Call Me Ishmael
​​
Whitehead and Moby Dick
on the Ruthlessness of God
​

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Photo by Mike Doherty on Unsplash

Quotes to Get Started


"Moby Dick is about the forces we cannot control, not just whales but our fate..There are two novels really in Moby Dick. The novel of Ahab which is a quest for revenge against a whale that took his leg; then there is the novel of Ishmael which is quest for knowledge of the same whale. And so you have going back and forth in the novel the chapters with Ahab pushing his ship the Pequod after this whale Moby Dick who has dismasted him (as he puts it) and you have interleaved with these chapters Ishmael learning about everything in the world and in the universe besides."

​- Emily Ogden, University of Virginia, BBC World Forum


“What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I.”

​- Herman Melville, Moby Dick


New to the Novel?

​Try This BBC Forum
​


​"Moby Dick is the story of a crazed and vengeful sailor, Captain Ahab, hunting a giant whale that bit off his leg. It's a large and challenging book and its author, Herman Melville died without knowing how influential or revered it would become. Although it failed to impress when it first came out in 1851, it’s now hailed as a ‘great American novel’, one of the towering achievements of American literature. With Bridget Kendall to explore the book and its author, Professor Jamie Jones from the University of Illinois, Emily Ogden from the University of Virginia and poet and academic from Lancaster University in the UK, Paul Farley."


Whitehead and Moby Dick
on the Ruthlessness of God


More people have started Moby Dick than have finished it. Some of us, and I am among them, have dipped into it. We know that Ahab, the captain of the ship, was driven by revenge against a whale that took his leg, and that Ishmael (the narrator) was insatiably curious about the whale and, more generally, everything. We are curious like Ishmael, and our curiosity extends to the question: What is Moby Dick about?

The BBC Forum offered above shows that it is about God, fate, destiny, questioning, and questing, including questing for revenge. I offer a comment on just one of these themes: Fate.

Consider two ways of thinking about Fate:

1. Fate is a pre-written script for how life will unfold.
2. Fate is what happens to you beyond your control.

​Open and relational (process) theologians reject the first meaning of fate. They do not think there is a pre-written script to human life or to the surrounding world. On the contrary, they believe that there is something like freedom or self-creativity within human life and within the depths of nature, such that the future is not pre-known or pre-determined, not even by God. Yes, there are parameters for what unfolds; some of us call them the laws of nature. But there are no fully-defined scripts.

However, open and relational (process) theologians also affirm the second meaning: fate has what happens beyond your control. We know that there are many things in life that are simply given to experience in the present moment, happily or sadly, pleasantly or painfully. They include events originating in our bodies, the societies that shape us, our families of origin, the historical circumstances of our lives. Indeed, for process theologians, fate also includes the future, in the sense that something will happen, whatever it is. Fate also includes our own responses to what happens after we have responded, which then become part of our fate. Once we have made decisions, we cannot unmake them. They, too, are given. Fate is what has happened and what will happen, as beyond our control in the present moment.

So how about God? Is God subject to Fate? Are there some things that are uncontrollable? Yes, say many open and relational (process) theologians. Can cannot reverse the past, God cannot unmake our decisions, and God cannot prevent tragedies.

There is a positive side to this. We cannot control the fact that God cares for us, that God supplies initial aims to us, that God shares in our joys and sufferings, that God is love. We are, as it were, fated to be born into a world where God love us and the whole of life.

Most open and relational (process) theologians would add that we are part of God's Fate. Whatever happens in the world happens in and to God: the fellow sufferer who understands. Our decisions and experiences are given for God to experience and share in. God cannot control what we give to God, and we cannot control God's love.

So what is this love?

