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

 

If the palsied universe lies before us like a leper, what shall we do? What way of life, what regime, should human beings follow?

Democracy would be one. The principle of democracy is equality, and if we all are equally illumined not by the light of the Gospels, nor that of the Enlightenment, but by the colorless, all-color of atheism, no one, no few, among us deserves to rule the others. Such pretensions belong among the pretensions Nature paints, in painting herself like a harlot. Nor should democrats be dismissed as entirely ignorant. They hear things. If they are beneath some in civil society, this does keep their ears to the ground, or in this instance the deck. A sailor believes he’s heard something below the deck of the Pequod, something or someone not yet seen on deck. He does not know what or who it is, and the crew both discounts his opinion and passes it around. (Readers know he heard the mysterious stowaways; Melville titles the chapter “Hark!” but the herald angels aren’t singing.) Democrats hear things, even if they might not immediately know what they are. Ishmael never suggests that the officers have heard anything below-deck. Superior rank makes rule easier in one way, harder in another.

Tyranny is another way of life, represented in Ahab. Ishmael shows him poring over his sea charts, calculating where Moby-Dick might most likely be found, given the known, regular migrations of sperm whales—their ‘fatedness.’ This instances the way in which Ahab’s intellect serves his ruling passion, “threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a view to the more certain accomplishment of the monomaniac thought of his soul,” forming a “delirious but still methodical scheme.” In the meantime (and here chance might intervene amidst the workings of fatality and the human will) Moby-Dick might turn up anywhere, long before the ship reaches the most likely hunting ground; Ahab will keep the crew vigilant. As for himself, he remains superficially rational but tormented, awakening from fitful sleep with “his own bloody nails in his palms,” self-crucified. The “hell in himself” drives him from his state room to pace every part of the deck. The “eternal, living principle or soul in him,” his heart, in a state of “horror” at the underlying ‘nature of nature,’ conflicts with his mind, whose “sheer inveteracy of will” drives him to confront and attempt to destroy that nature. More, his heart is “horror-stricken” by the very mind that sets his purpose. His “tormented spirit” may be “a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness in itself.” “God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.” Rarely does skeptical Ishmael go so far as to appeal to God, but he sees the whiteness of the whale, a “blankness,” in the soul of his captain, and doubts that any human word or deed can help him, or the regime he has founded. Ahab’s tyranny is contra natura in two ways: against what he takes to be the malicious underlying nature of nature; against his own soul, his life-principle.

Ishmael admits that Ahab does understand something about nature. In another of his ‘down-to-earth’ chapters, he testifies to the fact that Moby-Dick, if a prodigy, nonetheless has had predecessors for elusiveness and ferocity among the sperm whale species. Ishmael protests that his yarn is no “monstrous fable, or worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.” Sperm whales have indeed attacked whaling boats and ships, but land-dwellers seldom hear of these incidents and have little comprehension of the “powerful, knowing, and judiciously malicious” character of the monster, which “acts not so often with blind rage, as with willful, deliberate designs of destruction to his pursuers,” behavior attested to as early as the sixth-century historian Procopius of Constantinople. Wise Solomon was right: “Verily there is nothing new under the sun.” Deploying understatement to drive home the plausibility of what he reports, Ishmael writes, “I tell you, the sperm whale will stand no nonsense.”

His own credibility (and not incidentally, his own sanity) confirmed, Ishmael returns to the mind of the tyrant, whose rationality of method entails not only calculations concerning the Whale but ruling calculations concerning his officers and crew. “To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order.” Although for the moment Ahab has lodged “his magnet in Starbuck’s brain,” he knows that the soul of First Mate Starbuck “abhorred his captain’s quest,” and might challenge his rule; the conflict between mind and life-principle or soul which torments Ahab also torments Starbuck, thanks to Ahab, but in Starbuck his mindset was not self-generated, and so might slip. More, the length of the voyage might detach the souls of his crew from the regime. He has brought them to a high pitch of excitement and resolution with his demagoguery, but he knows that this mood cannot endure through long months at sea. More, “he had indirectly laid himself open to the unanswerable charge of usurpation,” giving his officers and crew a right to revolution, should they so choose. “The subtle insanity of Ahab respecting Moby-Dick was noways more significantly manifested than in his superlative sense and shrewdness in foreseeing that, for the present, the hunt should in some way be stripped of that strange imaginative impiousness which naturally invested in it; that the full terror of the voyage must be kept withdrawn into the obscure background (for few men’s courage is proof against protracted meditation unrelieved by action).” Therefore, action they will have, “some nearer things to think of than Moby-Dick,” “some food for their common, daily appetites”—namely, cash. Even the doubloon will not suffice, here, but rather the continuance of “the natural, nominal purpose of the Pequod‘s voyage”— whale-hunting and whale-processing for salable commodities.

