I have a lot of thoughts about the Lee Shore, and I don't plan on getting them all out in this post. (And good point, Caitlin, about the gender dynamics in the chapter!). But I'll start here, with how we might think about it in terms of Ishmael as narrator. We've stuck pretty close to Ishmael so far, with the exception, I think, of when Ishmael tells us the story of Queequeg's youth. But by the end of this week's section he's going to fade away and we'll barely see him again until the end of the novel. (Eli, I hope I'm not giving anything away for you). So I think one (of many!) ways to think about the Lee Shore chapter is as a foreshadowing of of Ishmael's fate.
Bulkington is introduced in the third chapter as though he might become the hero of the novel: "This man interested me at once; and since the sea-gods had ordained that he should soon become my shipmate (though but a sleeping partner one, so far as this narrative is concerned) I will here venture upon a little description of him. He stood full six feet in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a coffer-dam. I have seldom seen such brawn in a man..." He sounds like a superhero! But then the Lee Shore is the very last time we see him.
So I see Bulkington's disappearance as a precursor to Ishmael's own self-abnegation in the face of the sea's chaos. And the Lee Shore seems to be saying that it's this very disappearance that is our truest or highest expression: "Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing -- straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!"
Now compare that to Ahab's reaction to the "howling infinite." But that's a whole other post...
Hmm, interesting. I've mostly thought about the Ishmael-as-narrator question in terms of what it does for the book's form--i.e., that it's formally interesting to have a narrator who virtually disappears from the story, and who in fact narrates events that he clearly could not have been present for. But I like the idea of thinking of it as a method (or is it a sign?) of self-abnegation. A whole new way of thinking about Ishmael!
ReplyDeleteI just read The Lee Shore, and now I will have to go back and read it again. I was planning to anyway, because I didn't completely understand its message.
ReplyDeleteI feel very literary, sitting in a Paris cafe blogging away. Hemingway would...oh who gives a crap about Hemingway.
Hemingway would be drinking copious amounts of absinthe...
ReplyDeleteI'll weigh in on The Lee Shore etc. soon.