Recently in Moby-Dick Category

Some years ago I began to play songs before each of my American Literature I lectures. I was teaching on the eighth floor of NYU's Main Building (now the Silver Center), a building that wasn't really designed for the number of students that flooded into and out of it at the beginning of each class hour. If you didn't arrive well 15 minutes before the start of class, you'd find yourself waiting in long elevator lines. So I'd usually take the stairs, a good form of passive exercise, but (as you can imagine) I would often arrive on the eighth floor not only winded but in a rather ill-humor.

So I thought that it might be fun to play some music to cheer me up. Then I though that if I got there early, I could play several songs, which might amuse both me and those students who had gotten there early. I didn't say anything about it, but the songs were linked in some way to the day's subject. The students soon began to catch on; indeed, I would be met by disgruntled looks on those days when I happened to arrive too late to play the songs I'd prepared. Eventually, one of the students asked if he could make some suggestions for future lectures.

Playing songs before class thus became one of my standard practices. It meant, of course, that I was creating an amped up rather than a contemplative mood before class, but I suppose that suits my style at the podium. And I figured that it might serve as a subliminal suggestion to students that they should be sure to arrive at the classroom early. I also play one song as the students are leaving.

My selections tend to reflect my own prediliction for classic rock, so I'm always pleased to have new suggestions. One of the questions that I was asked on the questionnaire that I circulated at the end of Monday's lecture was: How did you find so many songs with "cosmopolitan" in the title? The answer is a 180 GB iTunes library. I sometimes find myself using keyword searches to find songs that I didn't know I had.

So here are the playlists for the first three lectures in this year's Conversation of the West course.

LECTURE ONE: INTRODUCTION
Opening: Bonnie Raitt, "Something To Talk About"; Dire Straits, "Once Upon a Time in the West."
Closing: "The Pretenders, "Talk of the Town"

LECTURE TWO: APPIAH AND COSMOPOLITANISM
Opening: Erin McKeown, "Cosmopolitans"; Nine Black Alps, "Cosmopolitan""; Al di Meola and Leonid Agutin, "Cosmopolitan Life."
Closing: Elvis Costello and the Attractions, "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding?"

LECTURE THREE: LOOMINGS (Introduction to Melville)
Opening: Corm, "Call Me Ishmael"; Toby Goodshank, "Call Me Ishmael"; Call Me Ishmael, "Seeing Stars."
Closing: Led Zeppelin, "Moby Dick."

Monday's lecture is about Zoroastrianism. Any suggestions?

Before Monday's lecture, the instructor who teaches in my room during the previous time slot asked me what songs I'd be playing. "Songs with 'cosmopolitanism' in the title," I replied. "Oooh, we don't like cosmopolitanism," she said, going on to explain that she and her teaching assistants were all classicists, and they felt that cosmopolitanism was being used to justify the acquisition of antiquities on the black market by collectors. She had particular animus toward Appiah: "He's gone over to the dark side." I suggested that if nations operated according to a theory of cosmopolitanism there might not be a black market in antiquities in the same way that there is today, but she wasn't buying. So I told my class that there were those on NYU's faculty who thought of Appiah as a version of Darth Vader, suggesting to them that they realize that both Appiah and cosmopolitanism are controversial and that they should give his arguments close scrutiny.

At the end of the class, I had the students fill out a questionnaire, asking them what they thought the most important point made in lecture had been, whether they had any questions about the lecture, and whether they had any questions about Appiah's book. Here are my favorite responses:

I really appreciated how he had his own set of beliefs, but he respected and cared about those of others. He learned from them. That is rare. [This makes me sad.]

Is the world eventually going to be a cosmopolitan society? [Wouldn't it be pretty to think so.]

Why did Appiah say that a lot of philosophy books are not useful? [A bit of an oversimplification, I think.]

Appiah's ideas seem so logical that I find it hard to consider cosmopolitanism controversial, despite his deconstruction of the terms he defines. [Clearly not voting for McCain-Palin.]

I wonder what race his wife is ... [Read the acknowledgments, but why are you asking?]

