Ahab/Stillstorm

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Suttrjac
Posts: 25
Joined: Tue Apr 05, 2011 3:00 am

Ahab/Stillstorm

Post by Suttrjac »

As promised I’ve scrabbled up a little Ahab/Stillstorm comparison for your reading pleasure. I author this short essay whilst keeping in mind a number of matters: that this is by no means exhaustive, and if I may throw the first stone quite an amateurish attempt, that the first chapter has only recently concluded and with the knowledge that not everyone is familiar with the Pequod’s deranged and ivory legged captain. So ho! Spoilers below!

Being now forewarned I hasten to introduce to ye all the infamous Ahab: A wiry elder with muscles like the actual cord utilized in the hoisting of his sails and furred with gray tufts about the cheeks and scalp and fitted with a prosthetic of ivory bone, a pilfered rib from one of his abyssal dwelling quarries, much American, known as a Quaker, and possessed with the monomaniac desire to hunt down the pale leviathan to whom he forfeited a lower limb, a creature known by harpooners of every nation as the dreaded Moby Dick.
Now it should be told that the Pequod was a Nantucket ship and her captain a tawny Nantucket whaler and it is here I should like to begin my comparison. For Nantucket is a frosty island off the coast of Massachusetts and it could not be said to be unlike the rimy continent of Beleri whose tempestuous seas sired our fabled Stillstorm (whose yellow eyes and pallid complexion and nose of Cyranoic [see pg. 78] proportions betrays her origins). Among both there stands a lengthy tradition of sailing and whaling which has undoubtedly engendered among the people the varied temperaments and hardness of hearts that accompany such sanguineous professions.

In fact one might well conclude it would have been better for all parties involved had it been our lady pallid met with the ivory masted man (so alike in physicality) instead of the one armed Captain Boomer. For each could well be seen with these words on their lips,

“Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other.”

And though we have seen little of Stillstorm have we not seen enough? Her very name evokes the hurricane, that ultimate tempest, she the eye and the storm raging all around her and is it not so the son of Omri likewise had a storm brooding in his kingly being? True she bows to Tempo, though never to a Stubb, but it was so that in more antiquated days it was the Specksynder who at times required ultimate deferment and the captain restricted to the “navigation and general management of the vessel.” In an honest push to shove ‘twould be no far stretch to believe Stillstorm would make any mutineer walk the plank into the oceanic void.

Of course the overlap does not end there. As the author has stated, though we are not in possession of all the details, Stillstorm has endured a fantastic amount of trauma to body and mind with consequences reminiscent of Ahab’s own encounter that left his mizzen demasted. To wit, and as has been said before Ahab, upon being reaped of his leg, had it replaced with an ivory tusk of bone harvested out from the blubbery breast of his eternal game. Tis the color I call attention to for the paleness of his bone is much like the paleness of her skin which we our led to believe was replaced in some grand surgery following her mauling (if you can call it that).

Neither do these fleshy wounded tabernacles betray any sign of weakness. For it was in spite of that ivory leg which lent Ahab his aura of invincibility and perhaps it is also so that the same is true for the reconstituted Stillstorm. In either case each has come to the point in their lives where they would call no sandy shore home. Stillstorm has served a full twenty-five years on the frontline (an exile, perhaps by now a self-imposed one) and Ahab after returning to Nantucket quickly departed after a brief stay for to resupply his ship with gear and men.

And that’s that. Hopefully as the story progresses I’ll be able to wring a few things more out.

Solemn
Posts: 165
Joined: Tue Mar 22, 2011 10:35 am

Re: Ahab/Stillstorm

Post by Solemn »

I never read Moby Dick.

However, I have seen movies starring Gregory Peck and Patrick Stewart in the role of Ahab.

The impression that I got from both movies is that Captain Ahab starts the story out seeming every inch The Good Captain, if somewhat aloof, but over the course of the story the cracks in his personality become more and more apparent until he's calling down Saint Elmo's fire and abandoning his friends and colleagues to a slow death as he sets his ship and crew on a course to damnation. So it's a story about a great yet hellbound man, who had initially appeared in a good, perhaps even heroic, light, who is slowly consumed by his flaws until they lead him to death over the course of what should have been a simple and profitable whaling expedition.

