Specter of Reason

I will be the first to admit that  Avatar: The Way of Water  is not a great film, or even a very good one. While the visuals are often stunning, the dialogue and characters are rarely compelling--and sometimes downright problematic. The film propagates patriarchal tropes and appropriates Maori and Native American culture in superficial ways, and all at the expense of character development. To top it off, the plot is full of holes. And yet, on a thematic and emotional level, it sometimes works. At the very least,  the power-hungry, Tulkun-hunting Captain Mick Scoresby (Brendan Cowell)  is set up to become a formidable villain in the next installment. More than that, Payakun may be the most sympathetic adaptation of the character of Moby Dick in film history. (Unfortunately, that says more about the inadequacies of prior film adaptations than it does about Cameron's film.) In the end, James Cameron has established a viable connection to one of the greatest works in Ame...

"Vengeance on a dumb brute!" cried Starbuck, "that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous."  "Hark ye yet again- the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event- in the living act, the undoubted deed- there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike though the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd ...

A lot of fans and critics of American literature get annoyed when Herman Melville's Moby Dick is summarized as a revenge story.  There's an irony here.  True, thanks to film adaptations, Captain Ahab's mad desire for revenge is often and wrongly believed to be the main theme of the novel.  However, I think there is a revenge story at the heart of Moby Dick-- not Ahab's revenge against the whale, but the whale's revenge against civilized man.  The truth is, Moby Dick is just as maniacal as Ahab, if not more so, and it's Ishmael's coming to terms with this mad whale that leads the narrative. Ahab is perhaps the greatest whaling captain of all time, and thus the strongest, most revered emblem of whaling itself, which had been recognized as mankind's greatest industry.  (Melville twice reminds us of Edmund Burke's 18th-century praise of whaling as an unequaled industry, and he describes at length and speculates about the many great purposes of whaling....

It is said that the best way to learn something is to teach it, a truth I'm discovering now as a teacher of American literature. I've been reading Moby Dick with an intensity of interest I can only attribute to the fact that I want to do right by my students and present the material as best I can. It helps that I love Melville's philosophical and narrative exploits, as well as the literary virtuosity of the thing. What is most striking to me, however, is the deeply personal aspect of Melville's story. One of the most fascinating aspects of Moby Dick is the ways in which it is not a novel, but rather a manifesto or, even more, a testament.  In chapter 45, "The Affidavit," Melville suggests the Biblical dimension of his narrative, comparing his descriptions of whales to Moses' descriptions of the plagues of Egypt. The whole point of this chapter is to ground the story of Ahab's mad pursuit of the white whale in historical fact, to establish it as no...