Some of the queries, however, I'll address at the beginning of the class, particularly one about cosmopolitanism as an elitist perspective (I opened the door to that myself in class by referring to Tim Brennan's critique of Salman Rushdie), one about the limits of cosmopolitan theory, and another about Appiah's attempts to be prescriptive.

I'm also going to a few moments in the text that will help me to introduce Moby-Dick, since the ostensible subject of the lecture is the "Etymology" and "Extracts" sections and Chapter One, "Loomings." These will include Appiah's argument about the value of storytelling (p. 29); his suggestion that "what it's reasonable for you to think, faced with a particular experience, depends on what ideas you already have" (p. 39), as a way of reintroducing the idea of the "horizon of expectations," which I discussed in the opening lecture; and Appiah's invocation of Hilary Putnam's maxim "Meanings ain't in the head" as a way of talking about intertextuality.

I plan to talk more about the nature of "meaning" and to argue that the "meaning" of a literary text arises through a complex negotiation between author and reader thorugh the medium of the text. I want to stress that meaning is a collaboration between between author and reader and to do that I'll use a device I've used before in my American Literature survey: I'll show a set of clips from the film Shakespeare in Love that show how Romeo and Juliet is produced not by a solitary genius but by a writer who transforms the materials of the everyday world around him and works in collaboration with other writers (such as Marlowe), actors, and indeed the entire culture around him. And I'll suggest that Melville is doing something similar.

Shakespeare will arise again when I call attention to the story of Melville's meeting with Hawthorne and his statement, in "Hawthorne and His Mosses," that "Shakespeare has been approached." The other thing I'll show them in "Hawthorne and His Mosses" is Melville's description of the "great power of blackness" in Hawthorne, which "derives its force from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free. For, in certain moods, no man can weigh this world, without throwing in something, somehow like Original Sin, to strike the uneven balance."

And of course, on the eve of the anniversary of 9/11, I'll have to end with that uncanny moment at the end of "Loomings," when Ishmael makes his joke about his role in the script that the Fates have written:

And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:

"Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States."

"WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL."

"BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN."

Whoa. Cue Led Zeppelin.

The Puritan writer Edward Taylor (c. 1642-1729), whose work I teach during my American Literature I lecture course, wrote a series of poems that he called Preparatory Meditations. The poems were written as a way of preparing for the sermons that Taylor would give before administering the monthly communion to the members of his congregation who had made a declaration of faith. A total of 217 of these poems survive, written between 1682 and 1725. Each of the poems begins by citing a verse of scripture, presumably the text about which Taylor was planning to preach.

The introduction to Taylor in the text that I typically use (the Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume A) tells us that "these poems, written for his own pleasure and never a part of any religious service, . . . gave the poet an occasion to summarize the emotional and intellectual content of his sermon and to speak directly and fervently to God. Sometimes these poems are gnarled and difficult to follow, but they also reveal a unique voice, unmistakably Taylor's. They are written in an idiom that harks back to the verse that Taylor must have known as a child in England -- the Metaphysical lyrics of John Donne and George Herbert -- and so delight in puns and paradoxes and a rich profusion of metaphors and images."

My favorite of these poems is "Meditation 8," which cites John 6.51 ("I am the Living Bread") and then livens up this familiar image by imagining it literally rather than metaphorically. Here are verses 3 and 4:

In this sad state, Gods Tender Bowells run
     Out streams of Grace: And he to end all strife
The Purest Wheate in Heaven, his deare-dear Son
     Grinds, and kneads up into this Bread of Life.
     Which Bread of Life from Heaven down came and stands
     Disht on thy Table up by Angells Hands.

Did God mould up this Bread in Heaven, and bake,
     Which from his Table came, and to shine goeth?
Doth he bespeake thee thus, This Soule Bread take.
     Come Eate thy fill of this thy Gods White Loafe?
     Its Food too fine for Angells, yet come, take
     And Eate thy fill. Its Heavens Sugar Cake.

This term I'm going to try some preparatory meditations of my own on this blog in advance of each of my lectures for the course "Conversations of the West," which I'm teaching this term. They won't be poems,  and I can't promise that they'll feature "puns and paradoxes and a rich profusion of metaphors and images," though I'll do my best.

The first meditation appears after the break.

