SPEAKER_00 0:01

High warships on that gritty comma between high and low tides, smelling salt and seaweed, where egrets graze and gulls cough. I was there last night after a thunderstorm. High tide sloosed sand off granite, which grabbed my bare feet as I balanced and took two big steps. One, two, and then jumped onto cold sand. The ebb had rolled all the way out past the seaweed, revealing the dirty underclothing of the world. Green weed insinuated slime between my toes, which dug down into water-smooth grit. No sun, no stars, no moon. The egrets which feed on low-tide mornings were nowhere to be seen. I could spy vagueness stretching out to the dark. I could hear the slow lap of water moving. Just a hint of salt burning in my nose.

SPEAKER_02 1:10

What you just heard there is the voice of Steve Mentz reading from his book Sailing Without Ahab. It's a book of many things: part poetry collection, part literary commentary, part autobiography, part experimental recasting of Moby Dick. And none of these categories are completely distinct. Like the world's oceans, they drift into and out of and alongside one another in highly generative and unpredictable ways. It's also, as you've just heard, beautifully written. And you can look forward to hearing more readings over the course of this episode. As well as sailing without Ahab, Steve Mentz has written several other books, including At the Bottom of Shakespeare's Ocean, an introduction to the Blue Humanities, and a contribution to Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series on the ocean, which is simply entitled Ocean. He's professor and department chair of English at St. John's University. And you won't be surprised, given this small glimpse of Steve's Frankly Oceanic TV, to hear that he is a great reader and lover of and writer on the work of Herman Melville. And I'm so excited to be talking all things Melville with him today. Steve Mentz, welcome to the Pequod Pod.

SPEAKER_00 2:29

Oh, thank you, Johnny. That's a that's a lovely and flattering introduction. It's a pleasure to be here.

SPEAKER_02 2:34

It's really, really lovely to have you with us. So this is our question that we always lead with with our guests, uh, because they all have such wonderful origin stories. When did you first encounter Melville's work? And at what point did he become a writer of particular importance to you?

SPEAKER_00 2:50

Yeah, I mean, I I encountered Melville's work as a child. Um, I'm pretty sure that I received a copy of Moby Dick as a gift when I was maybe 10 or 11 years old. Um I remember reading it uh on a weekend ski trip with my father when I was quite young. I think at that point I probably skipped the Satology sections and was in it for the, you know, the boys' adventure element, um, which is of course one way to slice up, uh slice up the novel. Um and then it it so in some ways it's a it even more than Shakespeare, uh which is my sort of professional professorly teaching home, Melville has been a kind of abiding presence in my imagination. And um, you know, I've gone in and out of it over the years. Um I didn't take, I didn't study Melville in college or in graduate school. I didn't uh, you know, I sort of started smuggling Melville into my oceanic work on Shakespeare from the very beginning, from the you know, the the 2000s. Um, but it's only really in this book that I sort of let my Melville flag fly fully and sort of came uh came to think that I can, you know, to think that Melville is a is a uh a person, a literary figure, and imagination that I really want to grapple with on a kind of larger scale. And in some ways, the weird structure of Sailing Without Ahab is my attempt to do justice to my own understanding of the weird structure of Moby Dick. Um, that Melville is an experimental author, and I felt like I had to be an experimental writer in order to make sense of what it what it means to me.

SPEAKER_02 4:37

I think you've hit upon a really, really wonderful way in Sailing Without Ahab of precisely yet reworking and in some ways commenting on the fantastic eclecticism of Moby Dick. Could you tell us a bit about the genesis then of Sailing Without Ahab? I mean it's it is a pretty mammoth task to recast Moby Dick in any way, let alone in a way that that potenti that but that pointedly excludes such a major figure as Ahab. So what you've already started to answer this question, but what led to the writing of the book in this particular way and specifically without the presence of Captain Ahab?