The lull before action affords Ishmael an opportunity further to picture his own understanding of the human condition. On deck on the ship in a quiet sea, he and Queequeg weave a sword-mat, a sturdy cloth designed to protect sails and riggings at chafing points. “It seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates.” The warp (the set of vertical threads, called the “longitude” by weavers) represents necessity or fate; “with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads”—free will and liberty of action. “Meantime, Queequeg’s impulsive, indifferent sword”—the piece of wood so called, which opens a space in the woof (the horizontal threads or “latitude” of the mat)—”sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly,” represents chance. Longitude and latitude: terms not only of weaving but of mapping; Ishmael and Queequeg’s actions parallel Ahab’s. Their purpose contrasts with his, as protection contrasts with destruction. Against Shelley’s thoroughgoing determinism in “Queen Mab,” Ishmael asserts a limited but still significant role for free will and chance in the workings of fate. Despite his earlier appeal to God, Ishmael leaves no apparent role for providence.

Fate then intervenes. Tashtego sights a school of sperm whales. At this, Ahab is “surrounded by five dusky phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air,” rather like demons in the Bible. These are those whom Ishmael had seen in the dusk, as he walked to board the ship in Nantucket, the ones the sailor heard below deck. They unhitch a fourth whale-boat, which the sailors had assumed to be only a spare; Ahab himself will join the hunt with these confederates. The dominant one, Fedallah, whose name means “in the hands of God” or perhaps “gift of God,” speaks in a serpentine half-hiss; tall, dark-skinned, garbed in black, his head is crowned with the whiteness associated with the whale—long, white hair braided and curled atop his head like a turban. He is a Parsee—that is, a Zoroastrian fire-worshipper whose race once lived in Persia before being driven to India by Muslim persecutors who did not regard Zoroastrians as gifts from God. The Satan-figure’s confreres are Manilans of “tiger-yellow” complexions; Ishmael calls the Filipinos of Manila “a race notorious for a certain diabolism of subtlety,” whom “some honest white mariners supposed to be the paid spies and secret confidential agents on the water of the devil.” While by his irony Ishmael distances himself from such superstition, he does not distance himself from the symbolic significance of Ahab’s chosen close collaborators—a sort of substitute set of officers he has placed at the heart of his usurping regime.

The ship’s formal officers react in accordance with their several characters. Devil-may-care Stubb shouts to his men, “Never mind the brimstone—devils are good fellows enough”; he urges on his rowers with talk of riches in “a tone… strangely compounded of fun and fury.” Starbuck finds relief in the whale-sighting: “This at least is duty; duty and profit hand in hand!” Flask gets up on Daggoo’s shoulders for a better look at the prey; “the bearer looked nobler than the rider,” as if “Passion and Vanity [were] stamping the living magnanimous earth,” to little effect. On the pursuit, Stubb is cheerful, Starbuck quiet, Flask voluble. As for Ahab, he addresses his boat-crew with “words best omitted here; for you live under the blessed light of the evangelical land.” All set off amidst “the vast swells of the omnipotent sea,” soon roiled by a squall.

