Author Archives: Jesmond Phimmachack

Week 7: A taste of history

Posted on by
1

From meeting a cannibal to the chapel to the sermon to sharing a moment with a bosom friend, Moby-Dick is a novel that refuses to follow narrative conventions. For this post, I want to focus on chapter 14.

The beginning paragraphs of the chapter has Ishmael act as our lovely tour guide once again, inserting us the readers into the story as characters and addressing us directly much like chapter 1. He implores us to look once more, allowing us (the reader) to visualize the environment of Nantucket: “a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background.” (Melville 69) However, as we read through the rest of the chapter, it turns out there is more to Nantucket than just its landscapes, as Ishmael notes of its agriculture, the people living there, and even its legend of how the town came to be. Herman Melville, through Ishmael, provides us a story within his story, a window to the past, to show how Nantucketers were able to specialize in the ocean to grow as a nation.

One thing Ishmael finds wonderous about Nantucket is how quickly it developed over time:

What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should take to the sea for a livelihood! They first caught crabs and quohogs in the sand; grown bolder, they waded out with nets for mackerel; more experienced, they pushed off in boats and captured cod; and at last, launching a navy of great ships on the sea, explored this watery world; put an incessant belt of circumnavigations round it; peeped in at Behring’s Straits; and in all seasons and all oceans declared everlasting war with the mightiest animated mass that has survived the flood; most monstrous and most mountainous! (70)

I believe Melville is trying to emphasize the richness of the ocean here, as well as give us a history lesson on Nantucketers and their worldly influence during the 19th century. Just how quickly did Nantucket go from catching crabs to conquering the seas? Ishmael doesn’t tell us the details, but it is implied that this evolution took place over a few decades. Nations take time to develop, but Nantucketers made use of openness of the sea and its inhabitants to grow quickly. The Nantucketer, as Ishmael says, “lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps.” (70) Because they are accustomed to the ocean (they do live near it), they are able to take advantage of it and do things that aren’t normally possible on land.

Understanding the ocean is a fundamental part in understanding our world. There is still so many things to see in the ocean, and when we familiarize ourselves with it, we are able to achieve things that wouldn’t be possible on land alone. I’ve still yet to read the remaining chapters for this week, however; they weren’t kidding when they said Moby-Dick was a whale of a book.

Week 6: Ishmael and Queequeg sitting in a tree…

Posted on by
1

Okay, so we breezed through the etymology, extracts, and the first three chapters with very few issues. Not bad! For this post, I want to focus on chapter 4.

Last week, we were introduced to the cannibal Queequeg in chapter 3. Ishmael is intimidated by his looks and his cannibalistic nature, and is outright terrified of him, believing that “ignorance is the parent of fear.” However, he is assured by his landlord that Queequeg is actually a nice guy, leading to the realization that he and Queequeg are just as human. Come Chapter 4, and the first sentences we read are… oddly intimate. Wasn’t Ishmael afraid of Queequeg before? What caused this drastic change in tone when it comes to describing his man-eating freak? As seen through Ishmael’s interactions with Queequeg, Herman Melville challenges the heteronormative view by establishing our beloved male character’s relationship with another man instead of the usual woman.

I should note that this intimacy begins right at the beginning of the chapter. After a night’s rest, Ishmael finds “Queequeg’s arm thrown over [him] in the most loving and affectionate matter,” addressing us readers (and us as the character) by saying we “had almost thought [he] had been his wife.” (Melville 28) Now, I want to pay close attention to the word choice in this paragraph. What does Ishmael mean when he said we’d think Queequeg would be his wife? We know Queequeg couldn’t possibly be his soulmate considering they only met for one night. However, the way he talks about Queequeg for the rest of the chapter does raise a few eyebrows.

