Charles Olson: Call Me Ishmael: A Study of Melville. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1947.

 

Burly, blunt Charles Olson emerged as an important voice among literary modernists in the years following the Second World War, as a critic, a teacher, and above all a poet following and extending trails blazed by Ezra Pound. As befits the future author of a poem titled Maximus, he loved Melville and especially Moby-Dick, which he took as the best expression of what he regarded as the true Melville, unfettered by social and especially religious constraints. Olson wrote his Master’s thesis on Moby-Dick before the war, publishing this book a couple of years after it. Far from an academic exercise, Call Me Ishmael follows in prose the principle Pound required of poetry: CONDENSARE. He writes after doing a lot of serious scholarly work on Melville, but with no scholarly ‘apparatus’ and absolutely no academic longueurs. His book has remained a favorite among scholars of American literature; its heart, a discussion of the parallels between Moby-Dick and Shakespeare’s tragedies, shows a fine poet writing on two great poets, one a prose poet. When he writes as a poet, as he mostly does, Olson is unsurpassed. Unfortunately, he was also an ‘intellectual’ who cut his ideological teeth in the 1930s, with Marxist and Nietzschean inclinations that prove a mixed blessing.

Olson divides his book into five parts. He begins with the material aspects of American life seen in the man and his book, followed by sections titled “Shakespeare,” “Moses,” “Christ,” and “Noah.” The first section begins with geography, which he takes to be “at bottom” of or fundamental to America. Space is “the central fact to man born in America,” a large territory split by a big river and lashed by harsh weather. “Some men ride on such space, others have to fasten themselves like a tent stake to survive,” with Melville the rider, Poe the man of the city. “They are the alternatives.” To master this space, Americans partake not so much of democracy as of “the machine,” “the only master of space the average person ever knows.” He regards “the will to overwhelm nature” and not “the will to be free” as the underlying driver of Americans; by freedom he means political freedom, which he incautiously associates with democracy (as Melville does not). The Whale is “all space concentrated,” at least in the mind of tyrannical Ahab, who would conquer the Whale and assume “lordship over nature.” Hence his weakness for magic, the magi-ism of Persian Fedallah. As for Melville, he was a man of the sea, from which human life (Olson assumes) along with all land life, emerged. This made Melville a man of origins, with “Noah and Moses contemporary to him,” not long-dead figures from an old book. “Melville went to space”—to the greater space, the sea beyond the American continent—”to probe and find man.” Americans too are ‘originals,’ “the last ‘first’ people,” a nation of immigrants bent on using and misusing “our land, ourselves.” “I am willing to ride Melville’s image of man, whale and ocean to find in him prophecies, lessons he himself would not have spelled out,” the hundred years since Melville’s death having “give[n] us an advantage” in increased freedom of speech and particularly (in Olson’s mind) in freedom from the censures of the religious, of which Melville needed to be mindful. Marx, Nietzsche.

Among the ‘big’ writers on America, the un-Poe-etic ones, Whitman stands as Melville’s only rival. “Melville is the truer man,” having “lived intensely his people’s wrong, their guilt” while Whitman “gave us hope,” appealed too much to our optimism, marketing himself better without telling us the truth. Melville’s big book “is more accurate” than Whitman’s “because it is America, all of her space, the malice, the root.” That original malice consisted of capitalism and Christianity, Olson claims, and Melville himself eventually “got all balled up with Christ”—a point to which he will return. He gives a good account of sperm-whaling and its importance in the American economy of the mid-nineteenth century, an industry that was (he shouts) “BRAND NEW,” and American “FIRST.” “The Yankees had discovered that the Sperm whale had the finest oil and brought the biggest price,” and “they went after it,” leading the way in “making the Pacific the American lake [it is] now” and building many of America’s “earliest industrial fortunes.” Consistent with his Marxism, Olson describes the whaling economy as initially a “collective, communal affair”—an example of Marx’s ‘primitive communism’—controlled by “WORKERS,” but now controlled by “the exploiters.” “THE TRICK—then as now” was to “reduce labor costs lower than worker’s efficiency,” in what non-Marxists might regard as an indispensable move to enable any enterprise, whether collectively or privately owned, to provide a livelihood for those who work in it, and for investment in it. Olson claims that American politics developed the same way, with the little people losing control to the grandees after 1777 or so, “until Jefferson gave them another chance”—Charles Beard’s claim. Olson also complains that “Melville didn’t put it all on the surface of Moby-Dick,” when it came to the American economy, analyzing and describing the “technic” of whaling—hunting, processing, storing the refined product—while downplaying the “economics,” the industry’s capitalist side. But in fact Melville begins with capitalism, his somewhat comical account of Ishmael’s salary negotiations with the ship owners. It may have been Melville’s refusal to take capitalists and capitalism very seriously that stuck in Olson’s craw.

Olson’s Marxian-materialist introduction to Melville makes economics fundamental to understanding the American regime. As he turns to Shakespeare, one hopes for the political dimension of Melville’s thought. Olson does not entirely disappoint this hope, although his poet’s eye focuses more on the moral and artistic connections between Melville and Shakespeare. Like Shakespeare, Melville “read to write,” his books “batten[ing] on other men’s books.” He read Shakespeare, beginning in February 1849, only a year before he began work on Moby-Dick. Olson really did his own book-battening, here, looking at Melville’s marginal annotations to show the novelist’s intentions respecting Ahab, Pip, and Ishmael. He also sees that Melville sees that Shakespeare wrote carefully, regretting that necessity: “I would to God Shakespeare had lived later,” Melville wrote, “and promenaded on Broadway” because “the muzzle which all men wore on their souls in the Elizabethan day, might not have intercepted Shakespeare’s free articulations.” Although “in this intolerant universe,” no one can be “a frank man to the uttermost,” “the Declaration of Independence made a difference.” “In this world of lies,” Melville continued, “Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling to Truth.” Olson earns his keep by digging out that comment, alone. And he adds to it, noticing that Melville check-marked a line in Antony and Cleopatra, spoken by Enobarbus: “That truth should be silent I had almost forgot.”

