On Sunday, September 28 at 3 pm ET on Zoom we will have the opportunity to have a conversation about Moby Dick with Wyn Kelley, Senior Lecturer Emerita, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She comes to us through the good offices of classmate Bruce Alpert. Lecturer Kelley’s MIT faculty listing, with drop down lists of courses taught, and publications as well as a link to her cv, may be found here: https://lit.mit.edu/wkelley/ .
This completes our re-engagement tour of the three books in the Freshman English Seminar. Imagine reading Paradise Lost, King Lear and Moby Dick (or Moby-Dick) in ten weeks. Well, most of us did it, because we had to. We were young then and perhaps a bit callow. Now that we are old, and perhaps still a bit callow, we can look again at these titanic works of English literature, and through them at ourselves. A Dartmouth Miltonian spoke with us about Paradise Lost, a Princeton professor about King Lear, and now an MIT scholar will bring us back to Moby Dick.
This announcement is being sent early because it might be wise for you all to read at least some of the book before we meet on September 28. Lecturer Kelley offers the following as worthy of your consideration:
“I might suggest reading Chapters 132-135 and Epilogue for a focus. One passage I find tremendously fruitful is this one from Chapter 134:
Here be it said, that this pertinacious pursuit of one particular whale, continued through day into night, and through night into day, is a thing by no means unprecedented in the South sea fishery. For such is the wonderful skill, prescience of experience, and invincible confidence acquired by some great natural geniuses among the Nantucket commanders; that from the simple observation of a whale when last descried, they will, under certain given circumstances, pretty accurately foretell both the direction in which he will continue to swim for a time, while out of sight, as well as his probable rate of progression during that period. And, in these cases, somewhat as a pilot, when about losing sight of a coast, whose general trending he well knows, and which he desires shortly to return to again, but at some further point; like as this pilot stands by his compass, and takes the precise bearing of the cape at present visible, in order the more certainly to hit aright the remote, unseen headland, eventually to be visited: so does the fisherman, at his compass, with the whale; for after being chased, and diligently marked, through several hours of daylight, then, when night obscures the fish, the creature’s future wake through the darkness is almost as established to the sagacious mind of the hunter, as the pilot’s coast is to him. So that to this hunter’s wondrous skill, the proverbial evanescence of a thing writ in water, a wake, is to all desired purposes well nigh as reliable as the steadfast land.
Ms. Kelley continues:
I would like to draw attention to:
1. sentence structure, especially in the long comparison starting “somewhat as a pilot,” a beautiful example of epic simile;
2. blending of discourses, from the mechanical (timepieces, ships and trains) to the lyrical, “the proverbial evanescence of a thing writ in water, a wake.”
3. the return to Ahab’s “pertinacious pursuit of one particular whale,” a theme throughout the novel, here presented as “a thing by no means unprecedented in the South sea fishery,” i.e. no big deal, when before it was cause for thoughts of mutiny.
From there I would open out to the way these chapters seem to contain the book in a nutshell—all the important characters, the most significant action, some of the most beautiful writing: with a difference. The whale has arrived! And with him a host of questions about how we may read the book’s many-stranded conclusion.
I hope this outline helps your moderator, and it would be fine if participants had this material as well. It seems to me a discussion that anyone could join in on, whether they’d read the book recently or never at all. Let me know if it works for you! Best, Wyn
For the somewhat more adventurous of us, in another email, Lecturer Kelley adds to her basic list a few other chapters which could pique your thoughts:
Ch 36: “The Quarter-Deck"
Ch 40: “Midnight-Forecastle”
Ch 96: “The Try-Works”
Ch 99: “The Doubloon”
Ch 119: “The Candles”
FOCUS
Ch 133: “The Chase. First Day”
Ch 134: “ The Chase. Second Day”
Ch 135: “The Chase. Third Day”
“Epilogue” (because we have to)
These are the most dramatic chapters, in many ways, and the ones in which individual characters get caught up in intense action. The writing is vivid, some of Melville’s best. And yet they often don’t get as much attention as the more philosophical chapters, or the ones that feature Ahab’s rhetoric or Ishmael’s thoughts, or the process of breaking down the whale. Why is that?
Thus, no real surprises for September 28. Maybe. Perhaps you can supply a few surprises of your own for us and for yourself in how you confront the Great White.
And your quest now that you are facing 80 years old? Surely you have one, or several.
Usual rules. Let me know by the Friday before the Casual Conversation whether you want to join us on Zoom by emailing me at arthur.fergenson@ansalaw.com .
Arthur Fergenson