Melville: Moby Dick Kapitel 97 - 100

 CHAPTER 97 The Lamp

 Had you descended from the Pequod's try-works to the Pequod's forecastle, where the off duty watch were sleeping, for one single moment you would have almost thought you were standing in some illuminated shrine of canonized kings and counsellors. There they lay in their triangular oaken vaults, each mariner a chiselled muteness; a score of lamps flashing upon his hooded eyes. [...]

CHAPTER 98 Stowing Down and Clearing Up 

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 surtout becomes the property of his executioner; how, in due time, he is condemned to the pots, and, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, 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 may—the romantic proceeding of decanting off his oil into the casks and striking them down into the hold, where once again leviathan returns to his native profundities, sliding along beneath the surface :is before; but, alas! never more to rise and blow. [...]

Nicolas Pethes Kapitel 98: Stowing Down and Clearing Up. 

Die Arbeit am Mythos der Jagd als eine Theorie des Erzählens

Auch das 98. Kapitel enthält, man kann es immer wieder sagen, den ganzen Roman  Moby-Dick in sich – in nuce, einer Nussschale, wenngleich einer stattlichen, der Pequod nämlich, die Ausgang und Ziel der Jagd auf den Wal ist: vom Erspähen des Opfers im Mastkorb über das Herablassen der Beiboote zur Aufhängung der Kadaver an den Längsseiten des Schiffs, wo ihnen Fleisch, Öl und Haut entnommen und unter den Schächernverteilt werden wie Christi Kleider nach der Kreuzigung. All das haben die vorangegangenen Kapitel Schritt für Schritt und detailliert erzählt, und genau so hebt das 98 . auch an: »Already has it been related ...«, als Erzählen vom bereits Erzählthaben also, in einer Zusammenfassung dessen, was bisher geschah, "previously on Moby-Dick: 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 inthe valleys of the deep; [...]

 Die anaphorische Reihung des »how« entfaltet und rafft eine Topik der Jagd – aber auch diejenige des Erzählens in Form listenförmiger Chroniken. Und als wäre die Gegenwart dieses Erzählens eine Gelenkstelle zwischen Vergangenheit und Zukunft, schlägt der Rück- in einen Vorblick um, in ein Erzählen vom Erzählenwerden, einen trailer des endgültigen Abschlusses der Geschichte: Nun also geht es an das Verstauen der Rohstoffe. Das Öl wird in Fässerabgefüllt und unter Deck gelagert, so dass der Wal, in seine Einzelteile zerlegt, wieder unter Wasser schwimmen wird und der Kreis der Jagd – und mit ihm der Roman – sich innerhalb dieser wenigen Zeilen schließt. 

Das Verstauen, das die erste Hälfte der Kapitelüberschrift ankündigt,ist also mehr als nur eine Station der Jagderzählung unter vielen. Es ist die Form dieser Erzählung selbst – das Verstauen all desjenigen, was bisher geschah und noch geschehen wird, in den ersten Absatz eines Kapitels, in dem das Erzählte nun also ebenso eingespeichert ist, wie das Walöl im Bauch der Pequod. Das 98. Kapitel kann mithin einmal mehr als eines gelesen werden, in dem der Roman Moby-Dick von sich selbst handelt [...] – in dem Sinne, in dem etwa Walter Benjamin Erzählen als »handwerkliche Form der Mitteilung« beschrieben hat, deren »Aufgabe [...] darin besteht, den Rohstoff der Erfahrungen – fremder und eigener – auf eine solide, nützliche und einmalige Art zu bearbeiten«, um ihn dadurch tradierbar zu machen. Das 98. Kapitel handelt von eben dieser Dialektik von Bearbeitung und Überlieferung: So, wie es eingangs auf die dem babylonischen Feuerofen unversehrt entstiegenen Kinder aus dem Buch Daniel verweist, werde nauch die Bestandteile des Wals wie das Geschehen seiner Jagd ›aufgehoben‹ – und zwar durchaus im Hegelschen Dreifachsinn von beseitigt, erhöht und bewahrt [...]" (mehr dazu hier)

Dieser Aufsatz von Nicolas Pethes liefert eine Theorie des Erzählens im Benjaminschen Sinne und weist im Einzelnen am Text nach, dass Melville sie schon hier im Text des 98. Kapitels am Beispiel seines Romans geliefert hat. Für die, die mit der Benjaminschen Erzähltheorie nicht vertraut sind, ist er also eine notwendige Erklärung dessen, was Melville in diesem Kapitel darstellen will.

