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

 

“Isolatoes” may populate this novel, but social and political relations persist. The “gam”—a social meeting between two or more whale-ships at sea—endures as a tradition no other type of ocean-going ship upholds. Typically, sailors on the outward-bound ship give letters to the homeward-bound ship for delivery to families and sweethearts in Nantucket; in exchange, the homeward-bound sailors offer information on whales they’ve seen on their voyage. It is almost needless to say that Ahab has no use for such social exchanges, unless the other captain has seen Moby-Dick. But such single-minded and unsocial behavior can exact a political price.

“The Town-Ho’s Story” is the longest chapter of the book. A yarn within the yarn, it consists of a story Ishmael tells to a pair of “Spanish friends” at the Golden Inn in Lima, Peru, some time after the voyage of the Pequod. [1] A whale-ship out of Nantucket, manned mostly by Polynesians, the Town-Ho‘s name derives from another whaling tradition: Before whalemen shouted “There she blows” upon sighting a whale, they shouted “Town-Ho.” “Town” is an Indian word, originally signifying that the speaker had seen a whale twice—a confirmed sighting. In English it originally referred to a closed-in garden, and eventually to a small, urbanized community as distinguished from a village and from the countryside. All of these threads play into the yarn. As for “Ho,” it’s another ‘H’-expulsion of breath, as is the word for the monster whose presence it signifies.

Ahab does want to talk with the captain of this ship because the crew has encountered Moby-Dick. But there was “a secret part of the tragedy” that Ahab and his officers never learn, a part “which seemed obscurely to involve with the whale a certain wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called judgments of God which at times are said to overtake some men.” Tyrants and oligarchs alike isolate themselves from their subjects, even as they rule them. As a result, they fail to learn some things. They often attempt to overcome this handicap by forming a network of spies—secrecy against secrecy. Ahab and the officers seem not to have taken this precaution.

Cruising the Pacific Ocean, the Town-Ho had developed a slow leak, which its crew attributed fancifully or playfully to a swordfish. There was no real emergency, as the pumps kept the ship afloat. Most captains stay at sea under these conditions, as long as they are fairly close to land. Only when they are far out at sea does a captain begin to worry, and set sail for some harbor. The choice is thus a matter of prudential judgment made within the constraints of geographic location and the condition of the ship. A few decades later, when thinking about ‘ships of state,’ scholars would begin to call such matters ‘geopolitics.’ Such judgments are what rulers are expected to make; to question their judgment is to question their authority to rule, to threaten revolution, regime change—mutiny.

Regime conflict arose from a private conflict between Steelkilt, a “desperado” from Buffalo, New York, a “Lakeman”—a man who sailed the Great Lakes before signing on to the whale-ship—and Radney, the first mate, a sharp-edged Nantucketer. Ishmael explains to Pedro and Sebastian that the Great Lakes are “grand fresh-water seas,” having “many of the ocean’s noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of races and climes.” These include “two great contrasting nations”—sharply contrasting indeed, as in the 1850s veterans of the War of 1812 still lived who remembered naval battles on those seas. On shore there are still military batteries, “wild barbarians,” and beasts of prey; on the seas, shipwrecks occur every year. “Thus, gentlemen, though an inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean born, and wild-ocean nurtured.” For his part, though a townsman, not a lakeman, Radney “was quite as vengeful and full of social quarrel as the backwoods seaman, fresh from the latitudes of buck-horn handled Bowie-knives.” Just as Radney had “some good-hearted traits” to go with his asperities, so Steelkilt “had long been retained harmless and docile,” and might have remained so, if treated with “inflexible firmness, only tempered by that common decency of human recognition which is the meanest slave’s right.” But Radney proved a poor ruler, “doomed and mad.” In this, he resembles Ahab, albeit with neither the intelligence nor the megalo-monomania. Radney was a tyrant, but a petty tyrant.

