Student+Notes-Industrialism

K.Jones 11/17- INDUSTRIALISM-An economic and social system based on the development of large-scale industries and marked by the production of large quantities of inexpensive manufactured goods and the concentration of employment in urban factories. http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=industrialism

Despite the exaggerations produced by the politicizing of //**Moby-Dick**//, it is not wrong to say that Melville had American capitalism much in mind as he wrote. That the voyage of the //Pequod// is a capitalist venture cannot be doubted. Nor is it possible to miss the implication that Ahab is a captain of industry, inasmuch as he directs a full-scale factory ship. For his American epic, Melville appropriately chose a characteristically American, entrepreneurial, industrial undertaking for the central action. Richard Chase spoke for most critics of the 1950's when he termed Ahab an "epic transmutation of the free enterpriser."

Yet if in //**Moby-Dick** "// the myth is capitalism," as Chase put it, capitalism never became an analytic category for Melville. Ahab is a heroic figure who happens to be cast in a capitalist mode. He would have been a heroic warrior for an epic of archaic Greece, or a slayer of dragons rather than whales for an epic of the Anglo-Saxons, or an explorer for an epic of Renaissance Portugal (to name three periods in which epics that influenced Melville were created).

To be sure, some critics have always given greater weight than others to the capitalist-American element. But as Philip Gleason observed in 1963, prior to that date "no one, except perhaps an occasional Marxist," had given //**Moby-Dick**// an "out and out political interpretation." Before the 1960's, moreover, not even Marxists claimed that capitalism told the whole story. The Marxist James B. Hall, for example, in //"**Moby-Dick**:// Parable of a Dying System" (1950), predictably treated Ahab as driven "by the spirit of free enterprise," and as representing **industrialism** "in the very image of himself: ruthless, cunning, and fatal." But Hall concluded that "the implications of the economic aspects—//**Moby-Dick**// as Industrial Saga—do not, it seems to me, present the most relevant meaning of the book."

Despite this disclaimer, after the 1960's Hall's kind of Marxist anticapitalism came to be accepted without reservations. In 1964, the year following Philip Gleason's relegation of the political interpretation to the occasional Marxist, Leo Marx published his //The Machine in the Garden//, with its transformation of Henry Nash Smith's observations about industrial imagery into a putatively out-and-out attack by Melville on capitalism. In a few years—following the political and cultural upheavals between 1965 and 1970—critics began taking it as an undisputed fact that Melville was an author concerned about "the fate of the poor," and bent on "exposing the essence of capitalist society." At the very least Melville, if not yet at a conscious level, was moving toward the "outright condemnation" of "the capitalist mode of economy" that would (supposedly) characterize his later works.

IV

By the 1980's the previously marginal Marxist view had become the common coin of criticism. The action of //**Moby-Dick**// was now seen as grounded in "capitalist expansion and possession," or in "industrial capitalism." Ahab is obsessed with the white whale because "capitalist appropriation has failed him"; he is "like a disappointed fetishizer of commodities." //**Moby-Dick**// is once again an "industrial saga" and a demonstration of "class conflict" in which Ahab exploits his "proletarian crew." If anything, Hall's language in 1950, though avowedly Marxist, was more nuanced than this. "The death of the //Pequod,"// he had written,

is the ultimate destiny of a culture which holds values that are contradictory to human welfare. If Ahab is a product, in a sense, of the culture and of the machine, he extends the implication to the point of destruction for all.

The kind of argumentation represented by Hall's phrase "in a sense" was no longer in evidence in the 1970's and 1980's; instead the unabashed return of the word "proletarian" signaled a revival of the didactic spirit of the 1930's.

If Melville set out primarily to criticize capitalism, as all these critics assumed, it followed that the //Pequod// goes to the bottom of the sea because it is the ship of the American capitalist state. With capitalism in the picture, long-discussed questions about how to interpret the whale's sinking of the ship dropped from sight. Seemingly forgotten was the observation by earlier critics that even if one narrows the symbolic meanings of the //Pequod// to its ship of state aspect, the sinking still has ambiguous implications. Was Melville issuing a prophecy or a warning? What is the meaning of Ishmael's survival?

In 1964 Alan Heimert had concluded that Ishmael's survival expressed Melville's "undying democratic faith," and that the American ship //Rachel// that takes him aboard "points to an American future that is not without charity and not, perhaps most importantly, without hope." Even Leo Marx similarly if more darkly wrote that "Ishmael is saved...in order that he may deliver to us a warning of disasters to come." But in the 1970's and 1980's the issue was solved flatly and unequivocally. Ishmael's survival notwithstanding, the American ship of state deserved (and deserves) to sink, and so Melville sank it.

The critics had different ideas about exactly which American sins Melville was punishing. For one critic the spectacle is simply the satisfying one of an "industrial world sailing to annihilation." Richard Slotkin specifies that the //Pequod// goes down because of "our devotion to material progress." Michael Rogin spreads his net wider. "Capitalism, imperialism, and slavery were, at the origins of capitalism, symbiotically intertwined," he believes. The American ship of state accordingly goes down in retribution for its "greed," as a result of its fetishization of commodities, because it "engrossed half of Mexico," and finally because of slavery and Indian killing: "those who killed the red man and enslaved the black met their manifest destiny in **Moby-Dick**." By "rooting Ahab's freedom in the enslavement of his crew," Rogin further explains, Melville showed that in the American "so-called free society," freedom was based on slavery. Therefore even "if the end //of **Moby-Dick**// imagines the end of slavery, then the price is the destruction of the ship of state."

[industrialism "Moby dick"&hl=en|link to source]