There is a reason for this caution in truth-telling, beyond any legal censorship. “Those occasional flashings-forth of truth”—hints, intuitions, “short, quick probings at the very axis of reality,” spoken “craftily,” “insinuate[d],” that “make Shakespeare, Shakespeare”—bespeak the thoughts concerning what Melville in Moby-Dick  calls “the invisible spheres [that] were formed in fright.” As Olson puts it, these are thoughts of the “dark men” in Shakespeare, men of “madness, villainy, and evil… called up out of the plays as though Melville’s pencil were a wand of black magic.” Shakespeare and Melville alike especially find evil in betrayal, and most of all in “disillusion through friendship and its falling off,” including “treacheries within the councils of the state” and within the family, as in Lear. Not only King Lear, but Prince Hamlet, tyrant Richard, Timon of Athens, all see play out permutations of treachery. (“Timon is mocked with glory, as his faithful Steward says, lies, as Melville notes, but in a dream of friendship.” And this, “the Stranger” in the play remarks, “is the world’s soul.”) But it is Lear that Olson finds “pervasive” in Moby-Dick: “the frantic king tears off the mask, and speaks the same madness of vital truth,” seen in “the lusty stealth of nature” Edmund acts out, even as he also displays the virtue of courage and the “power of attracting love”; the baser natures of daughters Goneril and Regan; the “weak goodness” of Albany (anticipating Starbuck); and the sufferers, not only Lear but Edgar and Gloucester. Lear can achieve “spiritual insight” only after gouging out his own eyes, a “crucifixion” “not of the limbs on a cross-beam, but of… the eyes of pride too sharp for feeling.” “What moves Melville is the stricken goodness” of these men, “who in suffering feel and thus probe more closely to the truth. Melville is to put Ahab through this humbling.” In Melville, crucifixion comes with insight but no salvation: “Both Christ and Holy Ghost are absent.” Here tragedy begins, and ends.

If Lear is no Christ, Ahab is no Lear. The world Ahab inhabits, first of all in his own mind, is the world of Macbeth, although Olson rightly distinguishes between the imagined world of Ahab, which drives the action, from the “universe” of the novel, which “contains more, something different,” namely the limits of evil seen in good or “Theurgic” magic, which “seeks converse with the Intelligence, Power, the Angel” and not domination of that trinity. “Right reason” or intuitive insight—noēsis in Plato, “the highest range of the intelligence in Kant and Coleridge, agapic love (or, more accurately, its result) in Christian terms—contrasts with black magic, the magic of domination, tyranny. “In the Ahab-world there is no place” for theurgy; his compact with Fedallah is “Goetic”/black magic. Olson finds theurgic wisdom in the madness of Pip, a madness that is “heaven’s sense,” and which almost but not quite ‘converts’ Ahab. Olson finds its sane, “Right Reason” version in Bulkington and Ishmael. As the chorus in the tragedy (and sailing in but also outside of its action), Ishmael tells the story, the tragedy, of all the others, “thus creat[ing] the Moby-Dick universe in which the Ahab-world is, by the necessity of life—or the Declaration of Independence—included.” One may surely quibble with Olson’s conflation of the erotic love of wisdom seen in Plato with the agapic love of Logos (ultimately a Person) in the New Testament, and with “Right Reason” in either Kant or the Romantics, while appreciating Olson’s insight into Melville’s insight. “The lovely association of Ahab and Pip is like the relations of Lear to both the Fool and Edgar. What the King learns of their suffering through companionship with them in storm helps him to shed his pride,” although Olson makes the parallel nearer than Melville does.

Here Olson brings politics in. “Melville was no naïve democrat.” The ‘great man’ he envisioned comes close to the tyrants “we have faced in the 20th century.” When it comes to tragedy, the modern state differs from the aristocratic, feudal ‘state’ in being prosaic, without knights in shining armor, a political condition lending itself to the new literary genre, the novel, no longer a matter for epic poetry. But when it comes to the possibility for tragedy the modern state only seems to differ from the feudal state. “In the old days of the Mediterranean and Europe it was the flaw of a king which brought tragedy to men”; today, the modern state with its putatively democratic regime has “not rid itself of overlords” because “the common man, however free, leans on a leader.” That leader, “however dedicated, leans on a straw,” or maybe two straws: the straw of fickle public opinion and the straw of his own character. Both may betray him at any time. The purpose of that state, and of its leader, “lordship over nature,” betrays the hubris of the human soul as surely as Lear’s wounded vanity, but on a vaster scale because in modernity the people themselves, the crew of the Pequod, become inflamed by the tyrant’s passion. But as Enobarbus says,

When valour preys on reason

It eats the sword it fights on.

Olson titles his central section “Moses.” Melville “could face up to Moses” because he “was never satisfied” with God of the Bible, New Testament or Old. “His dream was Daniel’s: the Ancient of Days, garment white as snow, hair like the pure wool,” glimpsed in the whiteness of the Whale and of its skeleton as seen on a tropical island. “He was not weakened by any new testament world” but declared himself “the rival of earth, air, fire, and water.” Like “another Moses Melville wrote in Moby-Dick the Book of the Law of the Blood.” To this it must be replied that the Law of the Blood sounds more like the philosophies of vitalism of which Nietzsche was the most discerning and subtle proponent. It must also be said that in this Nietzsche reverses Christianity, which also propounds a law of the blood, the Savior’s sacrificial blood. Melville takes a different stance, worshipping no god at all but instead proposing a tragic humanism. Not for him the will to power, however refined. Yes, we are all cannibals but, like Queequeg, that is not all we are.

Olson turns from Moses to his main target, Christ. He accuses Melville of having “missed his own truth” by turning half-heartedly (as Olson’s contemporary Existentialists would say, ‘inauthentically’) to Christianity in a trip to the Holy Land in 1856. Although in his first stop on the way there, the “polyglot city” of Constantinople, he ranged wildly and wrote extravagantly, “his body alive as it has not been since he swung with [his shipmate] Jack Chase in maintops above the Pacific,” this vitalism faded upon his arrival in Egypt, within whose pyramids “the idea of Jehovah was born” in “a terrible mixture of the cunning and the awful.” “Moses was learned in all the lore of the Egyptians,” going on to proclaim the laws of the Bible. At Jerusalem and with Christ, Melville “lost all he had gained,” all the power that made Moby-Dick. He became “prey to Christ” in “barrenness of Judea.” “It was death, and lack of love, that let him” become “Christ’s victim.” “He denied himself in Christianity,” the religion of the salvation of the individual, “the personal soul.” Vitalism, the call to intensity of life here and now, needs death to concentrate human attention on the here-and-now, but also on the life of the community, which survives the individual. A religion that preaches the eternity of the individual soul substitutes individuality for community, love of this world for hatred of it. In Olson, the marriage of class-conscious Marx and will-to-power Nietzsche generates communalist vitalism. In this he anticipates postmodernism and, as teacher of poets and of those who teach poetry, may have helped to generate its rise.