T. Walter Herbert, Jr. begins his marvelously insightful study Moby-Dick and Calvinism (1977) with an apologia for producing yet another book about Herman Melville:

It has been true for some time that by writing one reasonably intelligible book on Melville a man could secure a better living in America than Melville managed to win by writing the whole body of his work. It is possible that this period is now drawing to a close; but while it has lasted his writings have received such an immense volume of commentary that yet another article on Melville, to say nothing of a scholarly book, should be obliged to present reasons for its existence. (ix)

The raison d'être for Herbert's study is to make known "a major aspect of Melville's creative achievement" by providing "a biographical account of Melville's inner struggle with the theological ideas that were losing authority during his time" and investigating "his way of handling those ideas in Moby-Dick" (ix). Noting that "Melville's religious perplexities were shaped by the fact that he absorbed in childhood the opposing theories of Unitarianism and the most conservative orthodoxy," Herbert concedes that in the early nineteenth century, the debates between the proponents of these theories had come "to seem intractable and were denounced increasingly as a waste of motion" (5-6), and he suggests that Melville's "preoccupation with outdated religious questions was a source of dismay to his most intimate literary associates" (11).

And if these questions were outdated in Melville's time, how much more out-of-date would they seem to readers nearly a century-and-a-half-later? Somewhat defensively, Herbert writes that "Melville deals with historic theological issues that may seem quite remote to us, scarcely worth the energies of a great genius" and admits that "the need to review the historical context of his work" might be construed to be "antiquarian." Herbert argues, however, that such an interest is anything but antiquarian, because religion was part of "the structure of ideas that molded [Melville's] consciousness."

As Herbert presents it, the interest of Moby-Dick and Calvinism rests not on the particular religious ideas and theories with which Melville engaged (though Herbert does an excellent job of elucidating them for his reader) but rather on something more abstract: it is, finally, a study of the ways in which "masters of literary art" like Melville take "command of certain basic conventions of thought" that "dominate the meditations of [their] contemporaries" (5). Melville, Herbert argues, "lived in a world very different from our own, and thought in the idiom that his world provided," but he "addresses us directly" because he dramatizes "the historical finitude" of all the "basic conceptual frameworks in which men articulate their negotiations with experience" (5, 19).

Reading Herbert's study some thirty years after it was published, I am struck by the ways in which it seems simultaneously current and out-dated. In 1977, it was ahead of its time, an example of what Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen would refer to, nine years later, as "ideological literary criticism." Herbert doesn't use the term ideology, but like those critics in Bercovitch and Jehlen's influential anthology Ideology and Classic American Literature (1986), he draws on work from the social sciences to illuminate his account of literary creation: "Lines of research in sociology, anthropology, and psychology have converged upon the recognition that individual persons, as well as communities, render experience intelligible by employing conceptions of the world" (3). Although he feels duty-bound to invoke psychoanalytic theory in his discussion of "intellectual conflict" (12-15), Herbert's approach owes more to the work of Clifford Geertz and Thomas Kuhn, two of the most frequently invoked theorists among subsequent practitioners of ideological literary criticism. "Personality within a culture," Herbert writes, "coalesces about the scheme of basic attitudes which the culture mediates to every newborn in making him a member of his society. . . . Accepted conventions of thought and action reach into the individual and establish the terms on which he must achieve whatever individuality is to be distinctively his own" (3-4). Herbert's study is animated by a sense of the reciprocality of text and context that has now become de rigeur in the aftermath of the New Historicism.

And yet, one of the lessons of ideological literary criticism is that every act of reading or writing must be contextualized, and I am struck, reading Moby-Dick and Calvinisim in 2008 about the difference between its cultural context and my own. Indeed, I wonder whether the meaning of Herbert's suggestion that Melville "addresses us directly" hasn't changed in the thirty years since Herbert wrote those words: is it possible that the United States circa 2007 has more in common with Melville's time than it did in 1978?

In 1977, there was a Democratic president in office and social scientists fretted about what Christopher Lasch called the "culture of narcissism." Herbert writes with the implicit understanding that "the theocentric interpretation of moral experience has been superseded," but urges his reader not to underestimate the importance of religious thought.