In Starbuck’s boat, Ishmael witnesses the interplay of chance, fate, and choice the sword-mat symbolized. Starbuck orders Queequeg to throw the harpoon (ruling choice, chosen obedience), but a wind-swelled wave (chance) jostles the boat, causing the harpoon to miss its target. The storm (fate) intensifies; they lose sight of the other boats and of the ship. Hoping for rescue, Starbuck lights a lantern, which Queequeg holds. “There, then, he sat, holding up that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair.” They don’t find the ship until the fatality of natural necessity brings the dawn.

Melville titles the next chapter of Ishmael’s yarn “The Hyena”—a jarring title in a maritime narrative. “There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke,” one “at nobody’s expense but his own.” “There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy”—a sort of thoughtful Stubbism. Safely back on ship, Ishmael asks Queequeg whether such near-calamities “did often happen,” and is calmly assured that they do. He asks Starbuck if lowering whale boats in “a foggy squall is the height of a whaleman’s discretion”; yes, “careful and prudent” Starbuck answers, having “lowered for whales from a leaking ship in a gale off Cape Horn.” And you, Flask? “Yes, that’s the law.” Constrained by fate, chance, and custom, Ishmael nonetheless has a choice to make, and so he does. He draws up his last will and testament, with Queequeg serving as “lawyer, executor, and legatee.” And he feels better for doing so; “a stone was rolled away from my heart.” He concludes that “the hyena” is life itself, the cosmos itself, a “laughing hyena”—a jolly beast, but ready to tear you apart. The best an individual can do is to make prudent choices against necessity and mischance, with the help of a trusted friend. Ishmael thus avoids the maddened libido dominandi of the tyrant’s soul, the decent but weak conventionality of Starbuck, the thoughtless bravado of Stubb, the inanity of Flask, and what he judges to be the evangelical or Christian hope of landlubbers who ignore the harshness of reality.

He remains under the rule of Ahab, where this modest morality will do only a little good. In one of his cheerier moments, Stubb marvels to Flask about peg-legged Ahab’s courage at setting off in a whale-boat. “Oh! he’s a wonderful old man!” Never one to miss a chance to exhibit stupidity, Flask observes that it’s not “so strange,” really, because Ahab has “one knee, and good part of the other left.” Stubb ripostes: “I don’t know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel.” Surely not. Ishmael, who doesn’t pray much, either, instead considers Ahab’s political responsibility: Should the ship’s captain risk his life? The fact that he does, and the fact that he has engaged his own whale-boat crew, “never entered the heads of the owners of the Pequod,” nor does it much trouble many of its sailors or its officers.

As for Ahab’s picked crew-mates, Fedallah “remained a muffled mystery to the last,” with “some sort of a half-hinted influence” or “even authority” over the captain. Fedallah “was such a creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their dreams,” “the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic communities”—”insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in these modern days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth’s primal recollections,” memories of a time when “according to Genesis, the angels indeed consorted with the daughters of men,” and “the devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins, indulged in mundane amours.” If lands untouched by civilization, or by modern notions of progress, no longer produce such remarkable men, the original earth, still preserved in remote places, brings forth ‘Rousseauian’ noble savages like Daggoo, Queequeg, and Tashtego, but also sinister beings like Fedallah, whom Rousseau would have dismissed as unlikely. Melville is a Rousseau for realists.

Such persons thrive on the chaos of the sea. It was primitive men (Tashtego’s ancestors) who first ventured out on it to hunt whales. Fedallah is the first to see the Spirit-Spout, a will-o’-the-wisp whale-spout that vanishes when whaling boats chase it. “And had you watched Ahab’s face that night, you would have thought in him… two different things were warring,” his live leg and his dead, peg-leg. “On life and death this old man walked.” “There reigned… a sense of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition, as if it were treacherously beckoning us on and on, in order that the monster might round on us, and rend us at last in the remotest and most savage seas.” Savage persons on the savage sea; the more-or-less civilized sailors, split-souled Ahab included, associate the Spirit-Spout with Moby-Dick. They reach the Cape of Good Hope, which Ishmael, lost to hope, calls Cape Tormentosa, for its “demoniac waves.” There they have their first encounter with another whale ship, “The Albatross,” as white as its namesake, “long absent from home.” Ahab tries to hail it, hoping for news on the Whale, but it drifts off, birdlike. In Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the albatross is the bird of good omen. Ahab doesn’t kill it, as the Mariner does; for him and his crew, it is simply unreachable.

