This is the twelfth of a series of essays on Melville’s novel.
The Pequod caught a forward breeze. A few days after its gam with the Bachelor the crew killed four whales, one harpooned by Ahab himself, evidently practicing for the anticipated encounter with his nemesis. He considered the way a Sperm Whale dies, turning its head toward the sun: “He too worships fire; most faithful, broad, baronial vassal of the sun!” The seas, “where to traditions no rocks furnish tablets,” “life dies sunwards full of faith,” only to be spun around “some other way” after death, toward the “dark Hindoo half of nature.” “In vain, oh whale, dost thou seek intercedings with yon all-quickening sun, that only calls forth life, but gives it not again. Yet dost thou, darker half, rock me with a prouder, if a darker faith.” Ahab wants nothing of the solid rock of Christ, the Son, turning instead to the larger, darker sea, whose billows “are my foster-brothers.” He seeks a rock in something vast and fluid, a chaos-rock.
One of the whales couldn’t be hauled in immediately, so Ahab and his boat-crew stayed with it. Fedallah watched his fellow-predators, the sharks; Ahab told him of a recurring dream, a dream of hearses. It is time for prophecy. Fedallah reminded him that “neither hearse nor coffin can be thine”; at sea, there are no hearses, but before Ahab can die he must see two hearses at sea, “the first not made by mortal hands,” the second made with wood grown in America. What is more, Fedallah must die before Ahab; he must be Ahab’s “pilot,” his guide into death, if he is to die. In exchange, Fedallah has made two promises: that Ahab shall kill Moby-Dick and survive the killing. Fedallah adds another promise—that “hemp only can kill thee.” Ahab assumed that means the gallows, but should recall that the dangerous, snake-like ropes in the boat he sits in whip dangerously after the harpooneer lances a whale. Does Fedallah lie, or deceive?
In the Sea of Japan, the land of the rising sun, the summer sea under that sun shimmers with an “unrelieved radiance” like “the insufferable splendors of God’s throne,” the white throne of judgment. Fire-worshipping Fedallah gazed at the sun, which Ahab (now changing symbols, so to speak), called “my Pilot.” He asked the sun, “Where is Moby Dick?” Indeed the sun ‘sees’ half the world at a time. But the sun, silent as always, told him nothing. In fury he destroyed the ship’s quadrant, cursing “Science,” the “foolish toy”; “no longer will I guide my earthly way by thee” not because the quadrant is a human instrument but because it “feebly pointest on high,” toward heavenly bodies like the sun, whereas the ship’s other instruments, the compass and the log-and-line, point him along the surface of the sea, his fluid rock. Overhearing the Captain’s tirade, bluff Stubb concurs. “Damn me, Ahab, but thou actest right; live in the game, and die in it!” Ishmael isn’t the Captain’s only secret sharer.
The sea’s potential chaos overtook the Pequod, struck by a sudden typhoon. Dutiful Starbuck wished they would ride with the gale, towards home, instead of against it, towards Moby-Dick. Ahab had other plans. As lightning sets fire to the three masts, he shrieks to the crew, “The white flame but lights the way to the White Whale!” Ishmael compares the lightning to “God’s burning fingers” as He wrote the words of judgment against Belshazzar as recounted in the Book of Daniel: “MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.” The king calls upon the Chaldeans—Fedallah’s ancestors—to interpret these words, but they fail. They prove poor prophets. Only Daniel can understand truly: That God has numbered the days of Belshazzar’s kingdom; that the king has been weighed in the balance and founding wanting; that his kingdom will be divided and given to the Medes and the Persians. Belshazzar is killed the following night. As the “H” in “UPHARSIN” implies, the sundering of Ahab’s regime will take breath away.
Nonetheless, Ahab follows the Parsee. He prayed to the “trinity of flames,” worshiping them in a reversal of the way a Christian would pray to the Divine Trinity: “O! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance.” There is no kindness in chaos-nature, only “speechless, placeless power.” Therefore, “To the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here.” “A true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee.” Stubb had whispered about Ahab’s scar, months before, comparing it to the crack in a tree struck by lightning. If Ahab were an ordinarily evil man, he would lack this nobility, the character of the tragic hero which Ishmael suggests by his periodic allusions to Lear—here, to Ahab’s “beaten brain,” both comparable to and contrasting with the live, “beating” brain of Shakespeare’s king. Ahab’s brain has been beaten, finally, not by Fate or Fedallah but by itself, by its own inner flaw. He had that flaw before he met Fedallah. did Fate give it to him, or did he give it to himself? Having it, did he need to succumb to it?
Ahab regards the Creator-God as mindless. “Thou knowest not how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun…. I know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent. There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical.” As humans are to the God of the Bible, so the Biblical God is to—call it Fate. As a personality confronting an impersonal foolishly supposed personal by mythologizing prophets and priests, and their dupes, Ahab worshipped the truly impersonal Fire by defying it. Prudence dictates otherwise, but why would a noble man not defy such a being?