He titles his concluding chapter “Noah,” evoking the link between the world where the chaos-cosmos of water retook the dry land, then withdrew, some, to enable men to re-inhabit that land. At what Olson takes to be Melville’s best, Melville too was a man who rode the biggest ocean available to postdiluvian man, the Pacific. The Pacific meant three things to Melville: “an experience of SPACE, most Americans are only now entering on, 100 years after Melville; “a comprehension of PAST,” particularly of origins; and “a confirmation of the FUTURE,” in which the Pacific, not the Atlantic or the Mediterranean, would become the center of world commerce and politics. All of this weaves into America as Olson conceives it. If America (and, writing in 1947, he adds Russia) consists first of all of space, and if Russia, larger than America, deserves to be called the “HEARTLAND,” then the Pacific is “twin and rival” of Russia. As for America, the Pacific is “the Plains repeated, a 20th century Great West.” “Heartland” Russia, it might further be observed, then featured a regime animated by the Marxism Olson espoused, but it was America that enjoyed easier access to the “Heart Sea,” a geopolitical advantage Russia would prove unable to neutralize, especially when another rather large place, China, broke its alliance with her.

Respecting the past, “the Pacific was ‘father'” to Melville, older than America, Asia, and Abraham, where abandoned Pip saw the “wondrous depths where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes.” After citing this passage from Moby-Dick Olson cites one from Mardi: “King Noah fathered us all!” Noah, the man of the oceans, before Abraham, Asia, and America, prefigured Melville, the latest voyager on the Flood; after that voyage, “Melville took his dead to be all the fathers and sons of man.” America, originally the land of natural right, according to the Founders and Lincoln, must now begin to understand what Olson and Melville take to be real nature, the nature that borders its western coast.

As a confirmation of the future, the Pacific “opens the NEW HISTORY.” “America completes her West only on the coast of Asia,” in the opposite direction from the coast of the Mediterranean, the land of the Bible. Homer’s sea-voyaging Ulysses “already push[ed] against the limits” of the Mediterranean, seeking a way out” of the circular River Ocean. “Homer gave his hero the central quality of the men to come: search, the individual responsible to himself,” and not so much to the gods of Olympus or the God of the Bible—beyond Athens and Jerusalem. Ahab’s odyssey was “the third and final” one, after those of Homer’s Ulysses and Dante’s. And that means that Ahab marks “the END of individual responsible only to himself,” the final shipwreck of Western Man, who, having conquered the world, will be replaced by—what else can it be?—something like a World Man. Marx and Nietzsche, synthesized.

It hasn’t turned out that way. So far, at least, World Man has proved to be Davos Man—world-oligarch, neither Communist Man nor Superman. Melville never made Olson’s mistake, understanding that human nature remains a bit snaky. Melville’s Christ is no god, but he remains the Man of Sorrows, and Melville would be his latest prophet.

America, take note. Olson never mentions Melville’s civil war poems. There his readers see how Melville applied the teachings on nature and human nature elaborated in Moby-Dick to an actual political crisis in his own country.

 

This is the fourteenth in a series of essays on Melville’s novel.

 

The “Young America” movement aimed at speaking and acting for a new generation of Americans, as President John Kennedy would attempt to do, a century later, and as the ‘New Left’ would claim to do, only a few years after Kennedy. The passing of the torch of political authority from the older to the younger raises perennial questions: Will the fire light the way? Or will it burn the holder? Will it go out, causing the new bearer to stumble? Should it be snuffed out, and another torch lit? Should it be used to follow the same path, or should a new path be chosen?

In Melville’s generation, Abraham Lincoln considered these questions in a lecture at the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois. “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions” was delvered and published thirteen years before the publication of Moby-Dick; its author wasalmost exactly the same age as Melville when he published his great novel. Like Melville, the young Lincoln has been said to have had his doubts about religion, although unlike Melville he could later claim to  have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general.”

Lincoln invited his listeners to admire the American “system of political institutions,” which “conduc[es] more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty than any of which the history of former times tells us.” This “political edifice of liberty and equal rights” stands as “a legacy bequeathed us, by a once hardy, brave, patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors.” He understood the duty of his generation of Americans to be the transmission of this legacy, “unprofaned by the foot of an invader,” to the next generation. He found the prospect of foreign conquest remote. But the danger of self-ruin was real, as seen in recent instances of “mob law”: lynchings in Mississippi; extrajudicial execution by burning of a murderer in Missouri. When “the lawless in spirit” become “lawless in practice,” law-abiding citizens will lose their trust in the government intended to secure their liberty and equal rights. If such citizens lose their attachment to the ruling institutions of a republican regime, then “the capability of a people to govern themselves” must come into question. This will give an opportunity to the supremely ambitious men who arise in every generation, men who “belong to the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle,” men who “disdain the beaten path” of ancestors to seek glory on any ground other than that taken by men who have gone before them. Only if citizens trust one another, and trust the government they have constituted and perpetuated, can such potential tyrants by defeated.

To reestablish or strengthen that trust, only reason can furnish new pillars for “the temple of liberty.” Those materials can then “be molded into general intelligence, sound morality and, in particular, a reverence for the constitution and the laws”—for what Lincoln does not hesitate to call a “political religion.” The old pillars of the temple were the Founders; the new pillars can only be men and women who emulate them, whose ambition finds its model not in an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon but in George Washington, that supremely self-governing statesman who has earned his status as first in war and first in peace among a people who intend to govern themselves, first of all by ruling their own passions.

When Melville published Moby-Dick in 1851, Americans ruled the middle section of North America from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. If that rule could be consolidated by settlement, if disunion could be prevented, the United States would then amount very nearly to a vast island, with oceans along its eastern and western borders, seas bordering it on much of the North and South. Melville set out to caution Young America, to show his countrymen that the Pacific wasn’t entirely pacific, that ocean waters surround all land on earth with chaos. [1] America’s destiny may not be so manifest as Young America supposes. Is it as bright as they believe, given the real nature of ‘the Pacific’ Americans have arrived at? With Mexico and its ambitions to seize New Orleans defeated, and if the remaining Amerindian nations and tribes are subdued, will Americans enjoy the prosperous peace they have sought in their wars? Lincoln worried that they might not, and those worries crested like a wave in the decade to follow. He saw the possibility of chaos on land, political chaos within the United States, in an intensifying regime conflict between the commercial-republican North and the slaveholding-oligarchic South, worsened by the moral and political conflict between political parties in the North.