SPEAKER_00 5:14

Yeah, and so the attempt to sort of to excise the tyrannical captain um was something that that sort of crept up on me a little bit as I was thinking about the novel and thinking about the relationship between you know English language literature and the sea. Um you know, there are there are all these figures of the tyrannical captain, um, you know, I mean, including in some ways Prospero and the Tempest, right, as the as the tyrannical Duke, magician, wizard. Um, but I like I was I was growing increasingly interested in the perspective of the laborer rather than the captain, the perspective of the person who is close to the water. Um, this is a part of my abiding interest in ocean water swimming, both as a practice and a kind of meditation, um, and thinking about like what is it like to have a physical, emotional, maybe even spiritual engagement with the um with the ocean itself as opposed to the political superstructure that's sort of built around oceanic travel and transport. And so looking at Moby Dick over the years, I thought like maybe what I'm really interested in, I mean, it was obvious to me that I was really interested in the perspective of Ishmael rather than Ahab. And that, you know, the the novel is obviously moving back and forth between these perspectives, even though Ishmael is our consistent narrator. Um But you know, at some point I thought, like, what happens if you just take the tyrant and put him to the side? Like, what's left in the novel if you just if you don't have to follow the monstrous tyrant? Um, what are the things that you lose? And you do lose some things, and what are the things that you gain? Um, and really the project of Sailing Without Ahab is trying to inhabit that position of like what happens if you just push that man to the side and think about what's left. Um even though you still like like we're still in the boat, we're still uh sailing after the whale, um, the plot doesn't change, the superstructure plot. Um but one of the things that happened for me in writing this book is that I also found that there was a the there was space in the structure of the voyage, the Pequad, to include myself, right? Like the the the the innovation that was possible after Ahab moved off this off the center stage was the character I, um, I period, which is both Ishmael, you know, I-ish and I me. Um and so the the the passage the poem that I that I read at the beginning, the chapel, um, takes its title, obviously, from from Melville's title, Melville's chapter, the title. And about half the poems in the book take their titles from Melville's chapter titles, and half of them are original. Um but the story that the chapel tells is entirely about me, right? It's about my relationship with the little tiny beach down the street from my house, um, where I go swimming every day, at least in the summer. Um, and and so thinking about how my own relationship with the water, my own relationship with, you know, the sort of world, uh, the oceanic world that I live on the on the margins of in this kind of static position, um, not out on the wide sea in a in a wooden boat, um, but thinking about the the ways in which my own relationship with with the watery world might have some purchase on or connection to. Um, you know, I mean, I'm definitely the kind of person who walks around with lines from Melville sort of ringing in my head at at all all you know appropriate or inappropriate times, right? I, you know, I mean, I think that this is the um this is perhaps the nature of literature professors, um, but I think also the nature of intense readers, that we live with these stories. Um, we live with Ishmael and Kuquig and Starbuck and Pip and and Ahab too, as much maybe as we well, as much as I might like to keep the Ahab side off stage, um, at least for for at least to an extent. And and of course, you know, the book is called Sailing Without Ahab. The only word in the poems themselves that I'm not allowed to use is the word Ahab, but I do use the word Ahab in the title. So there's this this presence and absence, right? And the absence of Ahab in the text of the poems is itself a kind of uh it's a it's an absence that creates a kind of overhang of presence too.

SPEAKER_02 10:03

It is very much a text then about absence. I'd say it's it's governed in a way by a certain poetics of absence in really, really fascinating ways. Do you identify a comparable thematization of absence at work in Moby Dick at all? Not necessarily to do with Ahab, but potentially elsewhere.

SPEAKER_00 10:22

Yeah, I mean uh I mean the obvious absence in the book is the whale, right? Who is both the you know Moby Dick or the whale. He is the titular character of the book, and he also doesn't show up until, you know, whatever the chase, I guess just before the chase day one. So it's just a this very short period of Moby Dick being literally present, at least in the non-flashback parts of the novel. Um, and so there is a way in which Moby Dick is also about the poetics of absence, and or at least the poetics of because the whale is in another place. Oh, it's right. The whale, the whale is the is a creature of the undersea. Um, and the inability of Ishmael, you know, falling asleep on the masthead, um with Cartesian voids beneath. Yes, exactly, the glittering expanse, horizontal expanse of the surface of the ocean, and also constantly obsessed with the thing that is that is invisible, inaccessible, uh, not fully knowable that is under the sea. Um, and I I it seems to me like there are a couple moments where people, characters in Moby Dick have access to the undersea, like the most probably um resonant one is um is Pip in his drowning moment, um his drowning visionary moment, although maybe like Kuiquag swimming and a couple other places too. Um, but the the idea that there is this what Melville calls the wonder world, right? The world of the ocean, that that is mostly invisible and inaccessible, right? That the the most of the ocean is not the surface, which we can see and access. Most of the ocean is the is the domain of the whale, um, you know, 20,000 fathoms down, as as um as Father Mapple says, right? That there is this almost infinite space of inaccessibility. Um, you know, the source of most of the biotic life on Earth is uh the deep ocean. Um and it is the, you know, again, all the things that one can say about the deep ocean and the relatively recent human exploration of that space um strikes me as also important to thinking about Moby Dick. That Melville is already thinking about the deep ocean, um, you know, however many, you know, 100 years before Jacques Cousteau, right?