Somewhat concerned, Radney ordered the sails hoisted to speed the journey to the ship’s “island haven.” Because he was no coward, the sailors suspected his worry arose because he was a part-owner of the ship; so they joked, amongst themselves. The choice to change the ship’s course belongs to the captain; presumably, Radney persuaded him. But Radney had a problem in ruling, not with his captain or the sailors as a group but with one sailor in particular. “As you well know,” Ishmael tells his friends, “it is not seldom the case in this conventional world of ours—watery or otherwise; that when a person placed in command over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very significantly his superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man he conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness; and if he have a chance he will pull down and pulverize that subaltern’s tower, and make a little heap of dust out of it.” So Radney regarded Steelkilt, that “tall and noble animal with a head like a Roman” and “a brain, and a heart, and a soul in him… which had made Steelkilt Charlemagne, had he been born son to Charlemagne’s father.” Nature made Steelkilt a king, indeed an emperor, king of kings; chance and convention made him a subject, a sailor. By nature but not by convention, a Steelkilt should rule a Radney (a man “ugly as a mule; yet as hardy, as stubborn, as malicious”). Rule by convention is both necessary—a means of ruling the unruly—and at times unnatural, unjust, at least to the extent that justice may be said to retain some foothold in a ‘nature’ chaotic as the sea. Rule by convention is necessary because, as an earlier chapter taught us, many human beings will not obey rulers consistently without the habituation custom induces. The natural ruler who challenges conventional rule threatens the necessary conditions of any rule within a real, non-utopian human community. America’s Declaration of Independence, its founding revolutionary statement, acknowledges this: “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

Given this morally compromised, politically tense, and emotionally grating circumstance, Radney “did not love Steelkilt, and Steelkilt knew it.” Steelkilt did enjoy a small measure of conventional authority as the leader of the pump gang which keeps the ship afloat. Seeing Radney draw near while they worked, he pretended not to notice him, bantering with his mates about Radney’s “investment,” his “estate” in the ship and his supposed over-caution motivated by that self-interest. For his part, Radney pretended not to hear the chatter; taking refuge in his conventional right to command, he angrily ordered the men to pump harder. They did. Radney then foolishly pressed his advantage. When the crew took a rest break, he ordered the exhausted Steelkilt to to sweep the deck, a menial task for boys; “plainly [he] meant to sting and insult Steelkilt, as though Radney had spat in his face.” Steelkilt exhibited his natural superiority by remaining calm and attempting to take refuge in a countervailing convention, pointing to the three boys who were the “customary sweepers.” Radney persisted, repeating his command and threatening Steelkilt with a hammer. Neither man backed down, Steelkilt warning Radney not to touch him with that hammer; when Radney did, Steelkilt broke his jaw with a punch. That would make it harder for Radney to issue orders, for a while.

Though justified by natural right, Steelkilt had no illusions about the hazards of having violated the legal conventions of the ship. He went for reinforcements from his two “comrades”—”Canallers,” that is, sailors who worked on the Erie Canal and would thus have a certain social connection with a sailor who had worked on the Great Lakes. This requires Ishmael to offer another explanation to his Spanish friends, who have never ventured into North America. The Erie Canal has many of the characteristics of the Great Lakes. It may be narrow but it is very long—360 miles “through the entire breadth of the state of New York,” with cities and villages, swamps and “affluent, cultivated fields,” vast forests, “noble Mohawk counties” but also “rows of snow-white chapels, whose spires stand almost like milestones.” “Snow-white” gives the reader pause, and indeed there is a touch of the Whale’s chaos even in them. The Canal consists of “one continuous stream of Venetianly corrupt and often lawless life,” a point on which Ishmael does not fail to recur to his schoolmasterly inclination to offer a lesson: “There howl your pagans; where you ever find them, next door to you; under the long-flung shadow, and the snug patronizing lee of churches. For by some curious fatality, as it is often noted of your metropolitan freebooters that they ever encamp around the halls of justice, so sinners, gentlemen, most abound in holiest vicinities.” At this point, a silent and unnamed listener interrupts to confirm Ishmael’s understanding of fatality. Acknowledging the guest’s courtesy in referring to “distant Venice” instead of “present Lima,” this self-professed native of Lima cites “the proverb all along this coast—’Corrupt as Lima.'” The citizens of Lima have self-knowledge, perhaps more than the citizens of the United States. The man is a sailor, too, saying he’s seen Venice—indeed as corrupt as Ishmael has claimed: “The holy city of the blessed evangelist, St. Mark!—St. Dominic, purge it!” he exclaims. Dominic founded a new and austere order within the Catholic Church, a new regime within that regime. Does New York State need a new regime? Can a redirected “Young America” give it one?