For Lincoln saw in Young America—above all in his great Illinois rival, Senator Stephen Douglas—a threat to American self-government as dangerous as that posed by the slaveholding plantation oligarchs of the South. Douglas, Lincoln averred, was “blowing out the moral lights around us” by refusing to navigate the popular sovereignty of the republican regime in America by the constellation of natural rights, the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, which had justified the Founders’ assertion of that sovereignty against the sovereignty of the British tyrant. To argue that the legal status of slaves in the newly-settled territories of the United States may be settled by popular votes in those territories, instead of by appeal to the natural rights to equality and liberty enunciated by the Founders in the Declaration of Independence, overrode the rule of reason, valorized the rule of passion. Law should secure natural rights; citizens should not suppose themselves entitled to vote the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God up or down.

Ahab represents nothing if not the family of the lion or the tribe of the (sea)-eagle. Aboard the Pequod, no one effectively opposes him, as Starbuck dithers, the crew alternately trembles and cheers, and Bulkington stays below deck. With Moby-Dick, however, Melville opposes him, readying his readers to recognize and oppose him, too. To the mighty man, the might-makes-right man, Melville opposes the mighty book. A mighty book needs a mighty theme, Ishmael tells us. But mere might against might will not suffice. Don’t merely ‘enlarge’ your mind, Ishmael advises. “Subtilize it.” Make it more discerning, more reasonable. The way to reasonableness isn’t some ‘system’ of thought, philosophic or religious, but moderation of the soul’s passions. Tempering the passions gives the mind a chance to think instead of only feeling. Ahab suggests that he who feels most intensely, whose feelings overwhelm other less coruscant souls, rightly rules them with a minimum of ‘back-talk.’ Melville writes to make citizens more thoughtful, more likely (among other things) to recognize an Ahab as a tyrant, as a person who may “have his humanities” but will not permit himself to be ruled by them, will not rule others by them, and thereby compromises the humanity of those he rules.

To subtilize the minds of Americans, Melville takes them to sea, where the chaotic dimension of nature must be faced. At sea one meets foreigners, men reared in regimes different from the American regime. Ishmael recalls “gams” or meetings with whaling ships from several countries. The Germans prove inexperienced, therefore lacking in practical judgment or prudence. They haven’t ruled themselves long enough; the ‘nation of philosophers’ and of Kultur may mean well but it cannot do well, as it navigates often unstable seas. The French, too—landsmen, sometime upholders of the Rights of Man, accustomed to life under the centralized modern state—lack experience in self-government. The English do have such experience; what is more, their commercial way of life keeps them sane, but sometimes obscures from them the depths of the oceans upon which they sail so adeptly. As for the American ships the crew of the Pequod meet, they range from the self-indulgent to the compassionate. Which way will Americans take, in their regime?

They will need a modern state of some sort. With a decent regime, that state does provide protection for women and children against human predators; it sends out expeditions, usually for commerce or, as with the America of Melville’s time, expansion of its empire of liberty. Like all manifestations of the “weaver-god,” it needs a framework for production. Given the chaotic dimension of the cosmos, it makes oligarchy difficult unless oligarchy embeds itself into the state’s institutional framework in the form of bureaucracy—a move that wouldn’t happen for nearly a century. Otherwise, as in the novel, the modern state’s regime wavers between monarchy and democracy; under the well-designed framework of the American institutions, that had meant wavering between a strong Congress and a strong presidency. Democracy proves vulnerable to demagoguery and deception, whether religious or political. Founded as a tensile combination between ‘Abraham’ and ‘Ismael,’ the American regime of 1851 saw threats from both Southern oligarchs and restive democrats, neither of which much heeded the moral limitations of natural right. While democrats lauded America’s “Manifest Destiny” to rule the continent, Melville makes “destiny” manifest as a danger, not an inevitable happy ending. A better Young America would understand nature or the chaos-cosmos of the weaver god in a more careful way, soberly interweaving policy, including the policy of expansion, within the work of that ‘god,’ recognizing and avoiding demagogue-tyrants as they arise, encouraging commerce and industry without succumbing to venality. No aristocracy exists to guide Young America, but maybe Melville could. If, as one scholar puts it, Melville set himself the task of “reshap[ing] tragedy for a democratic (and American) audience” [2], as a lesson in much-needed moderation, his hero’s tragic flaw is dominant, his “humanities” recessive to the end. [3] Ahab rules his subjects by demagoguery, self-interest, and force, weapons lying around, as it were, in the commercial and democratic republican regime. Young America must learn to recognize such a man. It will fail to do so if immoderate and also if uncourageous—too timid, like Starbuck, or too rash and given to infect others with rashness, like Ahab. Ahab pits his personality against the impersonal weaver-god, but as John Alvis sees, “Personality is modernity’s substitute for soul” [4]. Melville doesn’t think the soul immortal, in the Christian sense, but he does want Young America to remember the soul, and to take care of it. In this, he wants what Lincoln wanted.

The weaver-god hears no mortal voice as it intertwines life and death. The ancients called this cosmic interweaving force Fate, supposing they saw it behind all the personal gods of their pantheon. Trellised by a lifeless framework, like the God of the Bible the weaver-god respects no persons but only because it is impersonal, not because it is impartial or just. American Transcendentalists were wrong to suppose it benign. American Progressives would make the same mistake. Marx was wrong to expect it to issue in a happy outcome. Nietzsche would be wrong to love it, although his pessimism of strength echoes some of Melville’s thoughts, even as it amplifies them too much. Transcendentalists had chosen the wrong symbolism to depict it; Melville deploys symbolism, too, but makes it compatible with his stern realism. Fate leaves room for chance or fortune, for randomness, also for human custom; despite these severe limitations, human beings can still ply the shuttle, exercise a modest freedom for good or evil. In politics, therefore, revolution or regime change and modest reform remain possible, although they require virtue and good fortune for success. The philosophic founders of modern science supposed that human beings can use their freedom to conquer nature and fortune; Melville thinks not. The ocean is too big. If he could see the technologies of later centuries, he would continue to say that the ocean is too big, pointing to the near-limitless cosmos beyond earth, with its imploding and exploding stars, its snake-spiraling nebulae (with their microcosmic counterparts, snake-stranding DNA), and its overall entropic careening, as an even more decisive refutation of human pretension. If the chaos-cosmos could speak, it too could ask the devastating rhetorical question, “Where were you when I created the heavens and the earth?” Melville provides nature a sort of voice, derived from his experience of the ocean.