SPEAKER_02 12:49

Um wonderful, wonderful. Well, maybe now will be a good time for another reading, Steve. Do you have uh uh another piece of text teed up that you'd like to read?

SPEAKER_00 13:03

I I was gonna read, I have another one which is kind of a uh a more homey one, but but having just talked about the deep ocean, I wonder if I should if I should read something that's a little bit more a little a little bit more a little bit more plunging into the water.

SPEAKER_02 13:20

Um why don't we sound a little more and then we can we can read the more homey uh homie homey piece later.

SPEAKER_00 13:27

Exactly. So um so this is uh this one is called Birthing Tash, and it's about that moment in which Kuiqued goes you know, removes Tashtago from the head of the whale where he has fallen, and then the head falls into the water and he's about to be drowned. Um Birthing Tash. Tashtago falls, I allegorizes. Inside the head, a trapped Indian struggles. The whalemen spy him throb and heave inside the massive case as it hangs alongside the pea. It is as if, thinks philosopher I, the head were at that moment seized with some momentous idea. The tackle parts, head splashes into the sea, Q dives to the rescue, delivers Tash from the whale's head womb. The gay header does not speak of entombment, but I dreams of having likewise fallen into Plato's honey head and sweetly perished there. I still dream of it, as if the whale himself might surface and speak. The hardcore Melvilleans on the pod will recognize that I'm quoting in a couple different moments. I'm quoting Melville, and you can hear the register change a little bit. And partly what I mean, again, the project is about reinhabiting Moby Dick as if I-ish and I me were the same person. So so it is thinking through, in many cases, Melville's own language. Um, and you know, I mean, in the in the printed text, I do italicize the the quotations. Um, but I'm trying to think about like how do they change when they are spoken by this different version of I. Um and in some cases I think they change not that much, right? I mean, I'm I'm inhabiting the reading of um Tesh Dego and stuff, the head of the whale, as a as as this image of thought, image of like thought at its most intense and embodied.

SPEAKER_02 15:28

Very much so, and that's mediated beautifully through this figure of philosopher I in this particular instance. And it captures wonderfully the way that Ishmael is the prism through which this incredibly dramatic, life-threatening moment unfolds. I'm really interested in the way that you are combining uh Ishmael I and your yourself I, particularly in this moment, and the fact that you uh uh f focus in on the uh philosophical and sort of allegorizing line of this of this uh moment to again slightly to the exclusion of this incredible drama that is actually kind of happening almost just offset uh i uh uh as it were in this i i in uh as you've as you've uh transposed it here. Is there is there a motivation behind the uh primacy of the philosophical voice here uh over the um the kind of uh dramatic and violent moment of almost of resurrection actually that's going on there with uh with Tastigo?

SPEAKER_00 16:39

Yeah, I mean I think that's a that's a very perceptive and helpful question. And I think that what part of I mean the last time I taught Moby Dick um to graduate students at St. John's, um I had I I was really struck again, you know, like you return to a text and and it and it speaks differently to you. I was really um really intensely engaged by and and and in some sense repelled by the extreme violence of the text, like the way in which the flesh of the whale is brutalized and the way in which that celebration is minutely described. Um you know it's it's quite horrifying what happens in the extractive industry of the whale fishery. And and like part of the effort, I mean, again, this I think is the one of the things that's behind the separation of the of the missing Ahab and the present, the sort of doubly present I is to think about like there's a way in which Ishmael goes to sea in order to understand the world, um, which is to say, in order to understand the ocean, which is to say, in order to understand the whale. But everybody else goes to sea to kill the whale. Everybody else goes to sea to murder and to and to uh you know to inflict harm upon flesh. Um, and I talk about innocent flesh at another moment. I'm not gonna be able to find the poem right now, but there is a like a super violence in this text. Um that um, you know, I think when I was a kid and read it for the first time, like it was the monster and it was the hero. That was like the fun part, right? Is that like there's a way in which narratives of violence are so incredibly um powerful in our in our literary history, um, and maybe in particular in the kind of um super masculine genealogy of adventure stories. Um, you know, going going back to Homer's Odyssey to include a topical reference. Um but um and part of what I'm I mean, I think Melville is really interested in both the the pull of the adventure story and the abstraction from it. Like clearly Moby Dick is not just an adventure story, um, but clearly it's also interested in thinking about why adventure stories are are powerful and um seductive and and in some sense inescapable, right? There's the moment um in the chase in which um Melville says that, or which Ishmael says we were not 30 but one. Like he talks about the unification of the crew, all the members of the crew, into the moment of assault on the whale. And like that's a horrifying moment. Um, and I think in the sense that it is a moment in which Ishmael, like the I character, gives up his individuality and subsumes it to Ahab's desire for vengeance against a brute creature, right?