CHAPTER 99 The Doubloon 

Ere now it has been related how Ahab was wont to pace his quarter-deck, taking regular turns at either limit, the binnacle and mainmast; but in the multiplicity of other things requiring narration it has not been added how that sometimes in these walks, when most plunged in his mood, he was wont to pause in turn at each spot, and stand there strangely eyeing the particular object before him. When he halted before the binnacle, with his glance fastened on the pointed needle in the compass, that glance shot like a javelin with the pointed intensity of his purpose; and when resuming his walk he again paused before the mainmast, then, as the same riveted glance fastened upon the riveted gold coin there, he still wore the same aspect of nailed firmness, only dashed with a certain wild longing, if not hopefulness. [...]

"There's something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all other grand and lofty things; look here,— three peaks as proud as Lucifer. The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all are Ahab; and this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe, which, like a magician's glass, to each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self. Great pains, small gains for those who ask the world to solve them; it cannot solve itself. Methinks now this coined sun wears a ruddy face; but see! aye, he enters the sign of storms, the equinox! and but six months before he wheeled out of a former equinox at Aries! From storm to storm! So be it, then. Born in throes, 't is fit that man should live in pains and die in pangs! So be it, then! Here's stout stuff for woe to work on. So be it, then." "No fairy fingers can have pressed the gold, but devil's claws must have left their mouldings there since yesterday," murmured Starbuck to himself, leaning against the bulwarks. "The old man seems to read Belshazzar's awful writing. I have never marked the coin inspectingly. He goes below; let me read. A dark valley between three mighty, heaven-abiding peaks, that almost seem the Trinity, in some faint earthly symbol. So in this vale of Death, God girds us round; and over all our gloom, the sun of Righteousness still shines a beacon and a hope. If we bend down our eyes, the dark vale shows her mouldy soil; but if we lift them, the bright sun meets our glance half way, to cheer. Yet, oh, the great sun is no fixture; and if, at midnight, we would fain snatch some sweet solace from him, we gaze for him in vain! This coin speaks wisely, mildly, truly, but still sadly to me. I will quit it, lest Truth shake me falsely."

CHAPTER 100 Leg and Arm; The Pequod of Nantucket, Meets the Samuel Enderby, of London

“Ship, ahoy!  Hast seen the White Whale?”

So cried Ahab, once more hailing a ship showing English colors, bearing down under the stern.  Trumpet to mouth, the old man was standing in his hoisted quarter-deck, his ivory leg plainly revealed to the stranger captain, who was carelessly reclining in his own boat’s bow.  He was a darkly-tanned, burly, goodnatured, fine-looking man, of sixty or thereabouts, dressed in a spacious roundabout, that hung round him in festoons of blue pilot-cloth; and one empty arm of this jacket streamed behind him like the broidered arm of a huzzar’s surcoat.

“Hast seen the White Whale!”

“See you this?” and withdrawing it from the folds that had hidden it, he held up a white arm of sperm whale bone, terminating in a wooden head like a mallet.

“Man my boat!” cried Ahab, impetuously, and tossing about the oars near him—“Stand by to lower!”

In less than a minute, without quitting his little craft, he and his crew were dropped to the water, and were soon alongside of the stranger.  But here a curious difficulty presented itself.  In the excitement of the moment, Ahab had forgotten that since the loss of his leg he had never once stepped on board of any vessel at sea but his own, and then it was always by an ingenious and very handy mechanical contrivance peculiar to the Pequod, and a thing not to be rigged and shipped in any other vessel at a moment’s warning.  Now, it is no very easy matter for anybody— except those who are almost hourly used to it, like whalemen— to clamber up a ship’s side from a boat on the open sea; for the great swells now lift the boat high up towards the bulwarks, and then instantaneously drop it half way down to the kelson.  So, deprived of one leg, and the strange ship of course being altogether unsupplied with the kindly invention, Ahab now found himself abjectly reduced to a clumsy landsman again; hopelessly eyeing the uncertain changeful height he could hardly hope to attain.