Poor Starbuck read matters differently. When lightning struck Ahab’s steel harpoon with “forked fire” like “a serpent’s tongue,” he told the Captain that “God, God is against thee.” Turn home “while we may,” on “a better voyage than this.” This panicked the crew, who “raised a half mutinous cry.” Immediately recognizing a nascent revolutionary moment, Ahab seized his burning harpoon and “waved it like a torch among them; swearing to transfix with it the first sailor that but cast loose a rope’s end.” The threat of force stopped them, giving him a chance to reinforce his rule with speech, reminding them of their oath to hunt the White Whale, an oath “as binding as mine”—’totalitarian,’ encompassing “heart, soul, and body, lungs and life.” To these words he added a final action, blowing out the fire on the harpoon and roaring, “Thus I blow out the last fear!” The last fear of God, but not the last fear in the souls of the men. Quite the contrary: Instead of overpowering the tyrant, the men, so threatened and so reminded, fled in terror. Starbuck’s attempt to rally ‘the many’ to his side thus failed. “Oh, none but cowards send down their brain trucks in tempest time,” Ahab said to himself, even as he reminded himself, Lear-like, to “take medicine.” But while Lear takes “physic” in order to expose himself “to feel what wretches feel” and thus dispose himself to charity toward them, Ahab remains a tyrant, not a king, knowing what wretches feel only to rule them for his own purpose, not their succour. As for the officers and the harpooneers, they do not share in the sailors’ panic but neither do their souls have the strength to rebel; Stubb could only say to Flask, “This is a nasty night, lad,” and Tashtego wished for a glass of rum. At this moment, was anyone on the Pequod better than a would-be drunken Indian?
The typhoon passed, the crew cheered and began repairing the ship, as ordered by the officers. The ‘many’ respond to immediate success and failure and except for Starbuck, the ‘few’—officers and harpooneers—were little better. Only the First Mate clearly foresaw the ultimate disaster to which Ahab directed the ship. Only he could act to stop it, and chance now gave him the opportunity.
Starbuck went below deck to report to his Captain on the new conditions on deck. He saw the muskets on the gun rack, including the musket Ahab had aimed at him. “An evil thought” occurred to him, which he found hard to suppress. Should he kill Ahab, as Ahab had been ready to kill him? The gun was already loaded.
How evil is that thought? “Shall this crazed old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship’s company down to doom with him?”—effectively murdering more than thirty men. He found Ahab asleep, incapable of resisting. Neither reasoning, nor remonstrance, nor entreaty had swayed the tyrant; Starbuck had tried them all. Alogos, immoralist, and un-agapic, the tyrant demanded only “flat obedience to [his] own flat commands.” As for the vow, the contract Ahab had cited, “Great God forbid!” that we make ourselves lesser Ahabs. Ahab’s real underlying ‘contract,’ the one with Fedallah, ignores the good of ship and crew; a king would rule for the good of his people but the tyrant rules for himself, for an illusory self-interest. Assenting to the contract with Ahab, officers, harpooneers, and crew assented to the contract with Fedallah, a soul reminiscent of the Prince of Liars.
Was there no “lawful way” to proceed? No: restrained, Ahab “would be more hideous than a caged tiger, then, I could not endure the sigh; could not possibly fly his howlings; all comfort, sleep itself, inestimable reason would leave me on the long intolerable voyage.” Ahab would murder sleep, as Macbeth’s conscience did; an anti-conscience, Ahab was the monster that would put reason to sleep. There was no law for Starbuck to fear, here on the open sea. “Is heaven a murderer when its lightning strikes a would-be murderer, tindering sheets and skin together?” Surely not: Starbuck might kill with impunity and also without moral hazard. With Ahab dead, Starbuck might see his wife—named Mary, for the mother of Jesus—and child again. Without Ahab dead, he would not. Personal, political, and familial morality alike command tyrannicide.
Starbuck then appealed to the final authority. “Great God, where art thou? Shall I? shall I?” Nowhere in this yarn does God speak to anyone. Events occur, which may or may not be interpreted as providential, but God is always silent. Here, only Ahab spoke, in his unreasoning sleep. After Starbuck made his brief report to the Captain, Ahab in his dream replied, characteristically, with a command: “Stern all! Oh Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart at last!” It was “as if Starbuck’s voice,” as he softly dialogued with himself and his God, and then to Ahab, “had caused the long dumb dream to speak.” “Starbuck seemed wrestling with an angel.” But unlike Jacob, he let go. “He placed the death-tube in its rack, and left the place.” He went back on deck and told Stubb to wake Ahab and make the report, prevaricating that “I must see to the deck here.” His conscience had made a coward of him. There would be no just coup d’état, no revolution against tyranny on the Pequod. The ship’s ruler pursued defiant rebellion against the personified impersonal; its potential ruler could not bring himself to rebel against that ruler. These two extremes spell catastrophe as surely as MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.
