"... never more so than in the unnerving chapter titled 'The Quarter-Deck,' when he persuades the polyglot crew of the Pequod that his own private grievance against Moby Dick—for having 'dismasted' him off the coast of Japan—is theirs, and that mere profit in barrels of whale oil pales in comparison to the chance to eliminate the evil White Whale himself. 'I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance,' says Starbuck, the voice then and now for narrow business interests. To which Ahab replies in his lordly way, 'Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.' As Ahab’s unhinged rhetoric escalates, even the reasonable Ishmael, schoolteacher turned sailor, surrenders to the manic mood. 'A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me,' he confesses. 'Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed mine.'"
Writes Christopher Benfey, in
"Siding with Ahab/Can we appreciate Herman Melville’s work without attributing to it schemes for the uplift of modern man?" (NYRB).
I wonder what Benfey thinks of Trump, because he seems to disapprove of the many critics who see "Ahab as the totalitarian tyrant menacing democratic freedom in the form of…Ishmael." Why don't readers "align themselves with Ahab"? The crew aligns with Ahab. And:
Not that Ahab isn’t appalling and even, at times, criminal. So is Macbeth; so is Othello. But do we really want our works of the imagination to mirror our own best selves, responsible and even-tempered, doing our small part to make the world a better place?
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As usual, the NYT is staffed by retards. Ahab makes sense as a character because of his personal vengeance that no one shares. By contrast, we HATE both the Deep State and the lying Rats. Unlike say Mitch McConnell, Trump hates them too. He wouldn't have had to, but now he does. If Trump goes on a vengeance trip, tens of millions will be bringing their harpoons.
If you haven't read the book "Moby Dick," then you can watch the movie.
It's called Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
They remade the movie in 1996, and renamed it.
"Star Trek: First Contact"
Starring Jean Luc Picard as Ahab and the Borg Queen as the white whale.
In fact, if you just watch any of the good Star Trek movies, it's all just remakes of Moby Dick.
"...own best selves, responsible and even-tempered, doing our small part to make the world a better place?"
In this world, Trump is the great white whale who must be slain. And every leftist man and woman in their day and in their work seem to be taken over by this passion to destroy the Great White Whale that is Trump. And, every one of them claim that it's their responsible selves, doing their little bit to make the world a better place. They rationalize the worst behavior, the turnings of our very laws inside out to accomplish this, they moan at a missed assassination opportunity, they cheer on an obvious moron to oppose him.
I see it in my neighbor's eyes. I hear it on TV. Like Ahab's consuming obsession, the Trump obsession has been taken to heart by half the nation.
Moby dick is really a compendium of early 19th century culture and everything melville could reference about whales going back to ancient greece
Yes picard was ahab in that film
I think the real question is not why do we not side with Ahab when the crew does, but do we find the crew's siding believable, even inevitable, despite our not sharing it? That's the mark of good writing.
But Trump's critics make no real honest effort to understand Trump's supporters. They sometimes pretend to, but it's never honest. It's always in the service of showing that even being charitable towards them, you still can't conclude that their position has any legitimacy.
One might think khan is ahab as well, marooned on ceti alpha 6 having lost his love most of his crew he continues to strike out at the source of his misfortune
"As usual, the NYT is staffed by retards."
The article is not in the NYT
Now let's talk about Christopher Benfey as Iago.
Hes written some interesting renaissance tales
Ann Althouse said...
"As usual, the NYT is staffed by retards."
The article is not in the NYT
7/27/24, 7:55 AM
Gosh, isn't that interesting. At least I could be tempted to blame the NYT as an institution if the NYRB was owned by them, as I wrongly thought. But no! Every single cultural institution merely associated with New York stops using the critical thinking skills like they're part of a hive mind. It's part of why I keep tying the insane hatred against normal Americans in general and President Trump in particular to the New York oligarchy.
I always take articles like this, from the same media milieu that praised “antihero” Tony Soprano endlessly, with a yuuuge grain of salt. As most cooks know salt tempers the bitterness of other flavors such as Trump Derangement Syndrome.
serious question (ok; a sarcastic, cynical question)..
Do we REALLY WANT to live in a world, where murderous White whales are Allowed to murder and kill?
SOMEONE HAS TO STOP Them...
"It’s true that Captain Ahab can seem quite Trumpian..."
Except for the sense of humor, golf skills, and hot wife, sure, bud. But if we're going to throw around analogies like that, wouldn't Joe's 50-year pursuit of the presidency and his grim holding on be more relevant?
help! help! my post was eaten by a white whale.. (or, a spam bot)
And there's that unknown, unseen character who threw those persuasive missives over Brutus's garden wall... Who played that same role in Bethel Park?