It has before been hinted, perhaps, that every little untoward circumstance that befell him, and which indirectly sprang from his luckless mishap, almost invariably irritated or exasperated Ahab.  And in the present instance, all this was heightened by the sight of the two officers of the strange ship, leaning over the side, by the perpendicular ladder of nailed cleets there, and swinging towards him a pair of tastefully-ornamented man-ropes; for at first they did not seem to bethink them that a one-legged man must be too much of a cripple to use their sea bannisters.  But this awkwardness only lasted a minute, because the strange captain, observing at a glance how affairs stood, cried out, “I see, I see!— avast heaving there!  Jump, boys, and swing over the cutting-tackle.”

As good luck would have it, they had had a whale alongside a day or two previous, and the great tackles were still aloft, and the massive curved blubber-hook, now clean and dry, was still attached to the end.  This was quickly lowered to Ahab, who at once comprehending it all, slid his solitary thigh into the curve of the hook (it was like sitting in the fluke of an anchor, or the crotch of an apple tree), and then giving the word, held himself fast, and at the same time also helped to hoist his own weight, by pulling hand-over-hand upon one of the running parts of the tackle.  Soon he was carefully swung inside the high bulwarks, and gently landed upon the capstan head.  With his ivory arm frankly thrust forth in welcome, the other captain advanced, and Ahab, putting out his ivory leg, and crossing the ivory arm (like two sword-fish blades) cried out in his walrus way, “Aye, aye, hearty! let us shake bones together!—an arm and a leg!— an arm that never can shrink, d’ye see; and a leg that never can run.  Where did’st thou see the White Whale?—how long ago?”

“The White Whale,” said the Englishman, pointing his ivory arm towards the East, and taking a rueful sight along it, as if it had been a telescope; There I saw him, on the Line, last season.”

“And he took that arm off, did he?” asked Ahab, now sliding down from the capstan, and resting on the Englishman’s shoulder, as he did so.

“Aye, he was the cause of it, at least; and that leg, too?”

“Spin me the yarn,” said Ahab; “how was it?”

“It was the first time in my life that I ever cruised on the Line,” began the Englishman.  “I was ignorant of the White Whale at that time.  Well, one day we lowered for a pod of four or five whales, and my boat fastened to one of them; a regular circus horse he was, too, that went milling and milling round so that my boat’s crew could only trim dish, by sitting all their sterns on the outer gunwale.  Presently up breaches from the bottom of the sea a bouncing great whale, with a milky-white head and hump, all crows’ feet and wrinkles.”

“It was he, it was he!” cried Ahab, suddenly letting out his suspended breath.

“And harpoons sticking in near his starboard fin.  Aye, aye— they were mine—my irons,” cried Ahab, exultingly—“but on!”

“Give me a chance, then,” said the Englishman, good-humoredly.  “Well, this old great-grandfather, with the white head and hump, runs all afoam into the pod, and goes to snapping furiously at my fast-line!”

“Aye, I see!—wanted to part it; free the fast-fish—an old trick— I know him.”

“How it was exactly,” continued the one-armed commander, “I do not know; but in biting the line, it got foul of his teeth, caught there somehow; but we didn’t know it then; so that when we afterwards pulled on the line, bounce we came plump on to his hump! instead of the other whale’s; that went off to windward, all fluking.  Seeing how matters stood, and what a noble great whale it was— the noblest and biggest I ever saw, sir, in my life—I resolved to capture him, spite of the boiling rage he seemed to be in.  And thinking the hap-hazard line would get loose, or the tooth it was tangled to might draw (for I have a devil of a boat’s crew for a pull on a whale-line); seeing all this, I say, I jumped into my first mate’s boat—Mr. Mounttop’s here (by the way, Captain—Mounttop; Mounttop—the captain);— as I was saying, I jumped into Mounttop’s boat, which, d’ye see, was gunwale and gunwale with mine, then; and snatching the first harpoon, let this old great-grandfather have it.  But, Lord, look you, sir—hearts and souls alive, man—the next instant, in a jiff, I was blind as a bat—both eyes out—all befogged and bedeadened with black foam—the whale’s tail looming straight up out of it, perpendicular in the air, like a marble steeple.  No use sterning all, then; but as I was groping at midday, with a blinding sun, all crown-jewels; as I was groping, I say, after the second iron, to toss it overboard—down comes the tail like a Lima tower, cutting my boat in two, leaving each half in splinters; and, flukes first, the white hump backed through the wreck, as though it was all chips.  We all struck out.  To escape his terrible flailings, I seized hold of my harpoon-pole sticking in him, and for a moment clung to that like a sucking fish.  But a combing sea dashed me off, and at the same instant, the fish, taking one good dart forwards, went down like a flash; and the barb of that cursed second iron towing along near me caught me here” (clapping his hand just below his shoulder); “yes, caught me just here, I say, and bore me down to Hell’s flames, I was thinking; when, when, all of a sudden, thank the good God, the barb ript its way along the flesh— clear along the whole length of my arm—came out nigh my wrist, and up I floated;—and that gentleman there will tell you the rest (by the way, captain—Dr. Bunger, ship’s surgeon:  Bunger, my lad,— the captain).  Now, Bunger boy, spin your part of the yarn.”