SPEAKER_02 19:54

Against very much so, and that happens on the verge of the catastrophic failure of the mission, and there's a sense almost that the loss of that subjective self is actually part and parcel of what goes so horribly wrong. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 20:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:11

That's that's really wonderful, Steve. I think that there's so much there that's that's uh very, very illuminating, both in terms of your process uh in terms of composing Sterling Without Ahab, but also in terms of your your reading of Moby Dick, especially as you speak to the way that violence sits so snugly against this glorious celebration of the ocean, the oceanic and the inhabitants of the ocean. And I mean this this speaks so wonderfully to your work on the blue humanities. I mean, you're you're widely regarded, Steve, as the founding father of the blue humanities. Could you tell our listeners a little bit about well what what we mean when we talk about the blue humanities? And as an inevitable follow-up question, why might Melville be rather significant to the Blue Humanities?

SPEAKER_00 21:00

Yes. Um, you know, for the for the last half dozen years, I feel like uh the the introduct the definition of the blue humanities is like the the thing I do like every day. Um but the blue humanities on it on its simplest level is an effort to orient literary criticism or or um even sort of ecological thinking away from the land and toward the water. Um this started for me primarily with thinking about the ocean as both the you know the largest thing on the surface of our planet, the primary reservoir of biotic life, um, and also the long history of the human engagement with the ocean as telling a very different kind of story from the the kind of um the the vision of green harmony and and um sort of the the the happy stability of an agricultural society. Like it seemed to me when I Was first doing this work you know 20 years ago, that the a lot of eco-criticism was really interested in what Shakespeareans call the green world, right? The place in which you leave the confines of the city and you enter into a um happier relationship with um with forests and plants and and uh you know and and green things. And it seems to me at the same time there's also uh a kind of counter-tradition, which is just as old, I think, as the green, uh, the green pastoral or Georgic dream, um, which is a blue vision, in which you recognize that at the moment that you leave the shore, you enter into a world which is hostile and dynamic and precisely um not sustainable. Like humans can't stay on or in the ocean for more than a relatively short, you know, some time, but not all the time. Um and so I was thinking about, I mean, I came to the Blue Humanities by thinking in contrast to green echo-criticism and really to ideas of sustainability, um, which are you know massively present in our ecological thinking. And, you know, as this work is continued and other people have um, you know, and like lots and lots of connections with other people doing it, many of them you know entirely independent of me and doing separate and fantastic work, um, I've been thinking more and more about the way in which water marks a kind of dependence on or relationship with the physical world, between the you know, the living human body, which is itself mostly water, um, and the relationship between the you know the water that comes in and the water that goes out, the ways in which, you know, as I said, I started with sort of the ocean as the largest body of water on the planet, but in the kind of Blue Humanities scholarship that I'm interested in now, like we're writing about groundwater, freshwater, ice, water in the air, uh, especially in a humid summer like this one, water in um, you know, water in the bodies of of humans and other mammals, including whales. Um, you know, all sorts of different kinds of water. And um, the ways in which water represents both this kind of generative principle, you know, water is life, um, and also this uh alien presence. Water is life and water also drowns us. Um that it is both the thing that we need and the thing that we can't um can't quite endure in in a in a kind of maximal way. We have to have this slightly mediated relationship with water. Um and so that is the the sort of big picture, I suppose, of what Blue Humanities um has been, you know, in a in a way now I think that you know it it is uh it has reached escape velocity, and there's lots and lots of Blue Humanities scholarship that is stuff that I had never even sort of imagined. There's this huge Blue Humanities community um in India working in a lot of cases on the massive river cultures of the subcontinent, um, as well as you know, lots and lots of interest in um the cultures of the Pacific Islands. I think about the poetry of Craig Santos Perez as a really important voice in this in this discourse, uh poetry and criticism that that um that Perez does. And um, you know, water is both a really intimate thing for many of us, most of us I suspect, and also it has this kind of global structure, global and and almost and almost uh, you know, I mean, literally planet encircling structure.

SPEAKER_02 25:49

Absolutely. Do you get a sense now that the discipline has reached a wonderful kind of velocity? And because it's now been a term that's become increasingly familiar over the last couple of decades, do you get the sense that we are having to in any way redefine what we mean by blue humanities or indeed by eco-criticism, given the enormous climate change that we're currently going through?

