98 Stowing Down & Clearing Up
CHAPTER 98
STOWING DOWN AND CLEARING UPCLEARING UP: In his “revised third” version of the Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick (2018) Hershel Parker introduced a new emendation, changing the American and British versions' “Clearing Up” in the Ch. 98 title to “Cleaning Up.” He argues, first, that “clearing up” is “redundant,” as it (presumably) reiterates “stowing down,” but, in fact, they involve two different operations: putting [stowing] barrels in the hold and “removing [clearing up] everything that is in the way, from the decks” (OED). Richard Henry Dana, Jr. uses the latter phrase in Two Years Before the Mast (1840) when he writes, “Not a letter was read until we had cleared up decks for the night.” Parker also argues that since various usages of the word “clean” appear in the chapter, Melville must have intended “Cleaning Up,” not "Clearing Up.” In support of this supposition, he speculates that Melville’s inscription of “Cleaning” in manuscript would have been misread either by a copyist or printer as “Clearing.” Given Melville’s handwriting, the speculation is conceivable, but until Melville’s manuscript is found, it is untenable and insufficient to warrant emendation. Moreover, apart from the nautical authenticity of “clearing up,” the various connotations of “clear”—meaning “to fill with light,” “to render transparent or translucent,” and “to enlighten” (OED)—comport with the sailors' emerging “fresh and all aglow” from their clearing of the deck. “Clearing up” also has the rhetorical advantage of encompassing the sailors’ new, higher consciousness of “clean tabernacles of the soul” implicit in Ishmael’s concluding references to Pythagoras’s metempsychosis. Given its principle of not mixing versions or emending on the basis of speculations on intentionality, MEL retains “Clearing Up” and notes the NCE revision of Melville’s chapter title here..
Already has it been related how the great leviathan is afar off descried from the mast-head; how he is chased over the watery moors, and slaughtered in the valleys of the deep; how he is then towed alongside and beheaded; and how (on the principle which entitled the headsman of old to the garments in which the beheaded was killed) his great padded surtoutsurtout: overcoat (French). becomes the property of his executioner; how, in due time, he is condemned to the pots, and, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego,REVISION NARRATIVE: and, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, // Refusing to bow down to the golden idol of the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, these three Hebrew provincial rulers were thrown into a furnace but were miraculously untouched by the fire (Daniel 3). Melville’s amusing reference makes light of a memorable biblical story that depicts Jewish faithfulness to their one, unrepresentable God. In the British edition, this presumably irreverent linking of the three to the commercial products of the sperm whaling industry was deleted and replaced with the word “how” to give "how his spermaceti, oil, and bone pass unscathed through the fire." To compare American and British pages, click the thumbnails in the right margin. his spermaceti, oil, and bone pass unscathed through the fire;—but now it remains to conclude the last chapter of this part of the description by rehearsing—singing, if I mayby rehearsing—singing, if I may: Ishmael’s shift from “rehearsing” to “singing” underscores the orality of his narration. Early religious works including the Bible and Upanishads, and epics, from the Greek Iliad and Odyssey and the Roman Aeneid to the British Paradise Lost, all famously assert that they “sing” the stories they tell. Like Homer, Virgil, and Milton, Ishmael, too, is the author of an epic. In 1855, Walt Whitman would make the same claim for “Song of Myself.”—the romantic proceeding of decanting off his oil into the casks and striking them downstriking them down: lowering them. into the hold, where once again leviathan returns to his native profundities, sliding along beneath the surface as before; but, alas! never more to rise and blow.
While still warm, the oil, like hot punch, is received into the six-barrel casks; and while, perhaps, the ship is pitching and rolling this way and that in the midnight sea, the enormous casks are slewed round and headed over, end for end, and sometimes perilously scoot across the slippery deck, like so many land slides, till at last man-handled and stayed in their course; and all round the hoops, rap, rap, go as many hammers as can play upon them, for now, ex officio, every sailor is a cooper.
At length, when the last pint is casked, and all is cool, then the great hatchways are unsealed, the bowels of the ship are thrown open, and down go the casks to their final rest in the sea. This done, the hatches are replaced, and hermetically closed, like a closet walled up.
In the sperm fishery, this is perhaps one of the most remarkable incidents in all the business of whaling. One day the planks stream with freshets of blood and oil; on the sacred quarter-deck enormous masses of the whale’s head are profanely piled; great rusty casks lie about, as in a brewery yard; the smoke from the try-works has besooted all the bulwarks; the mariners go about suffused with unctuousness; the entire ship seems great leviathan himself; while on all hands the din is deafening.
