War and Peace, Middlemarch, Finnegan’s Wake? What about Moby Dick? How many of the greatest books of all time are still collecting dust on your shelf of good intentions? Noted historian and author Ann Fabian knows all about it. In Moby Dick, Ishmael says the whale ship was “my Yale College and my Harvard.” For Fabian’s students, this masterpiece of nineteenth century American literature was not the musty tome they might have thought, but an unexpected intellectual adventure. The pursuit of life-long learning, she points out in her Phi Beta Kappa induction address, is also an adventure, and every new ΦBK member is like Ishmael embarking on a voyage of discovery.
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An Address by Ann Fabian
Phi Beta Kappa Induction
Alpha of New Jersey Chapter
Rutgers University
May 25, 2010
First, let me add another voice of warm congratulations to all of you. You have done something great, worth celebrating. I know you will hear this many times in the next few weeks. But for you here today I want to emphasize one note in these noisy celebrations. I want you to know that your professors not only acknowledge your abilities but recognize as well the privilege of teaching students gifted with your curiosity, ability, and ambition. The best thing about being a professor at this university is the discovery somewhere in the course of a semester—in exam answers, in a lab report, in a paper—that you actually have students who are as smart or smarter than you are.
Usually you get one or two in a class. But here is a room full of you—waiting to be inducted into an old academic honor society and, for the seniors, at least, getting ready to leave this university. Before you go off, let me steal five more minutes of your time to talk about Moby-Dick. I know none of you came expecting a whaling voyage on this rainy Sunday afternoon, but it’s hard for a teacher with a captive audience to resist a lesson. It was in 1851 that Herman Melville published Moby Dick – his story of the mad captain Ahab leading his doomed crew on a hunt for a great white whale. That’s the plot.
Moby Dick, a book I know we all think we should have read, is just too long to fit into any modern college course. So this past semester, I decided to read the book with a Byrne First-Year Seminar. I had an idea that a hardy crew of first-year students would sign on for the semester and that come spring, they would have read the book. Nothing else. Just one credit, for one book.
Well, classes don’t always work as planned and my small crew was blown off course, twice, by the Thursday storms that shut down the university this winter. As all of you know, classes are fragile things, and it is hard to get them back on track after even minor interruptions. But we pressed on anyway, carrying our dog-eared copies of Moby Dick around campus through the semester.
I was surprised when several of my very well-educated colleagues confessed to me that they had tried to read Moby Dick but had never finished it. Something was wrong with the book. They liked the first chapters, they said, the story of narrator Ishmael and his encounter with the tattooed South Sea harpooner, Queequeg. But once the whale ship Pequod left Nantucket Island, they lost interest in the story. They couldn’t make it through the book’s famous digressions on whales, ropes, sails and all the other associations that author Melville and his storyteller Ishmael found in whaling.
But those were the chapters that took on weight in our class this spring—not the friendship between Ishmael and Queequeg, or Ahab’s obsession with the whale that had bitten off his leg, or even the symbolic world of Melville’s rich imagination, but the digressions on the fact-laden world of whaling. I was determined to get my crew through those doldrums, and in doing so, the book opened for my class as a sort of college curriculum outside the classroom, an invitation to continuing education, even in the first decade of the 21st century.
My colleagues had their whispered confession—“never finished it.” My class adopted a different mantra—puzzled surprise: “everything is here!” The semester’s challenge then was how to make sense of this everything. That’s your university, I told them; everything IS here. Moby Dick is pretty specific on this university idea. The whale ship, storyteller Ishmael comments, was “my Yale College and my Harvard.” For today, we will imagine the whale ship as my Rutgers.
Picture Herman Melville, mind on fire, dreaming up the story that became Moby-Dick and reading the Rutgers College catalogue from 1845-46. “Published by the Students” and printed on Albany Street. If you are curious, you can find it on line. The catalogue describes a very odd college, heavy on administration. Well governed, I guess. There were six superintendents and 41 trustees, a group that included the governor, the chief justice and the attorney general of the State of New Jersey. Those 47 managers lorded over nine faculty and around 100 students.
The faculty included a professor of Constitutional and International Law (who doubled as the college president), a professor of Moral Philosophy, of Metaphysics and the Philosophy of the Human Mind, of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, of Oriental Languages and Literature, of Chemistry and Natural History, of Greek Language and Literature, of Latin Language and Literature, and of Modern Languages and Literature. That was your entire faculty.
You had access to a library with about 15,000 books and the use of valuable “Philosophical and Chemical apparatus, and a rare and extensive mineralogical cabinet.” (Your labs.) You attended a regular Sunday sermon, and a weekly Biblical recitation. In your senior year you read Greek tragedy, studied natural philosophy, political economy, Christian ethics, and geology and mineralogy. You would have paid a term bill of about $148 a year—a price that placed the “advantages of a complete Collegiate education …within the reach of the students at what will be found a remarkably moderate expense,” the Rutgers students wrote. And all in that “mild and proverbially healthy climate of New-Brunswick.” (That was N-B then. Maybe we should put this on the website.)
