Herman Melville’s Careful Disorderlieness

A Paper of Careful Disorderliness

My ambition with this essay is to examine broad and relatively superficial elements of structure and plot in Moby-Dick to help me solve a select few of the most pressing problems of my own novel. As with my last paper, I have been entirely arbitrary, choosing elements that I feel will be especially helpful to my own creative process. I don’t purport to solve every problem of my novel here, but to discover some guiding principles, to ask some of the right questions which can be answered later. 

To start out, I should define the nature of the problem. I have a project for which I have several notebooks full of material – character sketches, incidents, dialogue, and rough scenes. I’ve been collecting this material off and on for years, and my plan is to form it into a series of novels, perhaps a trilogy. The novel I’m focusing on here would be the first one, and in its most basic aspects, it’s a fantasy story about a man (Doran) and woman (Meredith) locked up in a tower together and tormented by guards and a warden. Its working title is Bastard’s Tower, partly in reference to the setting and main character, and partly in reference to the fact that the project has been such a bastard. The trouble is that it is spontaneous story with no structure and no plot. In 20 Master Plots, Ronald B. Tobias calls pure story “a chronicle of events,” and differentiates plot as not just what happens next, but Why? (12). Looked at in this way, my story is indeed nothing but a very loose “chronicle of events,” with no “why.”

It’s true that a story doesn’t necessarily need a “why” anymore to be successful.  It has become more common and acceptable for story to spontaneously erupt in a surreal way, as with the metafiction of Jonathan Lethem or the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Nevertheless, regardless of the degree of rational plot that exists in a story, it cannot be denied that material always requires at least some degree of structure. Also, though some of the trappings of magical realism might not be out of the question for my own story, I certainly have no desire to write surreal metafiction. My own preference is to provide a story with at least some degree of conventionally plotted causality. Though on the surface it may not seem to make much sense for me to look to Moby-Dick to help me with these problems, it has a strange rhyming logic for me; Moby-Dick seems in many ways an “irrational” book with some degree of rationality and structure imposed on it. Since my own material is essentially irrational – pure creation with no form – it doesn’t seem too far off base to look to Melville for a little help on a successful marriage of chaos with form.

J.A. Ward quotes chapter LXXXII of Moby-Dick, “There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.” Ward points out that Melville is “a great organic artist who is careful to provide his work of art with the architecture for orderly growth” (162). This is echoed by James Barbour in “The Composition of Moby-Dick.” According to Barbour, Melville’s creative process may have involved three different periods of composition of drafts, which essentially resulted in three different narratives that he assembled together. The first was a fairly straightforward whaling adventure that included many of the scenes involving the humorous and adventurous aspects of whaling, and which can still be found in the completed novel.  The second period mainly included the composition of the cetological chapters, whose distinguishing characteristic (for my own purposes) is that they lack any kind of plot whatsoever in its traditional sense. The third period of Melville’s composition of Moby-Dick was influenced by Hawthorne and Shakespeare and was characterized by the addition of Ahab’s quest to the narrative. The most rational response to this procedure is probably, “Don’t try this at home, kids”; it comes with no guarantee of resulting in Moby-Dick every time.  Even Melville apparently considered the novel a “hash” and thought the disparate parts had failed to blend (Barbour 352).  Later readers have, of course, come to regard it as anything but a hash, and Melville’s process was apparently agreeable to him in terms of creative satisfaction as evidenced by his request for ”fifty fast writing youths” to copy down all of his ideas (350).

