Note: This is the third of a series of essays on Melville’s novel.

 

Queequeg’s idol ‘tells’ him that Ishmael should select the ship they will sail on. The idol will prove a poor adviser, but off Ishmael goes. He settles on the Pequod—named, somewhat ominously, after a Massachusetts Indian tribe now extinct. It’s “a ship of the old school,” well-weathered, “a cannibal of a craft”—resembling his new friend, that way—”tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies.” Also like Queequeg, it is “a noble craft,” but unlike him “a most melancholy one.” “All noble things are touched with that”—a line recalling Napoleon’s remark, “Yes, it is sad, like greatness.” [1]  Greatness is sad because it is solitary; the great by definition must have few peers. The noble melancholy of the Pequod anticipates the character of Ahab, not Queequeg. Such a solid old craft, decorated with souvenirs of past triumphs over its prey, may attract Ishmael, giving him what will turn out to be a false sense of security. But he gives his readers no explicit reason for his decision, which may relate to his interest in seeking the origins of things.

He discovers one of the ship’s two principal owners, Captain Peleg, in his office—a wigwam on the deck, recalling the tribal name of the ship and, in the minds of some commentators, the symbol of the Democratic Party’s Tammany Hall organization (and if so intended, a reminder of ‘Young America’). The owners and officers of the Pequod are Quakers, although each has gone his separate way from the original doctrines of the sect. Peleg tests the young volunteer. He disdains Ishmael’s merchant-marine background—no preparation for whaling—and asks him why he wants to go on the hunt. To learn about whaling and to see the world, Ishmael replies, to which Peleg replies, if you want to “know what whaling is,” look at the ship captain, Ahab, who lost his leg to a whale, and if you want to see the world the way a whaler sees it, just look out at the ocean from right here, because that is what you’ll be seeing from aboard ship. Ishmael persists, and that is all Peleg really cares about: his resolve.

The other principal owner, Captain Bildad, himself has captained a whale ship. He presents a paradox: a pacifist engaged in a highly sanguinary occupation. Such men “are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance,” named “with Scripture names,” speaking with the ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ of Quaker households, but “strangely blend[ing] with these unoutgrown peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes of character, not unworthy a Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman.” Now looking back at his then-future captain, Ishmael remarks that “when these things unite in a man of greatly superior natural force, with a globular brain and a ponderous heart,” long at sea and thus far from the conventions of shore, that man comes “to think untraditionally and independently; receiving all nature’s sweet or savage impressions fresh from her own virgin, voluntary, and confiding breast.” Such a man may “learn a bold and nervous lofty language”—like Ahab, and indeed like Melville. Combined, these attributes make him “one in a whole nation’s census—a mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies.” “If either by birth or by circumstances, he have what seems a half willful over-ruling morbidness at the bottom of his nature”—intensifying the sadness of greatness, one will have “another phase of the Quaker,” indeed. The unresolvable tension between Christianity, especially in its Quaker form, and the warrior spirit, combined with intellectual brilliance, great-heartedness, experience of many civilizations that are far from Christian, exposure to the violent self-contradictions of the natural world; a gift for eloquence and therefore persuasiveness; and an obsession with death: this man may turn tyrant, but will be no ordinary tyrant. He will become, as it were, a metaphysical tyrant, a tyrant who takes his subjects on voyages of carnage. Stalin said to de Gaulle, “In the end, death is the only winner.”

In the meantime, more mundane considerations prevail. Peleg and Bildad negotiate over how little they will pay Ishmael. Bildad’s Quakerism has given itself over not to tyranny but to business. “Very probably he had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man’s religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another. This world pays dividends.” Indeed, “For a pious man, especially for a Quaker, he was certainly rather hard-hearted, to say the least”—never swearing except when he was aboard ship, commanding his men, from whom he “got an inordinate quantity of cruel, unmitigated hard work.” This is the Quakerism of Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia, grown up in what had been Puritan Massachusetts, a Quakerism that has generated in Bildad a “utilitarian character.” The sea takes men away from the metes and bounds of land, but the way one acts when at sea, when liberated from the conventions of landedness, testifies to the nature of one’s soul, and souls will differ when made manifest.

Peleg’s Quakerism, somewhat less hard, has turned toward the valetudinarian. Captain Ahab, he explains, is “a grand, ungodly, god-like man,” but a young sailor shouldn’t worry. True, he’s named for the tyrant of I Kings 16-27, a man “evil in the sight of the LORD,” a Baal-worshipper who “did more to provoke the LORD God of Israel than all the kings of Israel that were before him” (16:33), enemy of the prophet Elijah, a man who fights three battles against the Syrians and dies during the last one. But he’s “a good man,” “something like me—only there’s a good deal more of him.” Admittedly, “he was out of his mind for a spell,” but only because his wound caused him such pain. True, “ever since he lost his leg last voyage by that accursed whale, he’s been kind of moody—desperate moody, and savage sometimes; but that will all pass off.” Peleg concludes, sententiously, that “it’s better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad one,” and besides, Ahab has a “sweet, resigned” young wife and a child. “Ahab has his humanities!” Peleg will prove no better a prophet than Queequeg’s idol, although he is more loquacious. Ishmael goes away feeling “sympathy and sorrow” and also “a sort of awe”—the ‘H,’ again. His good experience with the noble savage Queequeg (better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian) and his turning away from Biblical restraints inclines him to underestimate the danger, one might think, although it is not clear that Melville so thinks.

Ishmael returns to the inn, finding Queequeg in the midst of a fast, perhaps as a precautionary act of devotion before the voyage to come. Ishmael delivers himself of a characteristically American rumination on religious tolerance. “We good Presbyterian Christians should be charitable in these things, and not fancy ourselves so vastly superior to other mortals, pagans and what not, because of their half-crazy conceits on these subjects.” Queequeg is content to worship his idol and fast; “there let him rest.” No one will argue him out of his beliefs, and truth be told “we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.” The limits Ishmael puts on toleration are killing or insulting others and injury to oneself. Wondering if the fast has injured Queequeg, he finds himself assured that his friend suffers from no dyspepsia on account of it; indeed, his only experience of stomach upset occurred back on the island, when he over-ate at a barbecue of slain enemy corpses—protein passed around “just as though these presents were so many Christmas turkeys,” which one supposes also may cause similar discomfort. Ishmael doubts that “my remarks about religion made much impression upon Queequeg,” who “seem[ed] dull of hearing on that important subject, unless considered from his own point of view,” a not uncommon trait among the pious. Also, he “did not more than one third understand me,” perhaps because of the language barrier. He finally “looked at me with a sort of condescending concern and compassion, as though he thought it a great pity that such a sensible young man should be so hopelessly lost to evangelical pagan piety.”