Perhaps I got this impression because he was played by Gregory Peck and Patrick Stewart, both of whom are most famous for playing roles that are practically synonymous with "Good Guy." If that impression is wrong, then, I suppose I should probably read the actual book before commenting on it.

But if that impression is correct, then I would assume Stillstorm to be a sort of mirror opposite of Ahab, because the first impression that Stillstorm made on me is that of a fearsome and hostile power with few legal restraints and nearly no moral ones. Then, the course of the battle (the story's first whale, if you want to put it that way) we begin to see her strengths; that she rapidly processes even a nonstandard situation, that when it's time to keep her head clear all the anger and frustration we saw earlier will get pushed to the side, that she can achieve remarkable results (pointed out by both her crew and her enemy), that when things get serious she's got ice-water in her veins, instead of the boiling, barely restrained fury she seemed to show when dealing with Alex, a creature and situation that put her far out of her element. Notably, she did not either abandon the Bellarmine (and salvage crews) for the sake of killing more Umiak, nor does she seem to have allowed her judgement to be colored by her thirst for vengeance. Sure, she laughed at 27 as she rejected his offer, but, that doesn't count against her in my book. So instead of the flaws and cracks in her personality becoming more obvious over the course of the whale hunt, she started out looking like someone who'd command the storms and call down Saint Elmo's Fire for an all-consuming act of vengeance, and has only now begun to show why her crew would follow her down every single step of that path to hell in the first place.

So if I were to guess, and if Stillstorm is to be a character who gets a lot of face time and a character arc of her own (I have no real reason to make that supposition right now), I'd say that Stillstorm seems (slightly) more likely to follow a path to redemption than damnation; might be that her story will close with her offering clemency to the Umiak, perhaps in terms even more merciful than those offered to her by 27.
Last edited by Solemn on Tue Aug 23, 2011 9:43 am, edited 1 time in total.

Suttrjac
Posts: 25
Joined: Tue Apr 05, 2011 3:00 am

Re: Ahab/Stillstorm

Post by Suttrjac »

Ah well certainly nothing against you for not reading the book, it’s a long doozy and not terribly known outside of academic circles save for the faintest details, but I would recommend giving it a go primarily because the movies just don’t do it justice and because the novel is a damn good read.

As far as the movies go I think Stewart was channeling just the slightest bit of Jean Luc which with the hacking out of some of Ahab’s more fearful scenes unfortunately taints the character. As for the 1956 version, I’ve yet to see it, so it may be a more accurate portrayal; I’ll have to check it out and can’t say otherwise until.

That said I would contest that Ahab started out as good or even sinisterly aloof. Ishmael, in chapter 28 titled Ahab, describes his captain thusly, “He looked a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness.”

(If I you can pardon me for taking a moment to support my initial argument I’d say this line is reminiscent of Stillstorm who Arioch mentions (Quotes Vol II), “Stillstorm lost nearly everyone she knew in the Semoset collapse -- sisters, daughters, friends -- and was herself critically injured when her own ship was destroyed at Tasinei...[and that] She spent years being pieced back together (mentally and physically)...” )

Ahab is further described at the end of the chapter as being a man who has been so traumatized by his mutilation that the spirit of him had been consumed by revenge. Ishmael makes a tender yet telling observation of his captain on his (what one could reason was his best day),

“Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling persuasiveness of the pleasant, holiday weather we came to, seemed gradually to charm him from his mood. For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green spouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants; so Ahab did, in the end, a little respond to the playful allurings of that girlish air. More than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile.”