Rightly so humbled, human beings may still have self-knowledge and a measure of self-protection if they exercise genuine moderation, not Starbuck’s false moderation. “In all seasons retain a temperature of thine own.” If you don’t, you won’t understand the underlying foundation of the chaos-cosmos, as in your thinking you will finally face the blank wall that tormented Ahab. It need not torment you, as it does him, leading him to ruin. You may never understand how or why human freedom can arise in the chaos-cosmos of fate. The blank wall Ahab finds at the end of his speculative thought defeats doctrines and systems religious or philosophic, but a mind alert to practical matters—how a ship works, how a political regime and a modern state work, and how such things might be made to work better—will find its “inner Tahiti.” Two deformations of Melville’s thought might come from this: pragmatism, which in American thought would put itself in the service of nature-conquest; and Epicureanism, an apolitical withdrawal from one’s country. Regarding the latter, Melville’s Ishmael may be an outsider, but he spins his yarn anyway, and Melville never set out for the territories to live as a hermit. He continued to intervene in American politics, in his subsequent writings.

What will guide practical reason? The chaos-cosmos, nature, may not lend itself to a doctrine of natural right, as the American founding generation maintained, but nature isn’t evil if decently treated. At its generative, original, ‘sperm’ level of being nature is pure, cleansing, offering human beings a natural baptism if not a foundation for a systematic natural religion. Nature affords a place for friendship and fraternity, so long as one doesn’t stare too long in the face of its fire, and so long as one accepts its carpenter-Christ as impersonal, the Christ of the Bible as human, as a man of sorrows.

Leviathan, the king of the proud, combines the bulk of the land with the movement of water; Leviathan’s spout mixes water with air. The `H’ of the word ‘whale’ denotes beholding, beholding the haishim, the fiery `souls’ of atoms postulated by Lucretius. Earth, water, air, fire: nature unites and balances opposites, as does its political equivalent, the modern state, as Mr. Madison saw. Nature is cannibalistic, self-devouring, a matter of life and death. The right way to understand it is with a pantheism of pessimism, a pessimism of strength. Expect little from it; do not be so foolish as to love it; reserve the agapic love Christianity teaches and the friendship-love of citizens for those fellow-humans who need and deserve it. The (perhaps) self-generating chaos-cosmos will kill you, but in so doing it self-regenerates, self-repairs. Cold comfort that is, but warmer comforts, material and soulful, remain to you in the meantime.

Ahab understands some of this, but not nearly enough. To the modern tyrant’s soul, ‘Being’ is alogos, a thing rightly worshiped only in defiance. In the plays of Shakespeare Melville so admired, he would rank with Richard III, not Lear or Prospero. Unlike Richard, however, he has not only political ambitions; unlike subsequent tyrants, he has no ‘ideological’ ambitions. Ahab’s ambitions are metaphysical. He rejects all that is ‘above’ him, navigating only by the ‘horizontal,’ what is around him. In this he partakes of democracy even as he tyrannizes, a practice Tocqueville would have expected, having studied Napoleon. Ahab contradicts himself, repeatedly, having taken the fluid sea as his solid rock. No human being can stand on that rock, much less walk on water and survive. Ahab would have needed to do one or the other, but he doesn’t want to be a man and he cannot be a god. After the fact, Ishmael rightly interprets the typhoon lightning strikes in Biblical terms—specifically, in terms of the Book of Daniel. Ishmael finds in Biblical prophecy cogent explanations of what has happened; he never ‘prophesies’ or predicts, claiming no access to the thoughts of a personal god. Charles Olson rightly understands Ishmael as the chorus for a tragedy in the form of a novel, not as would-be prophet. [5]

Ahab’s days were numbered; he had been weighed, found wanting; his state would split, sundered by the nature it sought to defeat. His regime, too, must split because its sole, a-logical ruler is ‘split’ among his many self-contradictions. Fire-worshipers crave freedom, but in gazing at the fire too long they become only greater slaves to fate, thinking not wisely but too wishfully in obedience to the false prophets they follow. Ahab would ‘save’ himself and even triumph by “pil[ing] on the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down.” Yet there is no reason to suppose that killing the Whale would cure Ahab’s soul; the chaos-cosmos will remain, whatever becomes of its symbol. Ishmael, who shares Ahab’s estimate of the whiteness of the Whale— “the palsied universe…lies before us a leper” —wisely avoids Ahab’s rage at it. Caught up in the general enthusiasm of the crew at crucial moments, and therefore no fit ruler, his soul reclaims its balance for the most part and in the end. Unlike his tyrant-captain, he does not weep over “The Symphony” of the elements, having so much less to regret. He sees that even at its most pacific, the sea-birds who skim the ocean’s surface are as white as the whale. Whiteness dominates the ocean tyrannically only when something or someone roils it. He seldom does.

If our souls are like orphans of unwed mothers, their fathers unknown, then philosophy must take the Socratic turn. That is, if orthodoxy, tradition, can mislead and if credulity can be foolish, so can incredulity. We don’t know enough for either. Ishmael scoffs at religious doctrines, but equally at the pretenses of modern science. Socratic inquiry through examination of orthodoxies and observations of the many human ‘types’ and political regimes is what philosophers can do. As for religious men, Solomon is the one Ishmael esteems, for his practical wisdom in speech and action. And if Socrates and Solomon are the Catskill eagles among men, the average citizen may need to think as the old Manxman does, with common sense. [6] Morally, his exemplar may well be the natural man, Queequeg—natural even to the point of cannibalism, in emulation of all nature—but also courageous, resourceful, adaptable to all regimes, a loyal friend, a wanderer and wonderer, like Ishmael. Ishmael doesn’t follow his friend into cannibalism of the literal kind, but he does argue that in a pantheistic universe we are all cannibals by necessity, himself included—all part of self-devouring, self-regenerating nature in one way or another. The ‘marriage’ or friendship of Queequeg and Ishmael serves as the equivalent of real marriage in Aristotle: the foundation of political life, in this case a pairing of a potential philosopher or (at least) an ‘intellectual’ and a man of courage, the alliance of reason and spiritedness commended by Socrates in Plato’s Republic. 

Wanderers won’t make citizens, but neither will philosophers, entirely. They will always hold fast in their inner core, observing and reasoning about their observations. Like citizens, and like wanderers Ishmael and Queequeg, philosophers will form friendships. They can become political philosophers, not mere isolatoes. If friendly, un-philosophic citizens also learn to recognize the kinds of men who endanger friendship, the tyrants, they can govern themselves. They need to see the virtues of Queequeg and Ishmael, as described by a political-philosophic poet, to strengthen themselves, and to smarten themselves up, for such civic friendship. Most will never be a Queequeg or an Ishmael, but most can learn things from them.