The professional gentleman thus familiarly pointed out, had been all the time standing near them, with nothing specific visible, to denote his gentlemanly rank on board.  His face was an exceedingly round but sober one; he was dressed in a faded blue woollen frock or shirt, and patched trowsers; and had thus far been dividing his attention between a marlingspike he held in one hand, and a pill-box held in the other, occasionally casting a critical glance at the ivory limbs of the two crippled captains.  But, at his superior’s introduction of him to Ahab, he politely bowed, and straightway went on to do his captain’s bidding.

“It was a shocking bad wound,” began the whale-surgeon; “and, taking my advice, Captain Boomer here, stood our old Sammy-”

“Samuel Enderby is the name of my ship,” interrupted the one-armed captain, addressing Ahab; “go on, boy.”

“Stood our old Sammy off to the northward, to get out of the blazing hot weather there on the Line.  But it was no use—I did all I could; sat up with him nights; was very severe with him in the matter of diet-”

“Oh, very severe!” chimed in the patient himself; then suddenly altering his voice, “Drinking hot rum toddies with me every night, till he couldn’t see to put on the bandages; and sending me to bed, half seas over, about three o’clock in the morning.  Oh, ye stars! he sat up with me indeed, and was very severe in my diet.  Oh! a great watcher, and very dietetically severe, is Dr. Bunger. (Bunger, you dog, laugh out! why don’t ye?  You know you’re a precious jolly rascal.) But, heave ahead, boy, I’d rather be killed by you than kept alive by any other man.”

“My captain, you must have ere this perceived, respected sir”— said the imperturbable godly-looking Bunger, slightly bowing to Ahab—“is apt to be facetious at times; he spins us many clever things of that sort.  But I may as well say—en passant, as the French remark—that I myself—that is to say, Jack Bunger, late of the reverend clergy—am a strict total abstinence man; I never drink-”

“Water!” cried the captain; “he never drinks it; it’s a sort of fits to him; fresh water throws him into the hydrophobia; but go on—go on with the arm story.”

“Yes, I may as well,” said the surgeon, coolly.  “I was about observing, sir, before Captain Boomer’s facetious interruption, that spite of my best and severest endeavors, the wound kept getting worse and worse; the truth was, sir, it was as ugly gaping wound as surgeon ever saw; more than two feet and several inches long.  I measured it with the lead line.  In short, it grew black; I knew what was threatened, and off it came.  But I had no hand in shipping that ivory arm there; that thing is against all rule”— pointing at it with the marlingspike—“that is the captain’s work, not mine; he ordered the carpenter to make it; he had that club-hammer there put to the end, to knock some one’s brains out with, I suppose, as he tried mine once.  He flies into diabolical passions sometimes.  Do ye see this dent, sir”—removing his hat, and brushing aside his hair, and exposing a bowl-like cavity in his skull, but which bore not the slightest scarry trace, or any token of ever having been a wound— “Well, the captain there will tell you how that came there; he knows.”

“No, I don’t,” said the captain, “but his mother did; he was born with it.  Oh, you solemn rogue, you—you Bunger! was there ever such another Bunger in the watery world?  Bunger, when you die, you ought to die in pickle, you dog; you should be preserved to future ages, you rascal.”

“What became of the White Whale?” now cried Ahab, who thus far had been impatiently listening to this byeplay between the two Englishmen.

“Oh!” cried the one-armed captain, Oh, yes!  Well; after he sounded, we didn’t see him again for some time; in fact, as I before hinted, I didn’t then know what whale it was that had served me such a trick, till some time afterwards, when coming back to the Line, we heard about Moby Dick—as some call him—and then I knew it was he.”

“Did’st thou cross his wake again?”

“Twice.”

“But could not fasten?”

“Didn’t want to try to; ain’t one limb enough?  What should I do without this other arm?  And I’m thinking Moby Dick doesn’t bite so much as he swallows.”