Heteronormativity is the belief that heterosexuality is the “normal” sexuality, and that romantic relationships are between a man and woman. What Melville is trying to do here is invoke a certain image in the reader that goes against this belief. Close your eyes and imagine someone putting their arms over their lover in bed, if you will. If you saw a woman with a man, you saw it with a heteronormative approach; it is considered “normal” for a woman to put their hands around a man while they lie together in bed. Melville spins this assumption around by making the reader imagine a man sleeping with another man–in this case, Ishmael and Queequeg–which goes against what was considered normal at the time. Also, have you noticed how the chapter reads like a gay man swooning over his partner?

Another (small) thing to note is how the word “gay” was used when Ishmael talks about “the sound of gay voices all over the house” while lying in bed. (Melville 29) Gay people were nary a thing in the mid-1800s, and the word “gay” was used in place of “happy,” so it’d make sense to read this part as Ishmael hearing happy voices. Nowadays, gay people are recognized in most parts of the world, and it’s rare to see gay used as a substitute for happy.

I think it’s safe to say that Moby-Dick is an LGBTQ+ novel because there are parts where a man develops feelings for another man. Or–a crazy thought here–Ishmael is to Queequeg as Herman Melville is to Nathaniel Hawthorne, because Melville appreciated Hawthorne’s works so much it’s almost as if they were lovers.

Week 5: Toes in the Water

Posted on by
3

Oh boy. We are actually reading Moby-Dick, a story supposedly about a whaler on a whaling journey. Let’s take a look at the extracts, shall we?

This part of the book was apparently supplied by a “sub-sub-librarian” who narrator (we don’t know their name during this part but is implied to be Melville himself) does not disclose. Near the beginning of the first paragraph, they address us readers, telling us that we “must not … take the higgledy-piggledy whale statements … for veritable gospel cetology” because apparently, another “poor devil of a Sub-Sub” has dug through all sorts of books looking for “sacred or profane” whale allusions. (xxxix) Admittedly, this part is a little humorous for some readers, but it does spark curiosity: what exactly is the sub-sub looking for in the whale allusions, and what are they trying to accomplish from doing this?

Let’s flip to the next page to see what the narrator is talking about–oh. That’s why. A lot of these are passages from the Bible, Shakespeare’s plays, and other classical pieces of literature; passages that deal with whales and large fish specifically. Herman Melville is definitely not alone when it comes to whales in literature. The whale craze was definitely something back then.

I think what the narrator is trying to say here is that we shouldn’t read too deep into these whale passages (no pun intended), but it could also be a message from Herman Melville, telling us to not read too deeply into any part of the book that involves whales. Because you don’t really get anything if you excessively focus on one thing and try to find some deep meaning hidden in it. But Melville is crazy enough to write about whales and turn it into a six-hundred something page novel.

These extracts, although meant to be “solely valuable or entertaining,” (xxxix) do provide us with a history lesson about how writers approached whales back then. However, there are several pages consisting of these extracts alone that it feels like the author is trying to overload us with information about whales. That’s the charm with a novel like Moby-Dick. It’s supposed to be overloading. After all, this book is indeed “hostile to all conventions,” and it’s hostile to the reader expecting a traditional novel.

Week 4: Testing the Waters

Posted on by
1

This will act as a follow-up to my last post on Philip Hoare’s What Moby-Dick Means to Me. For this post, I will be focusing on Andrew Delbanco’s the introduction to the novel.

I’ll admit, I skipped through the first chapters of the novel without reading the introduction, as most readers might have done on their first readthrough. I managed to stop myself from reading further when I realized that Chapters 3 and some of the chapters beyond that can span many pages. Thankfully, most chapters in this book are very short. However, given that there’s hundreds of them (135!) it’d make you feel like you’re on a whaling odyssey with Ishmael himself. I still think the introduction is worth reading; it reads like an essay on the language Melville employs in Moby-Dick and goes to great lengths to expound on the novel’s significance in the literary world.