As for Quakers Peleg and Bildad, their theological concerns prove simpler than Ishmael’s; they overcome any religious scruples about signing Queequeg as a harpooneer when they see how well he can throw his weapon. Indeed, when Bildad offers Queequeg a Bible tract, Peleg admonishes him: “Pious harpooneers never make good voyagers—it takes the shark out of ’em.” Heaven forfend. For his part, Bildad corrects Peleg’s suggestion that he and Ahab must have thought of death and God’s judgment when in storms at sea; they thought of what actions would save their lives and the lives of their crew. For these Quakers, physical concerns readily supersede spiritual ones.

For his part, Ishmael remains in the grip of his own wishful thinking. Back in Nantucket, before the final boarding, he is approached by a man calling himself Elijah—the name of the Biblical prophet who opposes Ahab and Jezebel—who issues vague warnings about Captain Ahab. “I pronounced him in my heart, a humbug,” a false prophet. Still, Ishmael has his doubts about “committ[ing] myself this way to so long a voyage without once laying my eyes on the man who was to be the absolute dictator of it,” but “when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself.” And so he “said nothing, and tried to think nothing.”

Returning to the ship, he and Queequeg learn that Ahab has boarded the boat. They set sail on Christmas day, listening to Bildad sing a hymn “full of hope and fruition.” Bulkington is on board, too, and Ishmael pays retrospective tribute to his now-dead shipmate, who preferred “the open independence of the sea” to “the treacherous, slavish shore.” “As in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!” In a chapter titled “The Advocate,” Ishmael expands this thought by making a sort of lawyer’s case in defense of whaling. Yes, it is a butchering business, but so is war, and we honor “Martial Commanders”; whalers show the greatest courage, for “What are the comprehensible terrors of men compared to the interlinked terrors of God!” Commerce, discovery, the political liberation of Latin America, the light that glows in religious shrines, the Kantian-philosophic prospect of world peace by dint of mutual understanding of civilized and savage peoples—all these great goods, real and prospective, owe a debt to whaling, a vocation praised by great authors from Job to Edmund Burke. The whale has even been written in the stars, as seen in the constellation Cetus. Don’t take your hat off in the presence of the Czar, but rather to Queequeg. And as for the life of the mind, “A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.” The thought of Bulkington puts Ishmael in an aristocratic frame of mind, and the loquacity which has followed overwhelms his reservations about subjecting himself to the regime of a tyrant. His rhetoric has persuaded its principal audience, himself. As for Bulkington, commentators have wondered why he never opposes the rule of Ahab, as aristocrats have opposed tyrants. Neither Ishmael nor Melville explains this, but there may have been a hint in the earlier chapter in which Bulkington was introduced. At the inn, he does not attempt to rule his unruly and vulgar comrades; he could, because when he leaves they follow him. But he does leave, likely tired of their carousing. Bulkington’s aristocratic disdain for ‘the vulgus,’ the people, may hold him back from acting to protect them, from moving decisively against tyranny in a regime that valorizes the people.

No tyrant can rule alone; he needs not a real aristocracy but a pseudo-aristocracy that will enforce his commands, require of him no Magna Carta. Ishmael sketches portraits of Ahab’s three officers: the first mate, Starbuck; the second mate, Stubb; the third mate, Flask. A Quaker from Nantucket, “a long, earnest man,” “a staid, steadfast man,” Starbuck proves “uncommonly conscientious for a seaman,” “endued with deep natural reverence”—perhaps the Quaker “inner light.” And a prudent one: “I will have no man in my boat who is not afraid of a whale,” apparently meaning “not only that the most reliable and useful courage is that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.” His nature inclines him not only to the reverence befitting a Quaker but to what might be described as an Aristotelian esteem for the metrion, the moral center between impassioned extremes. Having lost his father and his brother to the sea, having a wife and child on shore, he is “no crusader after perils; for him courage was not a sentiment; but a thing simply useful to him, and always at hand upon all mortally practical occasions.” To Starbuck, whaling is a business, as it is to Peleg and Bildad; younger than they, he means to take risks only if he needs to take them in the course of getting the job done. Why, then, does he serve Ahab? It is “not in reasonable nature,” Ishmael acutely observes, “that a man so organized, and with such terrible experiences and remembrances as he had,” not to have “engendered an element in him, which, under suitable circumstances, would break out from its confinement, and burn all his courage up.” Starbuck has physical courage, the virtue between cowardice and rashness, but he “cannot withstand those more terrific, because more spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man,” an Ahab. Ishmael associates Starbuck’s virtues with the nobility of human nature itself, and therefore with “democratic dignity,” with “our divine equality” bestowed by the hand of “God,” by which he means “the Spirit of Equality, which hast spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind,” raising men like John Bunyan, Cervantes, and Andrew Jackson from prison, pauperdom, and the common people. But Starbuck lacks the spiritual courage of Bunyan, the wit of Cervantes, and the vigor of Jackson.

Second mate Stubb displays a different sort of courage. “Good-humored, easy, and careless, he presided over his whale-boat as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his crew all invited guests.” He lacks Starbuck’s prudence. “What he thought of death itself, there is no telling. Whether he ever thought of it at all, might be a question.” Later he will say that “Think not, is my eleventh commandment” (with “sleep when you can” being the twelfth); thoughtlessness serves the tyrant’s purposes although, unlike Ishmael, Stubb never needs to struggle to suppress thought. Nor does he much fear God, as his “almost impious good-humor” carries him along, cheerfully puffing on his omnipresent pipe. Third mate Flask differs from both Stubb and Starbuck in being more thumotic; a lesser Ahab, he “somehow seemed to think that the great Leviathans had personally and hereditarily affronted him,” and so he makes war against them, although without Ahab’s grimness.