I think Melville’s eccentric process is useful as a corrective for the rigid formulas for writing that tend to crop up in writing books as well as universities. Formulas can indeed be quite useful, but only when they remain fluid and adaptable. I found this out the hard way during my senior year of undergraduate, when a professor directed me in a one-on-one writing project that was to be the start of my work on the material that I’m addressing here. Very little writing took place, as the professor insisted that I revise a two-page synopsis over and over for all four months of the semester. For him, this was the one and only way to write a novel – before beginning one had to have a synopsis whittled to absolute perfection and rationality. Though I don’t begrudge him his own method, by the fifth or sixth rejection of my synopsis I had lost all interest in and enthusiasm for my material. He also insisted that I eradicate all the contradictions in my material, which had been the aspects of it that interested me and that I thought worth exploring.  For example, one of my main characters, Meredith, had two children by two different men.  The professor said that this was not properly motivated, and made me eliminate one of the children (an event that sounds rather sinister when stated like that). However, I’ve often found that a lot of the most rewarding and interesting turns of my own stories come out of exploring such contradictions and finding a synthesis – stumbling across a dynamic answer that leads me in a new and unexpected direction. If one believes Coleridge that “the imagination reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities . . . “ then my professor was doing me no great favor by eliminating any possibility that I should grapple with such qualities!  To be sure, by the end of his prescribed process I had plot and structure, but it was useless to me since it had nothing to do with anything I had originally wanted to write. Also, when I did start writing the first chapters of the novel with the synopsis as my source, they came out very flat and uninteresting.

I’m not trying to use Melville to advocate some ridiculous notion that a writer can sit down without any planning and that a novel will somehow magically and organically erupt onto the page. But I am advocating that perhaps for Melville, and for many, there’s a happy medium somewhere in between “magical eruption” and a dull, rigid synopsis honed for months on end. It would seem that some instructive principles in accomplishing a “careful disorderliness” can perhaps be extracted from Melville’s process. For example, it’s interesting to me that what is now considered by most to be the main driving force of the novel in terms of both plot and theme – that is, the Ahab portion of the book – was apparently, in large part, added last.  If this is the case, it would mean that Melville actually incorporated much of what is considered the plot (the “why”) of the book as a later step since this is the part of the book that many tend to recognize as the “plot.” Eldridge calls it “the primary unifying force in the novel” (147). And various popular books on the craft of writing tend to dub this aspect of the book a “pursuit plot,” or “revenge plot” (Tobias 81). One possible lesson to be learned from this is that it is in fact possible to play both fast and loose. That is, it may be possible to start a novel with nothing much beyond a rather loose structure, a sketched in story, and a determined intention. Another way to put it is that it may be possible to start out with a weaker plot and discover and add the stronger plot (and other structural elements) later. In my own case, this “inside out” method sounds useful. If I were to follow it, the best course of action would probably be to form some kind of loose structure on which to start hanging the story, and then let other elements of story and plot develop as I go, which would also allow me to grapple with the contradictions that interest me.

One clue to finding this structure perhaps lies with the next element I’m eager to borrow from Moby-Dick, which involves a plot device called the crucible. This is a term of James N. Frey’s that Elizabeth George discusses in her book Write Away. She defines it as “a situation in which your characters are bonded together for one reason or another and thus unable to escape being in conflict with one another … a crucible works as a crucible if the characters either cannot get out or have stronger reasons for staying in than they do for escaping“ (62). George mentions both literal, material crucibles (e.g., a prison) and situational crucibles (e.g., two characters both coveting the same object, but only being able to obtain it by working together). 

George does not say much beyond that about crucibles, but for my own purposes it’s useful to extend the concept.  Along with material and situational crucibles, I’ll add a third category, which I’ll call “metaphysical.”  This is a more intangible, spiritually or mentally binding crucible, which I think often appears in fantasy or romance. Sometimes it will be embodied or tied up with a material object or objective so that it has a more solid presence (which also does a fine job of tying the plot together).  For example, in The Lord of the Rings the Ring is a kind of Meta- or Uber-crucible, uniting everything unto itself. It’s a portable material prison, keeping others within its grasp through a kind of addiction wherever it goes; it’s a situational crucible, bringing together the Fellowship of the Ring since it can only be destroyed with all working together; and it’s a metaphysical crucible forcing all characters into contact with power and evil. I might add that I admire plots with less unified, more mimetic crucibles just as much.  In Jane Austen’s novels, it would seem that all of the following are crucibles: English provincial life; the fact of being female in a 19th century world; manners; marriage; and love itself.

