Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish

Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish (Moby Dick) is the 89th chapter of Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick, in which Ishmael, the book's narrator, explains the concept of "Fast-Fish" and "Loose-Fish." If a whale, whether dead or not, is marked by a ship's crew with anything to claim it, such as a harpoon or rope, it is a "fast-fish", that is, it must be left alone by other whalers; if it is not so marked, it is a "loose-fish", which can be claimed by any ship that finds it. Ishmael refers to court cases dealing with disputes between crews of whaling ships, and then extends the concept to society and politics, questioning the ethics of the legal concept of ownership by force and the morality of possession.

Legal scholars use Ishamel's arguments to illustrate that the text of a law can be difficult to interpret and its morality unclear, and instructors teaching Moby-Dick use the chapter to illustrate one of the book's main themes.

The chapter

Ishmael opens by explaining that when the crew of a whaling ship has harpooned, wounded, or even killed a whale but for some reason is not able to take possession of it, another crew might lay claim to it. This would often lead to "vexatious and violent disputes," Ishmael goes on, creating the need for some "written or unwritten, universal, undisputed law applicable to all cases.” Whalers hit upon a simple formula:

• I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it.
• II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it.

Or, Ishmael asks "What is a Fast-Fish?" and answers "Alive or dead a fish is technically fast, when it is connected with an occupied ship or boat, by any medium at all controllable by the occupant or occupants,—a mast, an oar, a nine-inch cable, a telegraph wire, or a strand of cobweb, it is all the same."

Ishmael then describes a court case in which a whaling crew was forced to abandon both a whale and their own ship when the whale threatened their lives. Shortly after, another crew captured that whale and in addition claimed the ship as salvage. When the first crew took them to court, the judge found in favor of the second crew, who were in possession of the ship. He judge held that when the first crew abandoned the ship they gave up all property rights. Ishmael says that the decision was just, as the world as a whole favors the strong over the weak. But he moves on to a divorce case in which a former husband brought suit to lay claim to the property of his divorced and now remarried wife on the theory that she was a "fast fish," then to cases with wider and wider implications. The chapter ends with Ishmael's ironic attack on the concept of "loose fish" when it was used to justify the strong in taking possession of whatever their strength allows them to, such as men treating women or enslaved peoples as property, Great Britain taking possession of India by force, and the United States taking much of Mexico in the Mexican American War of 1848.

Thematic use in Moby-Dick

Critics point to meanings beneath the surface. Ishmael's description of the the law seems to praise it as solving whaling disputes peacefully, but the critic John Bryant points to the chapter as an example of Melville's ironic style. Melville characteristically does not have his characters "spout politics" but encourages readers to read against the grain. In "Fast-fish-Loose-Fish", Bryant continues, the "message of revolt" is not openly announced but "subsumed within the lyric strains of Ishmael's meditation." Ishmael gradually converts his initial off-handed meditation on the legal concept of possession into "a more sanguine, indeed calamitous, tirade" on such imperialistic thefts as Britain's rule of India and America's taking of Mexico, and ends with the question of whether the rights of man and the book's readers themselves are fast fish or loose.

The French critic Agnès Derail points out that the cases Ishmael refers to all give the property to whoever had it last. Ishmael condemns the principle “possession is the whole of the law”: to legitimize the right of the strongest is to legitimize all systems of exploitation. She also points out that Melville himself treated much published literary and whaling material as "loose fish" to be freely appropriated, including literary works.

In legal studies

The Moby-Dick chapter has been taught in law school classrooms as raising questions in property law and sometimes used to generally refer to legal ownership of any type of property, One law school instructor wrote that she uses "Melville's elegant and pithy meditation" on "the law's limitations" in a “rules” course like Civil Procedure. Most students believe the course principally involves memorization of the rules, so it is "often difficult for them to perceive the ambiguity of meaning and application that even some of the most apparently straightforward rules offer." They also learn the "importance of words," that "fast" does not mean "speedy", and that the text of the law is often not as important as how it is used and interpreted.

In popular culture

• The theme "loose-fish" and "fast-fish" was explored in a 2006 short story by Christine Lehner, entitled No, I am not a loose-fish and neither are you.
• The singer-song writer Laurie Anderson included "Fast Fish" in her song cycle "Songs and Stories from Moby-Dick".

References

• Bryant, John (1998), Levine, Robert S. (ed.), Moby-Dick as Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-55571-X {{citation}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

• "Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish and the Property Law of Whaling", Massachusetts Law Updates, Massachusetts Trial Court Law Libraries, 23 December 2015 {{citation}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Derail, Agnès (2019), "Property and possession in the cetological chapter 89, "Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish", of Moby-Dick"", Revue française d’études américaines, 160 (3): 10–24, doi:10.3917/rfea.160.0010 {{citation}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

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