Each mate has a harpooneer serving under him when the whale boats drop into the sea to hunt a whale. Starbuck has Queequeg. Stubb has Tashtego, an Indian from Martha’s Vineyard, a man of the original stock of Nantucket whalers. Flask has Ahasuerus Daggoo, a giant African who has “retained all his barbaric virtues.” Ishmael observes that this division of labor, with the “native Americans” or white citizens ruling the non-white foreigners—the one group “provid[ing] the brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying the muscles”—reflects the American workforce generally. And like many Americans, the workers too are “isolatoes”—on the whaling ships literally so, as most of them are Islanders. America consists of isolatoes, albeit “federated along one keel,” as the largely self-governing American states are federated. In this America, there is one anomaly, a person who doesn’t fit in to the purposes of the voyage. This is “black Little Pip,” a “poor Alabama boy,” whose only apparent function is to beat a tambourine. He is a sort of mascot; he might be taken for an American slave, except that he does no useful work. In the end he will play the role of fool to Ahab’s spiritually maddened tyrant/hero.

As the ship sails south, the warmth of the air finally brings the real ruler into sight, on deck. “His whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini’s cast Perseus.” Bronze is the symbol of God’s judgment of sin; Ahab will attempt to judge and punish the Judge. Cellini’s sculpture depicts the hero holding the head of Medusa, whom he has slain. After killing Medusa, whose gaze turned men into stone, Perseus rescued the princess Andromeda from the sea-monster, Cetus; he disposes of a rival suitor by holding Medusa’s head aloft, petrifying the man. Ahab would also slay the monster, but as a tyrant it is his own gaze that petrifies men, enabling him to rule them. He is marked (like Cain?) with a thin scar from head to toe, possibly inflicted “in an elemental strife at sea” or perhaps a birth-mark—the claims about it differ. No one disputes the cause of his other deformity, the leg-stump left over from, indeed, an elemental strife at sea, his fight with the White Whale. His gaze radiates “an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable willfulness, in [its] fixed and fearless, forward dedication.” This notwithstanding, “some considerating touch of humanity was in him,” as he avoided the quarter-deck when the sailors slept below, so as not to disturb them with the rapping of his whalebone peg-leg on the planks. Yet on one occasion, when “the mood was on him too deep for regardings,” he forgot; second mate Stubb emerges to ask deferentially if his captain might find a way to muffle the sound. Ahab calls him a dog, orders him back to the kennel; the offended Stubb protests, so Ahab calls him ten times a donkey, a mule, and an ass, whereupon the hapless subordinate retreats to nurse his wound. While Ahab throws away his pipe, a thing “meant for sereneness” and more fit for a Stubb than “a great lord of Leviathans,” Stubb falls asleep and dreams.

The dream-chapter is titled “Queen Mab.” Stubb dreams that Ahab kicked him with his ivory leg. An old merman appears, who comforts him by saying he was “kicked by a great man”—an honor, and one which will make a wise man out of him, too, if he understands that trying to kick back against a great man is like kicking a pyramid. Queen Mab, the Celtic name for the Faerie Queen, appears in at least two works of English literature Melville likely read. In Romeo and Juliet, lovestruck Romeo begins to tell cynical Malvolio of a dream he had. Malvolio cuts him short with a mocking speech about dreams: Queen Mab supposedly brings them to us, but in cold fact they depict our own wishes; the lawyer dreams of fees, the warrior of battlefield glory, and so on. If Melville alludes to this speech, he classifies Stubb’s dream with the wishful thinking that brings Ishmael and soon many others to submit themselves to the tyrant’s rule.

Queen Mab also appears as one of two main characters in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s early narrative poem of that name. The story there has nothing to do with Stubb’s dream, but much to do with the character of Ahab. The poem is a paean to antagonism for the God of the Bible, beginning with its epigraph from Voltaire, “Ecrasez l’infame!” Queen Mab casts a spell on the corpse of a dead maiden, raising her “Spirit.” She brings her far above the world to show her the vastness of the cosmos: “He who rightly feels [the universe’s] infinity and grandeur is in no danger of seduction from the falsehoods of religious systems, or of deifying the principle of the universe.” Such mere systems are too limited to comprehend the true infinity. All religions, but especially “the childish mummeries of the Jews” and, worse still, Christianity, cause most or even all evils on earth, including war, tyranny, selfishness, money-getting commerce, and slavery. Religion “peoplest earth with demons, hell with men, and heaven with slaves!” However, in a Spinozist or perhaps Hegelian turn, Queen Mab assures the Spirit that the true God, “the universal Spirit,” “the Spirit of Nature” with its “all-sufficing Power, Necessity,” guides us toward a better world. What men call God is only the personification of the unknown; what we need to know is that all is power, including the human mind, which has no free-will, and therefore cannot sin. There is no such thing as justice, “neither good nor evil in the universe”; all is utility, and therefore there is no reason for hatred or contempt. There is no “creative Deity,” separate from His Creation, holy, but “a pervading Spirit coeternal with the universe.”

Therefore, “Ahasuerus, rise!” Queen Mab commands. In the Old Testament, Ahasuerus is a king of Persia, traditionally considered an example of the fool by medieval rabbis. In medieval legend, Ahasuerus is one name for the doorman at Pontius Pilate’s estate who supposedly taunted Jesus on the way to the Cross. Cursed to “rive the earth from pole to pole” (in Shelley’s telling) the Wandering Jew will not rest until the Second Coming. For Shelley, Ahasuerus is a hero who says “the tyrants invented cruel torments, but did not kill me.” The Spirit asks the risen Ahasuerus, “Is there a God?” Yes, he replies: a God of malice, his Son “a parish demagogue” who brought not peace but a sword “on earth to satiate with the blood of truth and freedom his malignant soul.” A fit subject for Milton’s Satan, who would rather rule in Hell than serve in Heaven, Ahasuerus prefers “Hell’s freedom to the servitude of heaven.” In one of his extensive prose endnotes, Shelley claims that the real Jesus was a human reformer who died because he was a reformer at the hands of the religious and secular powers of the day.

Queen Mab describes an ‘end of History’: the “paradise of peace” where “Reason and passion cease to combat.” There, the disease of madness will be readily cured by the right diet. The Spirit returns to earth, reunited with her body in a Hegelian synthesis of the spiritual and the material, overcoming the fatal and false disjunction of these, enforced by the religions.