Ahab commands the helmsman to sail on, “round the world.” Ishmael reflects: “Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings; but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those that we left behind secure, were all the time before us.” If the world were “an endless plain,” at least there could be progress, “promise in the voyage.” “But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.” Given the futility of progress on a round globe, where should the ship of state sail? Should it sail at all, or only keep to port?

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

 

If the waters of the oceans represent and to some degree embody the chaos surrounding and even underlying the apparent order of the land—if chaos is an inescapable reality—how can that chaos be thought? And what shall, can, human beings do, given it, and as part of it?

In the eleven chapters beginning with “Cetology” and ending with “The Whiteness of the Whale,” Ishmael presents several attempts to understand and to deal with this reality. “Cetology” comes immediately after the first mention of the White Whale by Ahab, although we recall that Ishmael had alluded to it near the beginning of his yarn. With characteristic irony, Ishmael presents a taxonomy of whales, a “classification of the constituents of chaos” which he calls “indispensable to a thorough appreciative understanding of the more special leviathanic revelations and allusions of all sorts which are to follow.” Because the sperm whale inhabits the remote southern seas, and offers only glimpses of itself above the surface, the two best books on the sperm whale which attempt a “scientific description” of the species offer “necessarily” little information, but Ishmael brushes that aside: “Any human thing supposed to be complete must for that very reason infallibly be faulty”; limited human beings weakly comprehend a vastness that changes constantly. This does not preclude some insights, however.

On the question of whether the whale is a mammal or a fish, Ishmael cheerfully chooses to rely on tradition, not Linnaeus, even while immediately observing that the ‘fish’ has lungs, not gills, and warm blood. The real reason for calling the whale a fish is that it lives entirely in the water, the symbol of chaos; to Ishmael’s mind, mammals, including humans, are at most “amphibious,” like the walrus and perhaps the sailor. He defines the whale as “a spouting fish with a horizontal tail,” unlike all other fish “familiar to landsmen”; freshwater fish have vertical tails. Ishmael goes on to list the various kinds of whales, playfully dividing them, first, according to their size and naming their sizes in the same terms used for books: folio, octavo, duodecimo. The analogy is apt: neither a book nor a classification system can really ‘contain’ the vast reality it attempts to describe. “God keep me from completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught.” With insights along the way: Regarding the killer whale, Ishmael observes, “We are all killers, on land and sea; Bonaparte and sharks included.” Classifying the constituents of chaos does not tame them, even if it may give human beings a framework, however arbitrary, for making observations that tell.

From science, Ishmael returns to politics, this time not the formal politics of rank but the perhaps more powerful order of custom, which enables rank to endure. Returning to the origins of European whaling, Ishmael recalls that the regime of the old Dutch whaling ships consisted of the captain, who took charge of navigation and general management and the Specksynder (“Fat-cutter”), who governed whale-hunting. On American whalers, the harpooneer is “an important officer on the boat,” even to the point of commanding the ship’s deck on night watches in whaling grounds. For that reason, “the grand maxim of the sea demands, that he should nominally live apart from the men before the mast, and be in some way distinguished as their professional superior, although always, by them, familiarly regarded as their social equal.” Equality in civil society, but rank in terms of custom, custom based on the character of one’s role within the regime.

This notwithstanding, the true ruler of the Pequod remains Ahab. Yet even he “was by no means unobservant of the paramount forms and usages of the sea,” although “incidentally making use of them for other and more private ends than they were legitimately intended to subserve.” So he must do; given “the sultanism of his brain,” his drive to found an “irresistible dictatorship” aboard the ship will fail if he relies on natural intelligence alone. “Be a man’s intellectual superiority what it will, it can never assume the practical, available supremacy over other men, without the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or less paltry and base”—necessary “political superstitions.” Indeed, this is one reason why “God’s true princes of the Empire”—men like Bulkington—fail to ascend to the heights of command. A dolt may rule an empire because “the plebeian herds crouch abased before the tremendous centralization” of authority seen in a mere crown. When a man like Ahab takes the helm—one who, far from being a dolt, understands the use of custom or convention—the people will obey.