His veracity affirmed and encouraged, Ishmael continues his portrait of Canallers, men as “abundantly picturesque and wicked” as heroes in dramas; “like Mark Antony” (another revolutionary) along the Canal, the Yankee Nile, the Canaller “indolently floats, openly toying with his red-cheeked Cleopatra”; Shakespeare describes the original Cleopatra as having her cheeks alternately cooled and warmed by the fans her slaves wave over her. (It must be admitted that this wasn’t the last time a sailor would hail a whore aboard ship, in the hope of having his breath taken away.) “But ashore, all this effeminacy is dashed,” as he plays the “terror to the smiling innocence of the villages through which he floats.” Nonetheless, as with so many rough-edged men, including Steelkilt and even Radney, the Canaller has his “redeeming qualities,” proving as ready “to back a poor stranger in a strait, as to plunder a wealthy one.” One such befriended Ishmael, who evidently got himself into a strait at some point. Given these characteristics, Canallers are as much “distrusted by our whaling captains” as Aussies, proverbially a rough lot.”To many thousands of our rural boys and young men born along its line, the probationary life of the Grand Canal furnishes the sole transition between quietly reaping in a Christian corn-field, and recklessly ploughing the waters of the most barbaric seas.”

Don Pedro understands. “No need to travel! The world’s one Lima. I had thought, now, that at your temperate North the generations were cold and holy as the hills.—But the story,” he reminds Ishmael, who has digressed, with no shortness of breath.

In the ensuing brawl, Steelkilt and the Canallers fought two junior mates and four harpooneers, with other sailors joining in. Safely removed to the sidelines, “the valiant captain danced up and down with a whale-pike, calling upon his officers to manhandle that atrocious scoundrel,” but without much effect, as “Steelkilt and his desperadoes were too much for them all.” Barricading himself and his allies, Steelkilt opened negotiations, offering to return to work if the captain guaranteed no flogging: “Treat us decently,” he told the captain, “and we’re your men.” Faced with this dilemma of authority, this conflict of natural justice with the need to enforce convention, the captain refused; eventually Steelkilt and the other (now) nine mutineers agreed to be confined to the forecastle, where over the next five days the captain starved out all but the original three. At this point, Steelkilt proposed a breakout and a shipboard rampage but the Canallers betrayed him, tied him up, handed him over. For their pains, all of them were tied to the mizzen rigging, where the Canallers hung on either side of Steelkilt, like “the two crucified thieves” around Christ. Ishmael thus presents his Spanish-Catholic friends with a serious parody of the Crucifixion, a version suggesting that the Apostles deserted Christ (as indeed one of them, Peter, did). The parody preserves the nobility of the would-be savior of the ship from the tyrannical first mate and lackluster captain. But that nobility has a serpentine quality; this ‘Christ’ has a certain deviltry in him. As the captain prepares to flog the offender against the law of the ship, Steelkilt “hissed out something, inaudible to all but the Captain,” who hesitates and then desists. At this, Radney arose from his berth; hissed at similarly by Steelkit, he hesitated but flogged him anyway. What is the meaning of this serpentine hiss?

It may have something to do with the result of Steelkilt’s apparently failed revolution. Could he have whispered to the officers that his flogging would cause a violent revolt? However this may be, he had now won over the crew, effecting a real revolution underneath the superficial return to order. At his insistence, however, the sailors did not mutiny overtly, in action. He persuaded them rather to desert the ship after it reaches port and in the meantime to refuse to shout out if they sight a whale. In thus subverting the purpose of the regime by the means of a new social compact, Steelkilt destroyed the rule of his erstwhile masters. There shall be no “Town-ho!” cry on the Town-Ho, the men agreed. Thoreau-like civil disobedience will preserve the ship physically, maintain its regime nominally, while ending the regime effectively. Steelkilt has exacted public revenge on tyranny, with the prudence of a natural ruler.