Ahasuerus Daggoo has indeed riven the earth from pole to pole, but more pertinently Ahab, whose name’s first three letters are identical, and who has wandered even longer, will be seen to strike against what he takes to be the malignity of Being symbolized by the White Whale. Sure enough, Ahab interrupts the conversation in which Stubb tells his dream to Flask, shouting, “Look sharp, all of ye! There are whales hereabouts! If ye see a white one, split your lungs for him!” It is Ahab’s first command to the whole crew. Stubb doesn’t like it (“Ahab has that that’s bloody on his mind”) but he tells Flask to keep mum. He won’t cross the tyrant again. Does he thereby submit to reality, or only to the more comprehensive dream, and to the grander but fatal dreamer?

 

NOTE

1. Trained as a lawyer, Pierre-Louis Roederer read and admired Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. He specialized in commercial and tax law, serving as a Council of State and Senator under Napoleon. Walking with the Emperor at the gloomy Tuileries Palace, Roederer ventured to say that the place was sad. “Yes, it is sad, like greatness,” Napoleon replied. Charles de Gaulle interpreted this to mean that the great man, in taking supreme responsibility for a battle, or for the ship of state, necessarily isolates himself from those who do not take such responsibility. If that is what Napoleon meant, in associating greatness with noble melancholy he separated himself from, and elevated himself above, the disciple of Smith, for whom commerce betokened the natural sociality of human nature. Ahab will soon separate himself from the cheerful, businesslike Quakerism of his second mate, Mr. Stubb.

 

 

Note: This is the second of a series of commentaries on Melville’s novel.

 

Ishmael intends to sail from Nantucket, “the great original” of American whaling, where local Amerindians first ventured on to the water to hunt Leviathan. In returning to the point of whaling’s genesis in what would become the United States of his lifetime, Ishmael reminds himself and his readers that the hunt predates the arrival of Europeans here. The hunt began before the ‘age of exploration,’ modernity, capitalism. The hunt is human, not time-bound or ‘culture’-bound.

It is December and it is cold. He stops in New Bedford, another whaling town, to spend the night before proceeding to Nantucket. His search for cheap lodging on the freezing night takes on a boundaries-pushing, slightly phantasmagorical character, as he wanders from hotel to hotel, even stumbling into a black church, where pilgrim and parishioners behold one another with mutual surprise and incomprehension. Arriving finally at The Spouter Inn, he remarks the irony of the proprietor’s name, Peter Coffin; the rock of this establishment hardly invokes eternal life. (As events come to pass at the end of the yarn, a coffin will nonetheless save him, as this Coffin saves him from frostbite.) Ishmael reminds himself of Lazarus, the beggar at the doorstep of the rich man in Luke 16, self-pityingly imagining that even Lazarus did not need to suffer through a freezing New England winter. But he immediately recalls himself to his mission and enters the inn.

There he sees an oil painting done in dark, Turneresque shades, seemingly an attempt by the artist “to delineate chaos bewitched,” to control chaos rather in the way of the witches on the blasted heath in Macbeth. Sublime if not beautiful, the painting “froze you to it”—doing for the mind what a Massachusetts winter does to the body—”till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what [it] meant.” Ishmael cannot be sure, but he comes to “a final theory of my own,” that the picture represented a ship sailing around Cape Horn in a hurricane, with “an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft… in the enormous act of impaling itself upon the three mastheads.” Destruction of both ship and whale, hunter and hunted: chaos come again, as a Shakespearean character might say. Having reached one of those boundary lines he had determined to test, “I resolved to spend the rest of the evening as a looker-on.”

A crew newly arrived from a whaling expedition is the first thing to see. As the men drink and caper at the bar, Ishmael notices a man named Bulkington, a Southerner; he too separates himself from the company and looks on. He discreetly withdraws from the scene altogether; when his mates notice his absence, they go in search of him. They respect him, perhaps as a natural ruler or aristocrat. He will sign on with the Pequod expedition, but will attract little notice on that ship, which will remain firmly in the grip of a tyrant. In socially egalitarian or democratic America, aristocrats natural and artificial do not rule. There is a place for them, sometimes, in small portions of American society, but they will not rule the New America.

Landlord Coffin would rent him a room and bed, both to be shared with a harpooner who, Coffin cheerfully reports, is at the moment out trying to sell the last shrunken head he had acquired on a voyage to New Zealand—New Bedford being a commercial town, after all, and America a commercial republic. (It should not go unnoticed that commercial transactions require not only a willing seller but a willing buyer, and Queequeg has been selling shrunken heads to the local Christians.) He assures Ishmael that the bed was his marital bed, big enough for two. Unassured by the arrangement, Ishmael retires, awakened by the sight of Queequeg, tattooed from head to foot, surely “some abominable savage or other shipped aboard of a whaleman in the south Seas, and so landed in this Christian country.” Foreshadowing his encounters with several Quakers in the months to come, Ishmael shudders: “I quaked to think of it.” He calms himself somewhat by thinking, “It’s only his outside. A man can be honest in any sort of skin.” This doesn’t quite work, as fear returns; yet, he insists, “the parent of fear” is ignorance. If the Bible teaches that fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, Ishmael counters that ignorance is the parent of fear; hence his boundary-pushing. Indeed, these chapters of the novel show Ishmael succeeding in overcoming fear, and getting “on friendly terms” with the tattooed, idolatrous, shrunken-head-selling cannibal with whom he will spend the night.

After some mutual alarm and a timely intervention by Mr. Coffin, Queequeg takes the measure of his new roommate and commands him to get into the bed. “He really did this in not only a civil but a really kind and charitable way”; accordingly, Ishmael tells himself, “the man’s a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.” Having “never slept better in his life,” Ishmael awakens to find himself in “the comical predicament” of having sleeping Queequeg’s massive arms around him—a bit more of a marital bed than either had planned. This recalls Ishmael to a childhood incident when he was sent to bed by his stepmother as punishment and dreamed that “a supernatural hand was placed in mine.” Real or imagined, the sensation, puzzles him “to this day.” But the current dilemma is natural enough, and after finally awakening his bedmate he continues his role as looker-on, as Queequeg “and his ways were well worth unusual regarding.” He concludes that Queequeg is no savage but rather “just civilized enough to show off his outlandishness in the strangest possible manner,” dressing himself from the head down, for example, and shaving himself with the edge of his harpoon’s steel head. They go down to breakfast, where the landlord regards him with the amusement of a congenial prankster. Ishmael doesn’t mind: “A good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing.” No need for wounded pride at being laughed at. “The man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for” an aphorism equally applicable to Queequeg and Ishmael himself. His future tyrant-captain, Ahab, will sometimes laugh, but never at himself. The whalemen eat their breakfast in silence, punctuated by Queequeg’s spearing of lightly-cooked steaks with his harpoon.