Undoubtedly, Moby-Dick is made up of a brilliantly conceived series of crucibles. The Pequod is a material crucible, acting like prison walls; the hunt for the whale is a situational crucible; and Ahab’s almost superhuman personality combined with the metaphysical pull of the whale comprise a metaphysical crucible. Melville uses his crucibles to their most extreme end; once he has everyone imprisoned within the ship, within the hunt, and within Ahab’s mania, he destroys the entire (microcosmic) world. Many others have remarked on this phenomenon, though in different terms. Says Ward, “…the quest motif would be dominant and the object of the quest, the white whale, would serve as the object of both physical and metaphysical capture. Never before in Melville’s fiction had there been such a complete union between physical object and spiritual truth …”(167).

Ship, whale, Ahab’s quest: to me, they work as the engine driving the plot of Moby-Dick. All three are crucibles, all three force every character on the ship into conflict on various inner and outer levels. As already noted, some of these elements in Melville’s fiction may have been added late in the revision process, but in terms of their effect on the final draft, it matters very little whether they were added early or late; they’re simple (as most brilliant ideas are), and act as a bedrock force, helping to make the more digressive elements possible. With such a strong foundation to his plot, Melville had tremendous freedom to allow things to remain complicated, “loose,” and more experimental in various other parts of the novel – cetological chapters, characters that appear and disappear, philosophical rambling, and so on.  Nevertheless, the degree that one wanders off from the bedrock is, of course, a personal choice for a writer.  Melville chooses to play loose, whereas Austen piles on crucibles, but also keeps everything else about her plots very tight and focused. 

Crucibles have several other winning qualities in terms of their usefulness to the writing process. One is that they work as a kind of dynamic, multi-dimensional system that ties together a number of different fictional elements all at the same time. Setting, plot, conflict, tension, and character all tend to converge on the crucible, and sometimes other elements do as well.  A well-designed crucible can be a kind of fictional plate tectonics in constant motion, keeping the story world dynamic and alive. Depending on how one’s mind works, this can be a much more useful concept than linear plot. Essentially, crucibles are a great way to set up the “game.” Because crucibles will automatically produce conflict, once they are established as structure, one can write whatever comes naturally from them and then go back and revise more analytically later.  It’s a way to have one’s cake and eat it, too.  For Bastard’s Tower, if I were to set up a crucible, or a series of them, structure will result even if plot doesn’t, and chances are, it will help plot emerge as well.  My goal then becomes to develop the three different kinds of crucibles - material, situational, and metaphysical.  These crucibles can have a more unified aspect (as in The Lord of the Rings) a less unified aspect (as with Jane Austen), or fall somewhere in the middle (like Moby-Dick), but they must be present as far as I’m concerned. 

Though I already have my own material crucible (a tower), I’m jealous of Melville because in many ways a ship is the perfect crucible; it forces people into conflict within itself and yet is mobile so that it has the added advantage of coming into contact and conflict with other lands, ships, people, and so on. (Science fiction has used this concept advantageously in the form of the space ship, e.g., Star Trek.) Nevertheless, my situation does allow some similar ramifications as Melville’s situation, such as exile and isolation, though in one very important sense my goal for this exile and isolation is much different from Melville’s; as John Parke says, “…the absence of women and their influence from the crew and, generally speaking, from the story, may be taken as symbolic …the specific feminine principle of relatedness, of nurturing, of instinctive affection, is implicitly and expressly denied” (325).  Melville exiles and isolates masculinity, throws it against itself, within his crucible.  My goal, rather, is to exile male and female together, especially my characters of Meredith, Doran, and the Warden.  Gender is always important to me as thematic material, and I always feel compelled to explore both masculinity and femininity. What comes of the conflict I set up is something I’ll have to discover in the writing process.

            I still lack situational and metaphysical crucibles. That is, what I am missing utterly is a White Whale, an outward goal or object that serves as a crucible. If I were to follow the model of Moby-Dick, I would also need a parallel Ahab character, and in fact I do have a character that would be roughly parallel to Ahab – the warden of my tower. This is related to another interesting point: “within the domain of his own universe, the ship, [Ahab] acts as an all-powerful tyrant” (Heller 55). A material crucible often enables a tyrant. For example, Big Nurse is the all-powerful tyrant in the crucible of the mental hospital in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Not only is Ahab a tyrant, but he is a tyrant with charisma; he possesses a mysterious, almost magical force of personality that the crew cannot escape. Indeed, charisma is another of my favorite, rather strange types of crucibles. People can become “trapped” in the charisma of celebrities or leaders, which can throw them into rather sinister kinds of conflict sometimes. In my tower, the warden would be the all-powerful, and perhaps charismatic tyrant, a character who is, for the moment, woefully underdeveloped. This reveals to me that one of my priorities is to break this character wide open. He can’t be Ahab, but he might turn out to be an important element of my story.  If I were to develop this character, he might perhaps lead me to situational and metaphysical crucibles, just as every thought and action of Ahab’s leads toward the whale.