Ishmael shows how this works by describing the ritual of dining at the Captain’s cabin-table. Each officer must, according to “holy usage,” report to the cabin after the higher-ranking officer has had time to be seated and all eat in silence. (“Though nominally included in the census of Christendom, [Ahab] was still an alien in it,” socially “inaccessible” even at table). When the officers leave, the harpooneers dine rather more informally, in an “almost frantic democracy” of gobbling and chatter. But democracy establishes its own hierarchy; the men take their amusement by intimidating the cabin boy; “hard fares the white waiter who waits upon cannibals.”

Formal office and informal usage or custom reinforce any regime. To them rulers typically add architecture. Mast-heads embody authority, literally towering over the crew. Ishmael sketches a history of ‘mast-heads’ defined broadly as any elevated structure that either enables surveillance or forces onlookers to bend their heads upward, beginning with the pyramids of Egypt and including statues of George Washington and other dignitaries. On the whaling ship, however, elevation often induces neither vigilance nor awe but freedom from the captain’s orders (how can he tell if you really are looking out for whale, or just daydreaming?). Although “very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded young philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient ‘interest’ in the voyage,” they remain out of reach, “lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie” by “the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature.” In a word, the young sentry finds not whales but pantheism, an insight falsified not so much by the captain’s wrath as by the fact that his perch is precarious: “Move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror,” hovering as you do over “Descartian vortices” through which you might fall into that “summer sea,” no longer quite so mystical. Whatever one may think of monism and dualism in theory, in practice the duality of solid and airy substances pertains.

Office, custom, and architecture may suffice for ruling a regime under ordinary circumstances, but how to rule such a motley crew of all races, what Nietzsche would later call a cosmopolitan carnival of arts, worships, and moralities? And how to rule a whaling ship (or a regime like America’s) for an extraordinary purpose, under harsh conditions? Ahab knows how. He commands the crew to gather on his quarter-deck and offers them a material inducement: “Whosoever of ye raises me that… white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!” The sailors cheer, and Ahab breaks out the grog to celebrate their unity of purpose. But Starbuck demurs. Ahab is usurping the authority of the owners of the ship, staging a coup d’état in their absence. “I came here to hunt whales,” Starbuck protests, “not my commander’s vengeance.” To establish his tyranny beyond the supports of office, custom, and architecture, Ahab must put down this murmur of rebellion against his rebellion. If the purpose of whaling is to make money, I, Ahab, have just offered money, the doubloon reward: “My vengeance will fetch a great premium here!” The material rewards whaling offers the sailors are years distant and uncertain, a percentage of the profits at the end of the voyage. The doubloon is here and now. ‘The people’ incline to follow the nearer, more concrete payout.

His challenge blocked on the level of material motivation, Starbuck invokes the other great incentive animating New England whalers. “Vengeance on a dumb brute! that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous!” But Ahab has an answer to the spiritual challenge, too—a call not to spirituality but to spiritedness. “All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks”—he begins as if he were Emerson, a Transcendentalist—but behind the brutish matter of the white whale lurks “an inscrutable malice,” not the supposedly benevolent nature Emersonians imagine. “That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.” Man: Ahab calls Starbuck and the crew to manliness; if Shelley’s Queen Mab reveals a universe supporting an anti-Biblical atheism of delight and freedom, Ahab reveals a universe supporting an anti-Biblical atheism of pure thumos. Politically, he knows he has the crew, ‘the people,’ behind him, against Starbuck’s weak, sober, spiritual aristocratism. “The crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab, in this matter of the whale?” They are, and Ahab sees that “Starbuck now is mine; cannot oppose me now, without rebellion.” Starbuck is reduced to prayer: “God keep me!—keep us all!” Neither Ahab nor, as it will transpire, God ‘hears,’ heeds the prayer, but below deck the mysterious sailors whom Elijah asked about, the ones who have yet to come on deck, laugh in delight. Ahab commands that the sailors drink the grog (“It’s as hot as Satan’s hoof”), an order they do not fail to obey. Parodying a Roman Catholic mass, Ahab authorizes his “three pagan kinsmen,” the harpooneers, as his priests, who pass around the “murderous chalices” of grog. Pale, shuddering Starbuck turns away from the triumph of Milton’s Satan, who has justified his ways to men and thereby fixed them to his regime of tyranny, by their own impassioned assent.

