Category Archives: Week 4: Prefatory Framing–Mentz and Delblanco

Week 4: Testing the Waters

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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.

A Poetics of Planetary Water:

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Just reading the title of this article, I was already curious on how the use of “poetics” would be specifically applied to the study of water. I figured, since the ocean is often associated with the unknown and undiscovered, that its metaphorical sense was solely the reason to apply poetics. However, this article redefined the use of poetry as “powerful tools…because poems originate in and are directed to individual humans while also imagining vaster scales” The multiple ways one can interpret a poem creates a natural fluidity that coincides with the ever-changing nature of water in all forms.  This free-framing mindset helps to break away from the confinements of categorization. Of course, poems can be categorized but their interpretation and point can differ vastly depending on who is reading it, when they’re reading it, and how they’re reading it. 

My favorite example came from the article’s analysis on Hamlet, regarding the scene where two characters are pondering about the clouds in the sky. “The hybridization that Polonius accomplishes as cloud-reader, in which he starts with an initial identification, camel, then bends it into two new forms, weasel and whale, essentially follows a hybridizing theory of interpreting forms of water.” One character interprets the sky differently from the other, much like how the sea can simultaneously mystify and terrify. This scene encapsulates the ideal that water defies categorization—yet it is an essential and ever present aspect of our human lives. 

Gillis once described the coastline as “humankind’s first Eden,” so now I wonder—is the sea the place where we were to be cast out from Eden? Or is the Sea itself Eden, and we have cast ourselves out of it.

Andrew Delbanco Introduction to Moby-Dick

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In his introduction, Andrew Delbanco proposes the idea that Moby-Dick “is a book of universal reach about the neediness of men when they are denied the props of rank and custom; a book about what can happen to men in conditions of radical exposure.” (Delbanco 23) This idea to me reminds us that Melville’s novel is not simply about whaling but about the fragility of human beings when societal structures are stripped away from us. People rely on these “props of rank and custom” – social hierarchies, traditions, and institutions – to give them identity and purpose. When these “props” are gone, individuals find themselves exposed and vulnerable, forced to find a purpose by themselves, which can cause social conflict and loss of identity. 

I feel like the setting of the ocean helps intensify this theme. At sea, crews are radically isolated, they are cut off from the stabilization that lands provide. Crewmates are their only support available, but these relationships can be fragile due to each individual’s intentions, like their selfishness or corruption, for instance. Delbanco states that Melville highlights how easily individuals can become needy when stripped of their “ranks” in society. It will be interesting to see how this is reflecting onto the novel and see how the crew mates interact with one another. What betrayal and mischief will occur?

Delbanco also emphasizes the importance of politics in this novel. The ship functions as an allegory for America, representing a diverse and unstable nation struggling with race, class, and authority. He mentions that the ship gathers many different people from different backgrounds, yet hierarchies are still present and favor white men. The ship reflects the fragility of American democracy and the individuals a part of that democracy. It is interesting because, although we -arguably- have advanced as a society, we still carry some of those ideals. White men are still at the top of the societal ladder. It will be interesting to read this novel and see how it is still impactful today. By stripping away the “props” of everyday society and forcing them to recreate it on the ship, Melville exposes the instability of political and social life, which makes Moby-Dick more than just whaling, it is both a psychological study and a political allegory of America. 

Melville and Tone Within “Moby Dick”

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Within the introduction to Moby Dick, Deblanco calls the novel “A noisy book written in a braggart’s voice”. And, according to Google, a braggart is “a person who boasts about achievements or possessions”, which, I can assume from this quote, is a character trait of our protagonist Ishmael.

As a reader who has read 287 books (and counting) I absolutely LOVE when you can learn things about characters from the author’s writing. Or rather, when the author doesn’t TELL us what a character’s traits are, but shows us through their actions, thoughts, and most importantly, their writing. While this is most prevalent in books that switch point of views, it makes be excited to read the rest of this book.