Thus cheered, Ishmael finds more comedy in the streets of New Bedford, too, where he strolls later that morning. It turns out that Queequeg isn’t so unusual, here, as “in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners; savages outright, many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh.” “Still more curious, certainly more comical,” are the young New Englanders in town to sign on for a whaling voyage, “all athirst for gain and glory in the fishery.” Here, the Americans are in some ways as outlandish as the savages—in a way, even more so, as they have yet to go to sea. Americans and foreigners alike contrast with the men who invest in the ships, men as wealthy as any in America, whose wealth enables them to “superinduce bright terraces of flowers upon the barren refuse rocks thrown aside at creation’s final day.” Ishmael had arrived on Saturday night, just before the Sabbath commemorating God’s day of rest after creation, and now sees the seeming omnipotence of human art to transform that creation. Foreign savages, green boys from the Green Mountains, and prosperous merchants all seek the conquest of the nature that gives them little to work with. Ishmael will watch them try; Ahab will channel their energies into another, wilder quest. And so to church.

Ishmael enters the Whaleman’s Chapel. The Chapel is for whalemen, their wives, and their widows, who sit apart from one another, “as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable.” This is the second appearance in the novel of human beings closed off from one another—”isolatoes,” as Ishmael later will call them—the silent sailors at breakfast being the first. Awaiting the preacher, the parishioners solemnly read plaques on the wall memorializing dead sailors, each reader recalling her own dead, or considering his own possible death at sea. They find no consolation in what they read, only more intense isolation in suffering or in fear. Aside from Ishmael, the only one present who pays attention to the others is Queequeg, who sits with “a wondering gaze of incredulous curiosity in his countenance”; Queequeg, a ‘wonderer’ as well as a ‘wanderer,’ in this resembles Ishmael. In his case, however, wondering without believing comes from an inability to read; reading physically isolates the reader from his surroundings, including other people, and, it will transpire, reading pious inscriptions and even the Bible can prove isolating, too. “What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave.”

In all this Ishmael detects contradiction in Christian souls. If we really believe that the dead now dwell “in unspeakable bliss,” why do we mourn them? Either our faith is weak or the Biblical promise of immortality is an illusion. “But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope”—perhaps the hope of seeing the departed loved one, again. Does Faith bring eternal life, through God’s grace? The Biblical Ishmael is the one not among those chosen by God, and Melville’s Ishmael will fare no better.

Ishmael thinks, “the same fate may be thine,” namely, death at sea. “But somehow I grew merry again,” not through faith in salvation in God, but through nature conceived Socratically. “Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death.” If “what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance,” and if our bodies prevent us from clearly seeing “things spiritual,” then “my body is but the lees of my better being”; when death takes my body, it won’t take me. Death is like a wound that punctures a barrel, releasing the wine. Death will “stave” my soul; the pun on “save” also includes a double thought on the barrel, inasmuch as staving refers not only to barrels but to ships, which sink when staved, bringing soul-liberating death to those on board.

The whalemen call the preacher “Father” Mapple, respecting him as Catholics would respect a priest, although he is a Protestant. The Whaleman’s Chapel refers not only to the congregation but also to him, as he has hunted whales. Neither Ishmael nor Melville himself could dismiss him as a landlubber, a man clueless concerning the harsh and chaotic sea and its denizens. On land, he still retains the habits of a sailor, arriving after walking to his church in the freezing rain, little concerned with his own comfort. ‘I am your captain, the Bible our orders, God our general,’ his demeanor seems to say.

Before recalling the sermon, Ishmael describes two more features of the church. One is a painting. In contrast to the entirely dark painting at the Spouter-Inn, this picture shows an angel with a radiant, sun-like face, overlooking a ship. The guardian angel replaces the destroying angel, the whale hovering above the masts of the ship. The other feature is the pulpit, modeled on a mainmast, complete with a rope-ladder. Ishmael understands this symbolically: “the world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete: and the pulpit is its prow.” Thus the pulpit leads the world.” Father Mapple offers Ishmael an alternative captaincy to that of Ahab.

The service begins with a hymn. American literature scholar David H. Battenfeld identified this as an adaptation of a hymn sung in the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church, the church Melville had attended with his mother. [1] But the hymn sung in the Whaleman’s Chapel has all references to Jesus removed. Father Mapple does indeed speak for God the Father, not the Son, offering an interpretation of the Old Testament story of Jonah and the whale. There, Jonah (whose name means “dove,” carrier of messages) disobeys God, who commands him to go to Nineveh and prophesy against “their wickedness” (Jonah 1.1). Contradicting the meaning of his name, Jonah disobeys, paying ship passage to Tarshish, instead. God sends a storm; the sailors interrogate Jonah and learn that he is fleeing God. They call out to God to spare them, as they are innocents. To appease God, they throw Jonah into the sea, where he’s swallowed by “a great fish” (1.16). From the belly of the beast Jonah prays for deliverance; God does deliver him and he proceeds obediently to Nineveh. Far from being killed, Jonah succeeds; the Ninevites repent, and God repents of His intention to destroy them. Angry with God for sparing the evil Ninevites, Jonah relents when God teaches him to discriminate between the good and the evil, the innocent and the guilty. Not all of the Ninevites are guilty, and the many who were have now repented of their evil ways.

Father Mapple interprets the yarn. “If we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the harness of obeying God consists.” Like the Ninevites, Jonah much prefers to disobey God and follow his own lead. “Jonah sought to flee world-wide from God”; he might resemble some of the sailors, indeed Ishmael, although unlike Jonah Ishmael does not pay his own way. Mapple says that the fugitive Jonah’s conscience provides his first punishment, torturing him spiritually while aboard the ship. But he confesses to the sailors. They initially show him mercy, turning first to prayer and only then to action, when God chooses not to answer their prayer. Mapple adds to the Biblical account with a vivid description of Jonah sinking into the sea and the jaws of the whale, then describes Jonah’s prayer from the whale’s belly as repentant, not self-justifying. “And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment.” In retelling and embellishing the Biblical yarn, Mapple exhibits “an aspect of the deepest yet manliest humility.” He could never be considered a poor-spirited or ‘effeminate’ Christian of the sort Machiavelli derided.