The political philosophy scholar John Alvis has commented on Ahab’s brilliant, sinister use of demagoguery to rule souls, not merely bodies. [1] The Apostle Peter understands demagogues well enough to describe men like Ahab. “There were false prophets… among the people” of Israel, Peter writes, and there will be “false teachers among you, who privately shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction.” Coming from within Christendom itself, they will appeal to you with covetousness, while “with feigned words mak[ing] merchandise out of you”; your greed for gain he will turn to his profit. They will “despise government,” as Ahab despises the government of the ship’s owners; “self-willed, they are not afraid to speak evil of dignities.” They will “count it a pleasure to riot in the day time,” or at least pass around the grog for others to do so. And so they “beguile[e] unstable souls” with “great swelling words of vanity.” Having described Ahab, Peter then writes what might be called a verse for Starbuck: “Of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage.” (2 Peter 2) But does anyone on the Pequod think of Peter? Ishmael turns to the thoughts of captain, officers, and crew in the next four, brief, chapters.

If Ahab is right about Being, those whom Peter calls false prophets are the true ones, including Ahab himself. His day’s work done, the Captain, alone in his cabin, gazes out the windows at the sunset. He reflects on the crown he has successfully usurped; the metal in it is iron, not gold. The “dry heat” of the sunset no longer soothes, as it once did. “This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne’er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception”—insight into the malignity of Being—”I lack the low enjoying power” of his officers and crew. “Damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise!” Ahab is Adam, but an Adam not humbled but enraged by God, allied with the serpent. His will is iron; that is his true crown: “What I’ve dared, I’ve willed; and what I’ve willed I’ll do!” Soft Starbuck thinks him mad, “but I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened!” “I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer,” become “the prophet and the fulfiller” all in one, guaranteeing his prophecy by his own action. His regime, his way of life, will be “the iron way.” But will he be a true or a false prophet?

A little later, at dusk, Starbuck leans on the mainmast, nursing his injuries. “My soul is more than matched; she’s”—note the feminine form—”overmanned; and by a madman!” His “sanity” has failed, and not only politically but morally: “He drilled deep down, and blasted all my reason out of me!” Ahab “would be a democrat to all above,” challenging God, but “look, how he lords it over all below!” His “miserable office” will be “to obey, rebelling,” and “worse yet, to hate with touch of pity,” since “in his eyes I read some lurid woe would shrivel me up, had I it.” He can only take refuge in wishful thinking. “His heaven-insulting purpose, God may wedge aside.” Or not, God having His own purposes, His thoughts not being ours. Ahab has revealed something to Starbuck: “Oh, life! ’tis now that I do feel the latent horror in thee!” Gathering himself, he adds, “but ’tis not me! that horror’s out of me! and with the soft feeling of the human in me, yet will I try to fight ye, ye grim, phantom futures!” He prays to the “blessed influences” for help in this. But will those influences answer his prayer?

Still later, on the night watch, Stubb has “been thinking over it ever since, and that ha-ha’s the final consequence”—the ‘H’ sound of awe, filtered through his comic-shallow soul. “A laugh’s the wisest, easiest answer to all that’s queer.” The unthoughtful man makes a suitably thoughtless prophecy: “I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.”

Latest of all, the harpooneers and sailors sing drunkenly, to the time of Pip’s tambourine. The old Manx sailor prophesies to himself, “I wonder whether these jolly lads bethink them of what they are dancing over. I’ll dance over your grave, I will…” (In fact, he will not.) As a storm comes up, Daggoo and a Spaniard exchange racial slurs and start to fight; Tashtego observes, “gods and men—both brawlers!” while much-insulted slave-boy Pip says to himself, “that anaconda of an old man swore ’em to hunt” Moby-Dick—white men, he remarks, white whale, white squall blowing, and the “big white God aloft,” to whom he prays for mercy.