In particular I notice this most within books that talk about race, glass, and generational gaps. Authors use words that fit the character, rather than words that might make the novel more understandable fir the reader. And it really engages me, as a reader. I want to feel immersed into the world. And, ultimately, it doesn’t make sense for a 75 year old to use Gen Z slang terms, or for a British character to use the word “trunk” for the back compartment of a car, rather than “boot”. And, hopefully we see this with Melville in the novel within the dialogue of characters, and everything in between. From the descriptions and outside perspectives we have read in class, I assume that this will happen, as we learn, in depth, about what it was like to be on a Whaling ship. After all, if an Alien could recreate whaling from this book, it must be very, very in depth, (and as someone who had read the novel in previous years, I can confirm that it indeed, does).

On the very first page of the Introduction, “Moby Dick” is called “the greatest English novel”. And, to be called that, it must have inspired countless authors. And even in other completely unrelated genres, sometimes I see authors who have clearly been inspired by Melville, using their words to show us character traits of both the point of view character, and the world.

Deterritorializing Preface

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In this article, Steve Mentz mentions seven words and how they can overall re-shape our ways of thinking, viewing politics, and intellect. Nothing is stable, not even the land we are upon. It’s constantly changing- such as the environment itself, nature, our values and beliefs, even the cities we live in are constantly changing, so why shouldn’t we? This is why it’s important for us to allow our state of thinking to flow like the currents, as Mentz put it. If our thinking never changes we are allowing ourselves to stay close-minded. We need to have a shift in our thinking. Mentz says “Our metaphors must float on water rather than resting on ground. In an aqueous environment, nothing stays on the surface forever” (Mentz xvi). Mentz here makes a great point. The language we use should be evolving just as we are. By staying on the surface and resting on the ground, it makes it static and unchangeable. There is no fluidity. But if the language we use floats, it is able to adapt. And adaptability is key here. People were able to adapt on land, and we are still adapting to the changes in our world and society. And since the world and the people are changing, our language can too. 

Another thing that I found interesting was word 3: flow. We view our achievements and our progress as one straight path. Because that’s how we’re told to view our lives. According to Mentz, it’s “linear”. For example, we get told to go to school, graduate, and get a job. That is linear progress. It’s like we have a set path for us and we’re told to follow it in order to succeed. However, Mentz throws out the old and brings in the new. By looking at our lives like we do the ocean, it’ll bring in new opportunities. The ocean is at a constant state of flow, and by applying this to our lives, it makes our path not so linear and instead makes it so that it’s all over the place. It makes it “messier, more confusing, and less familiar” (xvi).  This allows us to be free and do as we please with our lives, but still achieve things. Mentz encourages us to open our minds and to look at our world differently. 

While I do agree with Mentz, I understand not wanting to have a “flow” in your life. Being stable is what makes us comfortable. Knowing we have stability in our lives and the world is what helps us sleep at night. The ocean is full of secrets and that could drive away our ability to think deeper. We are comfortable with what we have on land because it’s what we could see with the eye. Anything we can’t see makes us uneasy. And that’s where our comfortability with land comes in. Even though we view land as such a stable place, it’s constantly changing. Which is why it’s important to view things differently. It’s all about being uncomfortable and questioning things. The more curious we are, the more we’ll go out and learn. And this can go back to Emerson as well. Going out in nature will heal you and allow you to be more open-minded. So, allow yourself to go out and make a connection with the sea and land. 

