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Web site URL

https://sites.google.com/site/oshermobydick/

Schedule

• Week 1--Introductory: The Overture and the Moby-Dick world

  • "Call me Ishmael."—"Are the green fields gone?"

  • Chapter 1

• Week 2--Ishmael as voice and standpoint

  • "a mutual joint-stock world, in all meridians":

  • Chapters 2-13

• Week 3-The Ship

  • Down to the sea in ships...[to] do business in great waters"

  • Chapters 14-27

• Week 4--The Captain

  • "greenly alive, but branded"

  • Chapters 28-44

• Week 5--The Whale and Whaling

  • "the horrors of the half known life"

  • Chapters 45-59

• Week 6--The Whale and Whaling

  • "neither believer nor infidel"

  • Chapters 60-88

• Week 7--The Meanings

  • "orphans whose unwed dead mothers die in bearing them"

  • Chapters 89-117

• Week 8--Impending Doom

  • "So far gone am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me. "

  • Chapters 118-131

• Week 9--The End

  • "the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago"

  • Chapters 132-136

• Week 10--Summing Up

  • "the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago"

  • Chapters 132-136

Harvesting or Predation

When we think about the question in the Course Subtitle in the catalogue, several issues arise. Is being a harvester more innocent than being a predator? Most of the time I'd prefer to think of myself as a pastoral harvester, and leave bloody predation to sharks, tigers and the like, including those who supply what we find in the meat and seafood sections at the grocery. Which are we?

1) What does our culture suggest?

After God created "great whales, and every living creature that moveth" (Genesis 1:21) and told the humans he had created that their duty was to "replenish the earth and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth" (Genesis 1:28) it is unclear if "dominion" entailed killing and eating. The next verse seems to command a vegan diet: "I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat."

Here's a passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "Fate" that might clarify our role, and might parallel what we're going to find in Moby-Dick:

• • But Nature is no sentimentalist, −− does not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman; but swallows your ship like a grain of dust. The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple. The diseases, the elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, respect no persons. The way of Providence is a little rude. The habit of snake and spider, the snap of the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda, −− these are in the system, and our habits are like theirs. You have just dined, and, however scrupulously the slaughter−house is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity, −− expensive races, −− race living at the expense of race.

2) What does the book say?

Here are a few passages—out of many—we'll encounter that address our question.

• "Wish, by gor! whale eat him, 'stead of him eat whale. I'm bressed if he ain't more of shark dan Massa Shark hisself," muttered the old man, limping away; with which sage ejaculation he went to his hammock. Chapter 54

• But no doubt the first man that ever murdered an ox was regarded as a murderer; perhaps he was hung; and if he had been put on his trial by oxen, he certainly would have been; and he certainly deserved it if any murderer does. Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal's jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate-de-foie-gras. Chapter 55

• In that sloping afternoon sunlight, the shadows that the three boats sent down beneath the surface, must have been long enough and broad enough to shade half Xerxes' army. Who can tell how appalling to the wounded whale must have been such huge phantoms flitting over his head! Chapter 81

Resources

Books

• Parker, Hershel and Harrison Hayford. Moby-Dick. A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 2002.

• Parker, Hershel. Herman Melville: A Biography. 2 vols. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, 2002.

• King, Richard J. Ahab's Rolling Sea: A Natural History of Moby-Dick. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2019.

Subo-pages and web sites.

• The Questions

• Power Moby-Dick