I will move on now from crucibles, and trace out several smaller principles I can extract from Moby-Dick to help my project. The first of these is that the ship and the white whale are not just any general ship or white whale; the ship is specifically the Pequod and the white whale is specifically Moby Dick. The whale and the ship work as archetypes, and Melville developed more specific identities around these archetypes, weaving together his own myth (Ward 173).  Whatever the merits or demerits of the working title for my project - Bastard’s Tower - it reflects the vague and abstract level of my thinking at the moment; if I were to fail to advance beyond this level, it would be as though Melville failed to develop his material any further than being able to call his novel White Whale.  Just as Melville got hold of natural history volumes and other factual accounts to develop the cetological chapters and other part of his novel, what I need to do is study my archetypes and brainstorm on and borrow from historical accounts.  In this way, I can develop a much greater degree of specificity. My tower can gain a name and history, and a specific function; and though Doran is my eponymous bastard, he can be given a much more detailed history. 

Related to the need for greater specificity is what I will call a need for greater “groundedness.” As Ward says, “Melville creates a world cosmic in scope and spiritual at its center, but his starting point is earthly and material.” Because of this concrete foundation in fact, “Melville can afford to violate the canon of realism with impunity” (171).  And returning again to Coleridge: “The imagination reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities …; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; …the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; …and while it blends and harmonizes the natural with the artificial, still subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter” (170).  Unfortunately, in my case, by temperament I’m always trying to skip the concrete, the image, the old and familiar objects, the more than usual state of order, the nature, and the matter. And I simply cannot do that and write effectively.  If recognition of my affliction is the first step of recovery, then I’m well on my way. I see now that I must ground my story, develop more powerful descriptive powers in my craft, and do the necessary world building, whether it’s this world or some other.

Speaking of other worlds, J.R.R. Tolkien’s sentiments in “On Fairy Stories” are strikingly similar to Coleridge – so much so that a rather striking link between romanticism and “high fantasy” is evident, at least to my eyes. Tolkien insists on a consistent and concretely developed “Secondary World” so that the more metaphysical aims of Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, and Consolation are possible (60, 66). The highly structured plot of fantasy certainly fits the bill of “more than usual order,” while Tolkien’s notion of Eucatastrophe, “Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief,” is certainly “a more than usual state of emotion” (81). At any rate, attention to the grounded and concrete is part of Tolkien’s success, too.  He creates a world so detailed that he can then take the reader to some very metaphysical, spiritual places.  This is relevant to my purposes since what I’m striving to achieve probably borrows elements from both 19th century Romanticism and 20th century fantasy (among other sources).  And though the metaphysical elements of my own story are far from being well-developed, I now understand more fully the importance that a strong base be built to support them.

The next principle involves the problem of “nothing happening.”  According to Ward, Melville had a need to add some variety to his story, because “he had to face the obvious fact that on a long whaling voyage very little happens.”  If Melville were to concentrate too much on Ahab, the narrative would get too intense. But “to concentrate on the trivia, on the day-to-day activity of the seamen or on the capture of every whale, would be both repetitious and monotonous” (168).  All of this echoes my own problem that during a long imprisonment very little happens, and that the day-to-day activity of prisoners is both repetitious and monotonous.  Trying to address this issue, the professor on my senior project insisted that my story must have some kind of standard plot to drive it forward - specifically an escape plot. But while I wouldn’t mind an escape plot figuring into the narrative in a peripheral way (e.g. as a subplot), it’s not the driving force that I want. To focus on an escape plot would emphasize themes and issues that are not at the heart of things for me. According to Ward, one way Melville chose to solve the problem of monotony was “by punctuating the Ahab scenes and the whaling incidents” with the cetological chapters. In these chapters, “The whale is the common denominator, both object of exposition and object of quest” (168).  I’m not suggesting I should write a series of expository chapters related thematically to my material; readers are rather unforgiving about this tactic, and after all, I’m looking to Moby-Dick for techniques and principles, not trying to copy the book. But I can borrow the idea rather generally, and think about adding a third “stream” of some kind into the narrative, perhaps an elaborate sub-plot – perhaps an escape plot, for that matter!  It also seems to me that the gams serve a similar purpose in the narrative. In “‘Careful Disorder’: The Structure of Moby-Dick,” Eldridge argues that they have an important function in the structure as they are spaced evenly throughout and counterbalance more “organic” elements (155).  Certainly every time they appear, they enliven and spice things up.  This may be an idea that I can borrow more or less directly; a group of people comes to the tower to visit Doran and Meredith from time to time, and I should probably develop this as an important structural element.  Just like Melville’s “gams,” I could build in a “progression” to these meetings and use them to give some regularity as well as variety to the narrative.