Poetics of Planetary Water

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Reading Mentz’s essay on The Blue Humanities, while more extensive than the Gillis article from the week before, really helped but into perspective how vast the train of thought towards the topic can be. The gears only turned in my head after reading this specific chunk, “The reason to study the water today, as I would phrase the point now, is that we are going to be seeing more of it, closer up, in the future. Rising sea levels and high-intensity rainstorms are making our environment wetter.” Water is an ever-changing substance, and even thanks to the long lasting impacts of global warming, water is what fuels life, yet is something that can also destroy it. Water is everywhere, and just as Mentz put it, is close to us in many ways, shapes, and forms. Whether or not we choose to acknowledge what water can do for us is up to the individual, but blue humanities, as it turns out, is starting to shape the way I think about tackling Moby Dick. Sure, I can simply think about water as a simple substance that I drink or as a recreational thing to swim in or exist by, but why is the human relationship towards it so important? What drives human nature to want to “bond” with a liquid of life? Honestly, it’s human nature to want to discover the unknown. People fear what they do not understand, and even though we’ve discovered many things about the land, the sea, and the sky, I do believe the sea is still the scariest there is. It is lots of uncharted territory, but needing to strive towards the knowledge of how to approach it safely, I’m certain humans aren’t ever going to stop. It’s ego, it’s hubris, it’s passion, all in all, tackling the vast blue of the ocean through the lens of humanities rather than science seems a little more humbling. Our environments change because of water, and while science gives us the numbers, arts and words allow for a sort of empathy that’s required to even spare the blink of an eye.

An American Prophecy

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There’s a lot in Delbanco’s introduction that I wanted to highlight, but I’ll try to limit myself starting with this simple quote: “He [Ahab] is on a mission, Ishmael is on a cruise” (xx). It’s very brief but it does a lot to frame one of the main conflicts of the novel. Considering our talks about language in relation to the blue humanities, the words “mission” and “cruise” evoke the different nature of their goals here. Ahab is set on a clear path with the definitive goal of hunting Moby Dick, whereas Ishmael is willing to go with the flow and really goes on the Pequod just to see more of the world and learn about the whaling industry. Delbanco makes the point that this conflict never becomes a direct battle in the novel and their ideals aren’t directly pitted against each other because “Melville himself incorporates both, and he feels their claims with equal fervor” (xix). This I feel is very important to include because rather than only give us Ishmael’s perspective and preach about one over the other, Melville shows that there is merit to each side; no one side is completely right or wrong.

I’m a bit hesitant to view Moby Dick as a prophecy of a doomed American experiment because of the implications it has for our country’s past, present, and future, but time and time again we see the consequences of unbridgeable fissures between the people of our nation (xx). It only continues to get worse when people adopt the “us against them” mentality, and the view that “the other” is always at fault. “Like Ahab, every man feels maimed and hopes to find relief by assigning blame” (xxii). This line of thinking is poisonous, contagious even, and all it does is further increase the gap between differing ideals. Leaning too far on either side leads to more tension and ultimately catastrophe. I don’t even really know what I’m trying to say anymore, but I’m hoping I can find more of the optimism the chronicle of the Pequod has to offer.

Strife is Justice

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When we think about nature, we often imagine balance, ecosystems in harmony, waves rising and falling with rhythm, the shore holding steady against the sea. But Steve Mentz reminds us that this vision of stability doesn’t hold up when we actually pay attention to a massive part of nature, the ocean. In A Poetics of Planetary Water, he borrows Adam Nicolson’s phrase, “strife is justice,” to describe how ecological systems thrive through tension, conflict, and constant change (Mentz, Poetics of Planetary Water, p. 151). The ocean teaches us that instability, not balance, is the true condition of life, and that lesson changes how we think about both ecology and ourselves.

We see this truth played out every day on the shoreline. The waves erase footprints as fast as they are made. Hurricanes reshape beaches in a matter of hours. The “justice” of the beach isn’t a peaceful balance, but an endless battle between land and water, constantly moving and never settled. As Mentz explains, Nicolson’s tide pools reveal a Heraclitean vision of the world: “Nothing is stable, and yet everything coheres” (Mentz, Poetics of Planetary Water, p. 151). In other words, order doesn’t emerge despite strife; it appears through it.

This idea challenges the comforting “green” ecological ideal of sustainability, where everything is in harmony. Instead, the ocean tells a harsher but more honest story. Systems survive by adapting to disruption. Coherence comes only in temporary, fragile forms, like sandbars that will one day be washed away.