But a day or two after, you look about you, and prick your ears in this self-same ship; and were it not for the tell-tale boats and try-works, you would all but swear you trod some silent merchant vessel, with a most scrupulously neat commander. The unmanufactured sperm oil possesses a singularly cleansing virtue. This is the reason why the decks never look so white as just after what they call an affair of oil. Besides, from the ashes of the burned scraps of the whale, a potent leyley: lye. is readily made; and whenever any adhesiveness from the back of the whale remains clinging to the side, that ley quickly exterminates it. Hands go diligently along the bulwarks, and with buckets of water and rags restore them to their full tidiness. The soot is brushed from the lower rigging. All the numerous implements which have been in use are likewise faithfully cleansed and put away. The great hatch is scrubbed and placed upon the try-works, completely hiding the pots; every cask is out of sight; all tackles are coiled in unseen nooks; and when by the combined and simultaneous industry of almost the entire ship’s company, the whole of this conscientious duty is at last concluded, then the crew themselves proceed to their own ablutions; shift themselves from top to toe; and finally issue to the immaculate deck, fresh and all aglow, as bridegrooms new-leaped from out the daintiest HollandREVISION NARRATIVE:
Bridegrooms Aglow //
“The daintiest Holland” is fine, imported bed sheets, and the arresting comparison of the freshly scrubbed, formerly begrimed crew to “bridegrooms” leaping "all aglow” from their bridal beds, is as unexpected as it is amusing. All the more intriguing is the linking of sexuality to cleanliness: the paragraph opens with the observation that “sperm oil” spilled on the decks has a “singularly cleansing virtue,” which in turn leads to the censored observation that the sexualized bridegroom crew is as fresh and glowing as the deck is “immaculate.” (Melville is also echoing a perfumed and dandified "lord," who visits the battlefield, "Fresh as a bridegroom." See Henry IV, Part 1, Act 1, sc. 3; see also note on "is" in the "King Henry" Extract.) As with other references to variant masculinities regarding Queequeg, Ishmael, whalemen squeezing sperm, and bull whales (in previous chapters), Melville’s sexualizing here is modulated in a subsequent scene of domesticity, with young, wedded men seeking parlors and requesting napkins. Nevertheless, Ishmael’s bridegroom comparison was expurgated in the British edition. To compare American and British pages, click the thumbnails in the right margin..
Now, with elated step, they pace the planks in twos and threes, and humorously discourse of parlors, sofas, carpets, and fine cambrics; propose to mat the deck; think of having hang-ings to the top; object not to taking tea by moonlight on the piazza of the forecastle. To hint to such musked mariners of oil, and bone, and blubber, were little short of audacity. They know not the thing you distantly allude to. Away, and bring us napkins!
But mark: aloft there, at the three mast heads, stand three men intent on spying out more whales, which, if caught, infallibly will again soil the old oaken furniture, and drop at least one small grease-spot somewhere. Yes; and many is the time, when, after the severest uninterrupted labors, which know no night; continuing straight through for ninety-six hours; when from the boat, where they have swelled their wrists with all day rowing on the Line,—they only step to the deck to carry vast chains, and heave the heavy windlass, and cut and slash, yea, and in their very sweatings to be smoked and burned anew by the combined fires of the equatorial sun and the equatorial try-works; when, on the heel of all this, they have finally bestirred themselves to cleanse the ship, and make a spotless dairy room of it; 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 lifeYet this is life: In recounting the stowing down and clearing up process that completes the tedious trying-out of blubber and casking of oil, Ishmael concludes that they must “go through the whole weary thing again” as soon as another whale is sighted. “This is man-killing!” Ishmael observes, “Yet this is life.” Though “this” refers to the weary repetitiousness of labor, the line echoes Jesus’s prayer to God just before his betrayal and capture: “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3). Here, Jesus invokes the promise of resurrection, salvation, and “eternal life,” and Ishmael’s subsequent, reverent language—“tabernacles of the soul,” “the ghost is spouted up,” “some other world”—partakes of this reverence despite Melville’s irreverent misappropriation of the biblical text. Equally blasphemous are the comic sexual implications of the paragraph. Melville composed Moby-Dick during his and his wife’s vigorous reproductive years, and the whalemen’s “extract[ing] sperm” and “cleans[ing themselves] from its defilements” suggests the routine of intercourse.. For hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world’s vast bulk its small but valuable sperm; and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and 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! PythagorasOh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras: The sixth-century BCE Greek philosopher Pythagoras taught that the spirits of the dead pass into new bodies. Having ended the toils of one life, a soul or “ghost” moves on to the labors of another. This transmigration of the soul (metempsychosis), taken humorously, accounts for the story of Ishmael’s teaching a basic skill to the wise Pythagoras, reborn as an ignorant young sailor., 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!