Within the introduction, Delbanco writes that “Moby-Dick is simply too large a book to be contained within one consistent consciousness subject to the laws of identity and physical plausibility.” (xvii) It’s six hundred pages long, split across 135 chapters, and each chapter feels like you’re reading a completely different maritime book. With pages and chapters that many, it can indeed be difficult to even summarize the entirety of this story since it changes so much throughout the course of the book. You can expect the main character to go through his usual old man ramblings, seldom sticking to one subject at a time, and people will cherish those parts of the novel as a stylistic choice made by the one and only Herman Melville.

I think I’m starting to get what Hoare has said about this book being an “act of transference … an extended musing on the strange meeting of human history and natural history.” Moby-Dick is not meant to be read as a traditional novel, but as something else: for example, it can be read more like an experiment by Melville to see how much he can rattle off his knowledge on whales based his experience as a whaler. Or, it is Melville’s retelling of the sinking of the Essex from start to end. This novel is “hostile to all conventions,” as Delbanco puts it. There’s no “right” way to read Moby-Dick, and there’s no “wrong” way either. It reads how you want it to read.

Week 3: Moby-Dick still intimidates me

Posted on by
5

As a person who had a hard time reading past the first chapters of Moby-Dick, I still feel uneasy about getting into this novel. This behemoth of a story has an absurd amount of chapters, way more than expected for a typical novel, and its 800-page count is very intimidating for people who like to read medium-length novels like me. However, reading Philip Hoare’s article What “Moby-Dick” Means to Me at least eased these feelings of discomfort of having to read a difficult book in a class about reading a difficult book. Here are my thoughts while reading through the article:

Hoare frames Moby-Dick as “an act of transference, of ideas and evocations hung around the vast and unknowable shape of the whale, an extended musing on the strange meeting of human history and natural history.” instead of an actual novel. As of writing this (I got through Chapter 1 and part of chapter 2), I’d probably agree with Hoare. A good portion of the first few chapters of Moby-Dick is Ishmael monologuing about the city and his preparations before his whaling journey–at least, that’s what it looks like to the amateur reader. The book is more than 170 years old, and the English language has changed since then, and that probably explains why the book was difficult for its time. Either that, or this generation is not used to reading books as much as older generations do.

Moving on, Hoare talks about what reading Moby-Dick feels like to him: it feels like a drug that, when “taken” (read), makes him travel backward in time to the point where reading it is like reading “something that was written before books were invented” despite being modern. Reading that part of the article makes me even more curious as to why this work of literature is so acclaimed and influential. The first two chapters seem like Ishmael’s stream of consciousness, describing his surroundings as if they were parts of a painting. My opinion of this book may change when we all start reading it as a class later on.

Moby-Dick was definitely the novel of novels at its time, and reading about how the book had such an impact on a person’s life clued me in as to what to expect from a novel that’s split into many chapters and pages. The book is difficult, yes, but it’s a good way to challenge oneself especially after not reading for so long. Maybe when we start diving into the novel (no pun intended), we’ll see what Moby-Dick means to us.

Introduction

Posted on by
2

Call me Jesmond.
I am a Lao-American in their fourth year of majoring in English. There’s not much to this post since I am a quiet person and not really experienced in writing long posts but I’ll try to introduce myself as best as I can.

I am a neurodivergent person (austistic) who loves to read and game. I used to read a lot of books in middle school and high school, and I am especially interested in monsters such as vampires, zombies, and ghosts. Since I am taking this class along with ECL 305, my monster curiosity is beginning to expand to those of the deep: mermaids, sharks, whales, and the great unknown.

I initially chose this class to fulfill a requirement for my major, but when I learned that it was about Moby-Dick from an email from the professor, it resparked a memory. I have tried reading Moby-Dick in the past, but I wasn’t able to make it past the first chapter because it’s that dense. But when I learned that there are other classmates here who are facing similar struggles regarding this book, I knew I wasn’t alone. So, I am taking this opportunity to learn more about Moby-Dick and hopefully the reason whales are involved in this novel by the notorious Herman Melville himself.

As always, I am looking forward to hearing from you all and getting to know you more. For now, here’s a selfie I took at the Del Mar Fairgrounds on the month of July.