A decade after Melville published Moby-Dick, he and his fellow-Americans saw their own national tragedy, in which Ishmaels and Queequegs, Ahabs, Starbucks, Stubbs, and Flasks, along with many of the other characters in the novel, and some not there, came forward to enact a regime conflict ‘for real.’ Melville acted as the chorus in that tragedy, writing his poems, Battle-Pieces, as the events of the war coursed from beginning to end.

 

Notes

1. In this I depart from Charles Olson’s account (op. cit., 116-119) which takes the Pacific Ocean to be genuinely pacific. Nothing that harbors Moby-Dick can be genuinely pacific. And then there are the typhoons.
2.  George Schulman: “Chasing the Whale: Moby-Dick as Political Theory.” In Jason Frank, ed.: A Political Companion to Herman Melville.  Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013, 71.
3.  Olson makes much of Ahab’s ‘softening’ under the effect of Pip’s spirit (op. cit., 60-63). Ishmael makes it clear that he esteems the compassion Pip evokes—Ahab’s one tear being worth more than all the water in the ocean—but he also observes how Ahab overcomes that compassion with an act of will, as if this were the last temptation of the anti-Christ.
4.  John Alvis: “Moby-Dick and Melville’s Quarrel with America.” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 23, No. 2, winter 1996, 239.
5.  Olson, op. cit., 58. Ishmael is, however, a one-man chorus; he does not represent the opinions of any political community.
6.  Olson sees the Catskill eagle in Ishmael (op. cit., 15) misses the common sense in the Manxman. He must, because he takes the American people to be represented by Ishmael, whereas Melville knows that an Ishmael must always be the exception, not the rule.

This is the thirteenth in a series of essays on Melville’s novel.

 

As Ahab drew nearer the Whale, two gams followed in quick succession. New England’s Puritan founders had modeled their regimes on the laws of Israel; the name of the first ship recalls the early generations of Israel. The captain of the Rachel had not only seen Moby-Dick, he had chased him, losing a boat and its crew to him. The captain’s twelve-year-old son was on that boat. The Manxman now took the cries of the seals on the rocks to have been the cries of those drowned sailors. As in the Bible, the Rachel mourned her lost sons. Rachel’s husband was Jacob; Starbuck just failed to be a ‘Jacob.’ Now, he sought no ally in the visiting captain, nor does Ishmael suggest that he so much as thought of doing so. Starbuck was no founder, lacking the strength to follow his God.

The captain of the Rachel  knew Ahab from Nantucket, knew that Ahab himself had a young son. He implored Ahab to join him in the search, offering to pay for time lost. Ahab refused, with one of his most striking utterances: “May I forgive myself.” Ahab treated himself as God; after all, according to his gospel, he had personality, the ability to judge and forgive, whereas his ‘god’ had none.

Ishmael explicitly likens the Rachel to the Biblical Rachel, the mother of the Jewish people. In the Book of Jeremiah, Rachel weeps for her future descendants, exiled to Babylon by God; God promises to end that exile, in His own time, showing mercy for His chosen people. In the Book of Matthew Rachel’s story is said to have foreshadowed the murder of innocent children by Herod in his attempt to kill Jesus, prophesied to be a threat to his rule; the life and redemptive crucifixion of Jesus reveals God’s mercy not only toward Israelites but to all peoples. Even as he treats himself as God, Ahab put himself on the side of Herod.

Nonetheless, Ahab continued to have his humanities. Having sent the grieving captain on his way, he returned to his cabin and to Pip, his adopted ‘son.’ “Lad, lad, I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now”—not, to be sure, to save Pip from harm but because Pip, like the captain and his son, could distract him from his mission. “There is in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady. Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired health.” Compassion, agape, would impede that hunt. Ahab’s sympathy for Pip based itself on the assumption that Pip’s imbecility both came from and symbolized the cold indifference of the chaos-cosmos. But Ahab was now proved mistaken. Pip retained a core not only of sanity but of gratitude and compassion in his own soul: “No, no, no! ye have not a whole body sir; do ye but use poor me for your one lost leg; only tread upon me, sir; I ask no more, so I remain a part of ye,” the one who had adopted him. Pip wept and pleaded, but as with Starbuck so with Pip: Ahab replied, “Weep so, and I will murder thee!” Ahab then recalled a shred of his Quaker Christianity, relenting only so much as to say, “God for ever bless thee; and if it come to that,—God for ever save thee, let what will befall.” That won’t happen; by rejecting his many opportunities to change his course, his regime or ‘way,’ Ahab doomed Pip along with himself. Ishmael comments, “All his successive meetings with various ships contrastingly concurred to show the demoniac indifference with which the white whale tore his hunters, whether sinning or sinned against,” but the telos of the Ahab regime “domineered above” the “gloomy crew.” “The old man’s despot eye was upon them.” [1]

Ahab himself remained in a bondage of his own choosing. “Even as Ahab’s eyes so awed the crew’s, the inscrutable Parsee’s glance awed his; or somehow, at least in some wild way, at times affected it.” Both men stood on deck, day and night, awaiting the appearance of the Whale while gazing at each other, “as if in the Parsee Ahab saw his forethrown shadow, in Ahab the Parsee his abandoned substance”; “both seemed yoked together, and an unseen tyrant driving them.” Distrusting the dispirited crew, suspecting that they might deliberately pretend not to sight the Whale, Ahab commanded that he be hoisted to the top of a mast to serve as lookout. He shrewdly trusted Starbuck to hold the rope that pulled him up, rightly convinced that the First Mate would not allow an ‘accident’ to befall him. It would have been easy for Starbuck to arrange such a thing, but his God remains as silent as Ahab (or Machiavelli) would expect.

If God does not speak in words, does He nonetheless speak in actions? As Ahab perched on the mast, a “sea-eagle” seized his hat and carried it away, dropping it into the sea. Ishmael recalls an omen associated with another intruder-usurper, Tarquin, the fifth king of ancient Rome.”An eagle flew thrice round Tarquin’s head, removing his cap to replace it, and thereupon Tanaquil, his wife”—reputed a prophetess—”declared that Tarquin would be king of Rome.” “But only by the replacing of the cap,” Ishmael recalls, “was that omen counted good. Ahab’s hat was never restored.”

