Crawford follow-up

As Hugh Crawford put it in a follow-up email:

“yep exactly my point– the great human drama is crowded out by a whole bunch of non-human actors– magnetism, ocean carnot cycles, compositions of steel, hemp, etc etc. it is the novel of objects par excellence. I dont much care about Ahab’s or Melville’s quarrel with god etc, as I am with the disposition of the whale boat.”

Hear, hear.

On a slightly different topic, there are a number of stylistic marvels in the novel. One of the best is the horror of the crew in the face of the five creepy turbaned Filipinos Parsees who suddenly appear on the ship from nowhere; Captain Ahab had kept them as stowaways until that time, not letting anyone else know of their presence.

The viscerally negative reaction of the crew toward these newcomers might just seem like standard period racism, if not that the Pequod was already inhabited by the most diverse trio of harpooners you could ask for: a Native American, a towering African, and Queequeg the famous South Pacific cannibal. Because of the high position of these three, the cultural tolerance of the Pequod crew is already established (other than one racist Spaniard aboard) and the sudden appearance of the Filipinos is able to horrify in a somehow non-racial manner. It’s tough to pull that one off, but I think Melville does.