Mapple then draws his final lessons from the yarn: “preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood”; and, turning now to himself especially, “woe to the pilot of the living God who slights it” by succumbing to the “charms” of the world instead of adhering to “Gospel duty.” “Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appall! Woe to him whose name is more to him than goodness! Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor! Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation!” Such a pilot, such a seeker of popularity and honor, a man who would lie to save his life, fails to follow the example of “the great Pilot Paul,” eventually a martyr for God. Such a false pilot, “while preaching to others is himself a castaway!” Father Mapple is preaching to himself, examining his own soul and finding it sinful. He is, after all, a man who ascends to a mast-like pulpit, and evidently makes no objection to being called “Father” by his listeners. He attempts to rally his spirits, saying that not misery but “Delight—top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven.” He tells his congregation and perhaps most of all himself that the patriot of the Kingdom of God will find joy, unlike the patriot of any kingdom of man. He blesses the congregation; they depart, “and he was left alone in the place.” However impressive and moving, the Bible message has united neither the congregants with one another nor the messenger with his congregants. Is this a dilemma following from the absence of Christ from the sermon, or does it follow, in Ishmael’s and perhaps Melville’s judgment, from the radically anti-natural teaching of the Bible itself?

Ishmael returns to the Spouter-Inn to find Queequeg, like Father Mapple, “quite alone,” having left the Whaleman’s Chapel before the benediction. He busies himself with his idol. Although Ishmael finds Queequeg’s tattooed face hideous, “his countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul.” Honesty, courage, nobility, and liberty: his head “reminded me of General Washington’s head”; “Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.” The underlying nature of a human type shines out from the tattoos of convention, custom. Initially “overawing” (the ‘H’, again), “savages” or men close to nature exhibit “calm self-collectedness of simplicity” evincing “a Socratic wisdom.” Queequeg is a man of nature, a sort of philosopher, in contrast with Father Mapple, whose God commands us to resist our (fallen) nature. Thousands of miles from his home, “thrown among people as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter,” Queequeg nonetheless “seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to himself. Surely this was a touch of fine philosophy….” Has Father Mapple achieved the delight he hopes for? Or the serenity?

On this cold December night, Ishmael “felt a melting in me.” “No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it.” Ishmael finds himself redeemed not by Mapple’s religion but by Queequeg’s philosophic character, “speaking a nature in which there lurked no civilized hypocrisies and bland deceits.” He decides, “I’ll try a pagan friend… since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy.” They “left as cronies,” “naturally and unbiddenly”—that is, with no need for commands divine or human. Queequeg announced that “henceforth we were married,” meaning, “we were bosom friends.” He presents him with the shrunken head and half his money as gifts—charitable by nature, Christian without Christianity. Ishmael syllogizes theologically: surely the “magnanimous God of heaven and earth” could not possibly “be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood,” Queequeg’s idol. Given that worship is to do the will of God, and that “God wills to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me,” since Queequeg is “my fellow man,” why would I not want to reciprocate his attendance at a Christian religious service with my assistance in kindling the shavings he burns in homage to his “innocent little idol”? He even lets Queequeg smoke in bed: “How elastic our stiff prejudices become when love comes to bend them.” [2].

In a further Socratic-Platonic touch, the natural philosopher turns out also to be a potential king, the son of a Pacific island chief and nephew of a high priest. He left the island to “learn among the Christians”—to learn both their arts and their religion. “But alas! the practices of whalemen soon convinced him that even Christians could be both miserable and wicked; infinitely more so, than all his father’s heathens.” Going against nature can produce prodigies of both good and evil; Scripture stokes the grandest ambitions. Ishmael (and Melville) make it plain, through Queequeg’s testimony, that religious customs are indeed customary, conventional—a characteristic teaching of the philosophers. Ishmael sets himself against convention, against the ways of landsmen: “How I spurned the turnpike earth!—that common highway all over dented with the marks of slavish heels and hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea….” Philosophy and (aristocratic) morality both beckon him, as he chooses the natural friendship offered by Queequeg against the unnatural, isolating revealed religion of Father Mapple; fraternity wins his soul, not fatherly authority. As they are ferried from New Bedford to Nantucket, their fellow passengers “marveled that two fellow beings should be so companionable, as though a white man were anything more dignified than a whitewashed negro”; natural equality undergirds natural friendship. It is now no wonder that Jesus had been excluded from the hymn at the Whaleman’s Inn: The brotherly, down-to-earth Person of God who obeys His Father’s command to die on the Cross combines fraternity and the authority of fatherhood, calling into question the dichotomy Melville wants to establish.

 

Notes

1. David H. Battenfeld: “The Source of the Hymn in Moby-Dick.” American Literature, XXVII (November 1955) 393-396. The Norton Critical Edition of 1967 reprints the article on pp. 607-610, but it was removed from subsequent editions.
2. Given the imagery of marriage Melville deploys to describe the friendship of Ishmael and Queequeg, several commentators have alleged that their relationship is sexual. The method deployed to consider the evidence for this is dubious, consisting of taking several passages in ways that confuse intimacy with sex. What Melville actually does, very characteristically, is to leave things in a state of ambiguity, suggesting a sense of testing if not crossing the boundaries, very much in the manner that Ishmael valorized at the beginning of his yarn.

 

 

 

Herman Melville: Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Edited by Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1967.

 

Note: This is the first of a series of commentaries on Melville’s novel. The plan is to follow the story from beginning to end, retracing the voyage recounted by the story-teller, Ishmael.

 

On the frontispiece, Melville quotes John Milton’s Paradise Lost: “Leviathan, hugest of living creatures,” embodies a double paradox; he “seems a moving land” and “his breath spouts out a sea.” Land and water, breath and water: These are the terms of God’s creation in Genesis. Turning immediately to the “etymology” of the word “whale,” Melville quotes the English geographer, chaplain, and writer Richard Hakluyt, present at the genesis of the English settlement of North America as a promoter of the Jamestown colony; like Hakluyt, Melville writes of navigations and discoveries. Like Hakluyt, does Melville also intend to be a founder in the ‘New World’? Hakluyt writes, “While you take in hand to school others, and teach them by what name a whale-fish is to be called in our own tongue, leaving out, through ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh up the signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true.”