In the aftermath of the natural storm and the political near-storm, the waves still billowed, the sunlight gleaming on the ocean, making it seem “a crucible of molten gold.” Awake and secure in his power, Ahab exclaimed in megalomaniacal exultation, “All ye nations before my prow, I bring the sun to ye!” As Melville’s symbolism would have it, the ship’s compass needle had been deranged by the lightning strike, so Ahab takes charge of adjusting the ship’s course. Officers and men obey; “though some of [the sailors] lowly rumbled, their fear of Ahab was greater than their fear of Fate”—likely not the wiser fear. As for the “pagan harpooneers,” they remained imperturbable; “if impressed, it was only with a certain magnetism shot into their congenial hearts from inflexible Ahab’s.” As for the tyrant himself, he proclaimed himself “lord of the level loadstone,” overawing “the superstitious sailors” by making a new compass and gesticulating mysteriously over it, as if commanding it to come to life. Having regretfully rejected the human home, the earth, the sands of Nantucket; having defiantly rejected the heavenly God, dashing the quadrant, Ahab claimed mastery over men by controlling power of navigation over the chaos-sea. “In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all his fatal pride.”
The compass became the first of three new instruments Ahab commanded to be made. The second was a log-and-line. As the compass registers direction, the log-and-line registers the velocity of the ship: The line winds around a reel; a piece of wood, the “log,” is tied to the end of the line and is thrown overboard; sailors can then measure the speed at which the ship moves by the length of line pulled from the reel in a given segment of time. The old log-and-line had been damaged by long exposure to the elements; deployed, it snapped. The old Manxman remarked, “To me, the skewer seems loosening out of the middle of the world,” but Ahab simply commanded that a new device be made, having concluded from conversing with “the man from Man” that he had no wisdom to offer Ahab, that “the dead, blind wall butts all inquiring heads at last.” When Pip appeared, seeing in the loss of the “log” a picture of his own casting-away, the Manxman would dismiss him, but Ahab intervened and put him under his protection. To Ahab, deranged Pip fell from the “frozen heavens” and therefore “touchest my inmost centre.” Not the sagacious old man but Pip tells the true tale, the tale told by an idiot. “Lo! ye believers in gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude. Come! I feel prouder leading thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an Emperor’s!” The Manxman judged them “One daft with strength, the other daft with weakness”—true enough, but not comprehensive. Nor do recent scholars who find in this a stinging critique of American slavery quite see the point. The tyrant has his humanities, but they rule his conduct only when considering a soul that seems to him to mirror his own soul, with its own obsessions. Ahab made Pip his missing leg because Pip was crushed by unknowing, unspeaking ‘gods.’
Steering the ship by the new compass and measuring its speed by the new log-and-line, Ahab set his course toward the equator, the surface-center of the world. At night the sailors heard a cry sounding “like the half-articulated wailings of the ghosts of all Herod’s murdered Innocents.” Only the Captain knew what it was: the cries of seals when the mothers lose their cubs. In the New Testament, Herod’s mass murder, a futile attempt to kill the infant Jesus, recalls Jeremiah’s story of Rachel, weeping for her exiled ‘children’—her descendants, to be banished to Babylon by God in punishment for their idolatry. As God promises to redeem the guilty Israelites from their exile, so will His Son redeem guilty humanity, which sins repeatedly against Him. The next gam will be a ship called the Rachel.
The sailors, however, superstitiously took the seal-cries to signify the cries of lost, drowned sailors. Confirming their forebodings, the next day a man fell from the mast-head and drowned in the sea: “Thus the first man of the Pequod that mounted the mast to look out for the White Whale, on the White Whale’s own peculiar ground; that man was swallowed in the deep.” The sailors dropped the life-buoy for him, but it too, like the log-and-line, proved too weathered to work; it sank, following the man. Queequeg offered his coffin as a replacement. Starbuck fretted over the symbolism of substituting a coffin for a life-buoy; Flask considers the matter materially; Ahab turns again to the carpenter to re-shape the coffin for the new use.
The carpenter again revealed himself as a Jesus according to Ahab, fashioning a means of salvation without knowing what he is doing. To Ahab’s accusation, “Thou art as unprincipled as the gods, and as much a jack-of-all-trades,” the carpenter can only reply, “But I do not mean anything, sir. I do as I do.” If the Creator-God of the Bible is what He is, willingly shall be what He shall be, the carpenter-god here only does, humbly but mindlessly and will-lessly. Against such a being, Ahab asserts personality—mind and will. “What things real are there, but imponderable thoughts?” “A life-buoy of a coffin!” The coffin, symbol of death, “by a mere hap, made the expressive sign of the help and hope of most endangered life.” Could this have “some spiritual sense” as “an immortality-preserver”? But as soon as Ahab promises himself to “think on that” he exercises his will to deny it. “So far gone am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me.” He turns not to Christ but to Pip: “We’ll talk this over; I do suck most wondrous philosophies from thee!” His dialogue will be not with Christ, nor even with Socrates, but with a supposed mirror of himself, self-willed agent of will-less alogos.
Recent Comments