In ancient philosophy, Roman or Greek, the right telos of man and regimes was eudaimonia or the happiness attendant to the full development of human nature. Fedallah was no good daimon, Machiavelli no good philosopher, Ahab no good man. In its final gam the Pequod met the teleologically-named and, given its circumstances “most miserably named” Delight. Moby-Dick had shattered one of its boats, killing five men; captain and crew were burying with prayer the only body they had recovered. After hearing this, Ahab “like lightning” ordered his ship to sail on; his crew must not be permitted to dwell upon death, or God, lest fear of either overcome their fear of their ruler. Ahab imitated the god he has adopted, the electric fire which had caused his harpoon to burn with the fire of a serpent’s tongue.

The tyrant himself had nearly reached the end of the rope of his will. If thoughts of his moral and political responsibilities, his family, and the Biblical God had not deterred him, could natural sentiments reach him? Ishmael describes the “symphony” of nature on the Pacific, as the “feminine” air, “transparently pure and soft,” and the “masculine” sea, with its “strong, troubled, murderous thinkings” blended into an “all-pervading azure” of “a clear steel-blue day.” For a while, “those two seemed one,” as the sun “seemed giving his gentle air to this bold and rolling sea; even as bride to groom”—a natural parallel of the spiritual doctrine of ‘one flesh.’ Ahab responded. “The step-mother world, so long cruel—forbidding—now threw affectionate arms around his stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that however willful and erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save and to bless.” Nature might ‘save’ the man the Biblical God does not save—save him at least from tyrannical ambition and folly. “Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.” Starbuck approached him, and Ahab offered the most pious man on his ship what amounts to a confession, calling himself a fool, an “Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise.” “Starbuck, let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye.” He told Starbuck to stay on board the ship when next the whale boats lower for Moby-Dick.

At this one moment, Starbuck’s decision not to kill his captain seemed good. Better than dying a tyrant, Ahab might have returned if not to Christianity then at least to natural moral sentiment, to filial devotion to hearth and home—what Aristotle considered the foundation of political life. Starbuck urged Ahab to change course. “I think, sir, they have some such mild blue days, even as this, in Nantucket.” “But Ahab’s glance was averted” from his First Mate’s human eye; “like a blighted fruit tree,” Eden’s Tree of Knowledge, “he shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil,” rejecting what he acknowledged as “all natural lovings and longings” of “my own natural heart,” recurring to the “handspike” of “Fate.” Not the natural-right philosophy of Aristotle but the fatalism of the Greek tragedians (and of Nietzsche, after Melville) remained Ahab’s North Star to the last. Starbuck left in despair; Ahab caught Fedallah’s eyes, reflected on the water. When Moby-Dick reappeared the next day, captain and crew returned to the hunt.

The Whale “divinely swam” with “a gentle joyousness,” like a Jupiter or Jove of the sea. Nature turns hostile, but need not always be so. Knowing his own fate, Fedallah watched Moby-Dick with “a pale, death-glimmer” in “his sunken eyes; a hideous motion gnawed his mouth,” anticipating the same motion taken by the Whale’s jaw, which soon crushed Ahab’s boat with Fedallah and his ‘tigers’ in it. The ship rescued Ahab and crew, and here Ishmael pays tribute to the Captain’s greatness. Battered and exhausted, “nameless wails came from him, as desolate sounds from out ravines.” “In an instant’s compass, great hearts sometimes condense into one deep pang, the sum total of those shallow pains kindly diffused through feebler men’s whole lives.” “Such hearts” might “in their life-time aggregate a whole age of woe, wholly made up on instantaneous intensities; for even in their pointless centres, those noble natures contain the entire circumferences of inferior souls.” Ishmael’s language recalls the virtue he saw in Jesus, that He was a man of sorrows; if Ahab amounted to an anti-Christ, he was at least an anti-Christ, no Starbuck and very far from a Stubb.

Recovering quickly, Ahab ascertained that no men had been lost and ordered the boat to be repaired. Materialist Stubb joked at the ruined boat (garbling an Aesop fable as he did), earning the Captain’s rebuke, “What soulless thing is this that laughs before a wreck?” For his part, pious Starbuck saw an ill omen in it, drawing a still sharper scolding: “Omen? omen?—the dictionary! If the gods think to speak outright to man, they will honorably speak outright; not shake their heads, and give an old wives’ darkling hint.” His riposte must have hit Starbuck harder than Ahab knew, as God had indeed failed to answer Starbuck’s plea for guidance when he considered committing tyrannicide. “Begone! Ye two are opposite poles of one thing…and ye two are all mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of the peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors!” He would be the greatest isolato of all, the supreme, all-ruling tyrant. As such, he moved again to secure his rule, announcing that the doubloon will go to the man who sights the Whale on the day it’s killed, then assuring his men that if he is the one to see him first, he’ll pay each man ten times the value of the doubloon. This lifted the gloom that had threatened to undermine his rule.

On the second day of the hunt, newly-motivated Stubb exuberantly predicted that Ahab would kill Moby-Dick; he “did but speak out for well nigh all that crew.” “The hand of Fate had snatched all their souls; and by the stirring perils of the previous day; the rack of the past night’s suspense; the fixed, unfearing, blind, reckless way in which their wild craft went plunging towards its flying mark; by all these things, their hearts were bowled along” by the no-longer gentle wind, which “seemed the symbol of that unseen agency which so enslaved them to the race.” They had become fast-fish, not loose-fish. They had achieved perfect unity: “All varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to,” striving “through that infinite blueness to seek out the thing that might destroy them.” Like Ahab’s harpoon, the tyrant-forged unity of the regime cut through the evanescent but natural unity of peaceful air, sea, and sun. Indeed, the wind itself picked up, “rushi[ing] the vessel on by arms invisible as irresistible.” Unlike the American regime, intended to keep the many varieties of citizens checked from their worst passions by setting ambition against ambition, interest against interest, thereby achieving a dynamic balance, Ahab’s crew now fused themselves to Ahab’s will, to one fate.”