Why so? The letter ‘H’ in Hebrew signifies “behold,” referring to the way we hold our breath when gazing at (for example) the hugest of living creatures. God’s prophets often tell His people to behold in awe the works of God. For His part, God gives life to the clay that becomes man by breathing into it. More still, according to learned rabbis the word haishim refers to the fiery inner core or fiery “souls” of the atoms that compose the world God created. Above all, the Tetragrammaton, which stands for God’s unspeakable name, consists of the letters YHVH; further Hashem means the Name.  Melville’s book will ask us to behold water, breath, and fire, along with the massive ‘land’ or matter which moves like the earth in an earthquake, killing its would-be conquerors and sending them, as the old saying goes, to a watery grave. In the Book of Genesis, the Creator-God separates chaotic water from stable land; for Milton, as a “moving land” with breath spouting water, Leviathan challenges or seems to challenge the principle of separation God follows throughout his act of creation—beginning with the separateness of Creator from created, but continuing to the separation of land from water and the differentiation of the many kinds of created things in His creation and even the differentiation of his human creations into male and female. The “Satan” or enemy himself separates himself from God, exiles himself from God’s kingdom and attempts to ruin His creation by provoking God to do what Satan himself lacks the power to do: bring death to the human ruler of the paradise within that creation. The Romantics in philosophy and poetry often admired Satan, one of them going so far as to say that Milton was on the devil’s side without knowing it.

Whose side is Melville on? He confided to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne that his book’s secret motto was Ego non baptiso te in nomine patrie, sed in nomine diaboli—an invocation his Captain Ahab pronounces while baptizing his harpoon with the blood of his three pagan harpooneers. [1] Melville could let Hawthorne in on the secret, having read Hawthorne’s short story, “Young Goodman Brown,” which culminates in the calamity of the protagonist’s satanic baptism; Hawthorne, too, understood the dark side of human life better than their New England and New York City literary contemporaries. Yet Ahab loses his battle with the Whale, and only Ishmael survives to tell us. What does Ishmael want his readers to learn from his tale? What does Melville want them to learn? Both Ishmael and Melville have taught school, even as Hakluyt would teach teachers, in his books, so they are no strangers to the authority of teaching, with its precepts and commands.

Melville next provides us with a list of eighty quotes or “extracts” from various authors ranging from Moses to Thomas Hobbes to Thomas Jefferson to Nantucket balladeers. The Hebrew Bible tells us that God created the whale and also will punish it with death; Hobbes calls the modern state, made by human “art,” the “great Leviathan”—”an artificial man” who rules absolutely; Jefferson describes the Spermacetti Whale naturalistically, as “an active, fierce animal” which “requires vast address and boldness in the fishermen” who sail out of Nantucket to kill it; the whalers themselves combine Hobbes and Jefferson, singing of “the rare old Whale” as “a giant in might” of the ocean, “where might is right.” The whale is natural, not artificial, but like Hobbes’s Leviathan a king, “King of the boundless sea.” In Hobbes, the artificial mighty Leviathan, the modern state, imposes order on the chaos of the state of nature, composed of atoms; for the republican Jefferson, who most emphatically disbelieves that might makes right and that nature lacks moral laws, the men who hunt the whale are the heroes. Without saying so, Melville will address the Jeffersonian founding of the United States of America, with its grounding in natural right, the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. He has in mind a new American Founding.

Melville titles his first chapter “Loomings,” accustoming his readers to his Shakespearean fondness for puns, and thereby his fondness for Shakespearean language and themes. “Loomings” means portents; dangers loom. “Loomings” also mean the weaved garments produced on looms, symbolic of Fate’s work if not God’s. Looms are for yarn; this sailor’s yarn or story begins, famously, “Call me Ishmael.” That sentence does not declare, nor does it question, nor does it request; it commands. Ruling, and therefore politics, will loom large here.

Why choose “Ishmael” as the name one wants to be called, at the outset of the yarn? Genesis 16 relates events leading to the founding of Israel, God’s covenant with Abram, thereafter Abraham or “father of many nations.” The Flood, or the return of chaotic water over all the land, wiped the increasingly evil world of post-lapsarian humanity away; God set down the Noachide Commandments to govern all men. But the covenant with Abraham legislates for a particular regime, the regime for God’s chosen people, a people commanded to do and to be better than the general run of nations. The problem is that Abraham’s wife is sterile. She gives Abram her maid as a second wife, to enable him to generate a child, to continue his people. Hagar—another ‘H’ name—wants nothing to do with the plan, but an angel of God persuades her to consummate the marriage, promising that her son—to be named Ishmael, meaning, “The LORD has heard thy affliction”—will be the first of a multitude. More ominously, Ishmael “will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him.” His people will not be the children of the Covenant, the children of Abraham and Sarah born after God makes Sarah able to bear children, despite her great age. At the same time, God promises that Ishmael will beget twelve princes as the progenitor of “a great nation.”

The English settlers in New England regarded themselves as founders of regimes governed by the laws of the Covenant. They were descendants of Abraham through Israel, not through Ishmael. It should be noticed that the Jamestown settlement Hakluyt assisted in founding was not so governed; rather, it was a mercantile establishment. If not of Israel, then, necessarily of Ishmael. The United States of America, the American people, formed a tensile combination of Israelite and Ishmaelite characters. Melville’s Ishmael journeys to New Bedford, Massachusetts on his way to Nantucket—an Ishmael in Israelite territory but now partly given over to the commercial purposes of the whaling industry. To what extent can the awe-inspiring whale be made merely an object of acquisition and trade? In finding out, this Ishmael will learn things Americans who stay on land do not know.

Melville had learned those things on his own whaling voyages in the early 1840s. He returned to an America whose intellectual and political classes saw a generational shift in political intentions. The “Young America” movement gathered such prominent political figures as presidents James K. Polk and Franklin Pierce and Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas. Following the call of the writer John L. O’Sullivan for America’s “Manifest Destiny” to rule the remainder of the middle of the North American continent, Young America, while staying within the dominant Democratic Party, combined the longstanding Democratic policy of free trade, low tariffs, with the Whig Party policy of internal improvements—infrastructure designed to hasten the advance of Americans to the Pacific coast. The Young Americans attempted to settle the slavery controversy that threatened the Union by valorizing popular sovereignty in a way the American Founders had not done. The Founders’ regime located sovereignty in the people, but the people must adhere to the greater sovereignty of the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God; by proposing that newly-acquired territories west of the Mississippi River vote slavery up or down, then be admitted as new states of the Union on the basis of that majority decision, Senator Douglas and New America generally were “blowing out the moral lights around us,” in the words of Abraham Lincoln in 1858 by arguing that majority rule, a form of might, not moral law, made right. But the boundless sea, where might makes right, can be ruled only by Leviathan, the mightiest of the mighty. This would bring America to Hobbes and absolute monarchy in principle, if not immediately in practice.