SPEAKER_00 26:19

Yeah, I I mean I I think so. I mean, I think that it's that some of the basic things which 20 years ago might have seemed um innovative or even strange, that that, for example, that a work of literature might help us understand how humans relate to an environment which is intermittently hostile, um, which on the one hand is both obvious and also thinking about um whether it's the Tempest or Moby Dick, thinking about the these works of um or these literary analyses of human efforts to impose power on the world as having a particularly environmental structure. Um I think that that is now like you know, you're in England during a heat wave. Um, I'm about to face another day of sort of punishing flood-like rain conditions in Connecticut where we don't, or we didn't used to have these kinds of tropical rainbursts. I mean, this is the world for us that we live in now. And I think that uh one of the advantages for me about looking at blue rather than green ecological thinking is that it is a reminder that the world is not hospitable. Um, that that that we can indu, you know, that there is a a practice of endurance, including the practice of the swimmer as well as the sailor. Um, but there is like no um easy, hospitable relationship between the human individual or or maybe the human culture, the human society, and the um dynamic forces of the environment. Um that's kind of a dark response to it. And I think there's a lot of pleasure also in in Blue Humanities thinking, and I take a lot of pleasure in my own physical relationship with the water. Um uh and so I don't want to like again, I think there's that there's a kind of oscillation between those things.

SPEAKER_02 28:19

But I think inevitably there has to be darker shades to this kind of discourse because we are moving through the ecological moment that we are. And I think it's wonderful that despite that, it seems to me to be a wonderfully optimistic discipline by and large. It doesn't pull any punches, it's very, very frank, by and large, about what has happened, what we have done, and where we're going. But it seems to me, certainly in in your work on the uh on the on the blue humanities, that there is a sense of optimism, uh and and maybe optimism is is is more challenging to find now than ever. Thinking particularly of your of your book, your your introduction to the blue humanities, which seems to be very, very bound up as well as uh with with your with your deep, deep reading, deep in every sense, uh, of lots of different oceanic texts, including Moby Dick, you're also very, very closely dedicated to the ocean yourself. I mean, you've already mentioned that you have a very, very dedicated oceanic swimming practice. And I'm absolutely fascinated in the first instance by that word practice, as if it's as if you're we're we're you're sort of in some way rehearsing for something or kind of preparing for something. Could you tell us tell our listeners a little bit more about that, about that swimming practice and and if it has any um continued relationship with your uh with your scholarly work, with your creative work?

SPEAKER_00 29:46

Oh, yeah, I I would say absolutely. I would say that, I mean, just uh on a on a descriptive level, um, I live in Connecticut, um, you know, 150 yards from the the shore of Long Island Sound, which is you know kind of a backwater of the of the North Atlantic, and um I swim every day, um at least between, let's say, late May and early November, when the I'm not like a super cold water swimmer, but I, you know, when the when the water is a reasonable temperature, I get in every day. Um, you know, almost every day when I'm when I'm traveling, I obviously run into trouble. But but in that daily practice, that daily relating with this body that is much larger than myself, I I really feel like it has been essential for the kind of teaching and scholarly work and creative work that I've been doing over the past, you know, 25 years. Um, that the the ocean is my great collaborator. Um, and along with seaweed, jellyfish, egrets, uh, you know, we we have a healthy population of um uh cormorants and um and uh you know sea eagles here, um, and and like a relatively healthy population of different kinds of fish. And I I feel like those are all collaborators for me, that they're they're things that teach me about my place in the world and my not quite fitting into that place in the world in some ways. Um so, you know, just just yesterday I took a nice swim around um the uninhabited Green Island, which is right off the coast of they call it Green Island because it has like a couple trees on it, and but it has nothing else. As good a reason as any. Yeah. And um, you know, it's the it's the first time I've been I've been out of the country for for 10 days, and it was the first time uh in the summer we get these kind of little globules of sort of jellyfish and seaweed. And so there's a kind of texture to Long Island Sound. Uh, and it's something that happens in the high summer in the in the warm months. Sometimes, if we're unlucky, we get a little invasion of stinging jellyfish, and that interferes with the pleasure of my. I mean, I still swim, but I swim shorter distances if the if the jellies are out. Um, but you know, swimming with the vegetable matter and the biotic matter that that lives in the ocean. Um, I mean, I'm lucky that it's a relatively it's not a place that's super threatening to me. We don't have sharks, you know, like hope not. Um I I've seen very small sharks in the area, but I've never heard of anyone being injured by a by a shark attack in in the sound. Um and like there is this physical act of, you know, I mean a physical act of communion with the alien world of the sea. That is, you know, I feel like it it sits underneath all the poems in in Sailing Without Ahab, and also all the critical work in the Introduction to the Humanities or Ocean or even the Shakespeare book, going back, going back now a little while. Um, and and that like the coming to terms with that alien environment is at the is the core of what I'm trying to to do uh you know, as a writer, as a teacher, as a as as a critic. Um that and and being reminded of the physical sensation of that alien space is really important. I feel like if I if I uh you know, I mean, I I guess if I moved to the Midwest, I would start swimming in lakes and pools, and and that would be fine. And I would still get some of the some of the thrill of it. And I do swim in pools in the winter, so I'm not entirely um, you know, I don't dry out in the not entirely landbound, no. But it is highly landbound, yeah. Um, and I think that the um, you know, I mean the presence of and the and the kind of repeated sensation of watery immersion, uh, the feeling of being buoyant in uh aqueous environment, all that stuff is super important too. Uh it really motivates the the work that I do and thinking that I do.