Moby Dick is a lesson in humility and terror. It invites us to recognize that divine love is not always about us: that it includes a concern for order in the greater ecology of life. And to recognize that divine love for us, as felt within the depths of our hearts, can be terrifying not consoling: a lure to accept, in Whitehead' words, "the ruthlessness of God." Whitehead writes:

This function of God is analogous to the remorseless working of things in Greek and in Buddhist thought. The initial aim is the best for that impasse. But if the best be bad, then the ruthlessness of God can be personified as Atè, the goddess of mischief. The chaff is burnt. What is inexorable in God, is valuation as an aim towards ‘order;’ and ‘order’ means ‘society permissive of actualities with patterned intensity of feeling arising from adjusted contrasts. (Process and Reality)

The whale is also an invitation to recognize that even the God of love is in the grip of fate. Here is how Whitehead puts it:

​God and the World stand to each other in this opposed requirement. God is the infinite ground of all mentality, the unity of vision seeking physical multiplicity. The World is the multiplicity of finites, actualities seeking a perfected unity. Neither God, nor the World, reaches static completion. Both are in the grip of the ultimate metaphysical ground, the creative advance into novelty. Either of them, God and the World, is the instrument of novelty for the other. (Process and Reality)
​
The whale in Moby Dick is an incarnation of this Creativity, and a reminder to Ahab and to us that the order of things includes a creative advance into novelty that is beyond God and beyond us.

Some will reject this idea. They will say that God is in complete control and in the grip of nothing outside "himself." They will be classical theists.

We in the open and relational (process) world offer an alternative view. We say that God, too, is subject to the freedom of the world and the creative advance into novelty.

But often our alternative is cast in overly humanistic, sentimental terms. We see God as primarily concerned with the well-being of individual human beings in community with one another. Moby Dick is an invitation to understand that the love of God is not always so personal and that it is not about human life alone. It is an eco-love, and we can experience it as ruthless in its call to accept the larger order of life.

History includes the "remorseless working of things." This remorseless working, which includes our own freedom is Fate. To be receptive to God is to accept what is uncontrollable, to accept Fate. Even God accepts it. Is it ruthless? Yes, it can feel that way. Does it include a love beyond the ruthlessness, a companion to the whole of life? Yes, we can experience it that way, too.

- Jay McDaniel, 12/3/2022




Chapter 42: The Whiteness of the Whale
​

'I have written a blasphemous book', said Melville when his novel was first published in 1851, 'and I feel as spotless as the lamb'. Deeply subversive, in almost every way imaginable, Moby-Dick is a virtual, alternative bible - and as such, ripe for reinterpretation in this new world of new media. Out of Dominion was born its bastard child - or perhaps its immaculate conception - the Moby-Dick Big Read: an online version of Melville's magisterial tome: each of its 135 chapters read out aloud, by a mixture of the celebrated and the unknown, to be broadcast online, one new chapter each day, in a sequence of 135 downloads, publicly and freely accessible.
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Call me Ishmael


Open and relational (process) theology encourages us to be open to the world. This openness is not just love; it is also curiosity, which is a form of love. It is a love of truths and of information. Of course, curiosity is not the whole of a life well-lived. A life well-lived includes gratitude, kindness, playfulness, imagination, compassion, and zest for life. It is not about curiosity alone. But curiosity is part of it, and in Ishmael's case it is a quest. Not a quest for revenge but a quest for understanding: understanding the whale and understanding the whole of life. There is an Ishmael within each of us. It is never completely satisfied. It always wants to know more. But the very quest to know is one way of being open to God, who is experienced as a lure toward truth, toward wisdom, toward understanding. Each of us can say, in our own way, Call me Ishmael.

And in receiving this calling we find ourselves a conduit for other people's points of view. We want their voices to be heard. Indeed, their voices are true to their lives, quite apart from the question of whether they are true to reality, whatever that is. They are existentially true, and we want their existential truth to be heard. We are everywhere at once, never staying in the same place, because there are so many voices and we want them to be heard.

This desire to be a conduit, a receptacle, for other voices is like what open and relational (process) theologians call the receptive side of God. It is that side of God which feels the feelings of each and all in an understanding way. Call God Ishmael, too.

- Jay McDaniel, 12/03/22


Ishmael

Everywhere at Once
Conduit for Other Voices
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​"Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their out-reaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs."

​
Moby Dick, Chapter 104
​
Ishmael turns out to be less a character than a conduit for other voices and perspectives. This is either a daring experiment in omniscient first-person narration, or a sign that Ishmael is utterly unreliable.