It's extraordinarily difficult to imagine the Ahab thing coming from Captain Pike as he appears in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
He's got interesting hair and the series is episodic, which is good.
But maybe you have to be a Millennial or something like that to relate to a starship captain micro-dosing hallucinogens.
I remarked to my wife that the actress who plays Nurse Chapel must be a very good actress because she seems much better-looking on TV than she is in real life and my wife said it's just that the show couldn't afford to pay Anya Taylor-Joy.
Every now and then my wife fires off a ripper.
I agree with Timujin. In understand the Moby Dick allegory, but I always assumed that Ahab was a stand in for the Democratic party. The endless hunt for the great white whale that ends in total disaster for Ahab i.e. the Democrats. Certainly it ended in disaster for Biden.
If we're going to compare Donald Trump to fictional book characters, he more closely resembles Elmer Gantry, frankly.
As Temujin says, it is Trump who is the whale - The Great Orange Whale. And the lefties are the deranged obsessives determined to get their vengeance for the terrible crime of winning in 2016.
I see how this works. Compare Trump to a tyrant, then talk about the tyrant.
A plausible theory about Moby Dick is that the white whale pursued by Ahab is a metaphor for enlightenment.
So your "Call me Althouse" in an earlier posting either spookily anticipated this or resulted in this. There are no coincidences.
In the rough draft of the novel, Ahab's ship hadn't been dismasted by the great whale. Melville changed it later.
No, what happened to piss Ahab off so much in the original first draft was, the great whale had surfaced near the ship and loudly questioned Ahab's legitimacy as Captain, claiming Ahab hadn't met the requirements of Captaincy and challenging him to provide documentation. Ahab's crew stopped what they were doing and looked at him like, "Well...?" So Ahab finally went below and after a long time, he came back up with a piece of paper, but the whale said, no it's a fake and the crew was divided between some who believed the paper was legit and some who didn't. Anyway, Ahab stayed Captain, but it made for a tense voyage and Ahab held a huge grudge about it.
I came here to say what @Temujin already nailed. If anyone wants to explicate "Moby Dick" and discuss a white whale that's being hunted by an obsessed Left -- er, Ahab ...
there was one of those '80's ('90's?) movies, where one of the female protagonists expounded (in_length) about how Moby Dick was a love story..
Moby traveled the world, hoping to meet up again; with her One True Love, Capt Ahab.
And then, at the end; they Finally found each other, and reunited.
Some people accused her of Not understanding (or reading (or being able to read)) the story;
but i think she got down to the essence of Melville's text
How this regards the Democrat Party, and Donald Trump.. I'll leave for the reader to ponder
Surely Trump is the whale who dismasted them in 2016, when madness ensued among the Dems/Ahab.
In Don Quixote, Sancho Panza seems to be the voice of common sense, resisting the Don's mad and dangerous visions. But always chooses fairly soon to go along. Quotidien life is too boring.
"In this world, Trump is the great white whale who must be slain."
Great ORANGE whale. Let us keep continuity.
Your typical American has never read Melville and likely doesn't even know who he is, and certainly doesn't know what the Moby Dick narrative is. Some people really do have Trump Derangement Syndrome to where their fear & hatred for DJT has entered into their unconscious minds. Sad but funny. If asked, the average American prole likely thinks Moby Dick is a sexually transmitted disease.
Living rent free.
"In this world, Trump is the great white whale who must be slain."
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.
Such empty vessels these politicians. Bad and worse.
I am going with merely bad (Trump) because at least he has a huckster's appreciation for enterprise and commercial values. He is going to save us from the utopians who dream of equal poverty for all. And he has a sense of humor.
Biden's epic emptiness cannot leave the stage too soon for my taste. Is he gone yet? I didn't think so.
Kamala, who was picked as window dressing, has exceeded everyone's expectations of vapidity. More to come on this front no doubt.
Here is Michael Brendan Dougherty's summary of recent events:
"If you were a faithful believer in what the New York Times says and fell into a coma just one month ago, you went unconscious thinking that Joe Biden’s incapacity was a right-wing psyop inflicted on the gullible by unscrupulous conservatives using deceptively edited videos. One of the reasons you knew you had to believe this is because Kamala Harris is a political joke who has “has a public perception problem, a self-fulfilling spiral of bad press and bad polls” and “the lowest net-negative rating for a vice president” since such measures had been taken. That was the party line: Biden’s just fine, Kamala’s terrible. Believing anything else is stupid. Less than four weeks later: Biden’s terrible. Kamala’s amazing! And if you say different, you’re a dummy."