SPEAKER_02 34:16

The nourishment that your work, creative and and and academic and otherwise, draws from the ocean is is absolutely palpable. It really is. Nourishment is a good word. We've um we've quite naturally sort of flowed back towards home now. So maybe this would be a good time to Yeah, this might be a good time.

SPEAKER_00 34:38

This one is called out of place. It's a again an early chapter in the or an early poem in the book matched to an early chapter in in Moby Dick. Um, I'll just go ahead and read it and maybe we can talk about it a little bit. Lovely. Um, this is one of the first written um poems in this large cycle. Um, I I wrote a few early ones when I was trying to figure out if I could really accomplish this big project, and then they started coming faster and faster. But this is an early one. Out of place. There's a whale in Labrador Pond. It's too big. In a freshwater pond, only about a half mile wide, each end edge rounded off by lily pads and marsh, fed by a trickle through a rusty under-dirt road culvert. There's no place for a whale. He came here with me. I find no place for him. So in he splashes, fin full and overflowing, displacing with massive girth water that surges onto the porch to soak my feet, or I sits with my family playing clue. It's hard to know who did it. The whale swimming stirs up green froth. Its body rips algae fronds from the silty bottom. Air bubbles ascend, balloon, and pop. In the morning, I wakes to devastation. I bruise coffee and hot chocolate and bakes biscuits while sleepers dream of a bigger place.

SPEAKER_02 36:07

There's a really fascinating sense of a kind of double deracination there, this sense of a no place for this creature of the sea, but also a no place for the speaking eye. I say deracination, or what whatever the oceanic equivalent of deracination would be. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 36:25

Yeah, I mean, I I'm I'm like I've read this poem to academic audiences before, and talked with people about the way in which we as literary scholars are living half in imagined in an imaginary world and half in the sort of real world with other humans. Um and and the way in which, you know, even on vacation, this is a poem that's sort of set in a in a place that I used to go with my family when my kids were younger. Um, you know, even on vacation, like the whale comes with you, um, where the whale is like this constant churn of idea, you know, like the platonic um idea in the Tesh Diego poem, that the the whale is always with you. And and, you know, it's not always that comfortable to be living with the whale. Um, and yet, I mean, it seems to me like part of what I'm trying to explore in that poem, and I think that there's an element of this in Moby Dek, that like, how does Ishmael's desire to have access to the meaning of the whale in the ocean? How does that sit with the how does that work against the the sort of domestic life of the poem, if you will, the the the human life of uh you know, this this semi-retired school teacher who who needs to go to sea in order to uh to escape his his hypos. Um, you know, that there is a kind of alienation from the ordinary and also a need to to support the the life of humans among among other humans.

SPEAKER_02 38:09

Yeah, certainly. All of which is occurring under that kind of rubric of, well, surely there must be some meaning in this.

SPEAKER_01 38:17

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 38:17

Irrespective of whether we are on land or on or or on sea, and I think that's there's a wonderful um plumbing for meaning in this particular poem, whether it's playing clue, whether it's brewing coffee and hot chocolate or baking biscuits, or whether it is something more um or dreaming, or a form of investigation.

SPEAKER_00 38:38

Uh you know, unconscious investigation. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 38:40

Certainly it is. Well, Steve, we have moved back towards a certain kind of home territory now, and I would love to, in the spirit of homecomings, come back to your what you view as your academic roots and talk a little bit about Shakespeare and Melville. You, at the time of uh having this conversation, you are fresh back from the World Shakespeare Congress in Verona. Uh, I'm in the midst of a tour of uh of Twelfth Nights, uh, so I think we've both probably got Shakespeare on the brain to quite a large degree. I mean, you've you you've already mentioned uh uh a great deal of sort of Shakespearean uh connection to Melbourne. You've mentioned the Tempest uh in our conversation. You have spoken and and and written wonderfully in the past about plays like Twelfth Night in relation to Melville, the Tempest, um, and the Comedy of Errors. I'm really interested in what you might have to say on oceanic Shakespeare specifically, because we're very, very used to talking about uh Shakespeare and Melville in terms of the influence of King Lear, the influence of Hamlet, the influence of Macbeth, of Othello. And of course, those are all extremely important uh sort of intertext and kind of scholarly avenues. Um, but I don't think enough is said about Shakespeare as an oceanic writer and the nourishment that Melville as an oceanic writer draws from that specific version of Shakespeare. And I suspect you might be the perfect person to talk to about that.