Two chapters later Ahab is seen smoking on deck in a scene which reveals his leaving of the world of comforts,
“Hold now,” he soliloquized at last, withdrawing the tube, “this smoking no longer soothes. Oh, my pipe! Hard must it go with me if thy charm be gone! Here have I been unconsciously toiling, not pleasuring,-aye, and ignorantly smoking to windward all the while; to windward, and with such nervous whiffs, as if, like the dying whale, my final jets were the strongest and fullest of trouble. What business have I with this pipe? This thing that is meant for sereneness, to send up mild white vapors among mild white hairs, not among torn iron-grey locks like mind. I’ll smoke no more-“

His early offering of the gold doubloon indicates his intentions. It’s a purchase not just of the ship but of the men’s wills with which he buffers and increases his own. Even Stubb is forced to acquiesce to the man, quite against his better judgments. It should also be kept in mind that the three year voyage that the Pequod had embarked upon in which Ahab lost his leg was interspaced by less than a month’s time with the Ishmael’s going aboard. For a man with wife and child and great injury it seemed to me he was possessed with an enormous impetus spurred by revenge which he did not reveal until the ship was well under sail. In fact Ishmael comments on this deception(Chapter 41), “Had any one of his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking in him then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls have wrenched the ship from such a fiendish man! They were bent on profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint. He was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge.”

Edit: I just realized I didn't address your comment on the differences between their two styles of waging war so I'll say this, in my mind Ahab is not the atavistic egg which hatched Stillstorm but it certainly appears to me that they share at least a common ancestry of loss and pain and "for things which arrive at a common destination there is a common path."

I believe one can be partially traced backed to the other and I've tried to elucidate this. Later in the story I might venture to say that they are both possessed of "that certain sultanism of his [the] brain." Of course we don't have all the particulars since Outsider has barely begun and nothing here is incredibly in depth or even could be said to be ultimately accurate as her background is not yet set in stone. Even so I find this a pleasurable exercise (tis a guilty pleasure :D )

Solemn
Posts: 165
Joined: Tue Mar 22, 2011 10:35 am

Re: Ahab/Stillstorm

Post by Solemn »

Suttrjac wrote: Even so I find this a pleasurable exercise (tis a guilty pleasure
I understand completely. Believe me.

It could easily be that I had the wrong impression of both films, and/or the 1956 version might be much closer to the image of Ahab you'd get from the book.
I know that Gregory Peck's played some pretty despicable characters over the course of his career, too; for instance, he played Dr. Mengele in The Boys from Brazil. But it's still kinda hard for me not to think "that whale must be one son of a bitch; even Atticus Finch thinks it should die."
Things like that, despite being completely unrelated to the movie in any way, can color my perception of a character.

My perception of Stillstorm is probably equally colored by prejudice, though in a different way. Before the battle was halfway over, I thought she'd resolve the situation in a somewhat more ruthless manner. Like, horrifyingly ruthless. Stupefyingly ruthless. "No human soldier who ever lived would follow this captain" ruthless. Instead, she kept a cool head about her, and acted quite a bit more reasonably than I thought she might have. I think that might be the real source of her name; "Storm of Stillness" suggests a sudden and terrible calm to me, not the hurricane that you suggested earlier, though as I'm sure you can point out, a becalmed sea often proved no less deadly to sailors than the wildest of tempests.

That she did not act overzealous about killing the Umiak, and instead of focusing on personal revenge adjusted her priorities to fit a situation that had rapidly spiraled far out of control in all sorts of crazy ways, has helped make her seem more like a sane and reasonable person to me than she would have had I only seen her interact socially (I do not think she is very good at making friends).

So now I think the whole mind probe incident might be her personal moral nadir; seems kinda hard to top attempted brain-rape of an innocent and helpless main character in a PG-13 comic. And if that's her low point, nowhere to go but up, y'know?

Suttrjac
Posts: 25
Joined: Tue Apr 05, 2011 3:00 am

Re: Ahab/Stillstorm

Post by Suttrjac »

You say, “but it’s still kinda hard for me not to think that whale must be one son of a bitch; even Atticus Finch thinks it should die.”

But that is the very insanity of Ahab’s desire. His anthropomorphizing of Moby Dick, embodying it with an unnatural malice, that’s what Starbuck decries while on the Quarter Deck, “Vengeance on a dumb brute!” cried Starbuck, “that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.”
In Chapter 41 Ishmael states, “The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which had been from the beginning…Ahab did not fall down and worship it…but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale…”

There seems to be a comparable notion in Beryl’s comments to Jardin, “They breathe to deceive,” which may imply that the Umiak have come to represent the tangible manifestations of those intangible malignancies. Of course with that there is the problem that Stillstorm chose to talk to 27 instead of engaging in outright hostilities though I wonder if sperm whales could talk would Ahab have done so. Certainly he spat his last breath at Moby as if expecting his curses to register somewhere in that great cetacean brain.