Melville initially supported Young America, publishing in its main literary journal, the Democratic Review. [2] But by the time he wrote Moby-Dick he had become increasingly disenchanted; in his subsequent novel, a parody of the life of Jesus titled Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, he would deride literary New America as too genteel, too ‘idealistic’ about ‘the democracy,’ the people of America. His Ishmael, in but no longer of American society because he had experienced the searing events of shipwreck, functions as a prophetic witness to Americans, ‘young’ or not. The great nation he would found will understand God and nature far differently than any existing Americans had hitherto done. This new nation would reject Christianity and also then-fashionable Transcendentalism as ‘idealizing’ veils over the chaotic waters that surround and, in the fiery form of molten rock undergird the seemingly stable land. At the same time, it would also reject the insane quest to rule chaos, a quest that causes the would-be conqueror to imitate his intended prey in his self-destructive, and regime-destructive, malice disguised as moral outrage. And although it would not reject commerce as a way of life, it would know that peaceful commerce isn’t all there is to human life and nature, human or otherwise.

Given his distance from much of existing American doctrine, Ishmael adopts the irony if not necessarily the dialectic of Socrates. He offers his readers a lighthearted account of going to sea to counteract ‘the blues’ or, as he puts it, “the hypoes.” “With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.” Moreover, “all men”—the democracy itself—”cherish nearly the same feelings from time to time,” longing to get away from civil society to think, to dream, to be “wild.” In New York City, people interrupt their commercial busy-ness to stare at the sea “with ocean reveries,” congregating along the shore as “crowds of water-gazers.” In the countryside they gravitate to lakes and streams, for the same reason. “Meditation and water are wedded forever” in the minds of artists, poets, and boys. Religious men, too, from the Persians to the Greeks, seek the water; Ishmael doesn’t mention the waters of Christian baptism, but they cannot be far from his mind. But in these meditations the seekers find not God but themselves. Water reflects; “we see ourselves in all rivers and oceans.” Narcissus drowns, seeking “the image of the ungraspable phantom of life,” “the key to it all.” The breath of life, the “H” in the whale, does not lend itself to human control. Proverbially the individual in love with himself, Narcissus illustrates the perils of self-love as it gazes at life and sees only itself. Ishmael will almost drown at sea, but not quite; water or life absorbs the self-absorbed, but Ishmael isn’t entirely self-absorbed, and he survives.

Continuing his apologia for his conduct, Ishmael remarks that he goes to sea not as a passenger (he has no money), nor as an officer (as a former schoolmaster, “I abominate all honorable respectable toils, trials and tribulations whatsoever”). “It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself.” He does take care of himself, but doesn’t mind being ruled by others on ship. As a sailor, he must follow orders. But the New Testament tells us to accept our station in life, however menial, and for that matter, “Who ain’t a slave?” Every human being gets thumped “either in a physical or metaphysical” way. Metaphysical democracy or egalitarian thumping prevails over all; Being itself pushes all of us around. Having thus vindicated his honor as one who is ruled and not the ruler, Ishmael addresses the needs of the body. Unlike passengers, sailors get paid. The “urbane activity with which a man receives money” shows up either the self-contradiction or the hypocrisy of Christians, who believe money the root of all evil. “Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!” The common sailor’s body benefits not only from the human artifact of money but from “the wholesome exercise and pure air of the forecastle deck,” from nature, benefits he gains to a greater degree than his ruler, the Commodore on the quarter-deck, standing as he is behind the forecastle deck. Does the putative ruler really rule at all? Just as the Commodore only thinks he breathes fresh air, but really breathes air already breathed by the sailors, “in much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it.” Is monarchy only democracy disguised? And finally, what rules them all, if not “the invisible police officer of the Fates”? They are the ones who “cajol[ed] me into the delusion that [going to sea] was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.” In calling the Fates “stage managers,” Ishmael invokes neither the Bible nor human conquest, but the ancient Greek/pagan claim that even the gods are the ruled and not the rulers. The Fates weave the destinies of gods and human beings alike. They are the ultimate ‘loomers.’

Having done so, playful and ironic Ishmael immediately lists his principal motive for going to sea on a whaling ship: “the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself.” “Such a portentous”—looming—”and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity.” His motto might be, ‘I wander because I wonder.’ If for the Bible’s prophets fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, for philosophers wonder is. But to wonder is to wonder at things beyond the land, beyond civil society; it is to become a “wild man” of sorts, an Ishmael in the modern world, in America. Wonderers and wanderers push beyond civil boundaries or conventions. “I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good”—in this he differs from his ruler aboard ship, Captain Ahab—”I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it—would they let me—since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in.” And so to the water, to the surface of chaos; “the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open” to a voyage in which two “wild conceits” “swayed me to my purpose,” floating “in my inmost soul”: “endless processions of the whale,” that king of the boundless sea, “and, midmost of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.” Moby-Dick, the snow-white king of all kings of the boundless sea, appears for the first time in this yarn in the mind not of Ahab, whom he obsesses, but Ishmael. Ishmael knows about the white whale before he meets Ahab, before embarking on the voyage of the Pequod. This is the invisible mind-link between captain and sailor, ruler and ruled, the one who wants to close in on the white whale to destroy it, the other who wants to close in on the white whale in order to understand and in some sense befriend it. The mother of the Biblical Ishmael addresses God as El Roi, —”God of seeing” or “Thou God seest me,” understands me. The modern Ishmael wants to see, not to kill, perhaps to be seen, and surely not to be killed. Americans too need to come to terms with the white whale, if they are to perceive reality as it is without bringing destruction upon themselves.

 

Notes

1. In his brilliant account of Melville’s thoughts on Shakespeare, Charles Olson pulls out a longer Latin tag Melville wrote on the fly-leaf of his copy of the volume containing the tragedies: Ego non baptizo te in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti—sed in nomine Diaboli. As Olson notes, in the secret motto Melville disclosed to Hawthorne he retained the reference to God the Father but omitted the Son and the Holy Spirit entirely. See Charles Olson: Call Me Ishmael: A Study of Melville (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1947).
2. For an account of Melville and the Young America movement, see Andrew Delbanco: Melville: His World and His Work (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), 95-96.