“Well, then,” interrupted Bunger, “give him your left arm for bait to get the right.  Do you know, gentlemen”—very gravely and mathematically bowing to each Captain in succession—“Do you know, gentlemen, that the digestive organs of the whale are so inscrutably constructed by Divine Providence, that it is quite impossible for him to completely digest even a man’s arm?  And he knows it too.  So that what you take for the White Whale’s malice is only his awkwardness.  For he never means to swallow a single limb; he only thinks to terrify by feints.  But sometimes he is like the old juggling fellow, formerly a patient of mine in Ceylon, that making believe swallow jack-knives, once upon a time let one drop into him in good earnest, and there it stayed for a twelvemonth or more; when I gave him an emetic, and he heaved it up in small tacks, d’ye see?  No possible way for him to digest that jack-knife, and fully incorporate it into his general bodily system.  Yes, Captain Boomer, if you are quick enough about it, and have a mind to pawn one arm for the sake of the privilege of giving decent burial to the other, why, in that case the arm is yours; only let the whale have another chance at you shortly, that’s all.”

“No, thank you, Bunger,” said the English Captain, “he’s welcome to the arm he has, since I can’t help it, and didn’t know him then; but not to another one.  No more White Whales for me; I’ve lowered for him once, and that has satisfied me.  There would be great glory in killing him, I know that; and there is a ship-load of precious sperm in him, but, hark ye, he’s best let alone; don’t you think so, Captain?”—glancing at the ivory leg.

“He is.  But he will still be hunted, for all that.  What is best let alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures.  He’s all a magnet!  How long since thou saw’st him last?  Which way heading?”

“Bless my soul, and curse the foul fiend’s,” cried Bunger, stoopingly walking round Ahab, and like a dog, strangely snuffing; “this man’s blood—bring the thermometer!—it’s at the boiling point!— his pulse makes these planks beat!—sir!”—taking a lancet from his pocket, and drawing near to Ahab’s arm.

“Avast!” roared Ahab, dashing him against the bulwarks—“Man the boat!  Which way heading?”

“Good God!” cried the English Captain, to whom the question was put.  “What’s the matter?  He was heading east, I think.—Is your Captain crazy?” whispering Fedallah.

But Fedallah, putting a finger on his lip, slid over the bulwarks to take the boat’s steering oar, and Ahab, swinging the cutting-tackle towards him commanded the ship’s sailors to stand by to lower.

In a moment he was standing in the boat’s stern, and the Manilla men were springing to their oars.  In vain the English Captain hailed him.  With back to the stranger ship, and face set like a flint to his own, Ahab stood upright till alongside of the Pequod. (Melville: Moby Dick Chapter 97 - 100)

Für die, endlich wissen wollen, wie der Roman ausgeht, folgt im folgenden Blogpost auf Deutsch handlungsstark (und gekürzt) der Schluss des Romans übersetzt und bearbeitet von Wilhelm Strüver beginnend mit der deutschen Fassung des 100. Kapitels, die in der bearbeiteten Fassung als Kapitel 44 zählt.

Melville: Moby Dick Kapitel 96: The Try-Works (Tranöfen)

 Besides her hoisted boats, an American whaler is outwardly distinguished by her try-works.  She presents the curious anomaly of the most solid masonry joining with oak and hemp in constituting the completed ship.  It is as if from the open field a brick-kiln were transported to her planks.

Matthias Bickenbach Kapitel 96: The Try-Works:

"[...] Der amerikanische Walfänger ist daher nicht nur ein Schiff, sondern auch eine Fabrik. Diese doppelte Funktion führt in das Kapitel die Struktur der Heterotopie ein, die Michel Foucault als Räume beschrieben hat, die »andere Räume« implizieren und, wichtiger noch, hervorbringen. Heterotopien sind einerseits Orte, die mehrfach besetzt sind und heterogene Funktionen vereinen, auch paradoxe Umbesetzungen der ›eigentlichen‹ Funktion. Zugleich sind sie andererseits Schnittstellen zwischen realen und imaginären Räumen. Genau diese Überschreitung erzählt das Kapitel 96. Bereits der zweite Satz stellt klar, dass der amerikanische Walfänger durch seine Tranöfen einen »kuriosen Ausnahmefall« (653) darstellt. Er ist das Paradox eines Holzschiffes mit Mauern – und erst diese machen ihn »zum vollständigen Schiff« (ebd.). 