SPEAKER_00 40:18

Yeah, I mean, I I obviously I think that both Melville and Shakespeare are deeply oceanic writers in the sense that they are both interested in the physical materiality of the ocean. And here, obviously, Melville has a has a greater physical intimacy with that, with that space as a as a you know as an occasional whaleman. Um but uh but I think they're both really interested in the way in which the experience of encountering the sea, the experience of being on a ship off uh you know, out of view of land, um changes the human relationship with the environment and and also with their fellow humans. I mean, I do think that Shakespeare is very interested. I mean, I'm thinking about the I just saw a wonderful um production of The Tempest on um Lanzaretto Nuovo Island in the Venice Lagoon just a week ago. And um, like in particular, that opening scene of the Tempest and the kind of the alienation and the responses both from skilled maritime labor um from the bosun and the master, and then also the inappropriate foolishness of the you know the the king and the and the aristocrats who say, well, like why doesn't the storm listen to us? And because like you're just like humans and the storm is the storm. Um and then I I think that in addition to that physical pressure and the physical disruption that the arrival of water can produce on a stage or in um in a line of poetry, I think both Melville and Shakespeare are deeply committed, and like both of these things at the same time, but deeply committed to the metaphorics of water, the ways in which ideas of things like depth um and buoyancy and opacity um and and distortion, all of which are kind of watery effects in different ways, the way these become metaphors for our inability to know as much about our world and ourselves as we would like to. Um so uh, you know, I think in in Shakespeare we see this in in like the host of metaphors about Sinus. You know, um, Juliet, you know, my bounty is boundless of the sea, the more I give, the more I have, for both are infinite. Like the way in which the depths of the sea um uh become for her an effort. It's the it's the useful metaphor to understand the intensity of her own emotional experience, right? The emotional experience is inaccessible except insofar as it is like the sea.

SPEAKER_02 42:59

Very much so. And also the generativity of that, the fact that the more she has, the more she has to give. On the opposite side of that, though, then you take a character like Orstino in Twelfth Night, who says of his own capacity for love, mine is all as hungry as the sea and can digest as much. It's an appetitive thing. It's a digestive thing. Exactly. It's it's something that consumes rather than gives out. And the ocean is able to do that.

SPEAKER_00 43:23

And of course it does both, right? Which is the structure of the the structure of the wave, the structure of the tide. Um, so uh, you know, Floresel's um wonderful description of Perdida as a wave of the sea, um, you know, both in motion and fixed uh in the in the fourth act of the Winter's Tale. I mean, again, that there is this, I mean, again, it's a it's almost a habit, right? For for a writer like Shakespeare to reach for, and you know, clouds, another watery form that is that are metaphorically rich in Shakespeare and in Hamlet and Enton Clinton. Cleopatra and other places, that the the and it seems to me that one of the things that happens when Shakespeare is writing about water is that he's really attuned to this combination of intimacy and alienation. That water is both the thing that we all know about, it's close to us, we see it, we feel it, we touch it, we drink it, we you know, we take it into our bodies, and also it's something that's sort of fundamentally in um like we can't fully understand or inhabit it. It's like part of us, but also alien from us. And um, and that, it seems to me, is at the root of his fascination as an artist with this substance, both for its metaphoric and for its real uh elements. Um and I think something similar is true of Melville. I mean, I think Melville is um, you know, in some sense more deeply a saltwater writer than than Shakespeare. Shakespeare writes some about saltwater and some about other kinds of water.

SPEAKER_02 44:56

Interesting. Yeah, yeah, you're right.

SPEAKER_00 44:58

Um, and and I do think that Melville is probably um, you know, is the great writer about the ocean, certainly in the American tradition and probably in the English language tradition. Um, you know, Joseph Conrad maybe maybe gets a gets a nod here occasionally too. Um and and although I'm also super interested in the way that the sea shows up in in less expensive, uh less expected places in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, for example, um who we mostly think of as a garden poet. Yeah. Um yeah, and again, in the case of Dickinson, it is probably generated by metaphor. We don't know that she actually went to the seashore, although she doesn't live that far from it in Amherst, Massachusetts. But there is a way in which the the inhabiting of that metaphor for a poet becomes, you know, can can generate that that intensity that you know some of us maybe get by the physical encounter.