Of course, like Ishmael’s shipmates, you were all men. Your classmates were from New Jersey or New York, except for Joseph and Benjamin Scudder, brothers who gave a home address in Madras, India.
Herman Melville’s own education was spotty. He was a good student, but when his father went bankrupt and then died, teenage Herman went to work. In 1832, 13-year-old Herman would have passed his school-bound classmates on his way to a job in an Albany Bank. (Maybe if he had picked the bank as a setting for a great novel—hard to imagine—my colleagues would have pressed on through the story looking for clues to our recent great collapse—a mad banker looking for meaning in money. For Melville, whaling was a better bet. When he was a young man, whaling was the center of the American economy, producing the oil that lubricated early industries and burned in the lamps of hard-working students. If you make it through the book, you know whaling was a weird business.)
In school or not, Melville absorbed information from the world around him—from the stories his father had told him, from reading newspapers or Spenser, Shakespeare, and the Bible, from ideas he found in libraries or in the debating societies—intellectual clubs that welcomed curious young men like Herman and his brother. All his eclectic learning—generous and unstructured—seeped into the pages of this odd, long novel, leaving us a curriculum for a life-long education.
Let me try to convince you with a very quick look at the novel.
Moby Dick begins with elementary lessons in reading, writing, and arithmetic. The novel opens with a chalk-covered schoolmaster dusting off “old lexicons and grammars.” An old librarian grubbing up whale references follows the schoolmaster. And the plot begins with Ishmael (think of him as a freshman) struggling to learn about a new world--trying to read the signs on New Bedford’s dark streets, stumbling into a black church, puzzling over pictures of whales, trying to decipher the tattoos on the arms of his cannibal bedmate. And then as he signs on to the whale ship, Ishmael, the student of arithmetic, is called to quick calculations. What percentage of the profits will be his at the “777th lay,” or a “275th lay”—a whaleman’s word for his share of a voyage’s profits.
Think of those first chapters as Ishmael’s college application. Did he have the ability to make it through the adventure that was to follow? These were the “Terms of Admission,” as the Rutgers students put it. You had to know Latin and Greek grammar, Caesar, Virgil, Cicero, the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and Arithmetic. You needed “good moral character” too.
Ishmael’s whaling voyage eventually called on everything a Rutgers senior would have learned of Greek tragedy, natural philosophy, political economy, Christian ethics, and geology, as well as every lesson in astronomy, geography, psychology, anthropology, and anatomy. Read carefully, Moby-Dick offers lessons for carpenters, blacksmiths, and cooks, for lawyers, surgeons, and obstetricians, observations for scientists and experiences for sensualists—things to taste (a whale steak cooked rare), to touch (a hand mashing lumps of spermaceti), to hear (the bark of a seal mistaken for the moan of a drowned sailor), to smell (the body of a rotting whale, the perfume of ambergris or a whiff of Moby Dick, still miles from the ship). We get to smell Moby Dick before we see him and his “peculiar odor” annoys a reader really ready to see this white whale by chapter 133.
But what makes Moby Dick fantastic for my imagined curriculum outside the classroom is the simple fact that regular learning was never enough. Conventional subjects went wildly off course—setting up poor whaling students for challenges one impossible step beyond a final exam. Had Ishmael or any of his shipmates learned enough psychology to understand Captain Ahab as “madness maddened”? Did astronomy teach you to steer a ship when lightening scrambled compass poles? Anatomy, to behead a creature with no neck? Geography to follow Queequeg to his home on the island of Kokovoko, a place “not down on any map: true places never are”?
Of course not. For every education is sadly incomplete. A rough draft—a “draught of a draught,” Meville put it.
This dark, humorous book deserves more than this trite induction speech, but I figure the occasion calls for lofty sentiments. If you are in this room, your teachers have seen that you have mastered the subjects they put before you. Your next step is to take us off the map--to true places like Kokovoko, not down on any of our maps. This is the challenge of your continuing education. Think of Ishmael—carpetbag in hand, escaping a gloomy November in Manhattan to embark on a whaling voyage. On that voyage, Melville writes, “the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open.”
So I know they will for each of you. Good luck.
About the Speaker:
Ann Fabian writes on the cultural history of the United States in the nineteenth century. She joined the American Studies Department at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, in the fall of 2000, after teaching at Yale. She has just concluded a term as Dean of Humanities for the School of Arts and Sciences. Fabian’s books include Card Sharps, Dream Books, and Bucket Shops: Gambling in Nineteenth-Century America (Cornell University Press, 1990) and The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America (University of California Press, 2000). Forthcoming is The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead (University of Chicago Press, 2010). She has written articles on popular imagery of the American West, economic panics, basketball betting scandals, criminal confessions, the American West, the history of the book, the ancient skeleton known as Kennewick Man, U.S. explorations in Fiji, and abandoned bank buildings. She is a member of the Council of the American Antiquarian Society and on the board of directors of the Classic Stage Company in New York. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1982, specializing in American Studies.
Fabian's comments are represented here as they were given to the national office by the Rutgers chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.