The try-works are planted between the foremast and mainmast, the most roomy part of the deck.  The timbers beneath are of a peculiar strength, fitted to sustain the weight of an almost solid mass of brick and mortar, some ten feet by eight square, and five in height.  The foundation does not penetrate the deck, but the masonry is firmly secured to the surface by ponderous knees of iron bracing it on all sides, and screwing it down to the timbers.  On the flanks it is cased with wood, and at top completely covered by a large, sloping, battened hatchway.  Removing this hatch we expose the great try-pots, two in number, and each of several barrels’ capacity.  When not in use, they are kept remarkably clean.  Sometimes they are polished with soapstone and sand, till they shine within like silver punchbowls.  During the night-watches some cynical old sailors will crawl into them and coil themselves away there for a nap.  While employed in polishing them—one man in each pot, side by side— many confidential communications are carried on, over the iron lips.  It is a place also for profound mathematical meditation.  It was in the left hand try-pot of the Pequod, with the soapstone diligently circling round me, that I was first indirectly struck by the remarkable fact, that in geometry all bodies gliding along the cycloid, my soapstone for example, will descend from any point in precisely the same time.[...]

(Melville: Moby Dick, Kapitel 96)

Melville: Moby Dick Kapitel 95: The Cassock

 Had you stepped on board the Pequod at a certain juncture of this post-mortemizing of the whale; and had you strolled forward nigh the windlass, pretty sure am I that you would have scanned with no small curiosity a very strange, enigmatical object, which you would have seen there, lying along lengthwise in the lee scuppers.  Not the wondrous cistern in the whale’s huge head; not the prodigy of his unhinged lower jaw; not the miracle of his symmetrical tail; none of these would so surprise you, as half a glimpse of that unaccountable cone,—longer than a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and jet-black as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg.  And an idol, indeed, it is; or rather, in old times, its likeness was.  Such an idol as that found in the secret groves of Queen Maachah in Judea; and for worshipping which, King Asa, her son, did depose her, and destroyed the idol, and burnt it for an abomination at the brook Kedron, as darkly set forth in the 15th chapter of the First Book of Kings.

Look at the sailor, called the mincer, who now comes along, and assisted by two allies, heavily backs the grandissimus, as the mariners call it, and with bowed shoulders, staggers off with it as if he were a grenadier carrying a dead comrade from the field.  Extending it upon the forecastle deck, he now proceeds cylindrically to remove its dark pelt, as an African hunter the pelt of a boa.  This done he turns the pelt inside out, like a pantaloon leg; gives it a good stretching, so as almost to double its diameter; and at last hangs it, well spread, in the rigging, to dry.  Ere long, it is taken down; when removing some three feet of it, towards the pointed extremity, and then cutting two slits for arm-holes at the other end, he lengthwise slips himself bodily into it.  The mincer now stands before you invested in the full canonicals of his calling.  Immemorial to all his order, this investiture alone will adequately protect him, while employed in the peculiar functions of his office. [...]

Zur Erläuterung:

Matthias Bickenbach: Kapitel 95: The Cassock Den Schwanz vor Augen 

Das Kapitel 95 sollte man in Anspielung auf die »Bibelblätter«, die in ihm aufgerufen werden, ein »Extrablatt« nennen. Es ist eine einzige dünne Seite im Originaltext, wie eingelegt in den Roman (651/652). Vor allem aber entspricht es nur scheinbar der Logik der Zusammenhänge im Roman. Offenbar kündigt der Titel mit dem »Überzieher« eines jener Kapitel an, die typische Dinge und Besonderheiten an Bord eines Wahlfängers präsentieren und erklären. Der Überzieher und seine Funktion ist jedoch eine freie und willkürliche Erfindung, so merkwürdig und anstößig, dass dieses Kapitel sich einer mehrfachen Lesart empfiehlt. 