At the next lowering, Moby-Dick smashed two of the boats, not before entangling them in their own harpoon lines, like the weaver-god, Fate. He then attacked Ahab’s boat from below, and Ahab’s ivory leg splintered off. Rescued a second time, Ahab remained defiant: “Nor white whale nor man, nor fiend, can so much as graze old Ahab in his own proper and inaccessible being.” But Fedallah had disappeared, dragged under by Ahab’s line; given the prophecy Fedallah had issued and Ahab had believed, this gave the Captain pause. Starbuck took the event for one final chance at dissuasion: “Thy evil shadow gone—all good angels mobbing thee with warnings:—what more wouldst thou have?… Oh, oh,—Impiety and blasphemy to hunt him more!” But to him who denies the personal God, there can be no blasphemy except in the failure to resist, while contradictorily claiming fidelity to the chaos-cosmos: “Fool! I am the Fates’ lieutenant; I act under orders.” Turning to the superstitious sailors, he took care to sever any connection between Starbuck’s appeal and their beliefs. “Believe ye, men, in the things called omens? Then laugh aloud, and cry encore! For ere they drown, drowning things will twice rise to the surface; then rise again, to sink for evermore. So with Moby Dick….” But of course the same ‘omen’ might as well apply to the Captain himself. Speaking to himself, Ahab saw one of his contradictions, a different and deeper one: “Oh! how valiantly I seek to drive out of others’ hearts what’s clinched so fast in mine!”—namely, the Parsee’s omen or prophecy that he would “go before” Ahab in death, yet must be “seen again ere I could perish.” He vowed to solve this “riddle,” as he would do, on the third day of the hunt.

His ivory leg replaced by the carpenter’s latest, last efforts, Ahab observed the beauty of the third day, calling it “food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks, he only feels, feels, feels; that’s tingling enough for mortal man!” “God only has that right and privilege,” the right and privilege to think. Willfully thoughtless Ahab then thought, speaking a monologue on the wind. It is “a coward wind that strikes stark naked men, but will not stand to receive a single blow. Even Ahab is a braver thing—a nobler thing than that. Would now the wind but had a body; but all the things that most exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things are bodiless, but only bodiless as objects, not as agent. There’s a most special, a most cunning, oh, a most malicious difference!” The wind can strike but not be struck in retaliation. The wind is like God, exasperating but at times “glorious and gracious,” a spirit. For the moment Ahab’s mind swayed, so to speak, in the wind. But Moby-Dick’s reappearance tore him out of his thoughtful, willed thoughtlessness. This time, not only Ahab but the men on the three mastheads sighted the Whale simultaneously. “Three shrieks went up” from the sailors “as if tongues of fire had voiced it.” Fedallah’s spirit was now in the crew, talking in tongues inspired by an unholy spirit.

As for the Whale, the spirit of fire had risen in him, as well. “Maddened by yesterday’s fresh irons that corroded in him, Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven.” Upon sighting him, Ahab had bravely denied that Fedallah’s prophecy of doom could come true—that Ahab would die after seeing Fedallah one last time. How could a drowned man be seen again? “Aye, aye, like many more thou told’st direful truth as touching thyself, O Parsee; but, Ahab, there thy shot fell short.” “What is more, he exulted, “no coffin and no hearse can be mine—only hemp can kill me!”

Moby-Dick surfaced, breaching the waves once again with a majestic, warning leap into the air. Pinioned to the Whale’s body by harpoon ropes, Fedallah’s body reappeared with the monster, the Parsee’s “distended eyes turned full upon old Ahab.” The Captain dropped his harpoon, seeing the prophecy fulfilled: Moby-Dick himself was the hearse. But “where is the second hearse?” Ahab demanded, threatening his boat-mates with harpooning if they jumped off their craft. “Ye are not other men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey me.” As the Whale began to swim off, Starbuck watched from the deck of the Pequod: “See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!”

True enough, but when Ahab ordered Starbuck to set the Pequod‘s sails to follow his whale-boat, Starbuck again obeyed. The three harpooneers mounted the masts; while Ahab had chased the Whale, a sea-eagle had carried off the ship’s red flag, which Ahab, seeing it was no longer on the mainmast, ordered Tashtego to replace. Ahab’s boat caught up with Moby-Dick, and when Ahab’s re-seized harpoon struck the Whale, Moby-Dick charged not the boat but the now-nearby ship itself, “smiting his jaws amid fiery showers of foam.” Fiery showers: fire and water, Ahab’s worshiped “Father” and “Step-Mother,” combine in one image. “Is this the end of all my bursting prayers? all my lifelong fidelities?” panicked Starbuck wondered. The answer was yes, as Moby-Dick, “retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice…in his whole aspect,” “smote the ship’s starboard bow,” breaching it with “his predestinating head.” Ahab saw and understood: The ship was the second hearse, the one made of American wood.

Ahab made one last throw with the harpoon of the satanic baptism. This time the snaking hemp rope caught him, pulling him from the boat into the sea. The ship sank, sucking the last boat into its whirlpool. Tashtego, representative of the ‘first’ Americans, at the top of the mainmast, was the last to go down on the American-made hearse. Just before he did, he pinned the swooping sea-eagle to the mast, as it attempted to fly off with replacement flag. The ship, Ishmael thinks, was like Satan, who took a part of Heaven to Hell along with him. “The great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago”—the time of the Flood.

“And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” The Epilogue’s epigram is from Job 1: 14-19, the coda of each of the four messengers who reported a flood of disasters to Job. Ishmael means to be the bringer of bad news to Americans, but why? He is, after all, an Ishmael—a perpetual exile.

He had been thrown overboard from Ahab’s whale-boat during the fight. He ascribes his presence in Ahab’s boat to “the Fates,” who caused him to take the place of Fedallah there. Thrown from the boat, “floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of it”—exiled by Moby-Dick, Fate’s agent—he found himself slowly drawn “towards the closing vortex” as the Pequod sank. “Like another Ixion I did revolve.” Ixion is the Ishmael-figure of classical mythology, equally an exile, although for the crime of having pushed his father into a fire. The gods take him up, much to their regret, and eventually he provoked punishment by Jupiter for committing adultery with Hera, attached to a wheel of fire for eternity. The physical wheel of water has its counterpart in the ideational or mythological wheel of fire, both these contradictory elements serving as objects of Ahabian worship. Unlike Ahab, Ishmael escaped the wheel. Queequeg’s “coffin life buoy” reached the center of the vortex before Ishmael could be sucked into it, then shot up as the ship went under, propelled by the resulting jet of water. Ishmael clung to it and survived overnight. He was picked up by the Rachel, the following day. “In her retracing search after her missing children, [she] only found another orphan.”

Queequeg, the man of nature, in effect saved his friend by volunteering his coffin for use as a life-buoy, crafted and recrafted by the carpenter or mindless Christ. Ishmael was saved also by the captain of the Rachel, a man of familial moral sentiment and Biblical agape. Biblically-oriented readers will find in these and so many remarkable events prior to it the hand of Providence. Ishmael does not. Does Melville? Perhaps not, since after all his is the ruling intelligence behind the novel, and we have no way of knowing that he ascribed that gift to God.

 

Note

1. For a comparison of Ahab and Pip with King Lear and his Fool, see Olson, op. cit., 58-63.