then really, really what I think is uh super interesting is uh and still deeper, the meaning of that story of narcissists who, because he could not grasp the tormenting mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans, it is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life, and this is the key to it all. And I I think he's right, and I I really do think this is the key to it all, you know. Um get these various characters like uh Ahab, who is gonna rage against the uh like this ungraspable phantom and like not being able to grasp this. Uh, you'll get uh Pip who uh goes mad from this sort of encounter, and and really all we get is uh the only person who's really able to uh encounter this and um really articulate and tell us about it is Ishmael in this. And and I I I think this a relationship, this uh this uh looking for the self in nature, looking for a reflection of the the self outside of the self is really what's crucial about uh this image of water, this image of uh you know, looking for the divine or looking for something beyond ourselves that's really critical here. Um but what do you think, Meg?

SPEAKER_00 48:37

Yeah, I think something that's gonna be really that is interesting now in the in these pages, and something that is definitely gonna stay incredibly even centrally important for the rest of the thing is the idea that like we are putting a lot of thoughts and feelings on the ocean, and the ocean is just the ocean. She is not really thinking about us back in the same way, and yet we are interacting with it. It's not like a one-way street, it's it's going both ways, but only one party is like anthro, not really anthropomorphic, um, but like putting these those significances that you were that you were quoting, like our myths and our our central, our religions onto it. The ocean isn't making a religion of us back, it's just that the whales are are trying to kill us or something like that. So I think part of the um part of the the romantic project overall was definitely like a quote unquote return to nature, as if we had left it and now we're going back to it where we had been before, and that there's some sort of inherent um morality to it. And if we can only get into it in the correct way, then we can feel better about ourselves and our relationship with this thing. Some authors kind of stopped there, and that's fine, and those poems can be really beautiful, um, even though they were largely written by rich people who like could take trips to the countryside, which were maintained by like the farmers, etc. In any case, but some authors like kind of kept going, and the really interesting um American romanticists, um, the ones who I think still read as like shockingly good and innovative, like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, keep looking at it and kind of create like a cycle where it's like, does the snake care about me back? And like Walt Women who's pushing the boundaries of like what a sentence can do, um, is sort of having those same considerations of like when I'm lying in the grass, what's up with that? And like, this is a question that um I think Melville is asking in different ways in these literally questions that he writes down. Um, why is it that we we made a jove? We didn't have to do that, but we did. Why did we? And um this idea of like we're putting a lot of significance onto it. Is this a uh is this a harmful relationship? Does it help if it just makes me feel better and doesn't and sort of lets me not kill myself if I'm imagining a relationship? Maybe even parasocial is a obviously a term that wouldn't have made sense. Um, although we could have, I think we could have gotten Hermann Melville there. But the idea that like it's going one way, but we are interacting. Is that exhausting in the end? Is this worthwhile? Is this harmful? Again, like we're going into the ocean for certain ways. So the idea of putting like a divinity on it is as a romantic project problematic in a in a good way, in a way that's like really generative and is going to be the engine for a lot of the um sort of like middle chapters. Does the ocean know we're in the ocean? In some ways the answer is yes, but in some ways the answer is like it could not possibly matter less except when you die.

SPEAKER_03 51:47

Yeah. Another thing that's uh very important in this chapter is this idea of fate um and predestination. Um and let me find it that that uh though I cannot tell why this was exactly, yet now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises induced me to set about performing the part I did. Besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased free will and discriminating judgment. Uh which, you know, fantastic quote quotation there, but I think is really key uh and critical to the rest of the book and to the rest of the ideas of uh fate and uh predestination. Uh what do you think, Johnny?

SPEAKER_01 52:30

That whole passage is so gorgeously couched in theatrical language, uh, and is so um deliberately inviting us to think about the events that are going to follow in terms of something that has been staged, in terms of something that has potentially been preordained. Okay, we've already mentioned Shakespearean tragedy. He's giving us such a strong sense of how this is all gonna turn out. Um and I mean he even mentions, right, um, though I cannot tell why it wasn't exactly the stage managers, the fates put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies. Well, he's implicitly, explicitly aligning himself with the movements of a of some kind of theatrical tragedy there. Um it it it doesn't it doesn't sound great, does it, in terms of how this is gonna go. Yeah. And of course it sets in motion the whole question of of free will. Are we actually in control of our actions? Is there some other ungovernable force that is moving us? It's a it's an it's an issue that Moby D raises without ever definitively answering or even having any kind of uh demonstrable opinion on on either side. I think it remains fundamentally ambiguous all the way through on that particular matter. Who is doing the controlling?

SPEAKER_00 54:01

We also crucially get in that thing, in what you just quoted, now that I recall all the circumstances, which is another thing of I'm telling the story now of something that happened to me 20 years ago. So part of the part of the expectations of a text where the author is doing interpret, where it's mediated by an author even more than it usually is when you're reading fiction, or by author, I mean narrator. Um there's the idea of like, is he doing interpretive work for us that we don't see that is already circumscribing our experience of the things he's trying to tell us happened to him? So he's it seems like he's so the sentences are are ostensibly doing work for us, but you could also sort of um, as we know, um Melville's a fan of like irony in the way the narrative is put on the page. He likes to play around with that. So it's kind of um, like you were just saying, kind of a warning sign that he's like, this is kind of a tragedy. And we're like, this is chapter one. But indeed, that's like key, as the text says, this is key to the whole thing is how how is the story being told to us? What is it telling us is like coming down the horn? What do I need to be prepared for? So now we're like, whales, tragedy, chicken, broiled fowl. I'm ready. And it's like, and which is like we know it's coming, and I'm just I have to be prep. It's I'm learning how to read the book.

SPEAKER_02 55:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 55:27

And um, all of those, all of those weird techniques that we've talked about are are um are not going anywhere. And in fact, we'll only get bigger and brighter.

SPEAKER_01 55:36

You're completely right, Meg. And I think what you've what you've really hit on there, which I think is going to be so important, is again like a like a Shakespearean tragedy, it's not about the what so much as it's about the how. Exactly. Here's how this is probably going to end up, but now let me talk you through um how exactly we got there.

SPEAKER_00 55:57

Yeah. That's great.

SPEAKER_03 55:59

Yeah. Um, well, this has been such a fun conversation. Um, and you know, we've covered a lot of uh very weighty topics. Uh even though we've spent almost an hour now just uh devoted to this one chapter, I feel like we've kind of barely scratched the surface or uh uh sounded the depths of uh this chapter. Um but but yeah, um now Johnny, uh with your uh excellent acting voice, would you mind reading us the last paragraph of this chapter, which I feel like is a uh a a great uh jumping off point into the rest of the book?

SPEAKER_01 56:32

It would be my pleasure, Tristan. By reason of these things, then the whaling voyage was welcome. The great floodgates of the wonder world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two, there floated into my inmost soul endless processions of the whale, and the midmost of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.

SPEAKER_03 57:00

Love it. Well, thank you very much. Thank you, audience, for uh for listening, and we'll be back to you very soon with uh episode zero, Etymology and Extracts.

SPEAKER_01 57:14

You've been listening to the Pequod Pod with Tristan Bavol Marquise, Meg Francher, and Johnny Wiles. You can support the show by visiting patreon.com forward slash pequadpod, throw us a tabloon or two for some bonus content, and to help to keep the show going full sale. Thank you for listening, and until next time, call us the Pequad Podcast.