Es präsentiert zudem einen besonderen Teil des Wals, der wiederum gerade nicht in den cetologischen Kapiteln behandelt wird, so dass es diesen etwas hinzufügt, ohne dass es zur Cetologie des Romans zählt. Doch gerade jener Teil oder eben das Teil des Wals, auf den das Kapitel 95 zeigt, es aber nicht benennt, das »enigmatische Objekt« (651), wird in Thomas Beales Natural History of the Sperm Whale (1839), eine der zentralen Quellen für Melvilles Wissen über Wale, ganz selbstverständlich und ausführlich besprochen: der mannsgroße Penis des Pottwalbullen.1 Während im Roman Kopf und Kiefer, Schwanz und Skelett oder auch die Haut des Wals ausführlich thematisiert werden, kommt sein Zeugungsorgan jedoch nur in Kapitel 95 vor. Hier wird es jedoch zu einem Objekt, das von der Mannschaft auf ganz besondere Weise verwendet und in ein Ritual eingefügt wird, das ungeheuerlich erscheint. Ist es denkbar, dass an Bord von Walfängern die Haut des Pottwalpenis abgezogen, geweitet und zu einem »Überzieher« gemacht wird? Ein Gewand zudem, das einem Matrosen, dem »Hauer«, in seiner Funktion als »Ornat seines Amtes« (652) gelten soll, also ihn zu einem Priester werden lässt? Ein Priester in Penishaut? Was lässt Melville Ishmael hier unter dem Anschein der Faktizität erzählen? 

Diese Blasphemie wird dieses Mal keineswegs Ahab zugeschrieben, sondern zählt angeblich zu den Ritualen des Walfangs, genauer zu denen der vollständigen Verwertung des Wals an Bord. Diese werden jedoch bereits in anderen Kapiteln ausführlich behandelt. Wozu also noch ein Kapitel? Nach dem Flensen (Kapitel 67), dem Zerteilen des Wals, wird im vorangehenden Kapitel 94 bereits das Zerdrücken des Walrats und dessen diverse Formen thematisiert. [...]

(Melville: Moby Dick, Kapitel 95)

Melville: Moby Dick Kapitel 94: A Squeeze of the Hand

That whale of Stubb's, so dearly purchased, was duly brought to the Pequod's side, where all those cutting and hoisting operations previously detailed, were regularly gone through, even to the baling of the Heidelburgh Tun, or Case. While some were occupied with this latter duty, others were employed in dragging away the larger tubs, so soon as filled with the sperm; and when the proper time arrived, this same sperm was carefully manipulated ere going to the try-works, of which anon. 

It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several others, I sat down before a large Constantine's bath of it, I found it strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in the liquid part. It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A sweet and unctuous duty! No wonder that in old times this sperm was such a favorite cosmetic. Such a clearer! such a sweetener! such a softener; such a delicious mollifier! After having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralize. As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as. I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,— literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger; while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever. Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever!  For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side; the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally.  In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti. [...]

 (Melville: Moby Dick Kapitel 94)

Melville: Moby Dick Kapitel 93: The Castaway

It was but some few days after encountering the Frenchman, that a most significant event befell the most insignificant of the Pequod's crew; an event most lamentable; and which ended in providing the sometimes madly merry and predestinated craft with a living and ever accompanying prophecy of whatever shattered sequel might prove her own. Now, in the whale ship, it is not every one that goes in the boats. Some few hands are reserved called shipkeepers, whose province it is to work the vessel while the boats are pursuing the whale. As a general thing, these shipkeepers are as hardy fellows as the men comprising the boats' crews. But if there happen to be an unduly slender, clumsy, or timorous wight in the ship, that wight is certain to be made a ship-keeper. It was so in the Pequod with the little negro Pippin by nick-name, Pip by abbreviation. Poor Pip! ye have heard of him before; ye must remember his tambourine on that dramatic midnight, so gloomy-jolly. In outer aspect, Pip and Dough-Boy made a match, like a black pony and a white one, of equal developments, though of dissimilar color, driven in one eccentric span. But while hapless Dough-Boy was by nature dull and torpid in his intellects, Pip, though over tender-hearted, was at bottom very bright, with that pleasant, genial, jolly brightness peculiar to his tribe; a tribe, which ever enjoy all holidays and festivities with finer, freer relish than any other race. For blacks, the year's calendar should show naught but three hundred and sixty-five Fourth of Julys and New Year's Days. Nor smile so, while I write that this little black was brilliant, for even blackness has its brilliancy; behold yon lustrous ebony, panelled in king's cabinets. But Pip loved life, and all life's peaceable securities; so that the panic-striking business in which he had somehow unaccountably become entrapped, had most sadly blurred his brightness; though, as ere long will be seen, what was thus temporarily subdued in him, in the end was destined to be luridly illumined by strange wild fires, that fictitiously showed him off to ten times the natural lustre with which in his native Tolland County in Connecticut, he had once enlivened many a fiddler's frolic on the green; and at melodious even-tide, with his gay ha-ha! had turned the round horizon into one star-belled tambourine. So, though in the clear air of day, suspended against a blue-veined neck, the pure-watered diamond drop will healthful glow; yet, when the cunning jeweller would show you the diamond in its most impressive lustre, he lays it against a gloomy ground, and then lights it up, not by the sun, but by some unnatural gases. Then come out those fiery effulgences, infernally superb; then the evil-blazing diamond, once the divinest symbol of the crystal skies, looks like some crown-jewel stolen from the King of Hell. But let us to the story. [...]

