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Mocking the "Grand Programme": Irony and After in Moby Dick Christopher S. Durer University of Wyoming The proponents of irony in Moby Dick1 — whether of isolated ironic situations, motifs, or of broader structural arrangements — are certainly not lacking, although in recent years the main critical thrusts at Moby Dick have come from different quarters. As the time interval between us and the last phases of the practitioners of New Criticism increases, it is quite possible that irony in this work will continue to lose the atractiveness that it once had for critics and readers alike. Yet, despite the inauspicious critical climate, examinations of irony in Moby Dick do show a healthy potency, and I do not feel for a moment that I am espousing a lost cause. The recent discussion of ironic strategies employed in Moby Dick breaks, broadly speaking, into two groups. The first, following in the footsteps of critics like Nathalie Wright and Lawrence Thompson,2 sees in Melville's parodie treatment of Biblical themes the most significant element of its irony, with resulting reaction against Emersonian Transcendentalism, attack on Calvinist doctrine, and intensitied pessimism and absurdism. The other group, which utilizes many of the premises of Wayne C. Booth and which looks back to Northrop Frye,3 pays particular attention to the 1.Moby Dick, or The Whale, ed. Luther S. Mansfield and Howard P. Vincent (New York: Hendricks House, 1952). All references will be to this edition. 2.Nathalia Wright, Melville's Use of the Bible (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1949) and Lawrence Thompson, Melville's Quarrel with God (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952) are both significant contributions to the study of irony in Melville and Moby Dick. Generally Wright is critically more reliable than Thompson, who in turn is more provocative. There is also considerable subsequent work on the same subject which is often indebted to Wright and Thompson, or follows a similar path. 3.Dissimilar as Booth and Frye are in many respects, both The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1961) and Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957) contain important treatments of irony in fiction, whose impact is felt in the Melville criticism. The list of recent works on Melville where irony is examined is too long to begiven here, and it includes a wide range of critical approaches. Works otherwise as different as Robert Zoellner's The Salt-Sea Mastodon: A Reading of Moby-Dick (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973) and Paul Brotdkorb's Ishmael's White World: A Phenomenological Reading of Moby Dick (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), amongmany others, may serve as examples ofthe continued interest in Melville, the ironist. 250ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW role of the narrator in Moby Dick. Critics in this latter group examine the shifts in the narrative voice and often point to the fundamental weaknesses of Melville's novelistic technique: insufficiently realized themes and incipient, but unattained, syntheses which emphasize the lack of a coherent world view, either by choice or necessity, or through a mixture of the two. Although these two critical approaches overlap at times, the first usually stresses the militant and satiric nature of Melville's irony, directed as it is at the Biblical matrix; while the other stresses its more passive, reflective, and also more diversified character stemming from the author's ingrained doubts about his own creation, his hesitancies and deliberately designed ambiguities. My purpose here is to discuss a major ironic strain in Moby Dick, the one relating to the "grand programme of Providence," and to examine its changing stances and emphases. While being indebted to numerous critics in both schools of thought, I feel nevertheless that insufficient attention has been paid to the matter of irony in Moby Dick as a whole, to the figure of Ishmael in particular as the very center of this ironic design, and to broader stylistic and cultural implications that this irony suggests. This study, then, tries to establish some new premises. It is generally recognized that the universe of Moby Dick is fatalistic, and that this condition never changes. What is not always recognized is that the attitude towards it of...

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