Ahab said, "I will not have a man in this boat who not afraid of a whale!" Democrats might ponder that.
Trump always explains what’s happening. The Globalists that hire the Antifa rioters and the refusing to jail criminals prosecutors actually hate the White Nationalist population of the USA, and Captain Trump merely steers our ship into battle.
We are still the Ugly Americans. Our crime is crushing the German, Japanese Empires and replacing the British, French and Dutch Empires followed by saving South Korea and retracing the Soviet Empire until it quit being an insane International Marxist Empire.
Captain Trump also serves us as our drug sniffing dog that publicly speaks the truth back to the Narrative Spinning Fake News.
Suddenly this summer we have been reminded Captain Trump also has a great white whale dick named Moby and dodges sniper bullets. Talk about a great movie plot.
If Ahab is Trumpian, does that necessarily mean that Trump is Ahabian?
It's not too far out to imagine that Trump would argue to his "crew" that following him has many upsides, so get on board and join the fight. Whether the upsides balance out the expense of the leader's quenchless feud or not is, naturally, arguable.
I didn't pay my dollar to read the rest, but who or what is Trump's white whale in this story?
Looking for parallels, it would seem to me that if Trump is cast as Ahab, then L'éminence blanc is L'éminence grise.
More likely Hillary is Ahab, who persuades the polyglot crew of the Party that her own private grievance against Trump—for having 'dismasted' her in 2016—is theirs, and that mere profit in peace and prosperity pales in comparison to the chance to eliminate the evil Orange Whale himself.
Ahab was obsessed with aborting and sequestering his "burden", represented by a whale.
Out, out damned carbon.
Seemingly intelligent people have degraded literature because they force fit it into their myopic morality.
Trump is large. He contains multitudes
Good one, McCullough.
“Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged.
Missing me one place, search another.” Signed, Joe Biden
Akternative analogy: Trump is the Roadrunner, and the Democrats are Wile E. Coyote, always scheming but never quite
succeeding -- Russian collusion, impeachment, lawfare, early debate on CNN, assassination attempt (also on CNN, apparently). All failed or blew up in the Democrats' faces. The walls never actually closed in.
Not a perfect analogy, of course. Covid and ballot fraud in a handful of Democrat-controlled jurisdictions did manage to oust him from the Presidency in 2020. But if he wins in 2024, then the analogy works pretty well overall.
"Gosh, isn't that interesting. At least I could be tempted to blame the NYT as an institution if the NYRB was owned by them, as I wrongly thought. But no! Every single cultural institution merely associated with New York stops using the critical thinking skills like they're part of a hive mind."
That's a statement of your perception and belief, not a statement of fact, self-serving and sloppy.
In the "Trump" is Ahab comparison, the author seems to mix up who is Ahab and who is Moby Dick. It seems to me that it is the Democrats who are Ahab, always seeking to harpoon the elusive Orange Whale (and getting killed by it in the end).
Cook is a good example of the NYC hive mind.
"Moby dick is really a compendium of early 19th century culture and everything melville could reference about whales going back to ancient greece"
Please. Have you read the bloody thing?
Open to Chapter 113 and find Ahab and Perth the blacksmith in which Ahab demands a new harpoon, forged and then quenched not with oil or water but with pagan’s blood:
When the blacksmith had forged the head and welded it to the shank to complete the harpoon, he called for water to quench and temper the red-hot iron -- but Ahab said no.
“No, no -- no water for that; I want it of the true death-temper. Ahoy, there! Tashtego, Queequeg, Daggoo! What say, ye, pagans! Will ye give me as much blood as will cover this barb?' A cluster of dark nods replied, 'Yes.'" Quenching the hot iron in blood, Ahab howled deliriously, "I baptize thee not in the name of the Father but in the name of the devil."
By all means tell me that the thing is any type of compendium regarding whales, Greek or otherwise.
Tell me that such astonishing depths of symbolism and breadth of theme would ever devalue itself to serve as parable or allegory or template for that hot headed, blustery ass from Queens who happen to love this country more than the present fools and thieves in Washington.
Go back and pick up your Melville and try again.
Randomizer said...
I see how this works. Compare Trump to a tyrant, then talk about the tyrant.
It comes closer to "Say Trump reminds you of a tyrant..."
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