Moreover, as if perceiving at last that if he should give undiluted conscientious advice to Pip, he would be leaving him too wide a margin to jump in for the future; Stubb suddenly dropped all advice, and concluded with a peremptory command "Stick to the boat, Pip, or by the Lord, I won't pick you up if you jump; mind that. We can't afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama. Bear that in mind, and don't jump any more." Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that though man loved his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence. [...]

But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and Stubb's boat was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent upon his fish, that Pip's ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God. For the rest blame not Stubb too hardly. The thing is common in that fishery; and in the sequel of the narrative, it will then be seen what like abandonment befell myself. (Melville: Moby Dick, Kapitel 93)

Melville: Moby Dick Kapitel 92: Ambergris

Now this ambergris is a very curious substance, and so important as an article of commerce, that in 1791 a certain Nantucket-born Captain Coffin was examined at the bar of the English House of Commons on that subject. For at that time, and indeed until a comparatively late day, the precise origin of ambergris remained, like amber itself, a problem to the learned. Though the word ambergris is but the French compound for grey amber, yet the two substances are quite distinct. For amber, though at times found on the sea-coast, is also dug up in some far inland soils, whereas ambergris is never found except upon the sea. Besides, amber is a hard, transparent, brittle, odorless substance, used for mouth-pieces to pipes, for beads and ornaments; but ambergris is soft, waxy, and so highly fragrant and spicy, that it is largely used in perfumery, in pastiles, precious candles, hair-powders, and pomatum. The Turks use it in cooking, and also carry it to Mecca, for the same purpose that frankincense is carried to St. Peter's in Rome. Some wine merchants drop a few grains into claret, to flavor it. (Melville: Moby Dick Kapitel 92)

Melville: Moby Dick Kapitel 91: Chapter 91: The Pequod Meets the Rose-Bud

 “In vain it was to rake for Ambergriese in the paunch of this Leviathan, insufferable fetor denying not inquiry.”  SIR T. BROWNE, V. E.

It was a week or two after the last whaling scene recounted, and when we were slowly sailing over a sleepy, vapory, mid-day sea, that the many noses on the Pequod’s deck proved more vigilant discoverers than the three pairs of eyes aloft.  A peculiar and not very pleasant smell was smelt in the sea.

“I will bet something now,” said Stubb, “that somewhere hereabouts are some of those drugged whales we tickled the other day.  I thought they would keel up before long.”

Presently, the vapors in advance slid aside; and there in the distance lay a ship, whose furled sails betokened that some sort of whale must be alongside.  As we glided nearer, the stranger showed French colors from his peak; and by the eddying cloud of vulture sea-fowl that circled, and hovered, and swooped around him, it was plain that the whale alongside must be what the fishermen call a blasted whale, that is, a whale that has died unmolested on the sea, and so floated an unappropriated corpse.  It may well be conceived, what an unsavory odor such a mass must exhale; worse than an Assyrian city in the plague, when the living are incompetent to bury the departed.  So intolerable indeed is it regarded by some, that no cupidity could persuade them to moor alongside of it.  Yet are there those who will still do it; notwithstanding the fact that the oil obtained from such subjects is of a very inferior quality, and by no means of the nature of attar-of-rose.

Coming still nearer with the expiring breeze, we saw that the Frenchman had a second whale alongside; and this second whale seemed even more of a nosegay than the first.  In truth, it turned out to be one of those problematical whales that seem to dry up and die with a sort of prodigious dyspepsia, or indigestion; leaving their defunct bodies almost entirely bankrupt of anything like oil.  Nevertheless, in the proper place we shall see that no knowing fisherman will ever turn up his nose at such a whale as this, however much he may shun blasted whales in general.

The Pequod had now swept so nigh to the stranger, that Stubb vowed he recognized his cutting spade-pole entangled in the lines that were knotted round the tail of one of these whales. [...] (Melville: Moby Dick Kapitel 91)