However, as a man of still excessive spiritedness, an imperfect founder, Steelkilt wasn’t done with his private enemy. He plotted to murder Radney by smashing his head with an iron ball. Here the promised “wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called judgments of God” occurred. “A fool saved the would-be murderer from the bloody deed he planned,” but simultaneously provided him with the means of “complete revenge.” Revenge is mine, saith the LORD of the Bible; “by a mysterious fatality, Heaven itself seemed to step in to take out of his hands into its own the damning thing he would have done.” This begins with the action of the salvific fool, “forgetful of the compact among the crew,” who saw none other than Moby-Dick, and blurted out, “There she rolls!” Social compacts can prove vulnerable in the passion of the moment. This cry united the crew, sailors and officers alike, “anxious to capture so famous and precious a fish.” Ishmael again calls attention to the “strange fatality pervad[ing] the whole career of these events, as if verily mapped out before the world itself was charted”—as if providential, as if planned as Ahab in his cabin had planned, and as God does plan, according to the Bible. Fatality evidently works through the natural human desires for fame and fortune.

The whale-boats dropped into the sea and pursued the Whale. Radney ordered his crew to row right up to it, and Moby-Dick killed him for his zeal. Chaotic nature has its graces, even as rough Lakemen and Canallers have their virtues. Steelkilt, who crewed on Radney’s boat, cut the harpoon line, setting Moby-Dick free—one good turn deserving another. For his part, Moby-Dick eluded the other boats and disappeared; having done injury only to the petty tyrant who threatened him, the Whale injured no one else. Chaotic nature even has its justice, on occasion.

Steelkilt would need one more intervention from providential chaos. Safely reaching the island, he and several others did indeed desert. Undermanned, the beleaguered captain set out for Tahiti, some 500 miles distant, “to procure a reinforcement to his [depleted] crew.” Steelkilt intercepted his boat, forced the captain to delay his mission for six days, then set out for Tahiti himself. He and his just secessionist-revolutionaries found two ships soon to sail for France, land of revolutionaries, ships whose captains “providentially in want of precisely that number of men which the sailor headed.” Ten days later, the captain arrived on his boat, recruited some Tahitians, returned to his island-haven, and “resumed his cruisings.” In effect, Steelkilt (with an assist from chaos) had saved both himself from hanging and the whale ship from tyranny. The “town” or confirmed whale sighting on the Town-Ho aids revolution of the ‘town’ or regime of the ship itself. (As for the earliest English-language meaning of the word, ‘town’ as ‘garden,’ it will figure later in Ishmael’s yarn.)  Six is the number of God’s initial days of work. An inversion, indeed: Steelkilt required of the captain six days of rest in order to complete his own prudential and provident revolutionary action.

No one knows where Steelkilt is now, Ishmael reports. In Nantucket, Radney’s widow mourns her lost husband; she might have been among the worshippers at the Whalemen’s Chapel. Ishmael swears in front of a priest, on a copy of the Gospels, that his yarn is “in substance and its great items, true”; he knew members of the Town-Ho‘s crew, and had met and talked with Steelkilt himself. It is of course questionable how seriously Ishmael would swear upon the Gospels, that most telling yarn which he has parodied in his own. But in substance and its great items, there is no reason to doubt that his yarn weaves true to his own considered convictions.

At last the secret is out. The sailors on the Pequod prudently kept this yarn from the sight or hearing of Ahab and his officers because it shows not only that revolution against tyranny can succeed but how it can succeed. Regime change requires courage, prudence, and assistance from fellow-subjects and from a force larger than any human reckoning can control. But it can be done. Steelkilt did not aspire to rule the whale ship, only to get free of its tyrannical regime, a regime that invited him to revolt in a manner similar to that described by Hegel in his passage on the struggle for “recognition” between slave and master. Success here required not isolation but alliance, and indeed loyalty in combat. The wrong of private revenge was prevented by a sort of predestination, whether providential or fated. Ishmael here calls it providence, but he’s talking with pious Spanish Catholics. This notwithstanding, there is a sort of justice in small parts of the chaotic war of all against all that animates life both at sea and on land. If that were not so, could we trust Ishmael the yarn-spinner at all, or Melville? Could we trust ourselves to learn from them?

 

Note

1. Readers of Melville’s later novella, Billy Budd, will recognize in the characters Steelkilt and Radney certain parallels with Billy Budd and First Mate Claggart. The circumstances and the actions narrated also ‘rhyme,’ if not exactly. Melville has spun Ishmael’s yarn in a similar but not identical direction, tracing a somewhat different dimension of political rule.

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.