In the regime of isolatoes, only drunken sailors socialize, but their revelry ends in a fight.  Ishmael pauses his yarn to make his confession: “I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul.” Human encounters with the White Whale had proven not only injurious but “fatal to the last degree of fatalities”; according to both Job and Hobbes, death is the king of terrors. Such terror generates legends that deepen the terror. Moby-Dick is ubiquitous, having been “encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time”; Moby-Dick is immortal (“for immortality is but ubiquity in time”). “But even stripped of these supernatural surmisings,” which make Moby-Dick into a god, or perhaps an angel of death, “there was enough in the earthly and incontestable character of the monster to strike the imagination with unwonted power”: his “snow-white wrinkled forehead”; his “high, pyramidical [mast-head-like] white hump”; his body—streaked, spotted, marbled with white. Above all, Moby-Dick inspires “natural terror” in his actions, the “unexampled intelligent malignity” with which he would retreat from pursuing whale boats, only to turn on them and destroy them with an “infernal foresight of ferocity.” Far from the dumb brute of Starbuck’s description, Moby-Dick acts like a brilliant military captain and assault force, combined.

This is why Ahab hates him. Commanding a whaling ship, Ahab had descended onto one of the pursuit boats; Moby-Dick smashed all three boats, and Ahab bravely continued his assault, stabbing the monster. “Moby-Dick had reaped away Ahab’s leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming malice.” Ahab came to load “all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations” on the White Whale, now “the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them.” Unlike the devil-worshippers of the ancient East, Ahab did not worship the evil one but “piled on the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down.” In his delirium on the voyage home, “his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad.” By the time he reached Nantucket, however, he had learned to conceal that madness. His “great natural intellect,” entirely preserved, now served not as the ruler of his passion but as its “living instrument,” with intellect and madness binding to gather in his soul “a thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable object.” The man who would strike through the mask of appearance to the evil underlying all Being mimics the prey he hunts, and sane Nantucketers like Mr. Peleg fell for the ruse. Indeed, they think, wishfully, that Ahab’s war against the White Whale will make him “superlatively competent to cheer and howl on his underlings to the attack,” lending energy to the purpose of their intended regime on the whaling ship. “Had any of his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking in him then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls have wrenched the ship from such a fiendish man! they were bent on profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint. He was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge.” Peleg called him an “ungodly, godly man”; he got it only half right, as Ishmael now accurately calls him an “ungodly old man” at “the head of a crew… chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals—morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck the invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask.” But there is more than that. The officers and crew unite under Ahab’s tyrannical regime because there is something of him in each human being. “The subterranean miner works in us all.” And so, “for one, I gave myself up to the abandonment of the time and the place; but while yet all a-rush to encounter the whale, could see naught in that brute but the deadliest ill.” No Christian, Ishmael nonetheless discovers what Augustine discovered in himself, that he would do evil while knowing it evil. In this, both men achieve self-knowledge while learning what human nature is. Socrates considers this the dual purpose of philosophy.

But what is the nature of the Whale, and especially the nature of his whiteness? From the “classification of the constituents of chaos” in Chapter 32 Ishmael arrives at “the whiteness of the whale” in Chapter 42—whiteness, which has no constituents. Ahab defines the Whale by his malice. Ishmael defines him by his whiteness.

“It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.” But why? Is whiteness not an emblem of the Good? Ishmael not only acknowledges that it is often taken to be such, but he offers examples of the thought from many regimes and civilizations ranging from European empires ancient (Rome) and modern (Austria) to the Eastern monarchy of Siam (modern) and the “Persian fire-worshippers” (ancient). Does not the Book of Revelation itself envision the “white robes of the redeemed,” the “great white throne” of God? On land, the White Steed of the Prairies recorded in Indian traditions “always to the bravest Indians… was the object of trembling reverence and awe.” At sea, the albatross has proved a somewhat more ambiguous presence, a creature of “spiritual wonderment and pale dread.” “Not Coleridge first threw that spell; but God’s great, unflattering laureate, Nature.”