My last, very short, guiding principle gleaned from Moby-Dick involves the notion of the Pequod as a microcosm, as “society, as world-in-itself” (Young 449). If I were to make the population of my tower a microcosm, it would allow me to develop a cast of characters with a wide variety of attitudes and temperaments, just as the characters on the Pequod show “a variety of attitudes toward the white whale, a variety of attitudes toward reality and man’s place in the universe …” (Ward 170).

I will now attempt to sum up what I have learned from Melville to apply to my own project.  First, a writing method of “careful disorderliness” can be a very useful corrective for rigid writing formulas.  It is quite possible to start out with a weak plot and strengthen it as one goes in order to keep an element of surprise in the creative process. Second, a way to arrive at a dynamic kind of structure, whether early or late in the creative process, involves the use of material, situational, and metaphysical crucibles, which are a handy tool to produce conflict in an “organic” way.  The development of my own parallel “Ahab character,” the warden of my tower, may help lead me to satisfactory crucibles. Third, it is important to develop archetypes on both a general and specific level in order to arrive at a fully developed “myth.”  Fourth, it is also important to establish a grounded world of convincing detail, because this makes the fantastic or metaphysical details of a story resonate more believably.  Fifth, the monotony of “nothing happening” can be enlivened with a subplot or other separate line of chapters, as well as with a series of meetings (similar to gams) with characters from the outside.  Sixth, and last, my tower can be designed as a microcosm whose inhabitants exhibit a wide variety of attitudes and attributes.

The ideas I’ve covered here have been helpful to my project, and will continue to be helpful in exactly the ways I’ve stated. Nevertheless, it seems that the most immediate result of my efforts is that I “accidentally” jumpstarted a later book in my series while ruminating on Melville’s style of myth-building (i.e. points three and four above). One of Melville’s wonderfully freeing lessons seems to be that nearly anything can be transformed into a myth. Though I was not looking for that particular lesson, or for a start to that particular later novel, or for a whole new direction of thinking with no time to write a different paper, I won’t complain. After all, I’ve just spent thirteen pages pleading (if not praying) to Melville to help me justify freedom and spontaneity within form.

Works Cited

Barbour, James.  “The Composition of Moby-Dick.”  American Literature 47.3 (Nov.

1975): 343-360. 

Eldridge, Herbert G.  “‘Careful Disorder’: The Structure of Moby-Dick.”  American

Literature 39.2 (May, 1967): 145-162. 

George, Elizabeth.  Write Away.  New York: Harper Collins, 2004. 

Heller, Louis G.  “Two Pequot Names in American Literature.” American Speech 36.1

(1961): 54-57. 

Parke, John.  “Seven Moby-Dicks.”  The New England Quarterly 28.3 (Sep. 1955): 319-

338.

Tobias, Ronald B.  20 Master Plots and how to build them.  Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest,

1993.

Tolkien, J.R.R.  The Tolkien Reader.  New York: Del Rey, 1986.

Ward, J. A.  “The Function of the Cetological Chapters in Moby-Dick.”  American

Literature 28.2 (May, 1956): 164-183. 

Young, James Dean.  “The Nine Gams of the Pequod.”  American Literature 25.4 (Jan.

1954): 449-463.