Three decades later, however, theocentrism seems to be enjoying a renaissance in the United States, with a Republican president in office who counts himself among the ranks of born-again Christians. By all accounts, George W. Bush was able to win re-election in 2004 because he managed to turn out a sufficient number of voters from the religious right to make the difference.  In the aftermath of the election, the Economist, observing American politics from across the Atlantic, wrote that "the conservative rural red-neck Calvinist vote has captured America. A plurality of voters, emerging from poll booths, said that the most important issue in the campaign had been 'moral values'. It was not, it seemed, Iraq or the economy. And eight out of ten of these moralists voted for George Bush" ("The triumph of the religious right," 13 November 2004). Ten weeks later, U.S. News and World Report would call Bush's second inauguration "a day for the true believers -- the social conservatives, Christian activists, foreign-policy hawks, and, of course, George W. Bush himself" (20 January 2005).

Reading Herbert's monograph in this cultural context reinforces my sense that Moby-Dick was an emergent text in 1851 and is an emergent text today in 2008 -- in both cases because of its links to cosmopolitanism.

When I was in graduate school, my advisor, Sacvan Bercovitch, used to say proudly that he counted among his students one from the oldest religion in the world (Zoroastrianism)  and one from the newest (Mormonism) .

Full disclosure: my father is a Parsi, and I had a navjote ceremony when I was in the third grade, making me -- officially -- a Zoroastrian.

We had trouble finding someone from the priest class to perform the navjote ceremony, however, because my mother was a Filipino and a Christian -- a Protestant, oddly enough, my grandmother having converted to a Pentecostal sect before my mother's birth. My parents met at the International House at Columbia University, my father coming from Pakistan to study mathematical statistics, my mother from the Philippines to study literature and drama.

We weren't religious at home, though we did celebrate Christmas and made it a point to attend the Christmas eve services at Riverside Church in New York, a few blocks up the street from where we lived. My mother sometimes liked to attend Easter services there as well. It was always assumed that I would become a Zoroastrian, as my mother explained it, so that I could keep my options open. I could convert to Christianity but not to Zoroastrianism later, because Zoroastrianism didn't accept converts.

But, when the time came during third grade for the ceremony to be performed, we couldn't find a priest. We kept hearing excuses along the lines of "I would do it, but my mother-in-law is very old-fashioned." Finally, we managed to secure the services of a priest from Bombay who was traveling in the U.S. and spending some time in New York. Four years later, we had to go to London to have my sister's ceremony done.

It was an early lesson in the dynamics of culture, though it would take me years to recognize it: my parents' marriage was an emblem of cosmopolitan cultural mixing, while the priests' belief in the importance of cultural purity might serve as an emblem of all the forces that are arrayed against cosmopolitanism.

When I was growing up, strangers would ask me, "Where are you from?" and I'd say, "New York" or "the upper West Side." They'd look vaguely disappointed and then say, "No, I meant what's your background." I wasn't really being disingenuous, though I was well aware what the first question really meant. It's just that I never particularly identified with either of my parents' cultural traditions. We spoke English at home, and my parents had gradually lost their fluency in the mother tongues (Gujarati and Tagalog, respectively). What I identified with was being mixed and being able to slip from one cultural context to another. To my Parsi relatives, I looked Filipino; to my Filipino relatives, I looked "bumbai"; and to my classmates -- well, on the rare occasions when someone wanted to launch a racial slur, the result was usually a lame attempt to insult me as if I were Puerto Rican.

So I suppose it's somewhat predictable that in recent years I have chosen to work on what I call "emergent literatures" -- literatures that express marginalized cultural identities -- and found myself increasingly interested in theories of cosmopolitanism. And that I've been fascinated for the past fifteen years with a text that combines the Zoroastrian and Christian traditions -- Moby-Dick.

I'll be writing a lot about Moby-Dick here in the coming months, as I teach my Conversations of the West class again this fall and serve as an adviser for Ric Burns's new documentary, Into the Deep: America, Whaling, and the World.

[The image above is called The Voyage of the Pequod from the book Moby Dick by Herman Melville (1956) by Everett Henry (1893-1961). Courtesy of the Geography & Map Division of the Library of Congress. Click here to see their page about it.]