But whiteness itself has another dimension to it. “Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are?” An albino human being unsettles us. As do the living who pale at the sight of such beings, and as do the dead, who wear their “pallor” as “the badge of consternation in the other world.” In the Bible, Death is personified as the pale rider on the pale horse, king of terrors both in the Christian Book of Revelation and the Leviathan of the materialist Hobbes. “Therefore, in his other moods, symbolize whatever grand or gracious thing he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest idealized significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul,” in reversal of the benign Transcendentalism of Melville’s contemporaries. “To analyze it, would seem impossible,” as whiteness has no parts.

But is our understanding of whiteness only a matter of “moods”? Is our sometime terror at it nothing but sickly fear? No: Tell me, Ishmael challenges his reader, why a strong, young colt, “foaled in some peaceful valley in Vermont,” will panic at the smell of a buffalo robe. The colt has never been gored by a bison, an animal that departed from that land decades or centuries ago. “Here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute”—a creature that is what Starbuck wrongly supposes Moby-Dick to be—”the instinct of the knowledge of the demonism in the world.” “Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.” This means that not only does Ishmael reject the God of the Bible, as Ahab does, not only does he reject Emerson’s vision of a nature whose “aspect is devout,” but he comes nearer to Ahab’s claim about the underlying nature of Nature. He presents us with a choice. Given whiteness’s “indefiniteness,” by which it “shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe,” one might recall Pascal, terrified by those voids and immensities. The whiteness “shadows,” the whiteness darkens souls with fear. For Pascal, that fear was, as the Bible wants it to be for us, the beginning of wisdom—the fear of God. But is there a God? Here is the second choice: “Is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?” Does the faith that may issue from our fear of God only amount to a comforting cover for our greater fear that there is no God?

Leaving theology aside, the “natural philosophers” have discovered “that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within.” Let there be light, the God of Genesis says, but “the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself”; to consider it truly we must realistically see that “the palsied universe lies before us a leper,” its whiteness a horrifying and fatal disease. “And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?” Why would men, “deep men,” men who see truly, not want to destroy their would-be destroyer, before it can destroy them? But for Ahab, and evidently for Ishmael, no faerie queen, no Mab, will redeem us with some brighter tomorrow. In Moby-Dick Melville not only anticipates the ‘spiritual’ tyrants of the next century but rejects their cheery illusions of utopia with which they would beguile the vast crews of isolatoes under the sway of their regimes.

Although Ishmael explains Ahab’s whale-hunt, he does not thereby endorse its purpose, or Ahab’s regime. In dispelling the wonder at whalers and whaling, Ishmael shows why all human beings prove vulnerable to Ahabian appeals, to the demagoguery that induces them to assent to the madness of the tyrant, the tyranny of madness. We all have in us what Ahab has in him. But to show what we have in us is not to commend it. Ishmael succumbed, but has broken the spell. He would not have ‘Young America’ under the spell of a tyrant any more than he would have it under the influence of the grog of bullying democracy. Neither the nature as understood by the American Founders, from which right may be derived, nor the nature of Emerson or the nature of Shelley, beckoning us to utopian illusions, nor the nature of Ahab, cunningly malignant and thus the justification for tyranny, adequately comprehends nature. Nothing adequately comprehends it, if comprehension means an all-encompassing, systematic understanding, parodied in “Cetology.” If the universe is diseased, it cannot be the foundation of right or of utopia; nor is it properly the object of rage, inasmuch as disease bespeaks no malice. Disease does not bespeak anything; it is dumb. A calmer state of mind, properly fearful but not paralyzed with fear, will be needed in the New America and in the soul of the New American.

 

NOTES

1. John Alvis: “Moby-Dick and Melville’s Quarrel with America” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 23, Number 2, Winter 1996, pp. 223-247. Alvis remarks that Ahab never employs force, tyrant though he is.

 

 

 

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.