Other voices take over whole chapters, especially that of Ahab as he thumps the ship’s boards like a Lear or Richard III on the Elizabethan stage. As “one in a whole nation’s census […] formed for noble tragedies”, Ahab exerts a strong pull on the narrative, but Ishmael is eager to celebrate the “democratic dignity” of the Pequod’s multiethnic crew of “mongrel renegades and castaways and cannibals”.
For Ishmael, everything is connected and “there is no staying in any one place; for at one and the same time everything has to be done everywhere”.

Herman Melville. By Joseph O. Eaton and an unknown etcher - Library of Congress. Wikimedia CommonsThe forward progress of “what there may be of a narrative in this book” is constantly hampered by Ishmael’s need to consider his subject from all angles, addressing the viewpoints of different characters as well as the perspectives of different cultures and branches of learning, together with historical and mythic parallels, technical details, workplace practices and the philosophical questions these give rise to.
Even in the midst of the final chase that drives the novel to a close with extraordinary momentum, Ishmael cannot resist inserting a footnote to clarify his use of the term “pitchpoling”.

​The result is a radically discontinuous, multi-stranded text which insists on its own incompleteness as “but a draft of a draft”. In The Modern Epic (1996), the great literary scholar Franco Moretti contends that novels such as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and James Joyce’s Ulysses have become like:

"sacred texts that the modern West has subjected to a lengthy scrutiny, searching in them for its own secret."

But whereas the ancient epic presents the world as a unified and coherent totality, the modern world can only hope to express itself through fragmentation, dialogue, digression and collage.

​- Guide to the classics: Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville



​Listen to Moby Dick
readings of each chapter

"On the website Moby-Dick Big Read, each chapter is read by a different person. Actor Tilda Swinton reads the opening chapter. Poet Mary Oliver reads the epilogue. In between, you hear the voices of Royal Shakespeare Company actors. The novel with its scenes of sailors telling yarns and tall tales, of sermons, speeches, and soliloquies is inherently theatrical. It is also, in essence, a collection of stories told in hundreds of shift voices."

Is it You, God, who Does the Thinking?
​

“What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I.”

― Herman Melville, Moby Dick


A Scholarly Discussion
​

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Herman Melville's (1819-1891) epic novel, published in London in 1851, the story of Captain Ahab's pursuit of a great white sperm whale that had bitten off his leg. He risks his own life and that of his crew on the Pequod, single-mindedly seeking his revenge, his story narrated by Ishmael who was taking part in a whaling expedition for the first time.  With Bridget Bennett, Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Leeds; Katie McGettigan, Lecturer in American Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London; Graham Thompson, Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham.

Herman Mellville's Background: 1:09
Language of Moby Dick: 7:34
Outline of the Story: 8:38
The Doubloon: 21:06
Whiteness of the Whale: 22:35
The Labor of Whaling: 28
The Connection between the Whale and the Biblical Leviathon: 30:32
​The Great Antihero: 41:16

READING LIST:
​
  • Lawrence Buell, The Dream of the Great American Novel (Harvard University Press, 2016) George Cotkin, Dive Deeper: Journeys with Moby-Dick (Oxford University Press, 2012) Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work (Picador, 2006)
  • Philip Hoare, Leviathan, or the Whale (Fourth Estate, 2009)
  • C. L. R. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live in (first published 1953; Dartmouth College Press, 2001)
  • Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Verso, 2002)
  • Katie McGettigan, Herman Melville: Modernity and the Material Text (University of New Hampshire Press, 2017)
  • Jay Parini, The Passages of Herman Melville (Canongate Books, 2012)
  • Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography 2 Volumes (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002, 2005)
  • Eyal Peretz, Literature, Disaster and the Enigma of Power: A Reading of Moby-Dick (Stanford University Press, 2003)
  • Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea: The Incredible True Story that Inspired Moby-Dick (William Collins, 2015)
  • Nathaniel Philbrick, Why Read Moby-Dick? (Penguin Books, 2011)


​Songs and Stories from Moby Dick

​Laurie Anderson

'As the title says, what we have here is a collection of songs and stories, more reflections and variations on themes found in Moby Dick than any attempt to retell a tale already told. Often a character, incident, or description from the book will set Anderson off to ponder the implications of homely facts about whales or sailing, unexpectedly arriving at a poignant reflection on the human condition." - Peter Davis New York Magazine, Oct. 15, 1999
Open Horizons