"My perception of Stillstorm is probably equally colored by prejudice, though in a different way. Before the battle was halfway over, I thought she'd resolve the situation in a somewhat more ruthless manner. Like, horrifyingly ruthless. Stupefyingly ruthless. "No human soldier who ever lived would follow this captain" ruthless.”

At this point I think it may be beneficial to bring in two other Ahabesque characters for further elucidation so we can see a few common themes being repeated across several mediums. The two that come to mind are Blood Meridian’s John Joel Glanton (who was a real person famously documented in Samuel Chamberlain’s My Confession) and Platoon’s SSgt Bob Barnes.

Having evoked these people I may have to reclassify my argument (though at the moment I refrain from such action while reserving the right to do so) as relegating Stillstorm to a certain species of archetype. Jung never believed in tabula rasa. He thought that the archetypes dwelled within us comparing them to watercourses that could be dried and filled and dried again. An archetype being a tangible manifestation of an intangible psychological complex brought about by shared experiences/anxieties and summoned out of and by the mass collective consciousness.

Between these four characters there are a number of cornerstone similarities which helps to define the individual. For instance of the four every last one is a legendary commander who inspires awe and not a small amount of terror in the veteran soldiers/sailors they lead. Their force of presence is strong enough to override the collective wills of their subordinates and subsume them. This would be the ‘sultanism of the mind’ the dictatorial personality which demands obedience from all around.

Ahab achieves this by exerting his will after calling forth all of his crewmembers upon the deck. He fires the crew with promises of gold and intoxicates them grog and goes on to tell them of his murderous designs. When Stubb and Starbuck both protest he cows them with his fury into supporting him despite their objections.

In a famous scene Barnes enters a Vietnamese village and destroys it, at one point threatening to kill a child (and I’ll come back to this as it echoes Stillstorm’s ordered mind rape). The soldiers who oppose this course of action find themselves incapable of rising up against his fury.

Glanton has the benefit of have a more willing party. In the single case where someone questions his orders, that of deciding to kill a settlement of Tiguas, the only one who voices his qualms, the lone defender, is an earless fellow by the name of Toadvine and all he can muster is, “Them sons of bitches ain’t bothering nobody.” Even so he helps participate in the massacre.

Stillstorm has yet to be developed this far and admittedly the one scene where she had opportunity to exhibit her sultanism resulted in her taking a seat and allowing Tempo to politic. Despite this flaw a number of concurrences do exist between them all. Each of them have suffered a loss and or an injury in some manner to or by their mortal enemy. Ahab lost his leg, Stillstorm lost her family and was grievously injured, Barnes was reputedly shot seven times and had to deal with the loss of his men, and Glanton lost his wife and daughter to the Apaches.

Proceeding from there we then have individuals who are facing insurmountable enemies when taken as a whole. Meaning they can win a thousand battles but still lose the war. Barnes fights the NVA, Stillstorm the Umiak, Glanton the Apaches, and Ahab Moby-Dick (the malignancies).

I can see three other thematic overlaps, that being the location, the relative isolation of the participants, and the cause of movement (motivation). Without exception each commander find him/herself crossing barbarous, primitive terrains immense in size yet ultimately barren and hostile and demanding (even if that demand is not met) a moral devoid. Their retinues are always relatively meager. Glanton with his gang of 21 men hunts all of Apacheria across the Mexican deserts. Barne’s platoon hunts the VC in the jungles of Vietnam. Ahab with his Pequod hunts Moby-Dick across the world’s oceans and Stillstorm leads a squadron that hunts (interdicts) the Umiak through the void of space.

I could go on but I lost my train of thought and the old glug glug glug is starting to wear down my synapses and I’ve excuses for missed classes needing conjuring

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