Gathering Scholarship around a Passage (Moby Dick)

Since a lot of my reading of Moby Dick has been reading very quickly. (I'm sure a lot of people can empathize with that.) I thought it might be useful, then, to slow it down and look at a specific passage and what other people have had to say about it.

Let's take a section from chapter 98, where Ishmael is describing the bloodying and then cleaning of the whale ship:

many is the time the poor fellows, just buttoning the necks of their clean frocks, are startled by the cry of 'There she blows!' and away they fly to fight another whale, and go through the whole weary thing again. Oh! my friends, but this is man-killing! Yet this is life. For hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world's vast bulk its small but valuable sperm; and then, learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when--There she blows!--the ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life's old routine again.

 Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two thousand years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage--and, foolish as I am, taught thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope.

The definition of metempsychosis might be useful to know here (from Merriam Webster): the passing of the soul at death into another body either human or animal.



So, Ishmael is talking about Pythagoras being reincarnated and taught (by Ishmael) how to splice a rope. Rachela Permenter has some interesting things to say about this, most notably that

In this most recent incarnation, so Ishmael’s joke goes, he taught Pythagoras how to be a seaman and philosophically how to make the severed unified with the central Pythagorean concept that the world as perfect whole is also the many. When woven as a rope, fragments at the same time exist separately and are lost to the whole. [emphasis mine]

The seemingly random reference to Pythagoras is, then, linked to the scene Ishmael described before. Life consists of trying to extract valuable sperm from the world and clean everything up, only to have everything start again. There is a lot of duality in this novel--anticolonialism and colonialism, for example--but it all coexists because the perfect whole is also the many.

There is, of course, a lot more to do with this passage, but this post is already getting rather long. Props if you've read this far. And if you have, comment: what do you think about this part of Moby Dick? Think of it as a group close reading, if you will.