SPEAKER_02 45:59

Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, Steve, I have one more question for you. As we were talking about topics we might discuss on the episode, you said in an email that you would enjoy, and I quote, talking more broadly about Moby Dick as the greatest book ever written about the ocean. So, Steve Ments, allow me to ask you why is Moby Dick the greatest book ever written about the ocean?

SPEAKER_00 46:24

Um so I I guess I think that Moby Dick is the greatest book written about the ocean because it it combines, and again, this is like in some ways my my project in sailing with that ahab is to separate the things that Melville combines. It combines the the massive urge to exploit and dominate through the captain and also through like the whole project of whaling, and the urge to abstract and philosophize. That those are those are the sort of the twin structures of the novel. And it seemed to me, I mean, especially in an era in which we're spending a lot of we as a as a species are spending so much time um, you know, drilling for oil at the bottom of the sea, thinking about the mining, deep sea mining and the and the gathering of lithium nodules and things like this. Like the the extraordinary exploitation, that the long history of fishing as an industry um is a story of exploitation um and of you know killing one fish and then moving on to the next one. Um and like that a habian relationship of domination and exploitation is always entwined with this. I mean, Ishmael in some sense is a proto-scientist. Um he is fascinated with the you know the structure of the whale, the the you know, how big is the head, why can't we, you know, does the whale have ears, you know, all these all these kind of physical um physical elements, which he understands also as essentially elements of an allegory, um, that the whale represents you know some kind of divinity, it seems to me. Um and the precise nature of that divinity is only accessible to someone who has intimate contact with the skeleton, the body, the flesh, the blubber, and the violence that is required to have access to those things by participating in the um in the profession of wailing.

SPEAKER_02 48:36

I mean, that's a wonderful, wonderful way to bring this very, very deep dive on Moby Dick and all sorts of other things uh to a close. Thank you so much, Steve. I remind our listeners that we've been talking with Steve Mentz, Professor and Department Chair of English at St. John's University. His books, including Sailing Without Ahab, are available at fine bookstores near you. Steve, uh, do you have one last poem that you would like to read to play us out?

SPEAKER_00 49:05

I thought I would give one last poem. Um, you know, there is an element of this book that is designed to be read out of order. Um and like like part of the structure of Moby Dick, again, this this has to do with this adventure story structure, right? It it is as you know, it begins in Manhattan, it moves to Nantucket, it moves to the, you know, it like follows this this narrative, and it really is interested in this question of like what is preordained and what is not. I mean, how much are we on these these iron rails of fate and how much is there a possibility of of um uh individual variation? Um what the the one of the ideas of Sailing Without Ahab is to take that inevitable structure of plot and throw it into a variation machine, right? Is and and to distort it and and modify it so that one way to read this book is to read it out of order, to read it in no order, um, just to pick, you know, start with poem 75 and then go to 34 and then go to 110. Um, I don't know how many people actually read it that way. I suspect not that many. It's just physically cumbersome given the structures of books. But um I will I will choose a random page here, um, and I will uh I'll read the poem on the left-hand side, the title of which is When It's Almost Possible to See. On full moon summer nights like tonight, it becomes almost possible to see through moon glow the path the pea takes across wave roads toward polyglot futures. Listen, the waves lap. Can you hear the wind splashes? I wants to go there, whale rock does not move. Six birds sitting, clustered close on the narrow outcrop that must be the whale's tail. They face separate ways into wind and sun. I swims past, face beneath the surface.

SPEAKER_02 51:18

Beautiful. Thank you very much, Steve.

SPEAKER_00 51:20

Thank you, Johnny. It's been a been a fun conversation.

SPEAKER_02 51:26

You've been listening to the Pequot Pot with Tristan Babel Marquise, Meg Fansha, and Johnny Wiles. Our music is by Lost in the Loop with sound engineering by Lauren Ayton. The show's artwork is by Delaney Garrett, and Tristan is on the synths. We want to say a big thank you to all of our supporters on Patreon. You can join them over at patreon.com forward slash Peakwok for bonus content and for opportunities to help us keep the show running in ship-shaped condition. Ratings and reviews also really help us out, so if you enjoy the show, please do express your thoughts and metaphysical yearnings in the review section wherever you're listening to the show. Tell your friends, tell your foes, tell the white whale on whom you're monomoniacally urged to be revenged. It all helps for listening, and until next time, call us the Pequing Party.