That vision can be unsettling, but it’s also liberating. If strife is justice, then change isn’t failure; it’s the rule of life. The ocean doesn’t offer us peace or permanence. It offers us dynamism. To live with water is to accept instability as our ground, or better yet, our current. And maybe the most human thing we can do is learn how to float.

Flow > Fields: Fluid Mindset of the Ocean

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When I read Steve Mentz’s Ocean, the line that stuck with me the most was: “We need flow to know Ocean.” (xvi) That short sentence on page 2, to me, captures the whole spirit of the blue humanities. Flow isn’t just about water moving; it’s about how we think, how we connect, and how we let go of the old land-based metaphors that have shaped cultures for so long.

Mentz challenges us to stop thinking of “fields,” which sound fixed, solid, and agricultural, and instead to think in “currents,” which are always in motion. As we should be. That shift feels important because the ocean itself is never still. Knowledge about the ocean, and probably knowledge in general, cannot stay locked into stable and fixed categories. It has to move, to bend, to circulate around us. Flow becomes not only a method but also a mindset.

What I found powerful about this idea is that it kind of resists the comfort of any type of certainty. Fields produce neat harvests on a sort of schedule, whereas flows of the ocean can carry you into the unknown. Flow makes history “messier, more confusing, and less familiar” (Mentz xvi), and that’s a good thing. It reminds me that learning, like the sea, isn’t about arriving at a final, solid truth but more about engaging with change, turbulence, and unpredictability. That’s when we learn.

Thinking this way also changes how I picture the climate crisis. Rising seas aren’t just a threat but also a reminder of interconnection. Flow shows us that humans aren’t separate from the ocean but are caught up in its movements. To “know Ocean” is to accept that we live in fluidity, that stability is more of an illusion, and that survival might mean learning to move with the currents instead of trying to anchor ourselves against them.

Ment’s simple phrase has made me rethink how I will approach literature, history, and even my own writing. Maybe instead of looking for the solid ground in every text, I should be searching for the flow, the connections, the shifts, the messy but vital movements that carry meaning forward.

Steve Mentz’s article is truly noteworthy. 

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After reading Mentz’s article, it feels like my eyes have opened up a little bit more because of the details that I completely agree with. In the article, he quoted: “For literary writers and scholars, the ocean seems especially attractive because of its metaphorical vastness. The great waters represent a principle of narrative fecundity that Salman Rushdie has described as the “sea of stories.” (140). This quote is so interesting to me because, for a long time, I have been curious about the idea of: is there more to the ocean than just water? We all know that the ocean is vast. We all know it has tons of stories of people who are worth mentioning. This is when curiosity strikes me. I want to know more about the deep-sea creatures. Most people would think that such creatures would never exist, but the deep dark sea contains everything, and when I say everything, I mean creatures that our eyes could not even believe in. Mentz made such great points in this quote because, as scholars, we allow our curiosity to win over us. We study by gaining knowledge. We study by thinking about the possibilities of everything that could possibly happen at any moment. We create thoughts that are beyond the human imagination. We are attracted to the ocean not only because it has water, but because it creates images that allow us to visualize those stories in our heads. This is why Moby Dick plays a huge part in all of the articles we have read so far. The novel allows us to explore the mysteriousness that the sea offers to us. As scholars, we are not meant to know everything about the sea. We are meant to study it, to visualize it, and know the dangers behind it. When Mentz refers to ‘sea of stories’, I believe he is referring to the stories of the people who sail to the sea in the novel. There has to be people who challenge their lives in order to go out into the deep sea. Even though there are some points that I believe are spectacular and worth mentioning, this article still confuses me because it talks about the sea with poetics alongside other poets. Does this mean the ocean is the body of a poem? And people just sort of utilize it as a way to create more poems? I would love to learn more about how the ocean is associated with poetry because it definitely plays a huge role in explaining the vastness of the ocean.