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Melville and cultural persusasion GOAL of this chapter is to make explicit the difference between Moby Dick as a 19th century soical text and MD as a modern classic The quarterdeck as a scene of cultural persuasion 256 quarterdeck scene: Starbuck is not persuaded by Ahab and accuses him of blasphemy, grounds of his dissent are religion and American free enterprise 257 Ahab's reaction: he takes rhetorical control of the situation he makes Starbuck appear shallow and turnis him into an implicit blasphemer by treating the whale as nothing but a dumb brute, by letting his course of action be determined by the profit motive. Ahab gives him a deeper motive. Þ Ahab does not respond directly to Starbuck's argument but places his argument onto another motivational scene. On this scene, Starbuck can no longer compete with Ahab. He turns the public argument (Starbuck-Ahab) into a private argument (Starbuck-Moby Dick), which invalidates the public argument. Þ Ahab can present himself as the victim of a cosmic design, Starbuck no longer has a motive of his own a distinction between Starbuck as a rational Christian man is no longer possible: Starbuck feels the same need for revenge as Ahab does. the second speech completes this seperation, Ahab enacts the rage at the universe Starbuck felt when confronted with Ahab's speech. Þ Ahab is no longer a target for Starbuck's dissent. Ahab has the monopoly over his scene of persuasion and places the crew in a second realm, which is ideologically determined by the first The Jacksonian persuasion Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian persuasion political basis for Ahab's persuasive power: most Americans needed a higher purpose than a purely economic one to interpret their motives Þ such notions as manifest destiny most Americans wanted to preserve the virtues of a simple agrarian republic and set themselves off against the aristocrats. The population, however, was not so neatly divided: many Americans were speculators, and their activities were often not distinguished from those they opposed. Still, they preserved this model of persuasion. i.e. post-Jacksonian scene of persuasion they themselves couldn't be the common people but orators could sustain the persuasion price: worship Cold war commentary on a survivor text the canonical reading of MD put it on a modern scene of cultural persuasion: the Cold War like Ahab-Starbuck, discussion is not possible in the Cold War scenario, it is very persuasive pervasive opposition the Cold War scenario silences dissent just as Ahab The Cold War and consensus formation the ideological work in two different contexts: 1.
Approximate Word count = 1542
Approximate Pages = 6.2
(250 words per page double spaced)
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